UC45 April-May 1981 by Christopher Squire

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Undercurrents 45 April-May 1981 1 Eddies: News from everywhere 7 What’s When & What’s What 9 Women in Co-ops - Tarn Dougan: What’s up at t’Co-op Fair 10 The Westminster Zoo - Bob Housrnan: A look behind the House of Commons facade 12 Pros and Cons - Jo Pacino: How male chauvinist laws oppress prostitutes 14 Open Door - Neil Bartlett: A new kind of prison 15 Tai Ar Dan - Dic Penderyn: Why the summer homes are burning in Wales 17 Rewriting History - John Fletcher: Our Celtic anarchist ancestors 18 Tribal Anarchy - Nick Hanna: Who needs laws anyway? 20 Red Barristers - Liz Woodcraft: Radical advocates tell all 22 Police Review - Bill Alexander: Old Bill with a human face 22 Angry Val/eys - Jererny Gass: The South Wales Anti-poverty Action Centre 23 Canning’s Catalyst - Donald Marier: A fix for polluting woodstoves 24 The River Shall Live! - Riku Tomson: How arctic activists saved the Alta 28 Servant of Peace - Dominic Michel: The Gandhi of the West 29 Reclaiming the Law - Geraldine Pettersson: What a community lawyer can do 31 Alternative Engineering - Stewart Boyle: How to do AT at University 32 Facts & Faeces - Simon Watt: A sanitary engineer looks at structuralism 33 Bottle Battle- Trisha Rosson: Cleaning up Sch ... you know who! 35 Britain’s Nuclear Machine - Tony Benn: The cult of the juggernuke 36 The Enchanted Cruise - Harry Hamill: ATWitch rides again 37 Letters - Feedback from friend and FoE 38 The Undercurrents Review of Books 46 Small Ads 47 Back Numbers __________________________________________________________________________________

Published every two months by Undercurrents Ltd., 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R OAT. Full details of editorial meetings, distribution, etc., are on p. 48. ISSN 0306 2392. Cover: George Snow __________________________________________________________________________________ Thanks to the generosity of two UC contributors, John Garrett and Geoff Wright, (they’ve just sold their UC 27 feature Micro Is Beautiful to the Japanese) we are able to offer the following prizes for a short story ‘about the future’: a First Prize of £30 plus a five year sub; and two Consolation Prizes of £ 10 plus a two year sub. Rules: 1. Entries to our Clerkenwell Office to arrive not later than Wed 10 June 1981. 2. Maximum length 2500 words. 3. Entries must be typed, double-spaced, on one side of the paper only. 4. Illustrations for the story, preferably black and white line drawings, are welcome and will be taken into account. 5. The judge’s decision is final. The competition will be judged by the science writer Malcolm Peltu. The winning entry will be published in Undercurrents 48 Oct/Nov, but copyright will remain with the author. __________________________________________________________________________________

Construction recommencedon

6 February this year, but

W I T RELISH A MASS DEMONSTRATION AT BROKDORF

nuclear power plant in North Germany called by the BUD (a national citizen's action group) brought 50,000 people into confrontation with riot police on the 27th and 28th February this year. The protest went ahead despite a court ban on all rallies in the area over the weekend and by Saturday 250 arrests had been made and 30 people were in hospital - one of them seriously injured by a police helicopter. More than 20,000 riot police tried to block off the site either with skips filled with sand or 'nato wire' (arather nastier version of barbed wire with filed down barbs), but by the afternoon some of the skips had been cleared by shovelling the sand out and people began to flood into the inside perimeter. They were assaulted with water cannon and riot police clubs. Compared with a smaller and relatively peaceful demonstration at Gorbelan in the summer Brokdorf shows that the level of Inurgency in Germany has bean Increasing dramatically. European anti-nuclear groups are reacting vehemently, sometimes with e~alatlng violence, against the pro-nuclear consortlums. The plans to build a nuclear power plant at Brokdorf ware firat announced in 1973. &&gns against it have been ooinson ever since. Their success in (Maying comtruction and pomading the City of Hamburg to drop out of the schema, achieved i n the face of violent police action, have made i t a landmark in Wast Garman nuclear resistance. 11 1973.76%of local people voted apimt the planned reactor. I n 1974, when the nuclaar industry applied for building permlabton, local group! collected 31,000 signatures against it in four weeks. Within two years, the authorit i n were forced t o turn the construction site into a fortress to local residents hinderingconstruction. Mass demonstiations ensued. The first, on December 30 1976, attracted 10,000 people, and over 30,000 took part in a second one two weeks later. There was heavy fighting during both as demonstrators trying to occupy the site were beaten back by police equipped with helicopters and vomit gas. The local anti-nudear group filed a lawsuit w i n s t the nudaar

industry,and announced a third demonstration. The lagal action succeeded: in December 1977, the rhonal court s t w d construction until the industry improved Its plans for waste ditpoial and dacommissioning. Pennhsion to continue building was granted on 1 December last year by the Fedaral Government, which considered that the regional court's requirements had been met.

Union, the firm whkh is building Brokdorf phnt. Tin homenude bomb, which contained , Â¥bwt&O of Â¥xpkxivn is (thought t o ba pin of a 'black

'i1

equipment needed for the site was held up by the arrival of 120 protestors who blocked the main entrance t o it In the early morning. Police arrived after two hour* and brutally dragged them away. On 26 February, sixty demonstrators blocked the approach road for another two h w n before police removed them. In the meantime, the City of Hamburg, which had a 50% stake in the plant, decided on 10 February to postpone construction for another three years. pending better guarantees for the disposal of nuclear waste. Thk dadsion followed a vote on 2 February by the Hamburg branch of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) against thecity's continued co-operation in building the plant. Seventeen thousand demonstrators, including 500 of the SPD's youth-wing, gathered outside while the party made its decision. They got a rough reception from 3000 police, reinforced by special border troops. Twanty-nina demonstrators were arrested. The Brokdorf plant, which i s 40 miles away from Hamburg, in the naighbwring state of Schleswig Holstein, was to have bean built jointly by Hamburg Elactricity Work (HEW) and Nordwastdautscha Kraftwerke (NWK). I t would have mat 20% of the electricity needs for Hamburg's port. The city already gets 35%of its electricity from

government of SchleswigHolstein i s determined to push on with the Brokdorf plant, end has isued a further construction permit, but the SPD vote against it has revived the nuclear debate inawest Germany at a time when the Federal Government had hoped that the anti-nudear movement had passed its peak.

Nuclear power hm never been gladly accepted by the grasi roots of the SPD. In 1979, Chancellor Schmidt had to hint at resignation before the party would accept his view that nuclaar power would be a necessity for West Germany in the next fewdecadas, until other forms of energy were developed. To add t o the unpopularity of nuclaar power, four of West Germany's ten nuclear plants had t o be shut down in February for safety reasons. The Fedaral Government now fears that Hamburg has nt a precedent for nuclear installations being frozen or cancelled by local party decisions. The importance of the Hamburg SPD meeting was shown by the arrival of one of Schmidt's chaif aides, Defence Minister Hans Awl, to put the government's case: Contact: BUU Hambum, BartehtrÃ‘ 26 2000 Hunburg 6. IPNSI

NUCLEAR Â¥Iwl~i~l ila% c h a m than that from ctrl ~ t t o m~y , thm CEQB, and thw should know, shouldn't thw7 Apnnntly not. Profnor JW Jaffary of Birkbeck Collage has bean looking at the way they do thair sunn and has found what we long ago suspected: unlike accountan84n ordinary businwe!, the CEGB makes no allowance for tha fourfold inflation In building costs since its f i n t MOQnoxes Were commissioned 16 yaan ago. As this Is the main c o t of nuclaar electricity this schoolbov howler (or deliberate fraud?) he* a large affact on the result. He calculate! that thatEGB's figures (coal 1.3 p1kWh; nuke 1.O) should be coal 1.6 a i d nuke 2.0 if the current cost of building the power stations is included. Allowingfor today's much higher intarast rates pushes both costs up even further (coal 1.6, nuke 2.6) and i f the CEGB had to borrow at today's minimum landing rate nudaar power would cost nearly double coal power. This wouldn't worry the foreign banks that provide most of thair long-term capital however: their loans are guarmteed by that most trusty of borrowers, the British State. Obviously the firat thing an ecosocialist junta would do is to scrap this guarantee, thus bankrupting the .. CEGB a t a stroke. Sir Chai n warned

rial And.

Protesting,to an inspector that an arrested person was .being kicked the ribs while being dragged awakshathan found himself arrested by the inspector and another constable. THE LAST OF THE TORNESS The two C~WMbles TRIALS, following the arrest of 27 people during M~ action , Wjpearing in court&d Jonathan 'was arrested by them because he at the propd ritejt was swearing and shouting. innaddinaton in

Default

"DONTPAY FOR NUCLEAR POWER" is the timely mamw from SCRAM in.the latest ioir of the SCRAM Enemy Bulletin p u b l i d on February 25th. Coming close on the heels of the Select Committee on Energy Report (see page 4 1 the SCRAM Bulletin focusses on the growth o anti-nuclear consumer campaigns, which are an attempt t o reverse the situation whereby the electricity consumer is powerless. People who join these campaigns simply refuse t o pay the "nuclear portion" o f their electricity bill (in the South of.Scotland this is 20% which is paid into the South of Scotland Anti Nuclear Consumer Campaign Trust Fund). SCRAM makesit ,.Ieathat r

nuclear power industry. taking part in a consumer Fact: The British nuclear industry campaign is an act of civil dis. refused has obedience. and as such. should publish its own safetystudies. not be entered into lightly, lt involves stepping outside the L~~ Fact: The General and Municipal recently won for the sake of principles and directly challenging the Â£30,00 compensation for two ~ l ~ ~ ~ ~ rpolicies. d ~ ~ G~~~~ , ~ widows i ~o f workers i ~at the ~Windwhich the scale nuclear reprocessing plant. the monopoly have insupplying electricity, and Fact; The Irish Sea is now the &nostradioactive sea in the world. their refusal t o yield t o the

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07i

hi^^ ~~b~~~~ 12th. However a photograph produced by defence lawyer Richard Danny from London was clearly showedthe found 'not guilty' of 'possession of an offensive weapon* but fined . inspector's involvementin the Â£5 on the -breach of the peace- . . . arrest. "1 put it t o VPL Constable, that your evidence isa pack Of charge. This brings the fines total lies," was Gardeners comment t o to Â£625not including the high ' both travel costs for the ':summonsed" ~ ' 'Following the fewdary 12th coming from places like Oxford, Reading and London. Most of the triat a sit-in was hÃˆld, the SSEfl showrooms in nearby Dalkeith. nine trials have followed the Lack of numbers p:&vehted this pattern of normal magistrate being fully effective, b i t the trials. Its the police evidence that management were disturbed counts. Fines ranging between enough t o summon the local Â£5 and Â£00 (or alternatively forces of Law and Disorder to thirtv. davs are . imorisonmentl . evict the protestors. .pretty high considering that it is based on the story worked out TYNESIDE by two policemen shortly before ANTI-NUCLEAR CAMPAIGN the trial. SOUTHOFSCOTLAND ELECTRICITY BOARD AND THE UNITED KINGDOM ATOMIC ENERGY

' We've noticed that some people are unhappy about our building Fact: An ex-Chairmen of the an AGO nuclear power station at Central Electricity Generating Torness in East Lothian. Indeed, Board, Sir Arthur Hawkins has last May we had t o ask 800 of our described the Advanced Gasfriends in the police to try and Cooled Reactors (which includes stop about 200 people occupying the power station at Heysham) the site and disrupting the work. as "a disaster we must not They did this very enthusiastirepent. " cally, arresting 27 people, who Fact: Britain's first nuclear were only having fun, and power station, Calder Hall in charging them with the most Cumbria, was opened in 1956. serious offences they could think Its primary function was t o TUCKED l f AWAY a among e l pkduce plutonium for Britain's announcing pfÃ‡yand cultura' Let us reassure you - our atomic weapons programme not wants you wafind in the library to prduce electricity, nuclear power programme and a few glpamphlet! muad by ECONOMICAL? the police state that goes with it the Central Eloctricity Gemrating pm: are for yourown good. We know leakedto the Ontitled w*ar that we already have nearly twice Electrical Review in 1878 put the ty.' Thaa- pmviously in a as many power stations as we total generating cost of electricity your pile On thecounter need. We know that accidents, produced by the Advanced Gasbooks womrtamped but design faults, etc. at our HuntersCooled Reactors (at January 1977 ton AGR nuclear station have have .. .now.been moredkrwtb prices) at 1.48-1 6 7 p per unit. dxpUYea. made our nuclear power c a t far This is over twice what the CEGB These pamphlets give a onemore than you can afford. We're inevidence to the sided and totally false picture of windscaleenqui not quite sure what t o do with all the state of the nuclear power massive This is part the deadly radioactive waste we industry in this country. For publicity effort by the nuclear keep making - but we're thinking example, under the heading industry t o 'soften up'thepublic about it. And we'll keep on "A Story of Success" the leaflet in preparation for the building nuclear power stations claims that nuclear power has forthcoming public 'enquiry' into until we get it right. been producing electricity their plans t o build the first of a I n the meantime, here's a few "safely, efficiently and new breed of nuclear power DO'S and DONT'S for you t o economically". stations at Sizewell in Suffolk. elp us carry you smoothly into This was the type of power he Breve Nuclear World. Fact: The incidence of myeloid station (Pressurized Water DO pay your electricity bills leukemia la form of cancer) in Reactor) that nearly unleasheda romptly - some disruptive the Burnley Health District hap colossal'amount of radioactivity lements have suggested that nearly trebled during the last If o&*e unsuspecting residehts'of ople keep back 20% of the years. According t q a study in Pennsylvania in MsfSlh oney and send this 'nuclear The Lancet 115.9.79 pp 54% ortion' to NAG, PO Box 4,43 551Ithis may be the result of Bilfhlay Anti Nuclear Candlemaker Row. Edinburgh. increased levels of radiation as a Alliance b h o ' l l hold it in e trust fund

massive opposition t o the nuclear power programme, it k the consumers' only means of expressing their disapproval and affectingthe 6 - d ~ ina way which ,,ndpmtand .....-.. thev - ..- , .. -.-..- - . .. financially. -

until we 'show more'responsibility'. Obviously i f a lot o f people did this, i t could seriously hinder our plans. ,. DONT do anything t o upset the smooth runningof the Electricity Boards business. Occupations of showrooms, superglue in keyholesand other pranks cause us nervous headaches. D O N T takeanyform of direct action against the'threat of nuclear war. Nuclear weapons are a valuable by-product of our power stations and we're told they're kept purely for peaceful purposes. And please D O N T take part inany form of mass direct actior at the Torness site on the weekend of May 16th and 17th this year. We have t o stop work for several days each time this sort of thing happens and i f it became too regular an occurrenci or if the site was permanently occupied or besieged by protestors, we'd have t o abandon thi project altogether. Even worse, this kind of action might encourage people t o start thin kin that they don't need any experts like us t o make decisions about their lives, and t o start acting collectively t o create a society where people basic needs would be what counted, not the scheme of profit-motivated and power hungry groups like us. (Distributed day of last Torness trial) '

lercurrent

The news that the Department of Energy and the C.E.G.B. are at last moving towards the development of wind energy generators has naturally been welcomed by everyone concerned with alternative sources. But it needs to be received with caution because of the way that our energy establishment has tinkered with wind power in the past and the scepticism that it has shown towards it as a serious contribution. And in Britain? We did not Indeed, the very manner in only rusticate - the C.E.G.B. which the news of the latest involvement emerged is itself cause for suspicion. The first word came from Mr. Glyn England, chairmen of the C.E.G.B., on August 13 last year and it was.immediately discounted by the Department of Energy whose spokesman said: "As end when we have complete design studft:, that will be the time when we will decide whet t o go ahead with. It won't be the C.E.G.B. who make the decision whether t o spend an awful l o t of money on the real thing" (Guardian, August 141. But in fact it was the C.E.G.B. which had got it right. Within a short time, the Department of Energy was catching up. By January, it was giving official approval t o a plan t o build a 250 kilowatt aerognerator in the Orkneys by October this year, t o be followed by a three megawatt machine on the same site by 198314. The C.E.G.B. meanwhile is going ahead with a 100 kilowatt mechineat Dyfad in Wales. It all sounds fine so why should we, in the words of Virgil, "fear the Greeks, even though they offer gifts"and. t o switch t o Samuel Butler, "Look a gift-horse in the mouth'? The trouble is that the energy establishment has experienced a remarkable conversion. It was as long agoas 1953 that the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board erecteda 100 kilowatt wihd generator at Costa Head in Orkney. Three years later, it was taken over by the Electrical Research Association and never heard of again. Another 100 kilowatt machine was put up in 1955 by the British Electrical Authority at St. Albans end a year later sold t o "a foreign undertaking."The Danes want ahead and in 1957 put up a 200 kilowatt generator. They now have e two megawatt machine operating.

carried on propaganda against wind energy. It blamed the public for objecting t o windmills in "areas o f high scenic beauty" (which was true) but coupled this with the insistent argument that even with "many sites" (each containing "several" 3 MW machines) the wind could make "only a small contribution . . . about one per cent of the present C.E.G.B. demand As late as July 1978, the charman of the C.E.G.B., Mr. Glyn England, was arguing that wave energy was more promisinfl. Then came the sudden change of direction last year. What had happened?The C.E.G.B. realised it had a oro-nuclear govern-

. . ."

go through the motions of SUIsporting wave power. But it still needed, as we know from the leaked Cabinet papers, t o avoid drifting into "a position o f c0nfrontation"with theantinuclear groups. So it sought to pull back from its tepid support for wave energy and cover its retreat by making friendly noises about the wind. A t first, it denied this. Mr. Peter Taylor, its Director of Information, wrote to the NewStatesman in October saying it loved the waves. But while his letter was being written, one of his colleagues, Dr. John Wright, Head of Generation Studies, was composing a pamphlet saying that "the oresent oreference" was for windenergy although "until recently we have set most store on wave power." If anyone doubts thecynicism of this analysis, it is worth consulting the Science Editor of the Financial Times, David Fishlock, the favourite trustie of the energy establishment. I n a little-noticed article in e

he wrote on January 12 "Electricity authorities coming round t o the view that it may be easier t o win acceptance of nuclear energy if they make a serious attempt t o develop some of the alternatives.. . A case in point is Britain's plan t o be the first country t o instal en array of large windmills." The heading was: 'Tilting a t windmills to make nuclear power acceptable." We do not need t o break up into wind v. wave groups. Both sources must be harvested. But we do need t o remember that the C.E.G.B. has always believedthat the wind could offer no more than a minor way of saving fuel by coming on stream at odd moments and that today it is experimenting with aerogenerators that could hew been bought off the shelf abroad as long as 25years ago. DAVID ROSS

In April t h e n will be e British Wind Enerov Aoocmtion wind power workittop at ~ n n t i e ~ d , then in AuguK the UK Motion a the International Solar Energy Society will be holding a world solar forum in Brighton. In September t h e n is the BHRA's wmo and tidal power confennci in Cembridga. NATTA is also planning a conference on the potential of renewables for the uk, sometime in Octoberor November. E w n the Dep't of Energy seems t o have caught the bug, in en article entitled Whither the Renewables' in the Dec. issue of ATOM, Or Dawson, ETSU's director pointed out, albeit somewhat guardedly, that the ultimate technical potential of renewables in the UK was "up t c about 200 million tons o f coal equivalent per ennqm. "That's about what we'll be getting from oil and gas by.the turn of the century and considerably more than we are ever likely t o get from nuclear power. Meanwhile the rapid growth < "self help"locel energy groups continues. In addition t o Newpol end Nevern Energy Group and Lewes Energy Group there is now an embryo group in Oxford, Roger Kellysproject in Radstock, South Brent Energy Group, the Oartington Institutes local energy project, plus a number of new groups in Wales. F u more details on these various pmjdcts and conferences see NATTA's bimonthly newsletter, annual sub rate Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ from NATTA, c/0 ATG, Open University,

THE TUCS draft Energy Policy Review, d i s c 4 at a c o n t u b tiva conferenca on Feb. 27th calls for funding o n renewable enerw remarch development and demonstration t o be incmand t o around Â£3 million each year with ubaqumt inca> commorcid demomtration proceeds. A Â£ billion four year consawation prognmme is also called for. More predictably the unions also supported an expanded nuclear programme - but one based o n a British designed and built system, presumably the AGR as opposed t o the US PWR (the option favoured by the Tories) - not so much on safety grounds but because of the potential delays while safety clearances were obtained and more importantly because much of the work on PWR's would go overseas, and thus not sustain the ailing UK power engineering industry. An even more forthright line d s taken on this issue by the House of Commons Select Committee on Energy - which reported a week before the TUC conference. They concluded that "the maximum likely rate of ordering of 1-2 GW per year will be well below that required for it t o be commercially viable for UK companies t o invest in new manufacturing facilities t o produce PWR components." But they went further end called into question the need for a large scale nuclear programme of the type proposed by the Tories: 'We remain unconvinced that the CEGB and the Government have satisfactorily made out the economic and industrial case for a ( I 5 GWI programme." This certainly didn't go down well with the UKAEA and the CEGB -or with many of the engineering unions, who at the TUC conference insisted (not unreasonably) that the problems o f power engineering industry couldn't be ignored. Surprisingly, given the fact that ten unions (including NUM, NUPE, COHSE, USDAW, UCATT) are now formally antinuclear, the TUC conference itself was something of a disappointment -Joe Gormley of the NUM, while triumphant in having beaten the Tories, steadfastly avoided the nuclear issue. It was left t o NUJ, backed by NUPE and the Post Office engineers t o point out thet not all unions supported the pronudear line of the TUC's

consultative document. One NUPE delegate argued that the TUC's call for Â£30 t o be allocated t o renewable energy R & 0 nes 'totally inadequate' in view of the Â£70m pa. allocated t o nuclear R & D while another stressed the job-creation advantages of the alternatives Particularly CHP. David Ross of NUJ made a spirited speech stressing the advantages of alternatives, backed u p by Pat Cwne -who called for the setting up of a National Enemy Conservation Agency, a proposal taken on board, perhaps surprisingly, by Frank Chapple, The Conference Chairman. The pro-nuclear unions (EEPTU, AUEW, TASS, EMA) predictably hammered their usual theme "we'll freeze and starve without it", "no one has ever been killed by nuclear power'' and so on. John Edmonds o f the GMWU made a somewhat more measured contribution stressing that the need "to use our energy intelligently" pointing out that at present the UK "as "squandering energy resources using fuels in the wrong way and the wrong place." He said we should stop using valuable gas for bulk heating in industry and turn t o coal, reserving gas for sitpations where its prime advantage - ease of fine control .could be exploited 0%. for domestic heating. Similarly oil should be reserved as a feedstock and not used for diesel trains and road transport - electrifiietion was the answer, as the TSSA agreed. Nevertheless, the TUC wid1 no doubt put more emphasis on the need for a steady ordering Programme in its re-write of the 'Energy Policy Review', although it may continue -as a sop t o the MUM to hedge its bets on the balance between nuclear and coal While they are redrafting, the TUC might also take note of the other points raised by the Select Committee, which reminded us that the Â£1 billion likely t o be spent on the Tory nuclear programme, "represents a preemption of i large slice of the nations resource: which might otherwise beavailable for investment in other parts of the economy." Even more (im)pertinently, they were 'dismayed t o find that, seven years after the first major oil price increase, the Department oi Energy has no clear idea of whether investing around Â£1,30 million i n a single nuclear plant ... is as cost effective as spending a similar sum to promote energy, conservation.'' We couldn't have put it better ourselves.

Not A Bad Attempt NUCLEAR

THE INDUSTRY received its wont official uimrin since the F l o w n report Int month with the f i n t report of the H o u r of Common! Solact Commkf on Energy, after tha committee's lingthy look at the British civil nuclnr power programme. Their report criticisesalmoti every aspect of whet the nuclear industry is doing, and finds that the nuclear programme - new AGRs at Torness and Heysham plus a PWR at Sizewell -is almost entirely bogus. It also says that much more attention should be paid to energy conservation, and savages the Department of Energy for its nuclear preoccupation. The report makes 91 recommendations and, as well as the main report, i n v o l w three fa volumes of evidence from everyone from Gerald Leach t o Lord Weinstock. The conclusions cover everything from the industrial relations at nuclear site: t o safety procedures. But the most important conclusions emphasise that civilian nuclear power in Britain is a house of cards, mainly because electricity demand forecasts are a shambles. One Labour member of the committee stated that i f work h a not already begun on the Torness and Heysham AGRs the committee might well have decided t o recommend that work on them should not start. And the fact that some money has already been spent on the Sizewell PWR was also cited as a reason for not coming out more thoroughly against it. althoudi evidenm heard by the committee

demolished the economic case for the PWR. The main point of the report for the British nucleer industry is that the government's steady ordering programme Of a nuke a year is bogus. This programme means thet in an era of low growth in electricity demand, usable power stations have t o be wrapped, interest payments threaten t o overwhelm the electricity industry, and spare capacity mounts. The select committee, chaired by Tory MP Ian Lloyd, has appreciated this end gives noexplicit support t o buildingany more nukes at all. The report, whose main volume costs Â£5.30 is full of good things for anti-nudear activists to quote at the enemy. I n particular, it never tires of pointing out that the experiment of building a British PWR may be a complete flop. Because large construction projects in Britain tend t o run years late end millions over budget, nobody can say that the PWR will provide the cheap electricity the CEGB claims it will. I n addition, different safety procedures will affect how it works on the CEGB system. And because British firms are not going t o set up much i n the way of manufacturing facilities for one PWR, largecomponents like the pressure vessel and the steam generators will all be imported hence PWR opposition from corners like the Confederation of Shipbuilding end Engineering Unions. I n addition, Lloyd's trooos savage with particular gli South of Scotland Elect; Board's AGR plans for Torness. This is partly as a result of the Scottish Office's testimony t o the committee, regarded by insiders as the most hopeless display by government officials before any select committee in many years.

Solar CITIZENS

THE US ENERGY P m J E c r mcmtiy l W l - 4 a m* study BIG BUSINESS& RENEWABLEENERGY sOU/ICES: A n Andy& o f the Cotpomto Connection. Tha Mlnp of the rÃ§pord f i l the MiorMchnwnt of th* n w r oil EOmpDniMand amrgy conolom~minto the Infant nmmnbl* inter m u g y Industry. Big oil corporation*, tar numpl*,akhtr own out%>cw control v i h d l y Â¥lloft rrieetricmil industrri: The 18month-long - CEPwudv ~tabiisha that: Nine of the ten largest photovoltaic companies are ownedby multinationalcorporations end six are owned or controlled by major, Oil rfim$.* ' . Ninety-pine percent (99%)of domettic copper production, eswnttel for making solar heating equipment, is owned or controlled by the oil industry. In each of the Int five wars, big businwm# have nceivdno Ins than ei&ty-teven percent (87%) of the government prime solar contracts. This occun despite the fact that eighty'-flw percent (86%) of solar businesses ere small fjnns (less than 500 employees). A National Science Foundation study shows that small businecseiare at lean 20 time* more cat-effective and innovative than big businesses in developing newrfechnologies. However, the Department of Energy's (DOE) patent policies, solar businesses giving major energy corporations an unfair competitive edge. The media campaign* of big oil firm have, in the put, decried d e r enem's potential as trivM and they continue to downplay solar despite the fact that, given proper incentives, solar energy could, accordingt o DOE'S mlmafs, easi'ly contribute 20% of our nation's energy supply by

2000. Major corporations receive at least 76%of ail government windpower contracts. For example, corporate giant Rockwdi international administan the DOE Small Scale Wind Proym. Trend* suggest that the major oil companies also swk to dominate the rewarch and development, manufacturing and distribution of alcohol fuels. The CEP study concludn that Â¥ole energy development In the US is being frustrated end stymied by big oil companies, the energy conglomerate& and their advocate* In govemrmnt Date suggntt that by dominating

the young solar energy industry. the major oil firms hope t o restrict solar's growth while simulmneously maximizing their profit margins in conventional fuels. It indicatesthat US Senator Gary Hart was correct in posing the rhetorical question: "Could it be that Exxon hopes that solar stays under wraps until the world's foail fuel market! are exhausted?."

Don there e x i t a (ecmt report claiming that wave energy is cheaper than electricity produced by oil-fired power nations? This MRS the allegation made before a distinguished audience at the Royal Society of Arts on March 9 by Mr. Stephen Salter, inventor of Slater's Duck. He mid: "It is nowprobable that electricity generated from see weves by any o f the betterdevices wouldbe cheaper than that obtainedfrom oil. The infcrnwtion which supports this conclusion was collecteda t the end of 1979by a group o f independentconsultants commissionadb y the Department

IN POSSIBLY THE FIRST USEFUL PRESS RELEASE

thsy'ramnruntw,thaDapt.of Emrgy hÃWid a bookim on

The consultants are Rendel Palmer end Tritton who, in 1970 produced a report confining apoallinalv high estimates for the cost of GveGectricity Theircosts have come down from 20p40p a unit for most devices to 4.5~-8pin little more than a y ~ while the costs of oil and coal have risen sharply. As to nuclear electricity, the costs includee notional figure for de-commissioning power stations a sharp debate is being pursued inside the board as t o whether it is worth refurbishingold(Ibw~ stations to meat the requirement of the Nuclear Inspectorateor to 30 ahead with the Thatcher 3rogramme of spending Â£16.00 million on new stations.

how to apply for fund* under the r ~ d announced y Third Round of Eumpam Community Damon#rations SetÃ‘li for Entroy Swing Projects. The d M d I i i for UK firmm d institutions wnhing to epoly for Community fund* is April 30,1981. The Department's 'Notes for Applicants' booklet explains how the European Community Scheme works and clarifies points which should be understood i f ~ r o o o n l are s to have a mod c h a k of being se~ectedfor funding. The booklet includes a Z model contract and lists successful projects under the first two rounds. 0 Successful projects will 2 receive funding between 25 per cent and 49 per cent of totel I costs. Caoital costs'mav be repayable on a sliding kale b i n on immhw, 1.000 woman tumid out In tin rein to accordingto the degree of the llv in T n h h r Soum for InfrnMbnd Womnr Dw on Much 7th.. project's success. In a letter to UK firms, drawing attention to the Commublack list are: ntty Scheme, the Department of -u Dudley 6% Energy says that failup to secure A LIST OF ABORTION BLACK Sandwell 7% Community support in no way SPOTS h r b a n compiled by Birmingham 11% . jeopardises a firm's chances of RÃ‘on C i n r i g n for Common Kirklees 11% obtaining support from the UK S*nm on Abortion, t o highlight Wolverhampton 11% Energy Conservation Demonstrethaw a n when ~ lt is p*rticulÃˆri Coventry 12% tion Protect Scheme. However, difficult t o obtaln a Nation*! Wirral 13% the Department advises firms to HÃ‘tt Swilc* abonbn. Walsali 17% apply to the European The latest figures published by Sefton 19% Community first for any projects the Office of Population Censuses Liverpod 20% starting 1982onwards. For end Surveys show that only 46% Soiihull 21% projects beginning before April of ail leal abortions on woman Berkshire 23% 1982, UK fund! may be available reddent In England and Wales in Caldeidele 23% under the continuing UK Endi'gy 1979 were carried out by the Leeds 24% Conwrvatlon Demonstration NHS. his wes a fail of 3% on Redbridge end Waithem Forest Project Scheme. 1978. More than half of ail 24% Writ* D m . of Energy, T h e s women undergoingabortions West Sussex 26% H o u r South, Millbank, London therefore had t o pay for their Salford 26% SW14QJ. operations at a charitable or Warwickshire 26% commercial clinic. Currently 1 Brent end Harrow 27% pricesat thew clinics range from Hereford end Worcs 27% about Â£10 t o Â£200 Kensington, Chelwa and Out of 98 A m Health Wenminster 27% Authorities in Englandand Wales, Bradford 28% 26 performed Ins than 30%of ell St Helensend Knowley 28% abortions on local women. This is Croydon 29% considerably below the national 31dham 28% average and far short of the 75% Contact for more information: recommended Ã a reasonable loanno Chambers, 27-36 proportion by the Royal Mortimer Street, London WIN Commlulon on the NHS which Tel: 01.580 9360.

CleverTrevor

A COMPLETE BREAKDOWN OF DEMOCRACY, i n which the strong might survive and the 4Ã§a would go under. This was the post-nuclear attack picture pnunted t o Carmarthan AntiNuclear Campaign at their meeting o n February 4th by M r Stan Hill, Oyfed County Emergency Planning Officer. Questioned about what might actually happen in Oyfed i n the went of a nuclear war. Mr Hill was vague but said that the county's plans we? t o be based on a scheme currently operating i n Wiltshire whereby volunteers including boy scouts, girl guides, cubs end brownin are being trained in 'home defence.' Mr. Hill said that he did not anticipate that one in forty local government officers would, in the event, leave their families to take up their allotted places in fall-out shelters t o administer the aftermath. His experience training police officers in the midlands led him t o assume that the government 'stav-out'advice (with which hestrongly disagreed) would be ignored as much by the police as by the public and any likely nuclear attack would see a massive influx of refugees into Wales. He agreed that during the recent 'Operation Square Leg' rehearsal the country emergency meals organisation had not fed any of the theoretical refugees because food supplies had been tooted at an early stage in the game. As t o how people on the isolated farms might hear the warning siren? Grey bleeper boxes apparently exist, installed on some farms many years ago and still supposedly in situ. Mr. Hill described Protect and Survive as 'laughable'and said i t 'could have been more honest than it was.'Saying that 'we would be fools not to agree with the principles of nuclear disarmament' he said there was an urgent need for more honest information t o be given the public about nuclear weapons. However when pressed as t o whether it was right to suggest t o the public that any civil defence could be adequate in the face of nuclear realities, his reply was 'Do you want to frighten people?' One lot of people Mr. Hill does want t o frighten are the members o f the Public Protection Committee. He has agreed t o let the C.A.N.C. show this* Council body The War Game',in March, in the hopes that they will suggest an increase in his staff and resources. AN& PETTIT FOR C.A.N.C.

THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE is facing increasing parliamentary pressure over its handling of the criticisms of a senior scientist at Aldenneiton, who has since been forced t o 'retire' due t o his appearance on a TV programme concerned with thesafety standards surrounding radioactive waste management. Trevor Brown, who was 'severely reprimanded' by the MOD after he had appeared on the BBC Newnight programme 'Is Aldermaston Safe?', has now said that he will appeal if the reprimand is not withdrawn by the Under Secretary of State, Mr John Nott. Should there bean appeal it is understood that further embarrassing criticisms may emerge about the fall in safety standards at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment -and that this negligence is partly due t o the secrecy surrounding the MOD operations.

.. RECENT PUBLICATION OF CONFIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT CONTINGENCY PLANS for World War Illinvolving the re-organisation o f the NHS t o cope with thedamage revealed that there were totally inadequatesupplies of medical Â¥quipmewamongit other thin(including the statamant that radiation victims would be given minimum treatment if any i n the wake of en attack). One of the consequences of this lack of supplies is that people would have to fall back on 'primary aid' (as opposed to First Aid, which presupposesa follow up that will not exist) and that this would entail a great deal of reliance on herbal remedies. A copy of the document obtained by Undercurrents contains reams of instructions on the use of Hawthorn. Foxglove, Lily o f the Valley, Mistletoe and other plants for the treatment of heart failure, hypertension and other disorders. Despite the assumption that firstly we will all know how t o collect and process, let alone identify, these plants;and that secondly we will be concerned with our blood pressure whilst radiation burns, presumably, look after themselves, Undercurrents readers may at least be reassured t o know that the NHS does indeed have some faith in alternative medicine?

press, I might have snapped it up for the price of a couple of Pints, even at post-budget prices, but wasn't asked In the current issue of RESURGENCE, John Mitchell opines that the reason Darwin thought we were descended from apes, as oppossed t o pigs, is that Darwin himself looked rathe like an ape. I've always wondered why John believes in pixiesand fairies. All he needs are slightly more pointed ears Friends of the Earth have been colonizing again. When the London Cycling Campaign ran a 'Buckled Wheel'award two years ago for the London Borough with the most potholes, FOE were so annoyed at not thinking up the idea themselves, they leaked the result before the award could, be made. This Februaiy, FOE, with starti n g originality, announced a 'Buckled Wheel' award, ignoring all protests from LCC. This looks like thifwork of the MegaBurke, thought to have been banished t o outer darkness.. ...... >.. Tom Langdon Davies, the head ' of the Natural Energy Association, was spotted at the Ideal Home Exhibition talking t o the chaps from the Nuclear Power Industry stand. 'I really d o admir these people' he was heard t o exclaim. We wish Tom well in his new Â£10,50 job as Engineering Consultant The Dean of St Pauls may have turned us down for his night spot, but watch out for the UC 'Alternative Crucifixion' night at Good Friday at the London Film Co-op. One of the best bands in the known universe are playing, plus poets, Pasolini's Rokotta, pagan rituals etc. Come as your favourite martyr. Bring your own crucifix

.......

Sir Winston Churchill's granddaughter Arabella is hosting a massive CND bash near Glastonbury at mid-summer, She expects 20,000 people and promises 'everything from fire-eaters t o puppet shows and plays*. Meanwhile Tory MP half-brother Winston is publishing a book next month The Defence of the West'. Winston, miffed at being left out of the cabinet, hopes his ramblings will get him the job of War Minister when the going gets really rough. The book i s the work of a paranoid schizophrenic's doctor friend of mine who has read a pre-publication copy informed me. When asked what he thought of EP Thompson, Churchill looked puzzled and said 'Eepy Who?'. . Paranoia is getting out of hand at the Leveller. A t their teach in on the State, a security conscious comrade pointed out during Duncan Campbell's talk that someone was photographing the meeting from a windowledge over-looking the meeting, In fact it was only a faulty neon light.. ....... Leopold Kohr, due t o give the keynote address t o the 4th World Assembly, is not in the hoct ...........of .....health I iinderetand the organizers were considering Lee Kuan Ywe, premier of Singapore, as a replacement, a man whose politics make Keith Joseph look like a raving pinko. ........... Assembly convenor ~ o h Pap. n l w n r t h has sold RESURGENCE ......... oartinotonprooertv . . Speculator Maurice Ash for Â£1 Fancying myself as the Rupert Murdoch of the alternative

ll,i-tie

Foot Rot ON SAT 21 FEE. a massive unemployment demo was held in Glasgow. Michael Foot spoke three times, after a ludicrous platformled chant of "we want Michael." After his third spbech the meeting was wound up, despite hundreds of people shouting and indicating that hundreds, if not thousands, of marchers were only just arriving end many more were still en route. They were ignored. Someone jumped onto the stage a@ said that these people the marcher*, the worker* wore the ones that mattered, that they had marched four miles in the freezing cold and snow, for what? The plug was pulled out o f the microphone as MPs indicated that they were the ones that mattered.

........

.......

LOONY DOOMSTER -. - - A

Amazing scenes followed as hundrylsof angry demonstra swarmed down t o the front c stage and the cries of "Right t o WorkS'were replaced by "Right to speak." Police arrived and the remnants of the vanguard party still on stage were ushered through the back. However, the demonstrators re-assembledat th. exit o f the stage where Jimmy Milne and other well-known revolutionaries were trying t o defend their party line. A police cordon was formed which left no doubt in most people's minds which side the Labour Party leadership were on. lt was the disgustingattitude of Foot and the Labour leadership which was the main topic of conversation in pubs and on the weary road home, not the success of the march, the turn-out or how we've got t o get the Tories out.

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WHAT'S WHEN is Undercurrents'fp listing service. Please send us details of your events by ourcopydate May 1st t o be o n sale May 30th. April 4: ARTHUR SCARGILL isspeaking on the Nuclear Disaster at $7.30 pm, Shakespeare Hell, North Road, Durham. April 10-12: Third World First are having their main conference, Whose Survival. Oxford. Details in UC44. At,the VITAMIN C SYMPOSIUM, April 9-10, the worlds researchers into the vitamin will be grinding their various commercial and . academic axes. Watch out for the flour and the soft drink lobbies. For keenies Â£75Roche Vitamin C Symposium, 318 High Street North, Dunstable, Beds. Fancy Enter in Britinny? Then go the the anti-nuke festival at PLOGOFF on April 19, or join the 150krn marathon from BegAn-Fry, North Finistere on Saturday the 18th presentations at villages en route t o Plogoff. Oragnised i n teams of 11 people. Details from Gerard Lucas 010 33 (971 72 03 95 or.Wise-UK 0865 725354.

A l m at Easter, LEAMINGTON for Eumpoan Nuclear Disarmarnmt are organisinga demonstration. Unfortunately since they forgot t o say exactly (vhich day, most of their listing has got the chop. Contact and address for LEND: Madeleine Thompson, 9 Church Terrace, Cubbington, Leamington Spa, Warks. The COOPERATIVE VILLAGES Conference will be at Botton, Dank, near Whitby, North Yorks on May 2and 3. This will be an opportunity for the several groups working to that end t o meet and share ideas The cost is Â£7.5 adults, Â£ children. Please write t o Jan Bang, M t Pleasant, Hanton, Lincolns. dal 050-781 397) with sag for details. Some space in UC 47 or 48 will be given over t o features and news arising from the conference and Jan would be pleased t o hear from anyone wishing t o contribute. May 4th (May Bank Holiday): TUNBRIDGE WELLS WORLD FAIR- in aid of FOE'S10th birthday celebrations, the Tunbridge Wells group are organKing en environmantal fair with

June 21 INTERNATIONAL SUN DAY: the Hackney Anti Nuclear Group is planning a "Festival of Alternative Energy" in one of North London's public parks, with music, theatre, speakers, and lots of alternative technology hardware. Hardware exhibitors' stalls will be free, contact Sun Power, 83 Blackstock Road, London N4. Tel01-226 1799. Volunteers t o help us organise the festival are very welcome.

exhibitors, entertainment, films, games and food. Venue is the Trinity Arts Centre, Church Road, Tunbridge Wells from 115pm. Bring the family.

May 9 is the day of a formal meeting and debate titled SECURITY and SURVIVAL: New Perspectives in the Defense Debate jointly promoted by DunamisITurning Point. Booking form and programme from Penelope Eckersley, St. James Rectory ,197 Piccadilly, London W1V 9LF. Tel01-229 5747.

TORNESS Wwk of Action, May 9-17, revitalising the campaign against the East Lothian nuke. Sat 9th, motor cavalcade through local villages and picnic near construction site; Sun 10th, womens' and childrens'action. Ring Mary Scott either for details or with your details of other actions t o be taken, tel031-225 7752. SCRAM office 2a Ainslie Place, Edinburgh 3. (Note t o Special Branch -the line is SCRAMbledl

COMMUNITIESof the FUTURE is an exhibition t o be staged from June 24 t o July 26 at the ICA, Nash House. The Mall, London SW1. Exhibitors expected are Greentown, Town and Country Planning Assoc, Andrew Page of Dartington and Nicholas Albery o f 'Frestonia'. July 16 t o Aug 1 2 EMERSON COLLEGE: a four week course on intensive small scale food production includingsome appropriate technology. Feeand full board Â£200Application! for the 12 places t o Rural Development Prog, Emerson College, Forest Row, Sussex RH18 WX." Aug 1st for three weeks is FOE'S GREATBRITISH BIKE RIDE. Hero- ring Jane Howard, Foe on 01434 1684. See listing UC 44.

The first INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF SELFSUFFICIENCY will be held from May 22 t o 25 at the City Docks Centre, Canons Road, Bristol. Details from the organisers at 9 Park Place, Clifton, Avon; tel 0272 292156.

MULTIPLE EVENTS \ ~ p r i l - ~ a Spend y: a hearty week restoring dry stone walls, stabilising dunes or fencing and tree planting with the CONSERVATION CORPS, Spring List, 10-14 Duke St, Reading. Tel0734 596171.

MULLWHARCHAR is a beautiful hill selected for test boring for nuclear waste disposal. 'Pilgrimage' on June 7. Details Kathleen Miller, The Manse, St Johns Town of Dairy, Kirkcudbrightshire. Tel064 43 380.

LAURI ESTON HALL PEOPLE CENTRE April 16-23: Wider Politics of Co-opflrtivn, a major discussion week taking a critical look back i successful and failed coops etc. Big turnout expected. April 24-May 1, Garden Week; May 14-21, Cycling Week; May 22-29, Men and children; June 29-July 6, Music Week; July 13-20, Womens' Week. For later gatherings refer t o Laurieston's newsletter. Laurieston Hall, Castle Douglas, Kirkcudbrightshire. Tel06445 275.

FESTIVALS 1981 (some of thses dates we understand are provisional - so n o indemnity against wasted journeys) 1981 is the 600th anniversary of the PEASANTS' REVOLT. The Labour movement in South London are organising a festival for the May Bank Holiday on Blackheath, between the Tolpuddle celebrations end a Durtiar miners' gala. May 1-5 Mayhill Free Festival, Gloucs. May 16 Epping Forest Free Festival, London. May 21-26 Northan FAIR (Festival of Answere, Insightsand Revelation's) Leeds Exhibition Centre. Tel: P Hutchinson 0532 . 441660 t o book space. May 23-24 Albion Children's Fail n r Diss, Norfolk. Contact 9 St Mary's Rd, Beccles. Suffolk. June 6 Cambridge Strawberry Fair June 5-8 Ruthin FreeF&t;CfWc June 12-22 Stonahenga Free Fen Jun8 19-21 CND M i d ~ m n ~ r F a t i d , music, k t u m and kids Â¥nt*Itdnnmt Worthy Fmn, Pilton, nr GItonbury. Â£7 L o u 1 publican unfrrndly. D f i l from CNO; td 01-263 '

Cartoons: Jo Nasbit

June 6: is International Bike Day and the day of the GREAT LONDON BIKE MARATHON covering 26 miles round the inner London boroughs and calling for 1% of London's road budget for cycle provisions. Ring Andy Marshall for route and times 01590 3802.

arms, 4 Conway St, London W1. April 6, Political causes of ill health; May 11, Food end Politics; June 1, Office Health Hazards -Women and Work Hazards Group. More details ring B.S.S.R.S. 01437 2728.

April t o June 19: CENTRE for AT i s part of the way through its season of alternative technology and other courses. See UC 44 for full listing or ring C.A.T. tel Machynlleth (0645) 2400. April-MayJune: HEAD for the HILLS, walking tours with Lawrence Golding: April 18-25, Carmarthen Bay; May 16-23, Radnor Hills; June 10-18, Exmoor. S.A.E. t o Recreation Hall, Garth, Builth, Powys. Tel. Llangammarch Wells 388. See What's What this issue.

April-May-June: SCIENCE FOR PEOPLE: meetings at the Adam's

4854. June 20-28 6th Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit, Olympia, W. London. Centrepiece: Friends of the Earth i n celebration of their 10th anniversary. June 27 2nd Liwrpool New Age Festival, St George's Hall, opp. Lime St Station. Festival office, tel Lesley 051-708 8248. July 3 Canthi Stone free test., Newtown, Powys. July 8: Wonun'. Dw: C o w Fair, mÂ¥1Ã‘w t h b law. July 10-11 Co-opa Fdr, BÃ‘ch wood, Elrnrte Lano, L n d s 8. See next issue for listing o f the rest of the summer festivals.

Undercurrents 45 fuel from the southern half of the country t o Windscale. THIRD WORLD FIRST is a student based campaign against the exploitation of the developing world. They have various old and new publications; Links is an occasional periodical usually with a theme, recently Education its use and abuse; Campaigns Bulletin is news broadsheet and co-ordinates student groups; HEADIines (Higher Educations and Development) explores the relation between the issue of development and higher education here, from overseas students t o the content of courses. 3W1,232 Cowley Road, Oxford. Tel. 0865 45678.

WHAT'S WHAT is Undercurrents' free 'nepotism' service where we give our friends and other worthy causes a plug. So if you're up t o something new and think you dese~e.amention, try us on! Copydate May 1st. The copyright of the SMILING SUN symbol Nuclear Power? No Thanks is strictly controlled for the benefit of the anti-nuke movement, proceeds from sales are fed back into the movement. The range of products is being expanded, for example there is a highly reflective bicycle sticker available and there are eight official distributors around the country (being increased t o ten). Ring FOE (Head Office) for your nearest distributor and/or price list. Tel 01-434 1684.

A EUROPEAN ATLAS on NUCLEAR SITES is being compiled in English and will contain every last nuclear plant, depot or site, uranium mining, transport of radioactive material etc. Also a blow by blow account for each plant, of its construction, leaks;cost etc and also opposition. All citizens groups will be listed, whether legal or illegal, in Western or Eastern Europe. To accomplish this guargantuan task the authors need the information inside YOUR head. Inundations t o the Eds, Nuclear Atlas, Klostermolle, Klostermollevej 48, DK8660 Skandeborg, Denmark. LONDON OPEN RADIO has an open meeting every Tuesday. They reside at 82 Pran St. London NW1. Tel01-388 7125 afternoons. HEAD FOR THE HILLS COUNTRY WALKING TOURS (a sort of Cooks 40 days in the wilderness) which has been a minor feature of Undies small ads Â¥eversummer is a still smaller voice this year. Laurence Golding, who arranges the trips, has found a place to base his operation, after five years of being nomadic. It's a sixty foot long shed in a railway siding in the heart of the Welsh Hills.So with lots of work t o be done, instead of the usual full programme of walks, there era Just seven trips this year. ,, However the camp might (urn up .' in the guise of a wholefood cafe" at some of the nicer festival!. See WHAT'S WHEN for dates

W O O F is TEN YEARS OLD1 Wwoof has gathered 2000 members over the yeam who are happy t o help out at weekends o n over 200 organic farms. It operates by circulating a bimonthly list of "willing buyers' and 'willing sellers' i.e. of every ones preferences,and the members and the farmers fix up their own arrangements. Membership is Â£ pa. Send sa.e. for application form from Wwoof, 19 Bradford Road, Lewes, Sussex. Do you think we need a SOCIALIST HUMANIST ASSOCIATION? If so then helo form an organisation t o develop the long atheist tradition in the Labour Movement, like Bernard Shaw and others, in order t o counter the influence of reactionary religion on Labour's thinking. Contact Colin Mills, 41A Chesham Road, Amerhsam on the Hill, Bucks. Tel. Amersham 6103.

available from some London bookshops and from: Sue Graenberg, 49 Davenant Road, London N19 3NW. 15p each +s.a.e. The TRADE UNION BOOKSERVICE is a mail order service based at Bookmarks, 265 Seven Sisters Road, London N4, and amongst the left bookshops has perhaps the best range of stock on subjects such as Rights at Work, Health and Safety at Work, Trade Unionism and a good selection on the New Technology and the Politics of Science. Send s.a.e. for booklist or phone 01-802 6145. At long last one corner of the country has managed t o call itself BANANA! ThÃ Burnley And Nalwn Anti-Nuclear Alliance (Colne gets left out -sob). Their secretary is Sue Bond, Tel Burnley 26230, and their pitch appears t o be the slice of Lanm between Manchester and Wind-, ~ d qIt. has a triangle of railway tines that carry the spent nuclear C,

PAMPHLETS The AGRICAPITAL GROUP of the British Society for Social Responsibility i n Science have just published issue no 1 of Foodand Politics in A5 format which they hope t o produce quarterly. First off are articles on the Hamburger Invasion, Cuban Agriculture, Food after the Bomb and others, and their editorial explains how they set out 'to provide information and a critique from a socialist point of view of the manner in which food is produced, processed, marketed and consumed.'We wish them well and hope it takes off. 4011 from BSSRS Publications Ltd, 9 Poland St, London W1. Also on the food issue is a small self published book FOOD: NEED, GREED and MYOPIA by Geoffrey Yates, which takes more of an ecological and third world viewpoint about food. It reviews the way the-rich countries and their multinational corporations exploit the developing countries through food trade, aid and about the Green Revolution and population. The remaining sections are concerned with nutrition and the relations of food policy t o land use and employment. No price quoted. Published by Earthright Publications, 7 Blayney Row, Newburn, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.Tel 0632 673133. Two pamphlets on nuclear disarmament have appeared at the same time; one stems from the Ecology Party's 1980 conference decision t o pursue unilateral disarmament. The pamphlet, quaintly subtitled Ecology Party Defence Policy Paper 1, attempts t o justify their position. NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT AND BEYOND, 20p, 8pp, Ecology Party, 36-8 Clapham Road, London SW9. The second comes from Aberdeen CND and i s smartly printed and

published by Aberdeen People's Press (APP). The theme is Civil Defense, hardenedcommunications and government bunkers in the style o f Beneath the City Streets but with all the emphasis on Aberdeen and the Grampian region, whose North Sea Coast bristles with communications hardware. It is an excellent expose of the lack of civilian protection but how neverthelessthe region is a target for nuclear attack. LIVING ON THE FRONT LINE, 48pp, Â£ incl post from APP, 163 King Street, Aberdeen. LIFE AFTER LEEDS is the title of the Beyond the Fragments Bulletin No. 1 (25p post free or at least Â£ for a ye+ f h Julia Meadows, 27 Stepney Green, London E l 1, a report of the BTF conference last August in Leeds (UC 42) and developments since then. A loose national structure has been established and there's t o be a national 'event' this year as well as local meetings. The BTF book is now into i t s third edition and is being translated into German and Dutch; in the US it will be published by Carrier Pigeon. This could be the start of something big.. . Pergamon Press have just published a new edition, revised and enlarged of David Ross' ENERGY FROM THE WAVES at Â£3.6 paperback. Would be student? Then get A N ALTERNATIVE PROSPECT for prospective students, a radical view of how t o survive and subvert perhaps your time at University. 20p plus post for 16pp from Know Future, Oxford House, Derbyshire St, London E2. New on the streets is an A.1 bulletin called The A.T. ALTERNATIVE TIMES: a selection of alternative energy news and views. Number One is dated March and consists of four duplicated sheets of energy policl news, developments in A.T. research, some international new; conference dates and resources. It is produced by Roger Stevens at a sub of Â£1.5 p.a plus Â£1.5 p&p or free? for activists if Islington FOE and the North London Anti-Nuclear Alliance. From The Shed,35 Wedmore St, London N19 4RU. Tel01-272 2360 The NUCLEAR DEBATE: ideology and science by Ian Senderson is a contribution t o energy studies from the O.U. Occasional Paper No 2,75 pp A4 format, Â£2.0 plus post from Technology Policy Group, Faculty of Technology, Open University, Milton Key--MK7 6AA.

Undercurrents 45

SISTERWRITE

n I The Making

We we a woman's collective, legally formed a* a co-operative, set up in 1978, to provide womens' end feminist books. We stock and large number of US book* and operate a meil-order wrvice for those whocannot come t o the (hop. We have e catalogue, available from us SOD . .vlus 250 OMUM. There a f i facilities at the shop for women to have coffee and also a reading room. SISTERWRITE, 190 Upper Street, London N1. (01226 8782)

THE FIRST DAY OF THE SECOND NATIONAL CO-OPS FAIR WILL BE A ONE-DAY EVENT FOR WOMEN ONLY. WE HOPE WOMEN IN WOMENONLY CO-OPS, WOMEN IN MIXED CO-OPS, AND WOMEN INTERESTED IN CO-OPS WILL COME. WOMEN'S CO-OPS FAIR DAY FRIDAY 10TH JULY 1081 SO-OPS FAIR SATBUN 11th/12th JULY

\T BEECHWOOD. ELMETE LANE. LEEDS 8. day will ba a mixture of wolkshopa and enmrtoinmont. Thm Â¥I bo a mawith cannina Â¥M Â¥roun it. We wM dl bo able to hoot i n th. marquoo, and t&r* will be lot* of room for Ixhfeitlonst o h o w whit w o m n In w-opa are doing. WÃ§1ebo how Iroom Inud* for worksho~. For further d t i l b write t o tarbore Sindon ond Ton MoMthon, 58 Ctarem St., Buml*y, Land

'028Z3W3ZI

THE FOLLOWING WOMEN'S GROUPS HAVE BEEN EXTRACTED FROM THE ENTRIES TO IN THE MAKING No. 8, WHICH IS DUE OUT I N APRIL. ITM, 44 Albion Road, Sutton, Surrey.

SSSOC OF RADICAL MIDWIVEL Formed in 1976 when e group of disillusionedstudent mldduives met t o offer support and mcouqwment to each other during training, our overall aim Is to restore the role of the tnldwife for the benefit of the mildbearing woman end her baby .Other objectives are: t o explore eltematlve patterns of care; t o share ideas, skills end Information; t o encourage gvaluatlon of development in our fl?ld;to m-astebliah the c o n f l d d a of the midwife in her lkllls; to encourage midwives in their support of e women's icttve partklpttlon In childbirth. The name radical may rilenate mmy, but w bellow that 'radical' e x p r u In ~ I t 8 original wnn the enonce of our group, Ia.rdotlng to roots Ã§n origins. Nitlond meeting) e n hold eyry 11xw n k i end than i s a newI*. Memberthlp Â£ per ymr. ASSOCIATION OF RADICAL MIDWIVES, P D IPI Mackelth, (.'~ountHoot

WRRC We ere a feminist library end resource centre which IS own toall women but only membea can borrow books for home reading. We keep information on all kinds of rewerch on issue8 of concern to women and have brought out several pamphlett. We are a charity and 8 coliactive with 1012 regular including3 paid workers. We waited in 1975and have over 1,000 member*. Mernbmhip Â£ a year learning under Â£6000(Â£1for Institutions end high earner*) Poor pÃ§opi p w what they con afford: WOMEN'S RESEARCH AND RESOURCES CENTRE. 190 upper Street, London ~ 1(01 . 369 6773) MOSS SIDE COMMUNITY PRESS We are a womens' co-op and community pren since September 1976. We employ four people and aim to ancourego and advise people who have no experloncÃof printinfbofm. We doa lot of work for wurrns' group* and community orgoilzitions. MOSS SIDE COMMUNITY PRESS, 210 Prince- Rud, Mmchener 1.4.1061 226 71 16). ,,

LONDON CO-OPS FATE? THE FIRST LONDON COOPS wwthÃ‘jintgotOFFTH GROUND. The (tat* h n boon filed for tha 30th MAY at INTERACTION, 16 WILKIN STREET, LONDON NW5. Tha mitt i t d f will bo mainly a socid, but with soma workshorn in the afternoon. T h m will bo thntra, film, l i mtek in the owning, borate. Plus th. u w l hcllities such Ã cncha, food, or whatm r . Thb is a "one off" ocoion, Â¥tfmptln only to cowr the c o f , tho m l n Idom beingt o put wrioul COW ond collectivn In touch with e d other, ~ hem tha quoaton mark. Ifyou would like to u k a pt (mom people, eipeclilly womon would be W M w m on the orgnnizingfront) write t o TAMDOUGANatUNDERCURRENTS for mom dotnib

LONDON We are compiling lnew

now u c t l w u on enwgy, the a n v i m m a , India, comPuft8, If any Undorcurranta d e n

know aomtthlngthot ihould b* Inducted Ian active group a publication, for example, or pmctlol tips and n g o ~ l b n s ) oould they tot us know at: BCM Aitw, London WC1V 6XX odd-) 01-221 7776. (full -1 A t a o n ape-ibl*,plw~w r n d y finkhod.

~hnrio, OEQRQANNE DOWNE8

ACTION MAGAZINE, With a group of friends Iam trying to set up two talking magazines. All of usare young people with various degrees of vhual disability who are fed UP with the lack of alternative left wing Pren coverage in the braille and taped publications. For example, magazines such as your* are never used in publications for usend unless we have kind sighted friends to read this sort of thing to us we tend to miss out on a lot. The organisations who N n the established braille end tape press tell us that seventy five percent of ell blind people are over the age of sixty fiveend therefore would not be interested in the sort of things that we are, and so they must cater for the majority. We would like to know therefore if it would be alright for us so use someof your published materiel in our monthly magazines. We wonder also i f it would be possible for you to publish somethingabout our plans as we need very much to have some more volunteers to help us out with reading taping etc. Yours sincerely KIRSTEN HEARN 13 Northbrook Road LEWISHAM

advice/experium of setting up e co-opend many more.T'hiswi1 we hove establish some solid [groundwork, for woman to

a supportative network of active omen ' involved in attempting t c

inue of Undles will k a s a baiis or the workshops for the omans (toy at the co-op fair. e are still looking for new, Info etc on w m n s groups nationally, m o t of our known urn are In or around London, o mw from groups outside of London would b* eipeclally lcome. The copy dote for the Inue Is the It May. So p l o i ~ entriei beform then. TAM DOUGAI

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Would YOU buy a usedgovemment from these people?

Most people have little idea what the House of Commons is really like. Bob Houseman reports from b e h i d the facade. ALTHOUGH nominally a 'stranger', like any visitor to the House of Commons- the holder o f a Parliamentary photogranhic pass cannot fail t o enjoy walking past a queue of 150 people waiting outside St. Stephen's entrance for a ticket to the Gallery, flashing his or her pass at the policeman and walking straight through. The thrill increase; when, after a month or two, the policeman rewgnises you and does not even ask to see your pass. The House (as you quickly learn to call it) is a very seductive place. Being research assistant/dogsbody to an MP provides some revealing and depressing insights into the atmosphere of the House of Commons and the real role of i t s members.

being drafted onto the Committee and quite frankly they don't have the time for that sort of serious business. After all as Andrew Roth's recent book c business background of MP's show! they are far too busy with real business for which incidentally the House provides a perfect platform-tea on the Terrace will not fail to impress a prospective client.

Charm

Bureaucrats It i s not new to suggest that MP's have no real power-Bagehot's distinction between the dignified and efficient parts of the constitution is still thrust down the throats of every first year politics student-How does this lack of political control show itself?Why do the 635 honourable members still give the impression of being the most important and influential people in the country? How do they actually fulfill an ideological role which perpetuates a notion of the political sphere as a separated (male), professional arena best l e f t to those ho enter it as a career?

Williams

Indecent Face-spottingin the House i s a game which every visitor plays and which every employee pretends not to play. Walking down the corridor from the Table Office to the door marked 'Lady Members' it i s hard to avoid Enoch Powell. His starched, separate collar makes his head with i t s waxen complexion look as though it could be easily separated from the waist-coated body underneath-no such luck. Bumping into Ian Paisley i s even more of a shock as he sweeps across the Central Lobby with his three Parliamentary henchmen. Walking into the Gents the unwitting may fall over that paragon of virtue Tim Sainsburyrelieving himself in a way that surely constitutes an indecent display under the terms of his own Private Members Bill. A t the other end of the scale i s the Beast of Bolsover, as Dennis Skinner i s affectionately known. As he gets to his feet during Prime Minister's question time there i s a roar of anticipation from both sides, which he counters with the comment: ' Y o ~ y o n ' tbe laughing in a minute1-they W i l l be and he knows it.

Callaohan

No Feeding the animals

Many backbenchers will avoid speaking in the second reading of a Bill (the only stage when amendments stand some chance of success (other than at the Committee stage, of which more later), they avoid it because they then risk

It would be naive to conclude however that mosf MP's are powerless and to defend that conclusion by some theory of society which locates power exclusively in a particular class or sex or in the Military-Industrial complex 01 in the Civil Service or in a combination of those elements (male-domination by the way is probably the only common factor among those explanations) If we are still going to protest at what MP's are doing, or not doing, then we should do so simply because Cabinet members can collectively determine the basic elements of any particular legislative programme and because the career structure of Westminster continues to preclude any serious backbench revolt. Add to this the gradual but significant extension of the Committee system and we see that MPs are, after all, not without power. Indeed, the present Government's highly successful efforts to implement a

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radical (and reactionary) manifesto might yet refute the argument that our two-party Parliamentary system will always tend to produce a wishy-washy centrist administration that serves only to preserve t.kstatus quo. It is in terms of political culture that MP's still exercise an unintentional influence-an influence that is elitist, deeply conservative and politically stultifying.

Battered Mini

and so on-they also have a Rent-aGob list of those who will profess expertise on any issue if it will earn them air-time. There is fierce competition to become the chief authority on any particular matter. Ten Minute Rule Bills (which give you literally ten minutes to raise a matter in the House); oral and written Parliamentary Questions; adjournment debates (half an-hour at the end of every day); and Early Day Motions (which simply appear on the Order Paper and stay there as long as there is a new signature added every day) are the classic methods of sustaining a campaign which in fact exists only in that brief Parliamentary airing and the subsequent column space in the Constituency newspaper. Some Early Day Motions are tabled solely for the benefit of the Public school sense of humour of the vast proportion of the Members. A recent motion noted with concern that Tony Benn had written the forward to a book about Gay rights-it might as well have read 'Yah boo, Benn's a pooftah'. Another congratulated Dusty Hare on scoring all 19 points for the England rugby team against Walesan amendment by a Welsh MP noted that 19 points were not enough to win the game and that Steve Fenwick surpassed that achievement by scoring all 26 points in a game o f a previous season. How much does it cost to have this school magazine printed by the following morning?

Most Members seek to match the charm of Dennis Healey. Running into him in the Members Lobbv and he will instantly raise his eyebrows, grin and say: '4ello' as if you arean old friend. Noblesse Oblige He still drives in and out o f New Palace Yard in his old battered Mini (his wife ' What happens when a constituent had apparently been lobbying for a seeks the intervention of their MP?The Metro), which his more cynical colleagues constituent has exhausted every bureauwould write off as good PR. This name- cratic avenue to obtain justice, the dropping has a Purpose. Seeing these correct amount of supplementary benefaces in their natural environment soon fi or a new meter. H~or she demonstrates that, with very few writes to their MP. The MP's office then exceptions, membership of that most exclusive male club serves to unite the members in a way that goes far beyond any political differences. John Patten, that smooth playboy don who is Member for Oxford, and has graced the pages of Cosmopolitan as Pet of the Month, would readily identify with Neil Kinnock's macho bragging that 'birds' are his main interest outside education. There i s an unspoken consensus among backbenchers (and front-benchers in opposition) that there is very little that they can do t o alter the legislative content of a Parliamentary session. They all tacitly concede that they might as well get on with the serious job of pursuing the many publicity-oriented campaigns which keep a backbencher busy in Parliament. TV and Radio stations have lists of MPs who are orepared to speak on economic issues, w,nsMm , , . ,,, +, penal reform, on foreign affairs

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Hit? {anDM* 38)

acts as a clearing house and the letter is sent on to the relevant Minister or head of department. Bureaucrats tend to jump when they receive a letter signed by someone with the letters MP after their name arm the problem is then sorted out, or at least explained away as not being a legitimate complaint. In many cases the constituent then sends a suitably deferential letter of thanks to the MP for being personally involved in their problem. The MP has exercised his influence by way of his ready access to levels o f decision-makingwhich most ordinary people are denied. Bureaucrats do jump for Members of Parliament they do not for members of the public. The ideological effect of t h i s process is to maintain a notion of political involvement as a professional activity. Politics is-somethingwhich MP's are paid to do and which should not enter into most everyday areas of life (how often have you been told to 'keep politics out of itJ?)The caring constituency MP i s one who fulfills this paternalistic rolethe Renaissance value of 'noblesse oblige' rules OK. MP's then have a monopoly of the r i d to make value judgements about public affairs (and private affairs in the case of Tim Sainsbury). And this monopoly stems in large part from the mythology of the Member". A loyal Labour Party worker told me the story of his visit to the House and how he wandered into the commons bar for a drink. The barman asked: 'Are you a Member, sir?' H e replied: 'Yes1-he has indeed been a fully paid up card carrying member o f tte Labour Party for years. In the House what being a Member means. a member you are one of us toEnoch Powell apd to Dennis Skinner. lt w i l l - a w w p *&%handful of 'Lad Mern^;&(&ffkMornan Prime Miniter Member. to s 4 + ,l+c, o f the male

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Bob Houseman

undercurrents 45

Pro's & Cons

PROSTITUTES are powerless women who sell their bodies to powerful men. So it's no accident that the law favours the client against the 'working girl'. Like other wage slaves, they are discovering that by getting together and organizing they can change the rules of the game, as Jo Pacino describes.

'Yes, we have been scrubbing floors, yes we have been nurses, cooks, domestic help, babysitters, factory workers, farm workers. And we have also worked as prostitutes. We are not ashamed o f that, because that's how we hiwa'suhived for generations '. OUR illegality has kept us hidden and divided from other women. Now that our campaign for all the laws against us t o be abolished is gaining ground, we can speak out and say just how many women have lifted themselves out o f poverty and into independence our way. We still face arrest, jail, fines, being called 'unfit mothers' and losing custody of our children. And police make it their business to hound us once we start to organise. But that's how all movements begin. The ECP was formed in 1976. As an indepenent organisation of pros and nonpros within the Wages for Housework Campaign, we have had a voice and joint action with other women -the best protection we have. For example, last year Women Against Rape picketed with us and other pros in front of the Old Bailey where a woman who'd been raped had her name released because the rapist claimed she was a pro. If you're a pro, the court assume you can't be raped. They think we're available to sleep with any man, any time. But we do say no, more often than some wives can. Because the WFH Campaign i s international, we made contract with groups of pros in other countries, and spread the news of actions pros have taken: the 1975 prostitutes' strike in France, or the Australian pros who refused to service sailors from a nuclear driven ship for health reasons. Our fights and victories were as hidden as we have been. We made contact with MP's, lawyers, community workers, and found allies. They say that pros are women from all walks of life but above all single mothers. Through prostitution we provide the welfare the State won't provide, for us and our children, for student husbands and elderly parents. Women wanted to know what we have in common with them, and whether going on the game was an option for them -if the money was wprth the risk, and what effect being a pro had on our sex lives. We told them that each woman is different, but having money of your own gives any woman more power to

decide, when not at work, with whom she'll sleep, when and how. There were some women, calling themselves feminists, who refused to support us and without thinking supported the laws against us. THey told us we degraded women by catering to men sexually. But the law comes down on us not because we serve men sexually -most women do- but because we refuse to serve men for free. By the summer of 1977 Barones Joan Vickers in the House of Lords called for all the laws against prostitutes to be abolished. One reason, she said, was that hookers have to go back on the street to pay the fines imposed on us. WE call that pimping by the S t a p In November 1978 she called a 'Public Debate' on the laws. Over 200 people attended, including a former suffragette, and members o f the Salvation Army and the National Association of Probation Officers which i s for the laws to be abolished. On March 6th 1979 Parliament passed reduced to 6 months. Public opinion was the first reading of Maureen Colquhoun's very synnathetic to Cynthia because her case was a very good example of the hypProtection of Prostitutes Bill, 130-50. This would abolish jail and fines for solic- ocrisy of the prostitution laws: while she iting, and the term 'common prostitute' was made to pay, her clients, many of which keeps us labelled and on the game whom were highly placed men, remained for life. unnamed and free. The night before'the vote, we organIn June '80 we published "Prostitutes ised a meeting in the House o f Commons, Our Life" the first book by pros about where a packed hall saw 'Hard Work', a pros. It was the first chance for the pubfilm about Margo St. James, founder of lic to get close to prostitute women, to Coyote (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), get a very good idea o f who a prostitute the bigest pros group in the U.S.A. woman is and how the law influence her Speakers from the ECP, PLAN (Prostlife. itutes Laws Are Nonsense) and PROS Lobbying the UN (Programme for the Reform o f the We were on the march of the TUC Laws on Soliciting) were onthe platform Day of Action, with a banner which said: with Wilmette Brown of Black Women1 for Wages for Housework (USA) speak- Mothers Unite English Collective of Prostitutes. We were distributing a copy ing for U.S. prostitutes collective. of our letter to Len Murray in which we It's a long way from standing on asked the TUC to publicly recognize street corners to feed your child~tn, to a Bill in the House of Commons; from prostitutes as workers and to recognize being harassed by police to being inter- our Campaign as a trade dispute. We also viewed by TV, radio and the press of the marched on the antinuclear demo-istration and demanded that the world. Government makes available t o mothers The campaign continues to grow. We have been invited to speak at Colleges and other women the money of the military budget. Universities, women's groups, mum's But the question is not only the cash: groups, gay groups, probation officers in July 1980 we participated in the. and social workers groups, parties United Nations World Conference on branches etc. We have organised around Women, in Copenhagen. Together with the case of Cynthia Payne, who was us were members of the US Collective sentenced to 18 months imprisonment and Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ4.00 fine and costs, on charges of of Prostitutes, and the French Collect-ive of Prostitutes and other organizations brothel keeping. The sentence was

Undercurrents45 from the International Wages for House- on the side to supplement Social Security work Campaign. We were black and white and become illegal, as do pensioners, 'women, third world and fretropolitan, gturfent~.and the unemoloved. People . are forced to get around immigration of different ages and nationalities rules, evade bills, selling stuff which they We lobbied the shouldinot be selling, not pay TV licenUN t o pass r b l u t i o n 103, which demand- e@. -.-. ed that women's housework and agricultural work be included in the GNp of The Rules Of The Game the countries. The figures o f women's The point i s that the Poor are not Supcontribution to society are quite shockposed to get money. We are supposed t o ing: women do 2/3 o f the world's work, stay poor. That's what the recent scandal get 1/10 of the world's income and own of the caretaker who earaed Â£14.00 a 1%of the world's property. year was about. There are thousands of There i s more money for technologies individuals on Â£14.00 a Year. There are such as missiles, moon-shots and other men who gamble that amount and much symbols of the virility o f men. But there more every night at Casinos. I t s all right i s relatively little Spent on technologies for managers of industries and Ministers that could imprort the lot of most to be rich. but it's scandalous for Paor women, such as making contraception peopletohave money. Precisely the completely safe, or contraception for =me concept lays behind the prostitution men. There is little spent on relieving the laws. Here is an excerpt from a speech drudgery of housework, which might given by Selma James on behalf of the palease the energy of h e n to do some- ECP at the ICA in a workshop called thing more creat ve l o r subversive) for .prmtitutes - - - . - and unemployment, part example, in relation to the amount spent of ISSUE, SocialStrategies by Women on computers to make international Artists. Selma was talking about going financial speculation less o f a headache on tha game refusal of poverty. and more lucrative. * .&w feiso think that it's an act of courage, and I just want to 90 into that "After all, who are prostitutes a bit more.

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go on thegame and to confront the law which says you're illegal i f you goan the game. But it's also an act of courage to holdyour head up after you have done something which society refuses to acknowledge as in any way a contributand vour dian.Ion - to .- -that - - societv - - - -,,- have ity intact. And I think that part of the motivation for the prostitution laws is presieety to undermine tho@of us who are prostitutes and those o f us who solw our financialproblemsinother ways the. are supposed to dmora/jse us. We retain&dignity,at Iwst we keep more of our dignity intaqt than they Me. A d the powers that be are btoody angr: that towrv/veso &/no tfUnas that they salt/ we should Secondly, the laws create many diffei ences among m e n and 'hive off'some of US -to use the words Maureen Colquhovn uses InqwVng the Crfmiaaf La\ Revision Cymi'n/ttee. 'Hie laws tbut exist that orait&ute worn& and - - nerwcute - - - , -that we want abolished, /,think those laws are there not only because they don't like us hot&!& i/p"ari>r tieaafi &ever we /king, however we have defied the conventions. I think the laws serve to fright-

as friend and allies. act bf courage not only to go on the game; not only to confront all of s o f e t y F i n a l l y , I think those taws exist Before the new technology of the because they Soft 'f FWTM-W ma@ wome, which says that you are immoral I f you computer and mketoprocessor, some togo fhv A? g&@rf~-ww/dg& if the Ian people might have believed there weren't weivnot ftfhtfik theV siisoect all - - . - tfwM. y live enough goods for ~ W b o d to of us, art t' 1 #$ fA~y fave cause. I think rnrnfortably. Nov? wacp toid by governnone ofus4 ke tada, all the free ivork ments and media that the problem is, which has bee& tfiq flterfny a& the what we are going to do with our leisure Identity of warned up td nod, in which time, because there won't b'e any work, we must/m/wtffree sewat w k . They the machines will produce all'the wealth wect W s Â¥wtt~ &r, MI: of //legality we need. So, one of our-demands at and pitruseism, to keep ys omrt from Copenhagen' was that techdologYAe each other fMt thep&ffspurt from tha, made to reduce women's Work , power, apart from thereal'katlon of our The latest Campaign @vefft'waiâ‚¬f own value, prostitute ami non-prostltutt publication o f our rights-sheet "A guide attke. L to the rules of the gme: AZ foriWSrk* hat thf Engfls~~ofieetlve e~rosting girls". We declared: 'The pfastltlittor. Itutes has hew- We sfnce 1975l$to laws are so devious that many @rostftSt@s make very efewtflatthe@yf w who an are yrrested and to'& w t h o u t even prostitutes amfthose cff vs ^wfw dm not knowing how to defend ouWtvsi. It.!? want the same tfilngs lfrSpite of the "way crucial for all of us -ftmfessfonu?s, art we h a y been W e d . We bath k v e the timers, beginners- to know wr rig <? same Mrif of resfsfance t o the powers so that fewer of us are prosecuted. It is that be; ore standlq up 'forourselves also about time the general tfuMc learnt wherever wS are and' being counted, and what the laws which are passed {ft t b f r name are realty about. . . . . '' Now, prostitutes are by no Mans the only sector o f the population which has to face the law in order to make a living, especially in times of high unemploy- , 4 ment. Most people at one time or an. JoPacinc other have experienced illegality and have had somethingto hide. It's very b t i t ~ t ' sOW : Ufa. English Collective hard not to break the law if you're poor. of Prostttutee; Falling Well Press, Bristol, 1984 If you are black, you are picked up on 1 AÂ£3.50 Gupe TO'T~B~ u l i f Of s The Game, AZ For suspicion and assumed to be guilty Working Girls, 5p tSAE from The Women's before you even do anything worth of suspicion. Many single mothers take a job u Centre, PO Box 287, London NW 6.

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Barlinnie Special Unit is a Scottish jail where long term prisoners are treated like human beings. Neil Bartlett, argues that it has much to tell us about what makes, and unmakes a 'criminal'.

undercurrents 45,

Open Door

THE specCUnit in HMP Barlinnie (Glasgow) was set up in February 1973 as an experimental response to the problem of violent long-term prisoners in Scottish jails. Outbreaks of violence by inmates in the top security Porterfield prison at Inverness in which prison officers were injured had led the Scottish Prison Officers' Association to press for the establishment of a unit to house a numerically small, but potentially dangerous group of criminals. A working party was set up, and in i t s findings argued that the response of the traditional prison system to this type of prisoner was proving highly unsatisfactory; punitive measures only led to further acts o f aggression and retaliation from the offenders and periods o f solitary confinement brought about deterioration in the individual prisoner's mental state. The working party suggested as an alternative the establishment of a community where prisoners and prison officers had equal decision rights in the day-today running o f the community, and where the community shourd produce i t s own codes of conduct and sanction. Importantly, each member of the community should have the right to call a full meeting at a moment's notice should any dispute arise. Five long-term prisoners (there are seven now) began the Unit in the converted women's wing of Barlinnie, living with prison staff in a closed community. All members of the Unit, both staff and prisoners, elect to go there. Some find the new atmosphere of selfdiscipline too demanding, and return to a more conventional prison life. The particular differences between the Unit and the main Prison can be listed; mail i s unlimited and uncensored in the Unit; visiting i s liberal, liberal enough to have allowed one of the pr~S0nerSto carry a relationship, made while he was in the Unit, forward t o marriage; the prisoners wear their own clothes and cook their own food; they made themselves a garden. They organist! their lives and resolve personal tensions in communal meetings. Since visiting artists were introduced to the Unit. all its membershe become involved in personal expression through painting, sculpture and writing: The aualltv of the difference'beween the unit and the main Prison may best berealised by a description. To visit the Unit you have to wait with visitors for the prisoners in the

main Prison. To get that far you have to have applied in writing. I was able to join a party of four visitors, at short notice. That sort c f flexibility isn't possible in visiting tLe main Prison. There you have to be on the list. The waiting room is casually ugly, like a DHSS waiting room. To get in, you have to go through two locked doors and a lobby full of warders in uniform; you hand over a signed chit saying who you are and who you're visiting. The warders look like thugs; they talk loudly amongst themselves be appreciated in the context of the but say nothing to the visitors. waiting room and the empty courtyi They know, and the visitors know, and the surrounding district o f Glasgow that time is very limited; friends and through which I'd come, to meet and relatives only have three quarters of talk with someone whom I'd never met an hour every few weeks. However, no before, a criminal. sign i s given of how long you will have to wait; it i s assumed that the warders will take their own time. They take TIioughts After A Visit the chit out through another door. A conventional prison exists to Eventually they return and call out establish and maintain a tautology: A a name. 1 assume that they see the Criminal is a Criminal. This is achieved same visitors repeatedly, but there fcty cutting off the criminal from any was no sign of it. I'm told that when other environment except that of you get to the visiting room you criminals. Letters are censored, written have to communicate through a glass not on ordinary notepaper but on window; no touching. There is a grill prison (criminal) letter-forms. Visits ar at the bottom o f the window, so controlled so that they become not acl that you have to bend down to hear of human communication which break and be heard. Time is short, and the prison routine, but carefully staged warders watch you. prison visits', reminders of theisolatio Taget to the Unit, you have to oftthe criminal. The activity o f prison walk through several empty floodlit life Is deliberately purposeless, unexcourtyards. The warder who led us pressive; all that the criminal can expre there talked to us. Then there is is the fact of his or her criminality. Thi another locked door. Inside there is a is the logic which forced the prisoners garden. This i s a surprise and a relief; now in the Unit to 'express' themselves there are several small, newly planted by acts of violence within prison. Ward trees, and the garden looks scruffy, used. 'mistreat' prisoners (treat them like Another door, which you push open criminals), so prisoners attack warders just like a front door. Inside there i s a (behave like criminals). The conclusion noise of conversation, TV, christmas of this logic was reached when jimmy decorations, a tank of tropical fish, Boyle, one o f the! original five member pictures and a pool game. Warders of the Unit, prior to his transfer there, and prisoners. was confined, aline, in a metal cage, a The man we were visiting took us to cell within a cell. That static image dehis cell; doors to other cells were open. fines the true conditions of the crimin; His cell was full of his pictures, books, within the conventional prison system; records; he made us all coffee, and we the Criminal is treated by being isolate; talked. We'd never met before. Since as, by definition, untreatable. A Crimir then we've written t o each other. He is a Criminal. showed us round th&@fuyone cell The prisoners in the Unit were conwas still bare, a coA&ltlt.'btox left over sidered to be definitive; the hardest, th from the time when this was the most violent, the most criminal. In beWomen's prison and not the Unit. .coming impossible to handle within thc Another cell had an engine half stripconventional system, they pushed the I ped down. He showed us his work, his ic of t+at system to i t s breaking point. sculptures, including a hard white male The achievement of the Special Unit as torso just stunding'in the corner of the an idea and as a reality is to give expre room with the pool table. We carried sion to that break. away another of his sculptures to be Instead o f creating a prison environexhibited in an Edinburgh gallery. The nent h is a fulfillment, a static extraordinariness of all this can only

culmination of being-criminal, the end of a career, a place where therefore only being-criminal can be expressed, it creates an environment which suggests that the prisoners have something else to express besides their status as Criminals; their humanity, their power t o change. '. The Unit is based on the idea of expression; that is why art therapy has beer so important in i t s development. And that art therapy i s not a cosmetic extra; the creation of art and craftwork by men who have never been artists before is par1 of a whole process which includes these men speaking out at communal meetings and taking real decisions regarding the running of their own community; it breaks th&togic o f the system which they have previously inhabited. It provides means o f expression which allow the realisation that they can live not as Criminals but as people. By allowing space for expression, by allowing expression that is not tautological, the Unit allows change. It attacks the idea o f the Criminal in the prisoners in the-nseives, radically altering their lifestyles. It presents them not simply with books, art therapists and sympathetic warders, but concrete opportunities for expression-decision, communication, progression-for the first time. It is also not simply an introverted intensive care unit; it splits open not only the ossified lives o f the prisoners concerned, but the ossified thinking and brutal practice of the penal system. Whereas the conventional prison seeks to enclose and silence the Criminal, to render them static, the Unit i s dynamic and generative, relating the specific problems of the 'unmanageable' prisoner back to the whole prison system, and the society beyond it. It changes the idealof the Criminal in those prison officers who live closely and informally with the prisoners in the Unit (live with them as human beings); in the penal Establishment, which has been confonted with a radical and successful experiment, and polarisedeither to attack or defend the Unit; in the visitors to the Unit who would never otherwise have come into contact with prison life; in institutions like the Third Eye Gallery in Glasgow and the Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh which have actively supported the Unit and brought its expressions before a larger audience, and not as a spectacle but as part o f a dialogue; in all those who have seen the sculptures and artworks it has produced; all those who have read jimmy Boyle's book A Sense of Freedom or been provoked by the TV version of the book (ITV, Feb 17). The Unit not only remakes the lives of those who live there, but also provides a space where we can rethink what makes and unmakes the Criminal. Neil Bartlett

FIFTY summer homes burned in Wales last year: the arsonists are at large. Die Penderyn tells why the phrase 'a war given a new meaning in the valleys.

Tai Ar Dan THE issue o f Summer Homes (Tai Haf

'regional' variations. This attitude mean that the State can see no difference ing is the direct result o f many factors, between settlers in East Anglia and settl some of which, being outside the exper- ers in West Caernarfon, except in terms ience of most English people, will cause of urbanlrural or middle/working class differences in the respective communconfusion and lack of sympathy, but ities. However, the effect in Wales o f an which nevertheless must be appreciated influx of outsiders takes on a dimensior ifany understanding is t o be achieved. There are many figures available such as quite outside this view, although it conthe constant high unemployment in tains elements of the situation as it exis in East Anglia. Wales as a whole-andparticularly in the The Londoner coming to live or retir Welsh-speaking areas, the depopulation and immigration (during the last ten to the rural areas of Wales is o f course years there has been an exchange o f one urban, and sometimes middle-class, but million people between England and he i s always English and his linguistic an Wales withe trend being that the Welshcultural approach will certainly change speaking areas gain population, while the the social pattern of the host communit industrial areas lose); Welsh-speakers This situation could be borne to some down to less than 20% of the population; degree when outsiders were fairly rare the rising numbers of Tai Haf and o f the and settled in fairly isolated cottages, b i council housing waiting lists, and so on. over the past ten years the pattern has These are all facts and they give rise changed and the influx has become a to the factors wich act as the mechanisms deluge to the degree where the host for action of any kind, namely the perc- community has been swamped, or wher eption by the people involved. The State whole villages have been taken over as has a particular perception o f the Welsh holiday homes. situation, and many Welsh people also Those who see ilanguage as 'simply have a particular perception; it i s the means o f communication' will hardly basic premise on which each perception appreciate what this change means to a i s which differs and this is crucial to an Welsh person; the language is perceived understandingof the motivation of here as being the one mystical living linl those who undertake this kind of action. with those who have gone before, and ii (I carefully do not use the term 'violence' i s held to be a priceless God-given heritbecause in Wales that i s a term used to age which must be treasured and, like al describe something which happens to heritages, handed on t o those following people rather than artifacts). To describe the language, as'some insen itive people do, as simpjy a means o f communication, i s analogous to describ ing the Bible to a committed Christian as 'A book'. Many Welsh people, particularly those with whom this article is concernt consider that the term 'Nation' applies to Wales, and that the Welsh national culture i s distinctive and differs considerably from that o f the 'British nation' The influx o f outsiders should therefore be viewed as a potent factor in the perception of a people who consider themselves under siege, and who see the language as the one distinct shield again' e philistine wglo-american torrent o f Whose Nation? , , iteratureartdpropaganda which is seen The State takestthe-viewthat the as an agentnfaKeiri~cialmntrol. This agent is perceived as the mechanism British Isles i s inhabited by a 'Nation.' and from this it follows that there is a which seeks t o introduce and reinforce ^common' culture with perhaps some new norms :and these new norms threa in Welsh) is not simple. What is happen-

Undercurrents

dimension.

Die Penderyr

Undercurrents 45

Remaking History

HISTORY is written by the victors, so it's not surprising that the Ce who were defeated successively by the Romans, the Anglosaxons and the Normans, have had a bad press. John Fletcher argues that their libertarian way of life has a lesson for us today.

THERE have been people with some form o f culture and organized society living in these isles for at least six thousand years now. Our history i s largely that of the sort of periods o f authoritarian rule -firstly the Romans then , from 1066 up to the present day. That leaves nearly five thousand years unaccounted for. Well, say most historians, tney're barbarians (ie, they didn't have centralized kingdoms, drainage systems -r tax collectors) so they are pre-history or the Dark Ages, and need concern us no more. The first thing that should be of interest to all libertarians in such ages is, precisely because they did not live under a centralized dictatorship, people organized themselves in a natural, spontaneous way. If we.are looking for a natural way of organizing ourselves into societies, without being continually prodded in the back by ideologues and authoritarians with bayonets, then we do worse than study the way our ancestors in these isles organized themselves.

Tribes and Chiefs

The tribe is a social unit that has evolved naturally, without theorizing or force, all over the world. Lie number one from official historians immediately arises -tribes are authoritarian, hierarchical structures, rule9 over by petty tyrants, they say. That is a total travesty of the truth. I know of no serious study of any tribe anywhere which bears out such an interpretation. Some tribes have no leaders whatsoever, most tribes have nominal, sacred leaders or chieftains, whose functions are the precise opposite of those usurped by their authoritarian successors. There is an African saying that the chief i s the rubbish heap of the tribe -you pile all your problems ond troubles on his head. The hasic unit of Celtic society was the fhine or family, all members of it being the descendants of one ancestor. All an individual's loyalty went to this grouping, and property within the family waas held in common. All members of the family, except the children and the senile, had full adult status within the fhine, and if, on entering the fhine from another family, she showed more property than her husband, then her voice would be heard above his when decisions had to be made. Within the fhine or krouoine. a leader

or king would be chosen, who had to directly descended, through his moth from an ancestor who had god-like ,. ~ualities.But his power was directly related to the favours of his queen, who was free to take lovers from among any of his close relatives, who had similar pedigrees in their breeding. The queen's choice of lover tended to reflect the popular choice, and the source of sovereignty was her bed. THe king, if he was rejected had to grin and bear it.

Kings By Consent It was common, to avoid in-breeding, for thfee or four fhines to gather into villages, or, if they were larger, groups of villages. A loose administration would then be formed by occasional meetings of the kings from the seperate fhines in a Gouro'if, but any decisions they reached had to be flexible enough for every member of the community to accept, since individual families owed obedience only to the head or king of their own family, and even then, we've seen how precarious his own power was. In our own dogmatic, Romanesque times, we might think such an anarchistic way of organizing things to be inept -1don't think the trains would ever run on time -but anyone who has ever read Viking or Celtic sagas will know , that the desire for individual freedom was the passion and ideal which such people held above all others. While such a system sufficed admirr ably in peacetime, in periods of crisis or war, like the Roman or Anglo-Saxon invasions, when the trains had to run on time, the leaders or kings within the Council would choose a great leader or regs -literally one who points the way, who would take responsibility for the defence of the community. Like Arthur, he need not even be a king, but a great and skilled warrior. His office was purely temporary, and would last only as long as the emergency which had caused his election in the first place. His survival in the post would likewise be heavily dependent on his succes in battle and in winning spoils, because warriors had no desire to follow a loser or cowaro. Celtic and'hglo-Saxon histories are thick ^MMWIBmples of unpopular or inefficientWaf leaders waking up on the morning of the battle to discoverthemselves alone on the battlfield as the enemy advanced.

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Undercurrents45 "^ty was i^^Y a secondary science, Druids were given precedenceIn the an& thefr time, greater truths. servers secretly acknowledge, power . councilsof kings. Their improvised and ' deduced Intheir,.cosmologythey,Â¥wer grows out o f the barrel o f a gun, then such technicallstunningly difficult poetry no more such a loose systemis not the most pract- could destroy a king overnight if it was ; convinced that individu*'are appearan<;es;andthat satire, and it was considered vital to . : than ical one for fighting a highly organized, ultimatelyThere is They S U C ~ ~ Sin S battle to have a druid compose authoritarian system, bent on invasion. stirring verses before hand. The Vikings. , therefore between men MIieved 2nd men that 0rbet-n trd&blationfiip men Becauseof the infighting and jealousy guarded individual right the Celts were, .Chose their war leaders for their ability., other temporarili,bverrun by the Romans,,&nd, to improvise inspiring martial p ~ t r y j i n .:. . t h e midst o f the battle. The Druids with~articipation and permeation, ruthlessly overrunby the and n negotiation. controfled policy making, presidid over :,, rather than o ~ ~ o s i t i o the ~orttjans.'Butat the time of the z ' ' S o however ; earthbound the matter in ,; ,>, haphhzitd$nd uncoordinated invasions -trials, supervised contracts, organized.',i hand;thewnior partnerip:alI dealings of BG ir,if the Celts organized them- political alliances, and doctored the sick; selvessuccessfully for some time under . The Celts were a semi-nomadic people; ^^ the. great invisible,one with partnersjoined and Arthur. The continual infighting w i t h i n ; . not given toworrying about boundaries. ; intermingled. : the Arthuriart court, and the haphazard ' or written laws. They delighted in great.' .' These.werethe peoptetiiat once live, manner,in which his doings and battles .;. do+nces, long periods of time intheir in our lan@,They and th~s$likethert lurch in and out o f the historicat record, m ~ t h ~ b gand y , wide open'spaces-like heefdr,a h,=ll of ot,onger than , however, underline the fierce.determinat-. the Hindus, to whom they were racially, ha"e.,hq,practi.l qwws*o ion ofthe,Celts to avoid centralized , . ' related.Whereas Romanrationalists and grumble Me they rearf,this,piece -if dictahrshi~and maintain their i f d i v i d ~ constitutionalists thought in national wt th~atfar. , ual liberties. terms, the Celts thought incosmic terms. . that the a,tic sige of humanity is just ,, .. . ., .. ' The Romans and their successors valued T h ~ , w a one s class in Celtic socie~y ..: the individual only in as much .as he as valid and 'natural as the Roman one, floated above tribal divisions and and that t o suppresstheyisionary side a minute in the maFhinery of stai k ,, 'O'altis:~the wide'y of human nature is just as'dangerous within'th+Celticworld and attending.;.'. : while t6 the Celts the individual'v* a ,,< and,poiwn9us as ,suppresstk praqi,G theirown.&hoo~and thee $ . . reflection of the universe, and therefore , ~ side. . ., . . inviolable... + : . s ~ .. :. had to undergo a ferocious twenty year If the times seem out o f joint, perhap he Druids were chosen above all for, it's because we have lost the balance schooling period. Since the Celtic society was an oral rather than a written culture,, their visionary qualities. In their poetry:? between vision and practicality that our huge.amounts 6 f mythology, genealogy, .- they dealt with the origins, vicissitudes took for granted. AT without law, mathematics and poetry had t o be and rhythms of the Universe rather.than-, a n alternative culture is meregadgetry, committed to'memory. The Celts' p r e the trials and tribulations of civilized.' ? so:letts start by getting our history right: decessors in these islands, the builders o f man. Every Celt saw his first duty a s ' . - B e who.contro/s the past, controls the Stonehenge etc., likewise had t o do all being to the gods, or to the great ideas . : "presentand thefuture: their immensecalculationsi n their heads, which could be put on a par with the ~:'.?k. . .~ . John Hetcher Tt"*"i~les?aited life, a long time'10. ass andhavebeen described, by our own , gods. As their social order only held firm when it conformed t o the general laws :. . Of KingA,rttiur, King Of Kim by Jean belovedFred Hoyle, no less, as veritable Markale, published by Gordon & cmmonesi Einste,in~:~,, -.,'. .. , . governing the worls, the organization of.. .; at ,.- .: . ~ fas , all

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singular. 'Laws' are rules, whereas 'law' is the process by which recognised rules are enforced; including the many ways people are prevented from breaking those rules in the first place. Again, laws are different from other rules by the way in whichthey areenforced. Iflaws aretaken as rules enacted by a superior authority 'then somesocietieslack them because rulers in pre-literate societies don't make rules forthe conductof, social re1ations;"~yingwhatwas:, .~. punishable today will be forbidden . . tomorrow. .. . ., :. . . '~# . ,~ . Every society has rules, w h i c h are called yaws' and others ,,.. e customs'. Even the, Hadza, withtheir minimal organisation, have a rule that youmustgiveyo.urmothe~-in-lawsome beadswhen you wish tomarry; and must continue to. supplyher with meat if you want to stay married; otherwise . she will marryher daughter h a better . provider, and there is nothing you can for community action emerge from ., . d o . Is this law or custom?It could be 'called aju@ rule: The word i s from their informal talk. the Latin jus;meaninga. right, as opposed to the Latinlex, meaning a, . law in thesense ofsomething enacted. 30Justiceby derivation means giving people their rights . . rathe ing laws. '. other men, since this would be impossible as he hasno means of com.~ p i l i n g them to accept his wishes. Law vs. Justice ~

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A t midday Bu$men sometimes have to ward o f f dehydration by lying in shallow pits of pulp wetted with their own urine. But despite the extremity of , It is with this in view that their conditions they have a rich . The , ' '' cultural life which manifests itself in 'legality' were contrasted in the caseof An extreme example of the absence the Pygmies. The Pygmies, andothers a belief systemthatallows them to like them, live in a society i n which take joy in every animal, plant and grain of any law or authority are the Hadza of food. T h i s awarenessof their close-,!, .: , of Tanzania. The Hadza do not claim . , relationshipsare,,multiplex;the people ness to the world around is evenmore..,:$:;;, ownership of territory and nor do : between whom disputesariseare . ' evident in relationshipswith the family" they recognize any leadership. There bound together in half ,a;doien differand the rest of the hunting bandii'$ . .. <,.;.3:. :<. .... I S no mechanism for settling disputes, ent ways., Settlements are brought about by takingall the diverse relationCommunal living, free o f disputes*;+ punishing disobedience, or organising common activities. There are no rules. ; ships intoaccount,and on sodoingthe i s created by a highly developed that people must camp together, %centison rights ..held, . nottheenforce. . . . ~ .. of family, and the band itself is also mentof laws.. .;. : . ... ,.. ,considred single lar^e,family, s o t h a t ';,);'s@ there is no need for decisions as emotional as well as economic ties bind!;~,: to when and where a camp should be :' A vast amounfof work has been them together. The high level o f mutual"~','moved.People go out looking for produced in the debateah to whether . or not pre-literate societies possess affection amongst a band of bushmen ; food on their own and often just and the constant need to be searching f o r e a t it asthey find it, so there is no :. , .'lawv andmost of it is entirely.fruitle.ss because i f is trying@ impose Our.. food stopssmall disputes from getting ? need for organisation of hunting or notions ofwhat,constitute~'law'on beyond the pointwheregroup disapprov- . the dividing up of food. A band . . .won'ttry and keepanother out of to an.entirely:different'(ysnceptuaj,. a1 cannot deal with, them.. . framework. In oiost o f these societies As well as sharing withthe Pygmies : i t s territory, but should any quarrels. 'law' i s k t a separate concept, or an a conscious rejectionof outsiders' values , break out they are quickly settled identifiably different area ofconcern. and the extension of personalfeelings : by one of the disputants moving Disputes are settled on a much wider to encompass the wholeband, they also away. It is often the fluidity o f basis which reflects theinultiplex"' both u w the same methodfor correcting small-scale societies that enables them to continue with no legal nature of social relationships. Neither blisbehaviour-ridicule~Ridic~le'isan informal mechanism ofcontrol w h i c h , institutions.If you have an argument , the Pygmies, the Bushmen, nor.the although seen as a game by the children with your neighbour sometimes the . Hadza have 'law' in,our sense of the : who excel at it, is every effectivein easiest way t o settle things is for one word. The important point to emerge : or other of you t o move away and . is that the rules which, gbvernc6hduct1 shaming any wrongdoerinto better behaviour. . . . join another band. the jural rights o f th6 people, & n o t It might be said that these three Various devices reinforce this tight f.:, separable in anyway butanintegral interpersonal network. One is the use . - : sokieites must have law because they part o f the functioning o'fthe society of a limited number of personal names,. have rules of conduct bywhich people as a co-operativehnit.'Law' is not must aliidt. Firstlyqit 4s. important t o which creates a sense of identification needed becausethe mechanisms o f distinguish betweeiv!lzw8and 'laws'; socialisation already ensure the rights and special obligations betbeen people confusion is often caused by inadvertsharing the same name. Another is an of thehiembers of these societies. edly moving from the plural to the elaborate system for sharing meat, \ Nick Hanna ,

;

Red Barristers

THERE ARE numerous hurdles for a prospective lawyer to overcome; these barriers ensure that the law conveniently remains in the hands of an elite.Liz Woodcraft looks at the prospects for radicals in the legal profession. A FEW months ago i n France there was the radical alternative, but they also a strike b y left-wing lawyers against the policies o f President Giscard dlEstaing. I n Germany lawyers have led protests against the berufsverbote-laws passed i n the wake o f the Baader-Meinhof gang. Lawyers and judges make demands and strike i n Italy. In England there is little sign o f a radical pr even a heterogeneous bar; at the solicitors end o f the scale there are Law Centres, but there is little indication o f a developing left wing alternative for barristers. There is the Haldane Society o f Socialist lawyers and the Society o f Labour Lawyers, but the members o f these groups constitute only a small percentage o f the total number o f lawyers. A few years ago a set o f chambers was formed whose members described it as a socialist collective. Wellington Street now consists o f 1 2 barristers, three pupils and three clerks. It is based outside the confines o f the Inns o f Court and regards its work and aims as political on an individual case level (doing work in such neglected areas as housing employment, juvenile crime) and on a wider collective level (making statements on political issues and organising the internal structure o f the chambers).

Fourteenth Century But why has it taken so long t o start this left-wing movement-the Inns o f Court began i n the fourteenth century-and why are there s t i l l so few radical barristers working-togethercollectively? This article will look at the problems facing anyone wishing to enter the Bar who does not conform t o the stereotype model o f the rich, white upperclass, ex-public school male. The point is not that everyone outside that stereotype i s radical but that their entry into the profession will have a radicalising effect on the Bar itself, as it is forced t o re-examine its traditions and codes o f practice. This i n turn will make i t easier for radicals t o come into the profession, meet others openly and maintain their radical momentum when they start their careers. Two cases have recently been reported o f challenges t o the straight bar. They can be seen as victories for

give an indication o f the enormity o f the problem facing anyone slightly 'different', i.e. female, black, foreign, working class, who wants t o go t o the bar. In September last year, Rudy Narayan, a black barrister, was called to a disciplinary tribunal at Grays Inn. The charge was conduct unbecoming a barrister. The reason was a letter he had written t o the Birmingham Law Society (the professional body of solicitors) claiming that solicitors were discriminating against him because of his colour. He had also sent copies t o local newspapers. He was found not guilty on both counts.

the Joan Bohon-Mitchell case those who obtained their degree outside the U K or Ireland were required t o take a two year course. This included people who had obtained first class honours degrees and even PhDs i n their own country. fThe reason for this anomaly will be discussed later). When overseas students arrive at the Council, those who haven't got Home Office clearance t o work i n the U K find themselves in a separate group, with a differently organised timetable.

Industrial In September 1978 at an Industrial Tribunal in Ebury Bridge Road, a claim was made against the Council o f Legal Education (the body which provides education for prospective barristers on behalf o f the Inns o f Court) alleging discrimination under the Race Relations Act 1976. Joan Bohon-Mitchell, an English Literature graduate from Columbia University, New York, brought the case against the Council for requiring her t o take a Bar Part 1 course which lasted 2 years as compared t o a U K non-law gaduate whose Part I course would take one year. It was found by the tribunal that the Council's requirement did have a discriminatory effect. These two cases indicate something o f the blinkered view that the Bar takes when looking at i t s own workings and its own members. Since the Ormrod Report on Legal Education was published in 1971 some features of the education and training given t o student barristers have improved but the biggest problems remain.

Financial Hurdles The Part I course (for non-law graduates is a course for which Local Authority grants are discretionary. Few students receive such grants and o f those who don't many are obliged t o rely on their families. This system may work well for those who have wealthy relatives. For those who don't-including the writerthe alternative is t o live on savings or work or crawl around to charities or a permutation o f all three. I was lucky: I got Â£20 from charitie had savings which paid my fees and had a pleasant four hours a week teaching post; one friend on the course was a night porter at a hotel, another worked a couple o f afternoons a week in a mental hospital and yet another- a woman with a small child-took a livingin job as a baby sitter. Overseas students of course have t o pay even higher tuition fees.

Free Coffee

The Academic I n order t o gain entrance t o the vocational year course at the Council it i s necessary t o have a law degree or to have a degree i n any other subject and to have com~letedthe Part I examination course consisting o f basic legal subjects (crime, tort, contract, land law etc). For those who obtained their non-law degree in the U K or the Republic o f Ireland the Part I course takes one year t o complete. Before

Pupillage i s unpaid. There are no Local Authority grants; there are a few grants or loans available from the Inns, but as will be described later, conditions o f sex, age and university background are often imposed. If a pupil is lucky enougl to get a grant it will probably only be worth â‚¬700-â‚¬1. pupilage lasts for a year. In the second six months it i s possible for pupils t o do work in their own right and be paid for it; it is the first six months which i s the killer. Pupil masters or

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mistresses are under no financialoblig~ cornmetits whichare greeted with tionto their-pupils-theestablished cheers from one half o f {he halland bartisteris~ing a pupil a favour by boos from the other. Conversations taking them on. , . are littered with references to yachtMuch'w6rk done by Barristers is , ing, ski-ing and personal tax. ' do& under pressure. Under the guise .' .. problems., Diningat your Inn i s meant to .of '"' giving pupils practice in working, 'under pre*re many barristers require serve the function of acquainting you their underling'st o prepare much withyour fellow barristers, most o f whom are students. Each student joins . paper wo&.which often means worka 'mess' of four, and conversation is . . ikthroujSf-the weekend for which .' the barristerwill be paid and the pupil kept strictly within the mess, despite wilt receivanothing. 'Sometimescoffee the fact that students sit inrowson Inchambeis$ free. long benches facing each other. After Another duty o f the pupil i s to a waitress has brought the food t o accompany the pupil master or mistress the Mess the meal is served by the to court. Thi~smay entailfrequent trips Mess Captain. Plates are;distributed, according to your Inn, in a clocktoChetmsford, St Albans Kent or . further afield. Train farware paid by ~. wise, or anti-clockwise, direction. thepupil; it doesn'treally show the ; There are often after dinner entertainright spirittosay you can't accompany ' , merits.suchas Morris Dancers, choral yourpupilmaster to Newcastle for a .: .- singers or Moots on subjects such as . one day @fa1because you can't afford it. 'should marriage be retained?' - ,,-, ,

...

, t

?"every .. year which changesthe'tax system. (This is to beat the tax experts, Â¥wh have found the loopholes in the . , 'previous .. k t to help tax avoidance), apd thus renders the book obsolete within'mopths, usually before the

ex-. ; To b e c o b a barrister youmust join , oneof the four Inns of Court: Gray's

Inn, Ljncoln's Inn, Middle Temple or.

' However, having obtained pupillage, the problems have only just begun. -Many pupils know that they have no chance o f being offered a tenancy: . there may be seven or eight pupils i n a set of chambers and only one olace for a new tenant. Many hope that they will be allowed t o stay on as squatters (sic) and somehow merge into the scenery sufficiently to be offered a tenancy when one arises. This is part of a larger problem o f the finite amount of physical space which exists in the Temple and Lincoln's and Gray's Inns; while the Bar remains fixed within these boundaries there is little hope o f gaining a tenancy for a great number o f the students emerging fresh faced from the Council. . . setus . . , ~.:...~, ,

why bother to be a barrister at all? Apart from the general theory that ' it is useful t o have left wing people hurdle if 'you have. working in every sphere; there is a successfully overcome the other three. need for barristers who, because they The Bar is only open as a viable option. . have right o f audience in thehigher to those who are financially and a<ia-. courts, will sympathetically service' demically secure and who are sufficientlaw centres and other solicitors who ly confident to take on all the problems deal with 'poor law' cases; barristers of completing years of study when there who willbe in a position to gather is no real certainty of pupillage, let information which will be of use t o alone tenancy, at the end o f it. other bodies; barristers who will be To obtain pupillage it is necessary able twuse their status to make . to visit or write t o as many sets of political statements and to be seen chambers as possible. For most people doing that; barristers who will.be.in thisis done quite indiscriminately with :-a position to press forchange within no thought to the type of work which the legal system itself, to ppe~nit is done in the chambers or whether it up, and make it more accessibleboth *ill suit the needs of the prospective to the client and to thiLprospective pupi1,since these considerations are' barristerluxuries., Get the pupillage first, ask As there is pressureformore women questions later.' to enter, for blacks to be treated equally, A woman friend o f mine, in her for the public school ethic to be eroded search for pupillage, always omitted . by members of the working class, the to point out that she was a ingle Bar will have to re-examine a lot of parent family witha small (faughter. i t s practice, find a lot of it outmoded She was terrified that ifthe barristers and begin to change.Thus the left will in the chambers knew, she would not be able to strengthen its own position, be given the chance even to begin to make clearer statementsand'tegin t o demonstrate any potential she had at have an impact not only in legal circles the Bar. but outside. Liz Woodcraft SO

' Inner Temple. It costs about Â£10to. join; the reasons for choosing which Inn to join are often arbitrary: 1 join-

qd. my Inn because theywere offering grants of money for which.@ an ageing' 7 year old non-Oxbridge-graduate -1e I was eligible. (Unfortun?tely ' I failed t o impress them with the above features and received nothing). ~avingpaidout the membership ': fee, 24 dinners must be eaten before . Call. Each costs around12.50 each. Inorder to dine dark clothing must be-wom and male students are often obliged t o hireor buy the appropriate threepiece suits while women have to weir skirts and the necessary &pensive footwear. Call t o the Bar

Squatters

Undercurrents 45

Peter Culshaw interviews Bill Alexander, a aountl-y policeman with libertarian tendencies.

This month the South wales Anti-Poverty Action Groupwill close. Jeremy Gass, one of the workers at the centre, asks: 'can law ever help ti.&most oppressed classes of society?'

FIVE vears ago thePSouth Wales AntiPoverty Action Centre (SWAPAC) was opened. Funded by the EEC's Anti-Poverty programme and the Home Office it was intended to serve community groups throughout industrial South Wales. It employed seven workers including a solicitor and was concerned with issues such as Housing, Social Security and Employment. In 1976 there was only one other law centre in Wales and only one more has opened since SWAPAC. But, now SWAPAC, along with other projects throughout Europe funded by the EEC, is to close down. In the EEC's view experimental projects cease to be experiments after five years and thus the funding must stop. And, not surprisingly, the British Government does not wish to take on the full cost, annual expense approximately Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ90,000 But what has it had to offer the working class communities of South Wales? From the outset SWAPAC workers have been well aware of 'the limits of the law'. The legal system is far from neutral and clearly plays a vital part in sustaining the 'status quo'. Take the examples of Employment and Housing Law.

Jobs Despite attempts by the media to convince us all that unions rule the country the Tories were quick in 1979 to ensure that nobody could claim unfair dismissal until they had ' worked for their employer for fiftytwo weeks (increased from 26 weeks). But of those who do get to an Industrial Tribunal and manage to 'win' their case only a very small proportion actually regah their job. And, as many people in South Wales know to their cost, redundancy provisions in law do no more than confer on the employer the right to buy off workers. SWAPAC has ought ways of working that recognise these limitations. This has sometimes meant discouraging individuals from working for legal 'solutions'. Where possible collective action has been recommended instead. Another strategy has been to link legal work with carhpaignihg. Over the past two year$ considerable resources have been devoted t o assisting the growth of a tenants' movement in South Wales. In as militant groups of

council tenants have cometogether in response to problems such as exorbitant heating systems and disrepair. In addition to organisational support the centre has been able t o offer.legal services to these groups. So tenants have been able to use various tactics in their campaigns, ranging from occupations of council chambers to legal actions against councils for failing to do repairs. There i s no doubt that this diversity has contributed to some of the successes groups have had. Education and information work has always been a priority for SWAPAC Given the high numbers of claimants of social security benefits and the virtua absence of advice agencies one centre could never meet the need for a 'casework' service. So from the day the centre began it was agreed that no such service would be offered. Emphasis has been given instead to setting up training courses for voluntary organisations and groups of pensioners and other The main reason for the increase in crime claimants who may be interested in in the last twenty years i s the breakdown helping others. Similar facilities have of communities. ~fyoulre livine ina been offered to Trades Unions partiwhigh rise flatand don't know your l a r l during ~ the major disputes that neighbours, they could be junkies'or, have taken place in the last three years. child molesters, and probabb are. The centre has also been active in old that a villaee s ga d P OC P S gossip is worth four policemen, which against' scrounger bashing' and social is ab.t,{ute~y true.The problem there security cuts. could be one of intolerance, but the has rarely been So legal alternative is t o become like certain a major activity undertaken i n isolation _.as of N~~ york, where you from other work. Legal skills have been walk down ,he street worse than used to inform and supplement the jungle. campaigns and educational work. I welcome the move by some police SWAPAC will leave behind it a forces to return to the use of bicycles number of viable organisations includrather than panda cars. In cars the police start acting like they're the ing the South Wales Association of Sweeney; they call them 'tinned Tenants and co-ordinating committee policemen' in Germany. The only against cuts in the NHS. There are complaints I hear about the police in numerous people who are far better , my area are either the patrol car poticeinformed of their rights. There are men, or about special units, such as the growing numbers of Trades Unionists Special Patrol Group, which have no who are dissatisfied with the Social real contact with the locality. If I act in Security system. There are more links an irresponsible or thoughtless way, I've between community groups and got to live with the consequences as I greater co-operationbetween workers know the people involved. And people in and users of state services like the in country areas have long memories. NHS. In small ways SWAPAC has One problem with being a policeman helpe 1 to weaken divisions-between on the beat i s that in this country you different communities, between have very little status.Al1 the ambitious different pensioners organisations (the Welsh and British Federations and young policemen or women want to get between tho? in jind out of work. into C.I.D. or administrative posts, If these lhkst<ftt"haveAeen built most of which could be done by girls up can be sustaintwj and developed the of sixteen. In Berlin, they have put more centre's work will not have been kops on the beat and it i s one of the few entirely in vain. j e r e r n v d a s s C i t i e s where the crime rate has actually iped in the last

ps are over 40 and given the rank of pector. They are not allowed an office hone or a desk and have to spend at 75% of their time on the beat. It s because it's estimated about 80% mes are committed within 2 miles offender's home. me left-wing groups opposed t h i s periment, saying that it would enable lice to build up intelligence records of sidents more easily. 1 don't believe

GOOD NEWS for w o o d s t h owners, thinking of scrapping their trendy polluters before they net busted under the Clean Air Act: vankee ingenuity has come up with a neat technical fix, a catalytic combustor, as Donald Marier of Alternative Sources of Energy reports.

Canning's Catalyst

Enter Corning Glass Works. Corning has developed a catalytic combustor, for woo^ stoves, that was introduced in two new stove models at the recent National Hardware Show by Franklin Cast Products Inc. of Warwick, Rl. The device consists of a cellular ceramic substrate that carries a catalyst for lowering the combustion point o f ingredients in smoke. By burning wood smoke in the combustor, the new stoves give improved heating efficiency, cut down air pollution, and greatly reduce creosote-based chimney fires. Cdrning provides stove manufacturers with the ceramic structure already coated with a catalyst. The structure is similar to a honeycomb, with 16 square cells per square inch. The catalyst i s a proprietary compsoition made of noble metals which e police are trained to thTnia bit affects the smoke as it passes through for themselves these days, while still the honeycomb. very much under the control of the The stove designs by Franklin Secretary. In Holland recently, a Cast Products feature a bypass arrangeSuperintendent refused to police an ment in case the combustor becomes I-nuclear demonstration on the grounds plugged, for example, by a sheet of t h e entirely agreed with the protestors. burning newspaper lifted from the en so, I'd prefer if you didn't print my firebed during a powerful draft. I name. This type of conscientious obCorning i s offering the combusn i s liable to happen in Britain as well. tion to other stove manufacturers i s an enemy of the communrgy i s placed i n the hands of who incorporate similar safeguards in their designs. instead of being in the ommunity. People nave

cialists will disappear because we 't afford them. And eventually the rtments For Making Silly Regulawill collapse under the weight eir own absurdity.

u So far, the combustor has not been designed into a device that could be used t o retrofit existing stove models.

How It Works Essentially, the catalyst that is applied to the ceramic substrate combines with the unburned pyrolysis gases in smoke and lowers their ignition temperature from about 700Â to about 260Â°C which is approximately the temperature at which wood in stoves burns. In the Franklin Cast Products stoves, the catalytic combustion system is activated automatically when the stove doors are closed. Within the initial 15 minutes of combustion in the main firebox, the company says, the catalytic after-burner begins to develop a red glow that gets brighter as 'super combustion' takes place. Franklin Cast Products claims a combustion efficiency of up to 90 per cent-which is almost 35 percent better than the best known airtight on the market. Their new designs, trademarked 'The Scandia After-Burn 2000' and the 'Concorde Catalytic' stoves, also incorporate high temperature glass doors, using glasses manufactured by Corning. Corning states, and one would Have to agree, that this is a revolutionary development in wood combustion. Now if they can just make one (hat works as a retrofit.. . Alternative Sources of Enemy. 107 S Central Ave, Milaca, MN 56363, USA. 132 for six issues airmail only.

River looking for fish. 'Old Lappland was about to come under the laser.

Clear Rows The Alta

Norway. HUNDREDS of police? Helicopters? Guns and dogs7 Way up in the far far north some strange kind of war wemad to be about to break. The Norwegian government was wanting to dam a great canyon in the middle of Laodand. while most of the Lapps and a large part of the non-~apppopulation are totally agaimt it There had been peaceful demonstrations and now the government was bringing in the heavies. It waictcar that the issues at stake ware enormous. I was told that a support group would be leaving Helsinki by train. It was the end of January, we would@ campjog out in temperatures between -20 and -40Â¡CJO the next 24 hour* becamea rush to Â¥craptogether the kit and cadi. f\.A

The Alta-Kautokeinowatercourse runs from the finnish border to the arctic sea Passing through the county of Kautokeino, it flows past Sami villages, norwegians and policeman. Spreading over reindeer grazing areas, through along the shore the town is divided, northern Europe's greatest canyon, east and west by a pyramid of rock. through vital farmlands and after being 'Komsafjellet'; it is decorated by 6,000 fed by many tributaries flows into year old rock carvings which depict Altafjord where it nourishes a rich the lives and symbols of an ancient local fishery. The Alta river is perhaps people, the Sami. the richest salmon river in Europe. It runs slap through the middle of the When the crisis at Alta started to Sami's last undisturbeddomain. peak last month, I heard a norwedan Kautokeino county i s 90%Sami speakin woman in the far north say and the largest village on the river is as '/t'sthe oil, it's Hie oil'. At first I a completely Sami speaking community didn't understand, but then- 1 d i d of 400, half of whom depend of reindec The only time when the inhabitants The river is indeed the life-givingforce 6 of the north were in the least bit useful the whole area. more than that it is the to the dictatorial south, was when the south needed the fish caught in the north heart of Sameland For the norwegian government to dam this river;- is like and that time hasl-i' passed. The south, having become excessively wealthy putting the scalpel to the heart of the had at last turnedits cold eyes on Die Sami people,rwnwing it and squashing', resources of the north and they were not it

KautokeinoCounty Council, the AIta County ~ouncil,every single Sami organidan in Scandinavia, the fishemrnasafsociatims, the farming associations and eventually the Norwegian Nalum Conservancy. Together these organisations, msisttd by the universities, collected the solid informations required to prove that the awernmant was wrona but the bdmrnent wasn't lteming.

Folkaksjon In July 1978 the early action groups amalgamated under ibageneral leadership of Folkddon, whae single objective was to stop thebuilding of the dam by non-violent means It's ' leadership was drawn front all political parties, many spoke Semi, essentially an action k m i t m a , it wal t'te. ' to work alongside the main Sami organisations and to generally concede political leadership to them. I n June 1979 the government again pasted a resolution (108 to 34) to continue with its plans for the dam. The actual site of the dam is *one 40 km* When on the 27th August 1970 up the Alto river m d a mrvica road hid _"At@* n-gim government reprefentdves m to be built over a distance of about arrived in M t i to explain that the A f m the Int months of u l o n , the Sun1 26 krm. village would soon be under water, a On July 6th 1979 machinas moved up they found the whole village wilting Ofginwbns little t i m to @IT and Folkwon their wits. E ~ m U l v to st# work on the road. They ware for them on the road In the school a spokesman for the government read a met by 200 le linked together with blunt piper on the technicalities a d h e w *afnt.% p o l i n arriwd md h ,,ael-. bm then he who spoke for the village rose about 100 people wen m t t d , but and let it be known that the Sarni would more p e d e kept coming and w n f t u l l y "' never in the face of such devil's I d b l 1. Graman 8, Orio 1, Norwy business leave the village where they h i d became known as the now almost 2 ~oitboki 2263,9610 Elwbakkm, mythical Zero P d n t On the 7th July lived for hundreds of years '...and we Nw Fdkaktjon officially opened itsbase shall fight to keep it, if necessary I can ftommbw to -low en infrn*bnd my with Hie old mauser rifles whkh we camp at DÃˆ4ikÃe little way dawn from flaw.' the roached During that sum* over R @ v ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . 6,000 people from 20 countries came to you mey (end telqmn to the norwdef After the Mas! demonstration the Prlmo Minister: demonstrate their support Towards the m r n m e n t went home to work on a k~ndlind. end of July a new c m p was Wit on the , StfminiÃ‘r M.Gro new plan. The government made R~wlngbyggn,Oslo-DEP-1, Nmvny. road at the Zero Point and became absolutely no studies of the effects If s a long vy from England to Alta and that this dam would have on the climate, known as the Stilla camp. Them was a Alta ha long wey north of the Arctk press hut, an information booth and a the farming, the fishing or the reindeer herding. The new plan consisted large roofed construction for assembly arcla So If you to 00 pnpÃ‘d Watch the mm and chwk with: and weather protection. People assentially of knocking a few meters off arranged nature c a m , theatre and Sam1 Support Commltt~,c/o London the height of the dam. It was not taken concerts. Over 6,000 people from G ~ Ã ‘ ~ ~ Group, M c 6 End^leigh S t i seriously and rejected by the whole community, which included the 20 countries came to demonstrati their London WC1. '

--..--.-.--- .---...Ã‘Ã‘

~~~~~ -.-

mzzw

~~~

/' The Zero Paint at Stilla, July 5 1979.

support during that summer. On the 17th September the police tried to break the Stilla camp Demonstrationsfollowed in Oslo and Bergen In Oslo the Sami raised their tepees outside the norwegian parliament; the police removed them but the Sami built new ones that same evening and began a hunger strike. By the end of October a temporary but great victory had been won. The government was forced to presentthe Alta case to parliament for a second hearing. Most of 1980 was taken up by meetings, courtcases and delegations imploring the government to listen to the peoples demands for rights, justice and common sense. ~ h d biggist happening of the year was the Stilla March, when hundred* of people, including members of the Russell Tribunal, walked the 60 kms from Alta to Masi. In September the Alta court made an historical decision when it announced that Folkaksjon had acted completely within its ridits in preventing the Norwegian Electricity Board from building the road a t Stilla. By the end of 1980 Folkaksjon had over 20,000 paid-up members.

The State Tries Again Incredible though it may seem, a t the beginning of this year the govemment again decided to go ahead with its plans. Folkaksjon's motto 'The river shall live' began to ring through the country and strange things started to happen Although it was mid-winter the Stilla camp was re-built and new chains were forged A large passenger boat was chartered by the Police and sailed to Alta where itbecame the operations base for 600 cops. A convoy of 35 army trucks was moved suureptitiously to Alta throub Sweden and Finland on civilian plates. In fact the Norwegian Government had placed Norway on a perilous

\,/

.<,

Folkaksjon's m e h r s h i p ticket: the gent with the wow1 is the Norwegian 'Minister of Justice'

"In samisk there was no word for War." --

The Sami'i Political Program WE are one people with a common language, common history and a common culture; and we have a strong sense of solidarity. We base ourselves on previous generations, while we live and work in the present for the coming generations. Only when we have been granted a safe position legally, socially end aconomically, can our culture fully develop. Consequently we demand: 1. That the Samis be given legal status as an indigenouspeople. 2. That the customary rights of the Samis to lend and water be confirmed by acts of parliament. 3. That the Sami livelihood by protected by laws and regulations. 4. That the Sami language be given official status. 5. That the Sami order of society and representative, bodies of the Samis be offldielly recognised so that we have realistic opportunities to debate and make decisions in matters that concern ourselves. 6. That Sami tradiation, history, art, knowledge end language be preserved and taught to our descendants through schools and other means. 7. To live in peaceful coexistence with our neighbours, and support end promote world peace, while baling ourselves on our own traditional values. This program is entirely in accordance with the UN Declaration of Human Rights. From The Sami Onltural Political Program 1972 and The Sam/ Political Program 1980 Nordic Sami Council.

"The Defence Minister's wife Said she W O U IGOW ~ ~ him if he sent the army in."

course. Hundreds of prominent norwegian citizens begged their government to pull out, not because they loved the %mi, but because they could feel a deep shudder begihning to rock the country. The Defence Minister's wife said she would leave him if he sent the army in! and norwegian army officers said they would not command troops in such a situation. The army was not used, but the police used all their equipment including helicopters and telephones. For the civilian population in Alta it had become like the last war. On January 14th the police moved in on about 1,000 'river savers' who were camped and chained together in deep snow at -30%. The Sami had erected their tepees in a line in front of the main body of people. It took the police 16 hours to break the camp. There was no violence. The people were taken to a special police court and fined about Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ30 each. The police then declared a no-man's land of 2 kms from the road construction in all directions, with immediate arrest i f found inside the area, plus the usual fine. The area was petrolled by helicopters and a permanent force of 80 police with dogs and snowmobiles. Some so-called strategic points were guarded by police with carbines.

Victory or Armistice? When we arrived the situation was surreal in the extreme; our job was to establish a new camp on private land in the neighbouring valley about 15 kms from the Zero Point The camp filled to about 200 people and every night we sent out ski patrols. These patrols would bivouac until dawn and then ski into the forbidden area to s i t in front of excavators. They would be arrested, transported to the police station in lorries, fined and i f they were not norwegian, deported under police escort After a week a police convoy of seven army lorries ground up the valley to

Undercurrents 45

Who Are The Samis? 7YEARS ago a norwegian anthropologist called the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia Lapps, a label mildly equivalent to the word nigger. The onetime inhabitant! of the whole of Finland, half of Norwayand Sweden and a part of Russia were the Sami and this was~+meland. Until $ha recent dramatic waits, maw Southern scandinavians conside* the Sami more-or-leu extinctM-h@eopleor nation, those still in w p c e being c o m e r e d more ' as toys of*F r i s m

The Sirh!ore one of the 80 formerly nomadic or semi-nomadic minority peoples of the arctic or sub-arctic circumpolar radon (like the Aleuts, Inuits end Creel. I n samisk there was no word for war. They were nomadic people who moved in groups of families and shared the lend They lived in topee-like tents and sometimes built turf (peat) shelters. When the finns (the Soumi) and the eryans began to spread north into scandinavia nearly a thousand year* ago, the Snni did not resist, they just packed and moved In the beginning the new immigrants had little effect, but as they settled to the work of estabiishingcentrelly organised societies, they demanded taxes from the Sami. To pay the taxes the Sami hunted more than they needed and the game became scarce. The last beaver was shot in 1861. The finns did not settle in the far north until the early 19th century. The Sami people, once free to roam over fertile scandinavia, now found their range limited to the far north under extremely severeclimatic and political conditions. The southern settlers brought ideas of agriculturewhkh encouraged some of the Sun'i to form permanent settlements. Little log houses were built in widely scattered communities end the people attempted to keep cattle and sheep a@ grow potatoes, but thus kind of activities were not always successful because of the slow regeneration of pasture. (There is almost complete darkness for 100 days in the year at 7 P N and outdoor work must be done by moontbht The recult of ail this was that the Sami, already fully adapted to a balanced ecological economy, had to develop an even more profound degree of adaption. I n a mnse they specialised end there came m exist definite groupings. There were sea Sami, river Sami, late Sami and fell Sami. , They had to know exactly how much they could take from nature and all activities were interrelated. People who didn't own reindeer could exchange berries, fish, hey end sedge for reindeer products. In the villages berry collecting areas were carefully allocated by family, as were fishing rights along the rivers. The lakes, unlike now, were flshed with care and understanding.

Followingthe Reindew Reindeer are en extremely efficient converter of a type of vegetation which would otherwise be difficult to convert and as game stocks ama t o fon docfined reindeer here

principle source of livelihood and to a large extent the whole backbone of the Sami culture. Traditionally, families who herded reindeer followed them continuously. I n Finland (reindeer pop' about 200,000) this practice was destroyed by the closure of the border with Norway and a system of herding districts was developed with owners and paid herders. I n Norway however, when spring is near, the reindeer still face north instinctively and in tens of thousands begin the migration from their winter pastures :c accompaniedby their herders. The reindeer calve in theearly spring whileon migration, before the onslaught of the mosquito, which would otherwise devour the new born calves. From mutually agreed winter pasture they move along ancient routes to their time-honoured summer grazing, often swimming in great numbers to the islands east and west of the North Cape; for some this migration i s a distance of about 200 kms. Today only about 10%bf the Sami are dependent on reindeer herdingand a family without any other source of income needs to own about 250 animals. SĂ&#x192;Â§mCulture Sam1 life was and for many still is naturally vivid Their gods were natural and so they had what people cell a shamanistic culture. The sun was not personified end Ibel was their highest god, perhaps the unifying force of life; there was no devil as such, but many of their gods could be ominous. Man in his own was powerless in this great barren wilderness and there was a need to pass beyond the confines of one's own soul: ascent into the spirit world was achieved by entering a state of trance assisted by the use of the magic drum. The drums were decorated with symbols of life and although many people possessed drums, it was soemtimes necessary to consult a specialist. The Sami have a particular way of expressing their feelings, called 'talking', a special way of ringing. One may joik loneliness end joy, one may h i k a tale or a character, one may joik together in harmony with others, one may joik t o trance or sleep. There areancient joiks which can be joiked anew or interpreted freely. Characteristically uninhabited, the sound is throaty, often rhythmical and spiritual, is traditionally unaccdpanied by musical instruments and may or may not have words. In mediaeval times the dana controlled a fort at Vadso near Russia. For more than two hundred years the commanders of this fort conducted witch hunts. Anybody found joiking was executed, that is anybody found singing was considered a witch, that means that the *nes murdered thousands of Sami men, women and children. Even today it is forbidden to folk in some schools. Unchristhn Unkind'Convertiq' the Sam1 to cTihstianity was b e g u n ~ q u i t & ~ r l ~ 6 1 t tfort Oih there wem no commanders qnd c h ~ r c h ~ u ntt ihl e mri gofthe17th century. The Sami ftxnd It sensible m r church goes, but continued to

Mikkel E i n from Masi at the Zero Point - --

use their drums at home. Gradually they were forced to take their drums with them church and the drums were burnt; people Ă&#x192; hid their drums were burnt alive with their drums. Under such pressure it became necessar! showa strong belief in christienity and needless to say alcoholism became a probiei In 1852 thirty-three Sarni rose in anger again the norvuegian authorities in Kautokeino an killed the alcohol pusher and the Chief of Police. Two of them were put to death immediately end many others died in prison; some of their direct descendants ha! been on hunger strike in Oslo this year. At about this time the swedish missionary Laestadius arrived on the scene preachinga severely puritanical gospel. The Sami were a batteredpeople, and: Laestadius helped them to stem alcoholism end did to some extent hold them up, but there remains aclear dichotomy in the religious beliefs of the Sami. Throudawt~rnodernhistory the Sami hi suffered from multiple taxation @ different nations, wars have ravaged their lands and e changing borders have frequently made reindeer herding a trial beyond endurance. Today there are reckonedto be about 30,000 Sami in Norway, 15,000 in Sweden 5,000 in Finland and 2,000 in Russia, but nobody really knows. There ere nine dialects. The Skolt Sami in Russia can barely understand those living in western Norway end language differences have been a problem The so called northern dialect seems to be spoken by about 65% of the people, but a common orthography was on agreed in 1978. Although children speak samisk at home their teachers often only speak a different language. There are many problems, like the old people p o die in far-away hospitals because they can't explaiff what's wrong with them.

Undercurrents45 our camp and destroyed it But there were people everywhere i n the town and on the farms and almost every day there would be 10,20, SO people arrested The police action was costing millions of pounds and it was clear that such stupidity could not go on. On the 24th January tepees were again raised outside the norwegian parliament and five Sami men began the second hunger strike in the tents. Thirteen Sam! women between the ages of 77 and 5 occupied the Prime M MiniW; own conference room for 15 hours before being carried away by the police in the middle of the night Two of these women travelled t o see the Pope and later .toamerica t o try and raise support at the U.N; On 24th February with two of t h e hunger strikers in hospital and the other in serious condition the government backed down. The reason they gave was that the road t o the dam might damage some archaeological site in the Alta valley. The museum at Trornso was t o investigate, but could not do so until the snow melted There i s an election coming up in October, so politicians of all parties may well prefer t o defer the , campaign for fioal victory over the Samis until next winter. On the other hand, any centre-right coalition that might displace the present Labour administration would have t o include politicians who have declared against the dam. The Sami are happy but in no way complacent: there are fairy tales and fairy tales Draw your own conclusions and keep your eyes open. La Elm Level Riku Tomson

Warn

of Peace

LANZA del Vasto, the 'Ghandi of the West', died recently in France; a personal memoir by Dominic Michel.

Paris, 1971) translated into EngI Warrior of Peace: writings on the technique o f non-violence (Knopf-Random H0U% New York, 1974)-

Larzac

These principles Shantidas carried into oractice: he oooosed stronelv the torture and detention of ~lgeriansdurLANZ4 drl Vasto was born in 1901. In ing their battle for independence. the Thirties he went to India and worked L~~~~ on he gave his support to the peaswith Mahatma =andhi# named him ants in the Larzac plateau area, south of Â¥Shuntidas''Servant of Peace; his first central,intheir opposition to book. Return to the Source. Rider was French government's plan toconsidpublished during the war; it described camp, a proPo+ erably extend a military his spiritual awakening and sold over a which would have causedthe loss million copies. of their farms to over 100 families. He founded The Order of the Ark, a self- The peasants themselvesdemonstratsufficient spiritual community in 1948; it ed great courage and tenacity. The part is now at La Borie Noble, some 40 miles Shantidas played in showing them how north of Beziers. to rely on themselves, and their spiritHe and his collegues decided to have ual values, and to increase their sense of a simple vegetarian diet, grow their own unity and cohfcsiveness, is graphically food, make their own bread, weave their described by Roger Rawlinson in The cloth, make pottery, and live without Battle of the Larzac (Fellowship of Reradio or television and other appliances conciliation, 1976). His lengthy fast on and utilities which they believed the site attracted enormous attention, unnecessary. Prayers were held every and he acted as a focus for the oppositio morning and evening of a universal to the military's prposals. nature, and meditation took place every Not only does there now flburish hour. whole host of Comites Larzac and other Shantidas believed that a community organisations, with their own newspaper should be much smaller than'that, for Gardarem Lo Larzac (30 francs from example at Taize, in Burgundy; about G.L.L. Potensac, Millau, 12100, Aveyror 30 pr 40 people at one place were suffFrance), but there has begun to be icient for a community as otherwise the forged a front linking the Larzac battle element of the personal contact, which with the struggle by the people o f was all important to him, was lost. Brittany against the prpposal to establHe showed this belief not only in his ish a nuclear power station at Plogoff daily life, but also during the philosophic (UC 44). discussions which he led during the one The influence of Shantidas was not or more week-long camps held each only religious and political but also summer at La Flayssiere, one of the personal: as an example, last July, he groups of farmhouses near La Borie and the Compagnon responsible for the , Noble. international Flayssiere camp permitted, Until 1979, the camps, to which p for the first time in the history of the people of all ages, beliefs, and nationalCommunity, and possibly also for the ities were attractred, were usually first time ever in a Catholic centre in conducted in French, but, to reach a France, the holding of a full orthodox wider audience, he decided to hold a Jewish Sabbath eve service. After it, to camp in July 1980, the working language the obvious delight of the many Comto be English, which he spoke fluently. munity members and visitors present, thi It was such a success that another camp, only Jew and Moslem at the camp gave for English -speaking visitors, will be each other a kiss of peace and reconcilheld this year from 17 to 25 August. iation. The address; Community of the Ark, Those who visit the Community and Domaine la Borie Noble, Le Busquet read his books will grow to understand d'Orb 34260, Herault, France. (Cost the enormous significance of the man about Â£35. railway station: Les Cabrilsl. whose death is a loss to all those who He decided after working with ~ h a n d i ,strive actively for peace. that non-violence was the only way in Dominic Michel which society could usefully change. His The books 'Technique de la non-violence', first work on this aspect o f his vision 'Le Pelerinage eux Sources', T o u r miter la fin was translated into English as du monde', and certain other works can now 'Definitionso f Non- Violence' (Greenleaf be obtained, in cheap paperback editions, Books, 1972). In the decade before his eithr through Librairie Hachette, 4 Regent death, his ideas were carried further in Place, London W1, or Les Librairies Parallelas, Techniaue de la non-violence (GontF-47 rue St. Honore, Paris, 75001.

Undercurrents 45

Community Lcr-vyer 'THERE ought to be a law against it!': often, there is one already, and it can be an effective weapon for community action, as Geraldine Petterson reports. PICK up any local newspaper and the chances are good that you will read of a community group, a tenants' association or a band o f angry residents expressing their strong opposition t o the plans o f a local bureaucracy, private developer or central government department. The plans may be for the construction o f a major new road; the siting o f a factory where noise or pollution will seriously affect the safety and health o f nearby residents; the destruction o f a neighbourhood in the interests of 'orderly' planning; office developments taking the place o f housing; or the closure o f a school or local hospital. It is not only plans for the future which can arouse the frustration and anger o f the community: authorities can be slow or reluctant to take any action to remedy the ills o f the present. Bad housing which has not been repaired or improved will mean that people are condemned to live in conditions which are damp, unfit and intolerable. Tenants o f some high-rise blocks have had to fight long and, often, frustrating battles to get the authorities t o recognise-not to mention rectify-the results o f poor design or less than adequate building techniques. Probably all o f us have examples which we could add t o this list. Examples from our neighbourhood or community o f problems that have been ignored or opportunities which have been lost or abused. However, though my aim in this article i s to illustrate ways o f making community action more effective, I cannot pretend that I approve of all the sentiments which are expressed through such protests. Let us look also at examples of community action where the lines between people and authority are not so clearly drawn. It may be that a local community objects to the provision o f a hostel for the homeless, or a refuge for the mentally handicapped or a short-stay home for ex-offenders. Since the recent changes in the way in which local government i s financed, there are those groups of residents and businesses who seek t o reduce their rate demands by attacking the level o f services which their local councils provide. Not all of us would agree with these kinds of protests but open debate o f the issues is often preferable to hidden criticism and resentment and, sometimes, such a debate can be a constructive learning process for those concerned.

Weapons from the Armoury Over the last ten years, community groups and others have turned more and more to legal remedies t o overcome the problems inflicted on them by a system o f decision-making which has become more remote and complex and, as a consequence, often insensitive t o local needs. Probably, town planning-whether proposals for new development or the change or demolition of existing streets and buildings-has given rise t o more public anger than most activities o f local government. The 1971 Town and Country Planning Act established the general framework for the control o f all development and gave those who wish to object certain rights t o be heard before an independent assessor or referee. A large scale development, such as that at Coin Street near Waterloo in south London, can attract so much community opposition that the Secretary o f State for the Environment (currently Michael Heseltine) can decide to 'call in' the planning proposals or planning application for the site. When the Secretary o f State calls in the planning application, i t usually means that he will order that a public inquiry is held. This public inquiry gives the chance t o individuals, community groups and any other organisations, who feel tl ey have a relevant point to make, to put their views before an independent Inspector. The Inspector i s appointed by the Secretary of State and i t i s his job t o see that everyone has a fair opportunity to air their opposition or support for the proposals. After hearing all the evidence, the Inspector reports t o the Secretary o f State and gives his opinion as to whether the development should be allowed to go ahead or not. Then, t o introduce an element o f the bizarre, the Secretary of State can either agree with his Inspector's opinion or totally ignore it! That the Inspector's opinion can be ignored by the Secretary o f State has sometimes worked to the community's advantage. I n 1973, after one of the first major planning public inquiries held in this country, the Minister went against his Inspector's opinion and threw out most o f the proposals contained in a plan which would have destroyed nearly two-thirds of Covent Garden in London's West End. Com-

munity hostility t o the proposals contained in this plan was the major force in influencing the Minister's decision.

Stamina and Dedication One o f the difficulties with using the legal machinery of the public inquiry to present community opposition to planning developments i s the time and energy such action requires from the groups and individuals who are closely involved. Shortly, another public inquiry is to begin on new proposals for the Coin Street site and this time the developers are seeking t o build offices, shops and restaurants in a series o f 200 foot high glass arcades stretching from Waterloo to the Thames. I t i s not only evidence that has to be pre.pared and presented but some constant presence at the inquiry i s often necessary. When such activities are combined the demands c f a full-time job and running a home, i t requires dedication and stamina to present the community's case. Another major public inquiry soon to start relates to commercial development proposals for Hays Wharf, Southwark. In recognition of the difficulties of presenting the community's case at a lengthy and complex public inquiry, funds liave been obtained from charitable tr'ists to employ a full-time worker. Obviously, where more money is available within the community, it may be possible for residents' groups t o buy professional advice and representation. For example, a residents' group in Surrey who wre opposing the location o f a major new hypermarket in open land had sufficient funds to use a planning consultant and be represented by Counsel at the inquiry. But what happens i f a public inquiry i s not held? The Secretary of State may not consider that the proposals are o f a sufficiently controver-

Undercurrents 45 the local aKthorffy finandally toi- BOÃ carrying out proper maintenance'af , -its homes. The- London Tenants $5 , , ; & s a t i o n hayfought a numb@ of '&sfuf actioni to get a ttnaA't rates reduced in response t o a I sk of repairs and maintenance to f. b *' flat. , dse of the I&:& it apptieita the finances o f a local-authority has made t5e deadlines in the national press with the threat of a Â£6,00 surcharge to some Camden coy~cillors. Each local authority must have their accounts subject to close financial scrutiny or audit. The 1972 Local Government Act gives any lopal elector the right to auestion a'council's svending, ifthey consider that such s(Ãˆed ing was unreasonable in law op was excessive due t o negligence or,,~wijful misconduct'. When such a complaint has been made bv the local government elector, he is entitled to a public hearing in front of the Distric,t,,$uditor and, after ail sides of the argument have been heard, the Auditor will present a formal report and decision. In Nottingham, a branch o f the Shelter Housing Action Group took the Council for a hearing before the District Auditor to object to the sale of Council houses and the financial imvlications of these sales. Recently.' ...~arfsite as alternatives to a private a decision by the Greater London develo~er's'scheme-the same action Council t o sell sites on the South to-day could cost them in excess of Bank o f the Thames to a private Â£2,000 developer has been referred t o the District Auditor for his views as to the legal correctness of this action, i Fighti-- Damp A resident of Soho has ob' eted to No to turn from planning t o look the District Auditor that $estmlwter b r i i i y at other kinds of legal taction Council charges less than it legally which can assist the community. It was should for the collection o f cororoeri recently reported in Parliament that cia1 refuse i n the Borough. Although one and a half million homes in Britain the use of the District Auditor i s a are affected by dampness. There is a growing feature of community action, growing awareness among community the rate of success for community groups and tenants' associations that groups is very low. Sufficient tq say, the most effective course of action is that the Auditor's decision to seek a to use the Housing and Public Health surcharge from Camden Councillors Acts to force the Councils to either was the first time that such a step declare the housing unfit or cirfi out has been taken under the 1972 L q a l the essential works. Sortie groups ha Government Act. , been extremely successful, as in This article has only provided a Edinburgh where the locqlauthorit very brief look at the many types of has agreed to provide substantial legal actions which are open to monies specifically for the purpose community groups. One general point of eliminating the problem of dampto end on-although the law exists and ness and condensation in the City's it can often be used successfully, homes. community groups are still at a very With housing the worst hit through severe disadvantage when opposing cuts in Council spending, it is a foreprivate developers and authorities gone conclusion that housing conditions through the Courts or at public will worsen and the queue fot essential inquiries. Access to mone time and the influence that can so o ten be repair?will lengthen throughout the wielded by those performing in a country. More and more tenants' legal arena, where they have knowassociations wIM use the 1936 Public ledge and experience, can too often Health Act ancl~&qr%w $0 get the mean that the protests of the Courts to uphoMitfteir/Bghtto live community go unheard. in a fit home afRJ\iGfl ao unhealthy , slum. It is also possible to penalise Geraldine Pettersson

sial nature to warrant a public Inquiry. The community groups may protest but the planning application may be decided without any public hearing and theopposition may be limited to writing letters o f objection. Hitherto, one way in which a community group could force the debate to be held at a public inquiry by putting in their own planning application for the sit?. Anyone can put in a planning application for a property or site and there is no requirement that you are the owner or have any a interest in the land whatsoever. If the planning application i s refused or just not decided upon within eight weeks, the community group has the legal right to demand a public inquiry. Thus, this could be a very effective way of ensuring community opinion was heard. Recent law could well have the effect of restricting this kind of action. Under the latest Local Government and PlanningAct, an applicant i s required to pay for putting in a planning application. With the charges for planning applications fixed at Â£4for each unit o f housing and Â£4for each 800 square feet of industrial and commercial space, it severely limits the scope of community groups to present their own proposals for formal decision by the authorities. Prior to. the new taw, a Southwark action group submitted two planning applications for the Hays

Undercurrents 45

Alternative Engineering

IF YOU want to study AT at university, Warwick's Department of Engineering is the place to go. But, as Stewart Boyle warns, it's hard work.

THE problem with good ideas is that they tend t o take a long time t o reach fruition. six vears first ~ ~ Nearlv ~ .~, . ~ ~ the . -~ , ~ after seeds were sown, the first undergraduate course i n the country related t o A T opened this academic year at the University o f Warwick. In the first vear. , , a fairly predictable basic engineering grounding'(see Table 1) w i t h a few surprise extras. Since EDAT undergraduates are actually going to get their hands dirty and will increasingly need the skills, they are packed off t o evening classes in nearby Leamington to learn how t o weld and operate machine tools. Woodwork i s tackled at the University and laying up fibreglass at local sct 001s. The other major change i s the emphasis on design project work: design a windpump for Ethiopia; match up a rubber band power drive t o a back axle; design children's play equipment for use in Coventry's Inner City; design and build the external wall insulation for solid walls from the paper work to the finished article; and finally carry out the stripping of a diesel engine in order to design improvements and write an instruction manual. A trip t o the Centre for A T in Machynlleth rounds o f f the year. Year Two brings in the theme of production, in terms of technology and organisation plus a number of departures from the standard set of courses such as students forming and operating a temporary small company or cooperative and the designing of smallscale agricultural machinery (a possible tie-up with thecouncil o f Small Industries i n Rural Areas-COSIIRA-may see these designs through to market). Thereafter things start to get a little less definite for a number o f good reasons: the course lecturers have had to adopt a 'suck i t and see' attitude due to the pioneering aspects of the course. Year Three will have a wide range of options and these will permit an emphasis on either small business, A T or Overseas Development. A personal design project will also form an important part o f the year. Ranging from a 'liberal reflective analyst', through a radical wind researcher heavily into Lucas Aerospace and high technology, to a Production Engin~~

eer strongly in favour o f Nuclear Power, the lecturers on the course provide a useful range of views to complement one another. Whether one's interest lies in Heat Pumps, microprocessors, agriculture, wind Power, community energy schemes, the Third World, Resources, Business, Bicycles, Instrumentation or a host of other topics, the opportunity to pursue these is available due to the range of Skills available. If you tried to get a job as a graduate solar panel designer at the moment you might experience some difficulty. Plenty of jobs for salesmen flogging Â£50 solar panels for Â£200 under easy instalments, but little demand for an engineering designer. Isn't there a danger then o f training people for something they will be unable to gain employment in? Dr. McPh i n retorts-'Ourphilosophy depends on turning o u t people who will start the firm ' The Graduate's responsibility is as much t o create employment as to be employed'. jobs should in fact be relatively easy t o obtain in conventional fields, such as designing systems or energy efficient housing, if graduates so wish. Another possible destination could be as resident engineer i n both rural and urban communities. EDAT i s an extremely demanding course. Proficiency in mathematics and an ability to grasp new concepts quickly is a necessity. I t was noticeable that the majority o f the first entry of students were either mature students or those who had taken at least one year o f f after finishing 'A' levels. Perhaps this is a reflection of our lack o f maturity at 18, a sobering thought when life choices are being made which will prove extremely difficult t o alter with our present higher education system. This i s not a course which will be of much help to self-taught A T buffs unless they have real mathematical ability or are willing t o prove their commitment by doing a correspondence course i n 'A'-levels first, as several applica*~ are currently doing. UC readers might feel sceptical about a course which seems to maintain the present system o f power resting with the few who have the necessary skills and training, but EDAT is a pragmatic attempt t o confront a world i n ~~

...

deepening crisis. There are no simple solutions for todays and tomorrows problems. As ~ e o f Watson f of N.E.A. stated at the recent NATTA conference, 'We started off with the idea o f making simple windmill kits for the D l Y market, b u t ended up with increasingly high technology -systems which we sell to vets and others able to afford them' EDAT graduates will be engineers, but engineers more attuned to changing society. For too long they appear to have suffered from the mentality which seems to afflict many scientists I f i t can be done, we will do i t ' (and get someone else t o clean up the consequences afterwards)- I f EDATtype courses do spring up around the country, then the prospects o f gainful employment, decentralised production and decision-making may be a great deal closer than they are at the moment^-'Just nipping around the corner to get a new diode for my windmill dear' . . . . Stewart

DUYIC

Access General Enquiries should be sent t o either Dr. T.H. Thomas or Dr. D. Chetwynd, Departnent of Engineering, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL.

I am indebted t o Dr. McPhun and Dr. Thomas for their assistance, and the use of a paper produced by Dr. McPhun for the Journal o f Medical Engineering a n d Techffology (January 1981I.

unaercurren

Facts & THE FADING Communists who join the Campaign for Social Democracy to find ' s ce' have fallen into the trap ofSlieving their own bullshit, says Simon Watt, our sanitary correspondent. His experience as a shit stirrer has taught him that theories are just working approximations; they should be used as tools, not worshipped as truth. SANITARY engineers have much sympathy for the embattled Cambridge literary 'structuralists' who attempt t o understand literature within the social context of the language of its own time and culture using broad models. For their methods closely resemble those of sanitary engineers who have kinetic models to make some sense of the vastly complex reactions taking place within sewage treatment plants. Both try to impose some order on chaos by holding up 'structural' mirrors to reflect reality and allow it to be interpreted. This approach is, of course, the basis of the scientific method. A theory i s intuitively evolved to account for the appearance of objects and events, and is used to explore the nature of other phenomena. When new facts show the theory to be limited or false the theory i s modified or overturned for one that f i t s better.

These structural mirrors,or paradigms are tools which only partially illuminate the totality o f human experience, although in their own time they are inevitably perceived as a 'true' picture of reality, the truth. In Sewage treatment the models deal with a neutral stuff which i s by then outside of ourselves. Some consensus on the validity of models is possible by putting them to measurable tests. Sewage treatment i s non-ideological: whoever heard of a Lysenko in public health engineering? The stuff of the humanities and social sciences, however, i s not outside but is, in fact, our own selves and consensus on the most realistic model is not possible.

"The world is but a basin of sludge: if we want to treat if we must do it a bit at a time." The opponents of the Cambridge structuralists, seeking facilities in a timeless vacuum, are themselves making transparent models of an individualistic bourgeois view of life that deliberately leaves out social matters. The examination of the structuralists i s a necessary part of the reform of the cultural super-, structure as the elite of the British State continue to dream of departed ways with a foul taste in their mouths. Sanitary engineers are forced by circumstances to go beyond theory unlike thecambridge academics: they have to make decisions about sewage works design and if they make a mistake the shit hits the river; their kinetic models are always regarded as a loose fit, never more than a rough approximation, and if operational events refuse to coincide with the predictions

of the model then both are treated witt measured tolerance. The activated sludi process provides a good illustration of this. I t was invented at the Davyhulme Sewage Works in Manchester in 1914, and the first full scale plant was built by Joshua Bolton in Bury in 1919. Since t'"-n there have been many developments which have come not from design engineers but from the plant operators forced to solve problems on the spot. Practice preceded theory which i s still struggling to catch dp with i t s models. The activated sludge process is very simple; it was living micro-organisms to feed on and metabolise incoming sewage, adding it to their cell mass and using it for energy. The bugs, aerated and ksot ir suspension, flow out with the effluent, are settled and either taken for further treatment or recycled to the main basin to keep up the numbers (Fig. 1). Fed under conditions of near starvation, the poor bugs excrete biopolymers that cause them the floe together where they continue to absorb both dissolved and suspended organic matter. Seen through a microscope a sample of sludge changes from an ugly and revolting grey-brown gungy mess to a startling jungle where larger beasts rip and swing their way through the floes in search of food. There are no shepherds here. On the face of it the process should be fairly simple to model and control. Qualitatively it seems simple t o understand. But sewage varies constantly in strength and quantity and i s composed of highly complex materials. Each bug i s also a small miracle with its enzyme systems that change to meet its needs.

Undercurrents 45 The parameters used to measure and model the process must be simple and relate directly to the biological and biochemical activities in the aerated basin. The trouble is that they are not and do not. Sewage strength Tor instance, is measured'by Biochemical Oxygen Demand, which takes five daygto carry out and i s of little use for plant operators who have to make hourly decisions. Nor can it beascertained what proportion of the effluent strength is untreated sewage, or waste excreted by the bugs themselves. For 40years plantoperators kept the works operating-rqaion&ly.well by rulesof thumb and stick dipping techniques, working out b5.practice and observationhow b s t t o control each plant. Disparate factors were lumped together a5 fiddle factors with legitimate sounding names.

It's All Very Well In practice, But It Doesn't Work Out in Theory With the University expansion of the 19601s, however, a veritable ex- ' plosion of research into sewage treatment began. Articles on kinetit modelling flooded the literature and reputations were made and lost at conferences. Kinetic models using measurementsas' arcane as anything the monetarists'hkve,.&evised set sanitary engineerHft9 different -, =, q camps. But the difficulty b ? ~ J ^ c e ~ t a i n about what wasactually @efrigmeasured made many of these models loo'lc like a box of jumble, whereh OM' sock, a bar of soap, and a pack4 of seeds were pulled out and equated' using a piece of research'selastic!, - ' In practice this research, whilst undoubtedly clarifying the behaviour of the process, has made little differ' ence to plant deficiencies and plant operators still use rules of thumb :' (Fig. 2). The Cambridge structuralists may learn from sanitation engineeythat whilst models are useful there is no substitute for r a c t i c e t s d e of the ivory tower, Their mirrors, threatened by the Right, should notbe for the initiated only but be of use to the majority of people and be rooted" in common experience. If the biological world o f watte treatment is soft, how much softer is the world of human societies, their literature and culture? We may para. phrase ,qan ~ i and say, ~ iforthe~ world i s but a basin of sludge: if we want to treat it we must do it a bitat a time'. Structures must never become dogmas. Simon Watt 2

Ssi" 2-2 " , % t J

Bottle Battle

REMEMBER the slogan "Don9 let them Sch . . .all over Britain'? That was ten years ago, and Cadbury Schweppes now use more me-trip bottles and cans than y^er. It has been an uphill struggle Trigha R~~~~~ is,,,,dismayed as sh describeshow plan to make 1981 the Year of the British Bottle Act.

I P S now ten years since Friends of the Earth launched the campaign against the throwaway society, with a massive dump of disposable bottles at the offices o f Schweppes. The slogan then was let them Sch all over Britain!. the same firm sells some drinks exclusively i n one-trip cans. At tttdt time the 'Don't Callfornicate Oregon'r?mpaign was promoting the first of many Bottle Bills. The issue in the States in the early 70s was litter; the issues for Britain today are energy conservation and waste reduction. Britain now throws away more bottles, jars and cans than ever before: six billion glass containers and seven billion cans in 1979,enough to build 'seven towers to the moon! One third of these containers were bottles and cans for beer, cider and soft drinks, A returnable system still exists for these containers, under which the cost of the package ^shared by all users. in recent years the vast increases in beverage sates have virtually all been in the take-home sector, and the bulk of the increase has been in disposable packs. The numbers of returnable bottles sold hasslight{ydecreased, predominating only i n pub5 and restaurants.

. ..

The supermarket customer i s therefore faced with little or no choice of container for a given drink. Possibly grudging1 drink (and container) are Purcha@J.'and one more customer is a i d to have 'demanded convenience'. As they are difficult to find, returnable5 are equally, or more, difficult to redeem. Hatf a dozen bottles may come from as many,Shops. This leads to a low 'trI~~age'rate,when the well"leaning consumer gives up in despair. Except for,impor@d drinks, glass bottles are mostly manufactured i n Britain from indigenous raw materials. Sand, salt and limestone are the main components, and all come from scenic Picl. A Slx-Pack areas. Unnecessarily pure sand is This growth in home drinking is extracted in Surrey and Norfolk and directly linked to the growth in superused to manufacture clearglass, which market$ which command a huge prooften has impurities added to colour it. portion of soft drink sales and an increas- Iron oxide turns beer bottles brown -ing amount of off-licence trade. They lower garde materials could be used are therefore able to dictate to a large in the first place. Limestone tomes packaging used by extent tkp w'bo,f from Tllrfxtead Quatry i n the.Peak the beverage Industry. A display of cans, District; it is used with Cheshire salt with to form soda ash. Can manufacture, on b i t s broad ~ label~surface, ~provides maximum sales impact in minimum the other hand, requires a wealth of space. Admititstfation and therefore imported raw materials; iron ore, tin, badx&and alumina. World supplies of of tihand bauxite are uncertain. ~~l~tfi^t! W i w p t the few returned or recycled containersfind

their way back to the land in the form of waste. Most are disposed of in landfill sites which are getting further from the source of waste as land is used up. When we are a little more desperate for resources, disused landfill sites may well provide more mineral wealth than virgin ore extraction! The manufacturing processes for bottles and cans demand more energy to convert virgin materials than to remelt reclaimed containers. Pollution levels are similarly higher. The industry intends to phase out the returnable system eventually. This would put another 500 billion bottles into the cycle, and the manufacturers would claim to have done so in the interest of wnsumer demand. *

Bottle Banks In fact the consumer demands no such thing. The strong support for are thrownaway in Britain every year. Will Bottle Banks demonstrates that people you pkaM introduce ImulationNOWto are loath to discard something when it still looks perfectly useable. Bottle Banks are the glass industry's would save energy and r e ~ o a f cnducB ~. waste and litter, and ~monutu~er~ over solution to the problem of-disposable Â£10million a year. bottles. Sponsor-fed by the Glass Youreiincerely, Manufacturers Federation (GMF), they NUM are entirely the financial responsibility of the local councils. The GMF sells ImlUuiinctateoilh. the authority half a dozen gaily colaured ski% wl ich are strategically placed TINS FOR NUMBER TEN for people to come and donate the Friend* of the firth ere (lunching e m a s h very containers they have recently paid' protest rimed directly at the Prhne Minbfr to protenat her Government's c o d i c e n t for. The Council empties the skips, faMi that Inductry will promot* the stores the cullet, and arranges for i t s returmbte bmconminer iyitun which transportation to the glassworks. it h a (Mlberetely run down over the past The industry thus ensures itself a dfdo* quantity of raw material at a fraction On April loth, hundreds of thouÃ‘K of the price of extracting virgin of cans dl dncend on Downing S t m t resources. The cutlet adds bulk to the from all wacthe country. batch in the furnace, and lowers the To nrticbf In this aÃ‘nt the label BkiÂ¥trflta k *nllaUi from FOE, or you melting point of the other materials. Glass furnaces are operated non-stop for cm nuke your own following thk pettern. There will dm be London went on the day years at temperatures of 1500Â¡C so to enure that Magoie faponds to the any saving is obviously welcome. dmnmds of the people. A reclamation system for metal cans exists only in the form of isolated required to retool factories and build pilot projects. The aluminium giant up a float of returnables. These would Alcoa is testing a scheme where l p is be countered by a net gain in overall paid for each all-aluminium can employment, in less specialised trades brought to the depot. The aluminium in all areas of the country. The can is the most expensive vessel for distribution network exists now to beverages and probably cost the every village in Britain that can boast consumer 8p, but at least the token a pub and more frequent and shorter refund is more than offered by the journeys would be possible if bottling GMF. plants were decentralised. One other system comparison is the Jaw Jaw question of job gains or losses. The FOEparticipated in a study which container industry opposition to reported last summer to the Departdeposit legislation claim that losses in ments of Industry and the Environment. employment would offset any gains The working party consisted mainly of embodied in a returnable system. The representatives of inAistry and wnsumretail and distribution,secmsclaim that i7creoses in handlingcosts would er organ.~tiqt1$~4 thy end of three yearsDd e l i l e ~ t l o n ' Tproduced ~ a offset the savings in materialcosts. ~ i n o f i $k&df~tfltaflingdiftedhces On balance, it is estimated that there of interpretation. At least one industry would be some jobs lost in container representative did the ---5 thing, but manufacture after the initial increase

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declined to offer it for publication. The study detailed savings in energy and resources available under a returnable system. The saving of 21% of the system energy requirementswas considered inconsequential, as the entire system demands only 0.6% of the nation's energy (equivalent to one third of our nuclear energy production!). External costs, such as litter and pollution, were outside the working group's terms of reference, though on surface consideration they were expected to be reduced under a returnable system. Oregon and many other places which have passed Bottle Bills have done so in the interest of litter reduction. However, foreign statistics, put to the working group by FOEwere considered irrelevant to Britain. The study finally recommended voluntary co-operation on the part of Industry to promote returnables and improve standardisation. FOEfeel that recommending volt tary co-operation is totally inadequ especially as no monitoring system has been proposed, and that legislation is the only way to realize the full benefit of a return to returnables. Legislation has worked in every place it has been adopted. In Vermont, industry ignored the Bill for a year, but now public opinion polls in the State show that over 90%of the populationare happy with the Bill. There is still a propaganda campaign against the highly successful Oregon Bid, now ten years old, to counteract pressure for a national Bottle Bill in the US.

Jar Law! The Government is clearly not going to legislate to realize the potential savings. Industry is not going to voluntarily cooperate in reducing their own sales volumes. FOEhas therefore decided to promote a Beverage Container Bill, to be introduced in Parliament later this year. The FOEBill calls for mandatory deposits on all containers for beer, cider and soft drinks, starting with the wholesaler. When the onus is on the beverage manufacturer to deal with the containers they will demand the most economical pack for themselves and their customers: the refillable, reusable bottle. Returns would be facilitated under th FOEBill by standardisationof shapes and sizes among brands, to be refillable by whoever last reimbursed the deposit. It is exoected that trippage rates would consequently improve to at least ten per container, and all the material gains would increase accordingly. Now is the time for a national Bottle Bill for Britain, so that we may finally settle this crucial and longstandingenvironmental issue. Trisha Rosson

Jndercurrents 45

Britain's NucL -ir Machine TONY BENN'S written evidence to the House of Commons select com- I have had contact with nuclear power nittee on energy was published, along with the rest of the evidence and t h e more sceptical Ihave become :he sceptical main report, in February. It is a lucid look at how Britain's about the claim made on i t s behalf by those who present it as the anewer ,-..-. iuclear machine works. Here is an edited version; the full thing is to our major energy problems of the wblished in volume two of House of Commons Paper 114, part 11, for ment decisions cannot be studied and I N response to the Committee's request assessed. I am not able to comment in detail for evidence about the decision I upon the factors which influenced the announced in the House of Commons present Government in reaching the on January 25th 1978 regarding the decision that they announced about choice of nuclear reactors by the last the civil nuclear power programme last Government, Iam attaching a copy o f year though I imagine that much of that statement, together with the the evidence submitted to them would Departmental notes covering the backhave been the same as was submitted ground prepared at my request by the to me. Department o f Energy as an aide For example, the influence of memoire for use in the House of GEC has been strongly in favour of Commons. the abandonment of the AGR and in This document may assist the favour o f the adoption o f the PWR Committee to understand the backfor series ordering on a large scale. ground t o that decision but I believe This was also the view of all the it would be in the public interest if all officials at the Department of Energy the Government documents prepared to assist Ministers in discussions before and the CPRS. I did.nct accept those arguments the decision was made were disclosed. when put to me and I doanot accept These would include papers preparthem now because they pre-empt ed by Officials of the Department o f Energy, and other Departments includ- immense financial resources before it is necessary, and before alternative ing the papers submitted tothe energies strategies that ma9 open up Cabinet Committee by the Central later have had time to emerge. Policy Review Staff, the evidence subI am also opposed to the series mitted by the interests consulted and ordering of the PWR because 1 accept the paper which I submitted to the the view that the PWR has inherent Cabinet. design weaknesses. These could onlySimilarly 1 betieve it would be in if at all-be corrected at costs that the public interest if all the relevant would make it less economic in operapapers which came to the Ministers in tion than the AGR. the present Government in connection This view has been reinforced by with the decisions it has announced Harrisbitp and the reported cracks were also disclosed., in PWR's elsewhere in the world. Iappreciate that if the Committee Britain has concentrated from were to decide to demand the disclosure the beginning on gas-cooled reactors af these documents it would reauire a and all our operating experience has decision by Ministers as to whether or been with these reactors which, in my not to accede to that request. judgement, should remain the mainstay But there is a wide and legitimate of whatever nuclear power programme parliamentary interest in any decision we find it necessary to adopt. involving billions of pounds of public In assessing the alternatives open ixpenditure with wide industrial and to Government in reaching these social implications and where such decisions a number o f factors have nigh, sensitive and potentially dangerto be taken into account. aus technologies are involved. The I have listed some of these factors, only exclusion from disclosure that and would be glad to discuss them should be insisted upon would relate to the sensitive technologies themselves with the Committee as a possible check-list for the Committee's conwhere there is a defence and security sideration. interest and those figures which it In conclusionfI think Ishould tell could be demonstrated beyond doubt the Committee that the longer that might harm the economic interests of the country. I have deliberately but this issue without full didosure the of disclosure into my submission I intpresp that many because without full disclosure the many lowerful interests which carry carry h e u ~ h i ,,,n great weight with Whitehall will not Whitehall will not become Ă&#x201A;ÂĽificomknown and their effect in known sncing the outcome o f Govern-

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future. Having been Minister o f Technology with responsibility for nuclear power from 1966-70, a Department which later absorbed the Ministry of Power; and Secretary of State successively for Industry and Energy from 1974-79 covering the whole raQe of industrial interests; ana as a mender of the Energy Council of the European Communities, and sometime i t s President, I have had a long time to think about these issues. I do not believe that British energy demands can be met without some nuclear component, at least for some time ahead; and other countries which lack the other fuels which we have in coal and oil may need a larger nuclear programme at least for the present.

The Real Unsolved Problems But having said all that, there are real unsolved problems associated wit) the development of nuclear power which everyone must take seriously. There is no established method of storing nuclear waste that we can be sure will be safe and effective. There are hazards that may arise from accidents, leaks, natural or manmade catastrophes which could impact on nuclear installations and what are described as non-proliferation safeguards are little more than a monitoring of the movement of nuclear material. In saying this I am not critici ing in any way the expertise, public spiritedness or dedication of all those who work in and around the nuclear industry for whom I have the highest regard. But the advent of nuclear power poses questions which must be faced by all those who wish to see democratic control maintained over all decisions that affect our society. I have, over the nine years during which 1have had responsibility for these matters, come firmly to the conclusion that the use of nuclear power on a large scale raises very serioi issues. These should lead us to look more urgently for alternative ways of meeting our energy needs and pause much more carefully before embarking upon a vastly expanded programme of the kind now contemplated by the present Government and even more on the sealer now ixin&pressed so insistentIYUP^ US'W theEuropean communities and~tMe~t\uolear industries of the world.;:s, I ' 8

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o n y Bern

Undercurrents 45

ALIENATED

MAN APART I gather from your letters column that you are on something of a witch hunt against Friends of the Earth in your country. This is too bad but none of my business. What is my business is that you printed without permission or acknowledgement a piece on which Friends of the Earth in this country holds copyright. I refer t o the word ball on oaee 47 of UC 44. It fust appeared in Not Man Apan, our monthly, a half dozen years ago. Last fall it was used on the back cover of an NMA anthology called Earthworks. It was written by Joe Miller. It is flattering to be reprinted but irritating t o be ripped off. As token payment. I'd reouest a donation from ~ndercu&nts to FOE Ltd, in our name. A maeazine iust paid us $220 to reprint tni piece in this country; maybe you could donate Â£2to FOE? Tom Turner, Editor Not Man Apart Friends of the Earth 124 Spear San Fransisco California 941 05

What we ought t o be doing is putting a lot more effort and research into finding more sources of protein which we can produce ourselves. We need to do this now. Food is going to be one of the biggest issues in world politics soon. A. Harris 6, Riddings Street Derby

SEXISM ANDPROGRESS ? - -

I am wholly convinced that the feminist movement is based upon a fundamentally just claim that women in OUJ culture are the victims of oppression. 1 do not think that the issue is the most important one of our time (for example, I would place nuclear disarmament well above it in a heirarchy of importance), although probably it is the most basic. It is certainly worth a great deal of attentionand deserves t o make progress. There can be no doubt that the feminist movement has acheived a great deal in many wavs. However. there do seem to b e certain areas where the movement deserves criticism. The first of these that 1 would like to mention consists of its response t o criticism. It has been mv experience that whenever I write t o a representative of the feminist movement offering any kind of criticism. either I am 1 ignored or, m~re'fre~uently, am subjected to what I can onlv describe as a torrent of emotional rhetoric. 1 am not talking of one isolated incident; I have had a similar experience several times with regard to different individuals. Secondly, there seems to be an opinion sharedby militant feminists that all men must share the guilt of those actually doine the sexist acts. For example, alimen must share the blame for the actions of one rapist. I would agree with this t i an extent, insofar as the sexist syndrome is cultural and therefore the responsibility of us all; but that includes women equally with men, and feminists seem to deny this. A further criticism I would make is that the feminist movement is rather shallow in its general approach to understand sexism, how it works, what makes it tick. For example, again using rape as a model for all sexist behaviour, when I have tried t o analyse the mner mental and spiritual state of the rapist, with a view t o understanding him and possibly thereby finding something out about the causes of rape, and what to do about preventing it, I have been accused of "apologising"for rapists. For "daring" to suggest that women should shce'in any part of the collective guilt for rapists (etc) I have been accused of bein a "pop psychologist", of "hatred" for women and of being a slave to my "nude em". Another point that I would like to raise is the unwillingness

My first reaction t o Nick Godwin's letter about South African raisins was "I thought this sort of thing went out ten years ago." My second was: "why stop at S. Africa?" Looking at a wholefood wholesaler's list, I find foodstuffs not only from S. Africa, but also from Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, Iran. Are these places any better than S. Africa in the way they treat .their inhabitants? Think of Brazil's treatment of its Indians, or Argentina's of its political opponents! This leads on to a much more serious ooint. About 95% of the foodstuffs on this list are imported. Many of the countries suo~lvinethem are Door Third world countries. I think it's about time all vegetarian wholefooders started asking: "What the hell are we doingbasing our diet on imported food instead of making more effort to be self sufficient?" And this should apply to everybody. Much of this food will have been grown as cash crops by poor farmers and landless peasants, who should instead be growing food to support themselves and their families. It seems a lot of veggies oreen themselves about not -exploiting animals and helping the environment, but they don't ve a damn about exploiting ird World peasants, as long as they can have their chick peas and cashews. ~~~we can't ow rice and soya and peanuts this country and we mustn't waste our time trying t o (remember Fiskeby U?)

of the women's movement to give men any guidelines upon which to measure their own sexism. I have repeatedly been told that men should somehow know all about every aspect of female oppression: "It's. . . up t o men to take responsibility for changin themselves. Women can't, nor siould they be hasled, to tell you how to d o it. You've got t o d o it foryourself, (recent letter in Peace News). Now this strikes me as extremely ination+ - in every other "anti-prejudice movement, gay lib., racial liberation and so on, considerable efforts have been made, with some success, t o communicate the various problems to the rest of the world and to indicate appropriate responses to them. Indeed, how can women expect empathy from men without offering the necessary communication? Lastly, and perhaps most importantly of all, it seems to me that the feminist movement is intruding into and beginning to undermine other areas of much needed social reform, notably the peace movement. Recently, Peace News published an article which tacitly condoned a woman's action in punching (and drawing blood from) a re orter's nose (PN/2136,, - 9/1/81 : 'Â¥AngtWomen , P.7). In the same article, censorship was described as "not being" censorship when applied to certain areas. Neither example is in itself of tremendous importance, but both represent, each in its own way, a dangerous signpost for the future if allowed t o pass uncorrected (my complaint t o PN about both instances was igno"*fi .---,. Itseems to me that it is vitally important for the feminist movement to reappraise its tactics, or it runs the risk of being ridiculed on the grounds of "emotionalism ". hi particular,I think it should review its policy on how to communicate with men, rather than just to allow us t o be made scapegoats for all women's ills. Finally, in anticipation of criticism on account of my sex, I wish to state that I see no reason why I, as a man, should be excluded from participation in this most important debate. "

Love, peace and freedom, Nick Godwin. 4 Hurkur Crescent, Eyemouth, Berwickshue, Scotland, 'I'D14 S A P . Editors note. This letter has created some dissention among the collective, hopefully it will open up a debate and create a response for the next %omens issue" of Undercunvnts.

EXETER FLYING FEATHERS I'm writing to you about the Flying Post article in the current issue. Even under the difficult circumstances. ie losine the article for several days, and itnot being typed out entirely in the first place, I fed that not to have roof-read it for sense or not to i ave marked it up correctly for typesetting was both unprofessional and careless. As I stressed to Peter several times - if there were queries concerning what I had written I would have been dad to clear them up. In fact until the Saturday morning of the final production weekend 1 was fully expecting to have to rewrite the piece entirely, it being missing. But the result was a series of blatant errors and non-sequiturs, one of which seriously altered the sense of what was meant. I refer to the Flying Post being called a 'Feminist' paper. Of the non-sequiturs, typical was the sentence 'fortunate in naming MSC sponsored works' - Instead ofhav' MSC sponsored worker? This isn't ingratitude of having the opportunity to write the piece and give the paper some national publicity - simply annoyance that such a bloody mess should have been made out of i t Neither have we received an apology. You evidently don't bother to proof read - do you even read it when it's published? Flat 7 Elgin Mansions Elgin Avenue London W9 We could have credited the cartoon, Apologies. We are an 'unprofessional' magazine and mistakes do occur. will

Thanks for the extensive coverage of NATTA's activities in your last issue! Just for the record I don't think I was alone in enjoy' myself at our ' ~ o m m u n i t y c t i o n and Alternative Technology' conference which was attended by more than eighty local AT activists. See the report in our latest Newsletter (No 9). As a NATTA affiliate it would be good if Undercurrants could Wjast a little,more coverage to our activities. That doesn't mean you have to be uncrtitical: fos example we'd welcome a review of our fust pamphlet, plus comments on our overall programme. In some ways NATTA is obviously taking over some of the AT advocacy and information role from Undies: that's not such a bad things I feel: it will free Undies to explore other issues- which it does very well, as in the excellent Media issue. But don't turn your back on AT or NATTA111

Dive mott Natta 0 en University &ton ~ e y n e s

Undercurren

"We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they 'IIgo by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots". Charles Fort

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Encounters With The Past, Peter Moss with Joe Keeton, Penguin 233pp. Â£1.5 New Hope Through Hypnotherapy, Monica O'Hara, Abacus Press 150pp. Â£3.5

"ALL hypnosis is selfhypnosis" says Joe Keeton, the Liverpudlian hypnotherapist whose work i s described in these two complementary books. His aim is to dispel the widespread popular fear o f being hypnotised, a hang-over from the days o f the stage mesmerist, andto establish it as a respectable andvaluable therapy capable of curing a wide range o f intractible psychological and physiological disorders. He has made aparticular study of the phenomenom known as 'hypnotic regression', what i s popularly termed 'experiencing past lives'. This i s the subject of Encounters, what it omits is the wider context o f JoeKeeton's work as a healer which Monica O'Hara FIRST DAY (his wife) describes. Capped and blazered, What hypnosis does is open UP communic- somethine sli~perv.even Fortean. about ation with your unconcious nervous sysd regressio;: here are some damned facts, tern (UNS), the 'Real You', the 90% of as many as you have patience to amass, your brain that you are not aware of, the that not only contradict the straight Big Brother that never sleeps and never materialist world view. they contradict forgets. As the UNS has perfect recall of any other world view you might adopt everything that has happened to you, the instead. Consider, for example, the most hypnotist can regress it back to uncover baffling of Keeton's subjects, Edna the events in your past that have made Greenan, 57 years old Blackpool houseyou depressed or agoraphobic or wife, left school at 14, a shop wprker migrained. The concious mind has no and mother of five. Edna consistently memory (or a false memory) of these events, which Keeton calls 'blocks'; one's regresses to the character of Neil Gwynn, the actressand courtesan; in a single first day ay school i s a common block: session she can switch back and forth think of it, scarred for life at the age of five! from Nell's infancy to her death bed. So there i s now a formidable mass of Patients are cured by bringing these material to be analysed, and since the blocks back to conciousness and re-experiod is extensively documented, it periencing and discharging the emotion might seem that here is a chance to settle attached to them; thts may be disturbthe matter conclusively (under deep ing: sujects 'scream, tremble and burst hypnosis as herself, Edna denies having into tears'. But afterwards they can recall the block without distress and read any book about Nell; in Keeton's their former symptoms disappear. opinion, she cannot be lying). Some of her answers are certainly If subjects are taken back through their lives unblocking as they go they correct, but many are plainly incorrect, will experience their infancy and then near-misses, or small talk; some are life in the womb; take them further back apparently new evidence. A lot of editand hey presto, they start to experience orial judgement id required as Moss,'-. a 'past life'. Everyone can do it if they makes clear: 'Edna's regressions are exhilwant to, says Keeton, and he has tried arating, disappointing,revealing, tdntalit on some 27.000 subjects. Many of ising. ', a psychic striptease that never these 'past lives' are obvious Walter quite reveals all i t s promises. Someone, Mitty, though they seem real to the letis hope, is having a good belly laugh subject at the time: Egyptian pharoahs, as we try and make sense of these travelRed Indian chiefs, and that sort of thing. lers tales from the undiscovered country But, and it's a big but, there remain of the mind. many regressions that can't be dismissed So what i s the Undercurrents line on so easily, or indeed at all. Moss's book all this? As part of the/$tohotion for the briefly considers the various interpwat- Moss book, Penguin invited me to a ions of regression that have been regression session with Keeton; when I advanced, reincarnation, spiritualism, , phoned to fix' it they said that the cosmic memory, geneticimemoryj tetestraight pr&ss-'$vereunexpectedly reluctpathy and u n ~ n s c i w ~ ~ e s a U y b f o r e ant to be regressed: would we like to f . make up a party? Sofvte'gathered, eight describing at length a ~ w n i b e k ncases that show how hard it is t&.decide which of us, to un^o^er our past lives. Keeton view, if any, f i t s the evidence. There's had a quick eed out those who

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Strapped to a schoolbag, Bmdiznwd with mother-love. - A small boy standsalone . I n theaiphah playground.

such pun unhappinm should bebottled; Sent toaii romantics. ~ e d d eTi h o m n Taken from Story and Stama, a magazine of creative writing published by the pupils of Woodmii,l High School, Dunfermline, Fife. A sub is 75p inland for four issues.

are eitherfrightened or unwilling to be hypnotised; of our group only I, he said, was suitable, though slightly scared (true). He hypnotised me easily enough dl to a lizht trance but when he tried to transport me awy to 'a place where I been perfectly content' I found to my surprise that I couldn't do it: Iwas, he said, 'blocked'; there was nothing to do but to return to normal conciousness. When another member o f the group asked to be hypnotised, he declined, saying there was no point, as 'they didn' want to be hypnotised'. So it was an ant climax, though an interesting one; I don't think Keeton was surprised: he said that only one in a dozen self-selected volunteers is able to regress to a pas life time. This particular game attracts many more onlookers than players. Hypnotic regression is, as I've indicated (and some of us knew beforehand) not something to be entered into lightly or wantonly: even if you are unblocked in your present life, you are likely to regress to a trauma in a previous life (if that is what it is). Nonetheless in the North West Joe has a waiting l i s t of thousands wanting to try it. He is now going to set up regression groups in London and invites applications (handwritten); his address i s 27 Meols Drive, Hoylake, Wirral, Merseyside. Joe's style i s paternalist (even I

Undercurrents 45 pelling: it distorts every aspect of British life from journalism, where the emphasis is placed onto scoops not analysis, to prison existence, where prisoners are placed by official secrecy completely into the hands o f the authorities in a way which is directly linked to the state of collapse of the penal system in Britain. Leigh really Who's Watching You?, Crispin Aubrey, has so much to say that it is best to Penguin E - l .SO. .. . it yourself (the book is marvellous h he-~rontiers o f Secrecy, David Leigh, read ly well written) but in the end he seem: Junction Books, Â£5.95 to have no doubt that reform of the Will the Soviet Union Survive Until official secrets acts cannot be made to 1984?,Andrei Amalrik, Penguin Â£250 work. -- -.-- . Instead, Leigh wants to switch After years when official secrecy was from official secrecy, where the state in resting only to a few subversives and decides to tell you a little bit, to aficionados,,the secret state's complete freedom of information where the incomnetence has finally broueht it state can keep a little bit private, but more publicity than a well-runpublicly has to defend i t s decision to do so accountable secret service would ever before adjudicators or in the courts. have attracted. Who's Watching You? The change in British life which this , and The Frontiers o f Secrecy are two would demand would be absolute and well-written and valuable books which sweeping. The present lot of senior between them tell most of what is Archosauria: A New Look A t The Old civil servants would probably be known of importance about the British decimated by coronaries in a month Dinosaur John McLoughlin Allen Lane secret state in the light of its latest i f it ever happened. But something 1979, 117pp., published at Â£4.50 remaindered by Booksmiths, Maiden Lane, round of horrendous howlers -the like it has happened in several Agee-Hosenball expulsions, the ABC western countries, and if you can London WC2 at Â£1.95 trial and the Blunt exposure -which thinkof any more worthwhile have brought it i t s biggest shock since political project for, say, the rest Burgess, Maclean and Philby made an of the century, we haven't heard of excuse and left and Buster Crabbe it.Anybody want to know, for went for a late night dip. instance, just what senior civil servants Aubrey and Leigh take two quite say to each other about the real costs different approaches to describing the of nuclear power? secret state. Aubrey's approach is Finally, a book about how they do comparatively personal, based around these things in that paragon of secret a description of the ABC trial and i t s states, the Soviet Union (presumably A r c h ~ ~ p t e r y not x , a bird but on Mil* Imdpolitical context, principally the need 'our' chaos, i f they do well, get reincarhaad predator, a ty* of d u m w r , tha for some legal backup for the Ageenated next time round as ebists, the order from which m dwmndad p r Ã ‘ dÃ§ Hosenball outrage. russian slang for the KGB). Amalrik's birds, the dinofaulf MI*wnivon. title essay was first published in 1970. In the course of the ABC case, the FOR dinosaur freaks here is pure delight authorities were shown to be as malic- and earned him six years in prison camp and exile in Siberia, after which John vIcLoughlin, a zoologist and scient- ious as they are incompetent, And along the way, Aubrey came up against he left to live in France. The most ific illustrator, show9 how the old idea interesting thing for us is his essay Who almost the whole apparatus o f the that dinosaurs were slow-moving and A n The KGB? Secret policepersons secret state from the opened letter and cold-blooded reptiles has been replaced are the same, one imagines, the world the tapped phone to the vetted jury. by a quite different view that they were over, but ours have not yet 'come out' For as in tl e Agee-Hosenball case, the warm-blooded, agile and intelligent. So like their Russian counterparts; ifthey full resources o f the secret state were what finished them off? This book was available to the authorities while the are 'proud to be spooks' they don't published just before Luis Alvarez defence was kept guessing throughout. say so. announced his discovery of a deposit of Considering what he has suffered, iridium dust laid down at the time of the So Aubrey has been able to build a complete look at Britain's concealed Amalrik shows a surprising compassion dinosaur extinction, evidence it is and officially nonexistent secret face, for his persecutors: he sees them as thought that a large asteroid struck the 'People hungry for power (who) go Into earth and filled the atmosphere with a around his'own encounter with it, and KGB work voluntarily as a form of cloud of dust. However McLoughlin doe' he has done it very well. David Leigh's book takes a less compensation for their own insignifiremark that just such a disaster could cance. They are often people afflicted have precipitated a mass famine and the personal view of the matter, but is able to cover a much wider range of material since childhood with an Incapacity for extinction of all species except those than Aubrey. As well as the security study or with characteristic cowardice, lowest in the food chain. services, he looks at areas like press sadism, or other undesirable traits. And he draws a moral for us:it is, he censorship and the official government Their reliance on the worst and most says 'a lesson In the special fragility of information machine. He also takes two primitive implies that they themselves advanced living things. in examining case studies, of the prison system and are neither complex nor good individthe sudden disappearance o f these juries, to look at just what effects mils. Irecall that in order to trick them splendid animals, we are forced to look British official secrecy has on people, 1had to make -if out much worse to our own time, where Homo Sapiens and o f just how a freedom of informathan Ireally am-and Inan almost child' is the agent o f fresh round o f extinctions tion law might work inBrititin. ish manner they unbunlened themselves Unlike the dinosaurs, we have a choice Leigh's case against secrecy is cornI , tomeinmi Martin Ince Chris Hutton Squire

noticed it) and this jarred on the femini s t members of the UC party; we think that the lack o f empathy between them and Joe may have contributed to what he regardedas their reluctance to be hypnotise?So, what we'd like to do, is to contact awoman hypnotherapist and try some women only regressions. Any one interested in this should write to Tam Dou* at UC. It seems, not so gentle readers, there are a lot more things in heaven and earth than are d ~ a mof t in our philosophy: what are you going to do about it3

Splendid

Animals

G o d &G u m b o o t s Faces o f Findhorn: Images o f a Planetary Family, written and published by the Findhorn Community, 177 pp., Â£9.50 FINDHORN was to the seventies, according to cultural h i s t o r b William I. Thompson, 'what Haight-Ashbury was t o the sixties'. Amidst all the hokum and hoopla surrounding this spiritual community in northern Scotland, perhaps the mo compelling evidence o f its 'magic! is that it is still there, long after the disappearance of i t s famous giant vegetables and the evaporation of so many other 'new age' groups spawned in the sixties and seventies. 'Faces Of Findhorn' i s a large, hand:, some, coffeetable book which takes up the story where 'The Findhorn Garden' left off. It i s a study o f cautious self-examination -and seffcongratulation- undertaken by community members themselves, telling their stories in words and pictures, struggling to explain what is so unique about their incodgruously-placed settlement that i s still the largest (and most succesful) alternative community in Britain. Thousands of earnest seekers and goggly-eyed spiritual tourists continue to make the annual trek to Findhorn, coming from as far afield as Boston and Bombay, doctors of philosophy and Bhagwan devotees alike. There must be more to the place than talking to the fairies and swapping armchair esoterics. Most people are aware of the legend if not the actual history o f the Findhorn community: how, in 1962, three middle-aged people settled in a caravan park on the Moray Firth, unable to find employment and forced to grow a garden in the sand-dunes so that they could feed themselves; how through a combination o f 'divine guidance' and liberal composting they were able to produce fantastic growth and variety in their plants; how scores, and then hundreds (and the thousands) of people came to see what thev were un - r to including a young ~merican,David Spangler, who first placed the burgeoning community in a 'new age' context, revealing it as a 'centre of light' and spiritual force capable of transforming people and building new forms of society. Books were written, the media had a field day and Findhorn was firmly on the map -a unique blend of mysticism, traditional spiritual principles, the Californian human potential movement and a genuine desire to re-establish right relations between people and their environment. Today it claims t o be a 'planetary village', exploring new ways in which to practise government, business and education, while contin. Uing its work in the gacdensand caretaking several l a m houses, a former hotel ~ n id600-acre island inthe Hebrides. It has always evoked ...- a - mixed ......- response in these Islands, perhaps as a --7

result of the prophet-in-his-own-land its premise that this i s the first step syndrome, or because it continues to towards planetary transformation is defy easy definition. Findhorn is untrue then it is certainly succeeding ashamedly middle-class, leading to where more obvious agitprop i s just suspicion from the left and often limping along. In a world o f acceleratin drawing accusations o f elitism and a change and diminishing ability to simple rip-off. Its members preach more control the course of social progress than they practise, disenchanting ('things falling apart' as Yeats would those for whom AT and active social have it), it can be argued that it i s change are urgent necessities. There healthier to build a new society than to used to be a saying that if you went to try and inject fresh life into an old and Los Angeles from Findhorn then you dying one. Few today could deny that automatically made a hundred friends; we are participating in a shift from an if you went to London, you lost a industrial paradigm to a post-industrial hundred. (probably planetary) culture While that no longer seems to hold To the frustration ot i t s critics and true (a recent national tour by cothe deli& of optimists everywhere, founder Eileen Gaddy and other comFindhorn rejects the depressing idea munity members proved very that this transition need be a violent 'popular'), this 'Utopia on the Moray one, and cheerfully ( some would say Firth' (as one papar put it) continues naively) goes about i t s business, playing to attract as many sceptics as seekers; with ideas borrowed anywhere from est and while this new book admits to the to the Essenes and trying to apply them presence at Findhorn of many refreshto the exigencies of daily life and the ingly human failings, it can only challenges o f close personal interaction communicate a glimpse of the real with others. Transformation is the ordei power built into the place. of the day. There i s a divine plan to What i s the secret of Findhorn's which we can all gain access, but most succes and staying power? Why do so of us are so attached to running through many continue to travel to the top of our own trips that it i s obscured by the world and shell out an average Â£9 doubt or lost in dubious philosophies. a week for the privilege of working in Faces o f Findhornreveals, however, this strange mix of commune and that life isn't all roses-in-the-snowin cloud-cuckoo-land?There i s no single this community, nor is it as flippant an doctrine or creed to which community and easy an existence as one might members adhere; the strong authoritargather from the above. A commitment ian leadership o f Peter Caddy has been to personal growth invites testing withdrawn for years, replaced by a challenges and requires great emotional flexible system of decision-making by stamina; it is a genuine struggle, too, group consensus and spiritual attunefor members to try and live up to the ment (although there remains a recoghigh ideals of their founders (most of nisible leader of the community, whom have now moved on). If at times Francois Duauesne): and members ofte:n the community has seemed overly seem to contradict each other in stating smug'mr glamorous, it has paid dearly the vision and aims of their enterprise. for this in other Ways, grappling with Findhorn today continues to exthe twin needs of financial stability and pound the virtues of talking t o your the embodiment of the truths it proplants, but has extended this to fesses. As the dust-jacket blurb quotes include computers as well. Its members from the book: 'Ithought Iwas coming are invited to address-major UN to Flndhorn to learn fromitfitiates how conferences; several American universto make my way along the path withities now credit their students for time out the stumbling Iseemed prone to, spent in the community,~evenif this What Ifound was extraordinary people involves scrubbing outlavatories or with barked shins and scraped knees, working inthegecdm,~lsthisallsome just like mine, who were struggling . cosmic joke.Ã§biootithe,spirituaaspirearnestly and with great strength to ations of ourtimes? understand. a consclousness and vislo, Probably. The fact remains that which says that humankind is holy, Flndhorn changes - .peoole's . lives. and if everything Is unity. '

I I

emerge oftheir own accord; and members o f the community engage in a daily practice o f sending out love and peace to the world i n meditation, whose least effect wo'uld be t o counter a measure of the despair and self-disgust prevalent elsewhere The appeal o f the book is undenlable. Its photographs and design are beautiful, creating a tartalising window into a world where unemployment, nuclear power and the assorted ills of urbandwelling seem as remote to i t s inhabitants as fairies and devas d s t seem in Brixton. But as it says in the foreword, 'Faces o f Findhom 1s not

It is easy t o point a cynical finger at such tender gestures of-piety and conclude that this is fine for this? whj can afford.;$; it is ultimately harder and more productive, however, to resist jedgements of this kind and admit that Findtern does play a legitimate role (albeit illdefined) i n the shaping of a positive future. If only one o f the hundred thousands who have passed through its gates turns out to be a Schweigqr or a Schumacher, that alone would jwtif'y its existence. Its indination is not towards altering the forms ot society but rather altering individual consciousness so that new forms will

then got more heated as he realised who I was. 'Whatever y o u say Iam not biased biased', he stormed, and then as his ager . .. reached a pitch came out with the immortal riposte (for a civil servant): 'And do you know, I've had letters from ,, members o f the generalpublic accusing me o f being biased. It's all a campaign against me whipped up by the press and Transport 2000'. David Lyness is the Assistant Secretary in charge o f Freight Central (and freight policy) at the Department of Transport, and one o f the civil servants pushing for heavier lorries most strongly. It is t o David Lyness and his like -the Joe Peelers, the Gerry Flanagans, the Sir Peter Baldwins and countless others at the Department- that John Wardroper's juggernaut, John Wardroper, Maurice Juggernniit stands as monument. The big lorry has long been hated by the Temple, Smith 223pp. Â£4.9 1 first met David Lyn&s at a conference public. Even i n h e heady days of 1960 towards the end o f 1980. In the course when motorways and traffic were considof pontificating about the civil service ered progress lorries were seen to be too noisy. A Committee set up under Sir he said, quite calmly, that, 'We only Alan Wilson recommended, 'as an interim represent a broad cross section of the measure', that maximum lorrie noise be public, we only do what the public reduced to 8SdB on the basis of doing wants'. 'What about heavier lorries?' 1 asked, 'Where 95%of the population is 'what Is immediately technically possiagainstyou: 'The public need educating, ' ble! Twenty years on and that t a w t has he replied, quite seriously it seemed, but still not been reached, and, following

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...

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CAtalog The Next Whole Earth Catalog, Wildwood House 608pp Â£6.95 Two and a half kilos o f the mixture as before: about a third each repeats from the two previous Catalogs, reprints from CoEmlution Quarterly, and new material, 2700 items in all. So what's changed? Domes and free schools are out, as is China, which, now that it has inflation, unemployment and terror tombers, is seen t o be just another poor third world country. In are computers, lots o f them, and coppicing, a practice evidently unknown in

comes to constructing a sustainable way o f life for the 21st century, they learn from us than we

;z;mtt;.

What it does offer is a world-view from the Pacific Rim, quite different from our insular wingeing, a combination of Back-to-Basics and Onwardand-Upward-ond-Outwrd-in-alt-Directions-So-Long-As-lt-Doem't-HurtAnybody-frpbably; it says nothing, of course, about nuking Teheran or napalming El Salvador. It'd be nice to see some space in the oh-so-precious CoEQ for the victims o f American O-and-0 t o tell what it's like t o be the toad beneath the American harrow. How about it,%tewari?l

117

~ h r i ' s ' k t t o Sauire n

meant to entree us t o Scotland or diminish who we are at home'. And the philosophy hinted at in the book is om which could (and should) find universal application: we can either react in fear or anger to the state o f our world, thus becoming part o f the problem, or respond creatively and become part of the solution. It's hard to disagree with that. Next off the press comes The Findhorn Family Cookbook: how to cook 401b cabbages and dispose o f the evidence before anyone'comes round? One wonders.. . Christopher Drake the Armitage Repordnlikely to be implemented until 1990. It i s the machinations o f the freight directorate in the Department of Transport which have kept this 'menace' at bay for 30 years. With luck they'll keep it at bay for another 30 years if past history is anythinj to go on. It is both the serious environmental problems that juggernauts pose and the techniques that the civil service have used t o protect the interests of the haul age industry -making Britain the most lorry dominated country in Europethat John Wardroper has comprehensively and compulsively related. Even as an old(ish) hand in the lorry business I found it hard to put down once I got started-which somewhat surprised me A bit like a horror story the tension is piled on as things get worse i n each chapter, the only let down being that, ii the end, the villains win. Well, it's not quite the end and the publication o f Juggernaut just at the time when the debate over lorries is reachinga peak should make.it compuls ory reading for all legislators, at least. That way, the final chapter might be rewritten making the heroes win. Nick Lester

The Ineluctable. Extreme culminant Whole Earth

Undercurrents achieved by the way the cast spend the whole first act doubling around the stage, doing press-ups, knee-bends and other calisthenics that keep the SAS fit. These actors really suffered for their art, No names. . . no medals: A story of the and I'd bet that they formed the same SAS Euan Smith. Presented by RADA sort of brotherhood as the squad they at the jeannetta Cochrane Theatre. portayed. Like Winston Smith in 1984, the one THIS play is daid to have been sub'wet' in the team finally forgets his titled Zen and the art of blowing people away. It Portrays the way that the mental questions on the validity of the whole thing, his dead and crippled mates, and and physical pressure ot continuous comes to accept that the regiment is his training amount to brainwashing (or whole world. The theme is illustrated satori), convincing the men themselves early on, $en one of the squad, returnthat they are an elite band while the ing from ten days leave ( with the wife media swamp the rest of us with the and the mistress) says It'sgood toget same message. The result is that our back to reality. heroes, with only a few weeks preparatAlthough there are no specific plans ion and some TV coverage are able t o to present the play again at the moment bust into an embassy and put thirty it's much too good to be kept on ice for roundxinto the nearest unarmed terrorist long. If you get a chance, see it. I don't .--. The taut military atmosphere is height- know what they do to the enemy, but by God they frighten me! Dave Kanner ened by the use of authentic-sounding

being slung around. Realism i s also

Workers' Co-operatives JennyThornley, Heinemann Educational Books. 216pp. Â£4.50. THE subtitle of Jenny Thornley's excellent book on co-operatives is 'jybs and Dreams'. Her thesis is that in Britain at least there have been a lot more dreams than jobs: between 1970 and 1980 fewer than 1800 new jobs were created in co-ops, of which around 900 were a direct result of state help, mainly through co-ops getting job creation money, and through the state saving Meriden's 500 jobs. And that decade was supposed t o be the great revival decade o f the co-operative ideal in this country. By contrast there are over 5 million workers in Italy's 1,780 co-ops. A t least that was the April 1979 figure; one month later another 115 co-ops had been added t o the total. Every year it is said that 5% of the Italian co-ops die but the total grows by 25%. Thornley's chapter on the Italian co-ops is the first good summary of them that I have found. I learnt that they compete with capitalist companies effectively in house building (where they are working towards providing all the inputs, material and professional, from co-ops), road and rail building, all kinds of maintenance and transport. To avoi^ individual co-ops growing too large, they have formed consortia t o link co-ops in jointly undertaking contracts or in trading with each other. Despite, or rather, Thornley would have us know, in keeping with, theit prag-

look* i-i. (~icture by courtow of RADAI.

enterprise, teach them about capital ism, and provide if not socialism at least 'a testing ground where men and women can say that they live ideological roots in labour movement with dignity and their lives have a socialism plus a pragmatic approach purpose'. But to achieve this, to the capitalist market that forms Thornley argues, we need to break jenny Thornley's recipe for co-operathe hold of the 'alternative movetive success. Her two chapters on the ment' and the Liberals on the coItalian and French co-operatives come operative movement, and learn from towards the end of the book. But they the Italians and French about comsolve the mystery for the reader who bining politics with business. has ploughed through the dire state Have said all that why on earth of British co-ops in the bulk of the is this book priced at Â£14.50 Heinebook as to how an obvious enthusiast mann obviously thinks only libraries for co-ops like Ms Thornley can still and academics will buy it, and only be an enthusiast after recounting so they will at that price. But as the many inflated and punctured dreams. 'There can be no doubt', she cheerful- best general book on co-ops around, well researched with plenty of ly writes, 'about the fact that the copractical advice as well as political operative sector (in Britain) is tiny, challenge, this should be available weak, unbusinesslike and middle class, to every co-operator. Itrust a cheap and is characterised by sweatshops'. paperback wiH follow soon, by a Middle class Is almost the worst of radical press if not by Heinemann's. Middle class is almost the worst of P.S. Something I'd like to know: her epithets, meaning everything with all this advice for co-ops and from Quaker pacifist businessmen to even money for co-ops, and a lot 'small is beautiful' utopian libertarians more coming if a Labour Government who think that profits and capital and gets in, where do co-operative promotmanagement are dirty words. The ers think the entrepreneurial talent ideological confusion and the financial is going to come from? That seems weakness that results are quiteas the biggest mystery to me. There important as the lack of traditional already seem to be more researchers links in t h i s century between co-ops and advisers in the co-op field than and the labour movement for putting setters up of co-ops. This i s something the working class off the whole idea. to do with culture and personality This book i s sobering for any coand motivation and gets perilously operative enthusiast to read. lt is the close to the tories' own back yard. best thing written yet to make us They say capitalism creates wealth seriously examine our notions about and socialism distributes it. I didn't co-ops expanding Into the economy feel I learnt much if anything about at large, But it ends on a note of the psychology of wealth creation qualified optimism. Co-ops can give from this book. Dave 'beiden people confidence in running an

The Common Ground: A place for nature in Britain%future? Richard Mabey, rfutchinson in association with the Nature Conservancy Council,Â£8.95 280~~. LIKE all good ecological books, this is about choices, in this case on the countrysidp, nature and wildlife. Here's one extrethk view: 'The City o f the future must be clean and green, safe and sound I suggest that a landscape archtiect visits Kew Gardens and selects.tvuical mecimens o f endangered species, e.g. elm and beech with prevalent urban species, e.g. the London dame. Casts could then be taken of the selected specimens -trunks and boughs would be moulded glass-reinforced plastic. Foliage would be polythene. The tree would be bon-fire and vandal-proof. Foliage would be selfextinguishing". This suggestion was seriously made in 1978 by a senior civil servant. There are other views. Some farmers see nature and natural habitats as obstacles to efficient

...

GIT !

Getting it Together, John Seymour, Michael Joseph 149pp.. Â£5.9 SUBTITLED ua guide for new settlerst, this latest handbook from the legendary John Seymour might best be thought of as a guide for those who think they might be 'new settler'.material. For i t s avveal. 1 am sure. will be to the citvdweller yearning for his roots in the soil. It offers little to the settler who finds himself plunged into the tough and often far-from-good life of the harsh rural environment, save one mart's experiences of a self-sufficient life-style, amusing and invaluable though many of his anecdotes and tips often are. In the same free-flowing style of his past works, the terminology when advising i s somehow too clear-cut: the word compromise rarely appears, but I would suggest, it is often the back-bone of the new settler's life-style when glossy fantasy turns into muddy reality and not all living costs can be shed via the move to self-sufficiency. European, if not intercontinental, in i t s flavour ("we do not all have to come to Wales to find our smallholdings") Mr Seymour uses military terms to plan the assault on a new lifestyle and environment -metaphorically speaking, of course, for as the book rightly emphasises, the local communitv and culture

farming: some don't have succesfully shown how even the present-day capitalintensive farming can coexist with wildlife. Some naturalists want nature t o be studied only by the learned and knowledgeable: others see it as a delight to be communicated. And then there's the longer-term view from the Islington squat, thay 'come the revolution' we shall all once again live in harmony with nature. "The Common Ground" i s about all of these -an approach to nature which affirms i t s value yet looks for ways to align it with the expectations of most people in this country. Richard Mabey, author of "Food for Free" and "THie Unofficial Countryside", reviews the past and present relationships between nature and forestry and agriculture, informatively pointing out the "past harmonies and present discords". By this he means that farming and forestry, formerly carried out in harmony with nature, are now in opposition to it. What he is looking for are ways that nature can survive economically and usefully -a reintroduction of old woodland practices forinstance, or using good farming practice to conserve wildlife habitats. More fundamentally, nature offers recreation for people in cities, another iustification for i t s survival. Mabey explores all of these paths,with common sense and a willingness to cross

vested interests where necessary, but also seeking common ground where practical. This makes the book less of a radical call to arms than other recent countryside books (see Theft o f the Countryside, UC 43, but also an essential complement to them. It raises questions like "why conserve nature"; it answers that with personal feelings because people like it, becuase morally it should be conserved -as well as econimics and politics. The main link Mabey doesn't make is with his previous book, The Unoffi-icia1Countryside, which revealed the existence of wildlife in towns. At prese according to surveys, 90% of visitors to Dartmoor National Park by car move n more than 400 yards awy from their cars, so they miss Dartmoor's attractiol and are less inclined to support the nature "interest" against those of farmini and forestry. There has to be a place fo nature in people's hearts and minds, no just on sites. Mabey mentions urban wi life but not i t s edltcational potential. Projects likk the Environmental Resources Centre in Edinburgh and Town Teacher in Newcastle are showing child ren from concrete and wire estates that nature isn't only in the countryside, it'! here in t h e city, if you look. Stephen JosepI

must be highly respected. The use of this strategic jargon gives the work a logical progression from 'the object', 'consideration affecting the attainment of the object', 'courses open to us', 'the plan', e t c and nothing i s treated too simplist. ically, a criticism which has been levelled at some aspects of Mr Seymour's former publications. Altogether an eminently useful book for the pf0spective homesteader, but one which only superficially mentions the complexities -personal, spiritual, Raymond ~ o u e l i financial et a/.

How Tao

Too: The Three Treasures BhagwanShree Rajneesh,Wildwood House, Â£4.95

THIS i s the first of four volumes of 'talks on fragments from the Too te Ching. Bhagwan i s an Indian guru with an I! ashram of doubtful repute near Poona of the worm in the mind. The cure, say but it i s in no way a book of mystic rot Bhagwan, i s to become choiceless, but a straightforward and often funny 'simple': 'Ifyou know that you know, commentary on the cryptic commonyou are fnorant. I f y o u know thatyou sense of Lao Tzu, 'the old guy'. Nothing don't know, you are wise. An absolutel~ is known for certain about Lao; all we simple man does not know either way, whether he knows or does not know'. have i s one book, written at the end of his life at the behest of a disciple, a Not perhaps a philosophy of life that frontier guard who refused to let him will appeal to many Undercurrents leave China to die in the Himalayas until readers, more's the pity, but, for those he had completed it. 'The Too', it begins, that like that sort of thing, this is a book not to be missed. 'that can be told o f is not *'-- ^ao ', but Chris Hutton Squire ie disease a way of describing it is th

PLUTONIUM terrorism, nuclear meltdowns and the like make up a distinct sub-genre of thriller writing these days. We recommend Maximum Credible Accident (John Howlett, Hutchinson Â£5.95 to jaded antinuclear campaigners for i t s insight into the hermetic world of top civil servants and ambitious politicos. The plot is the attempt of an American lobbyist to railroad the British Energy Secretary into an international deal to build up fast breeders even as a prototype i s out of control and near to meltdown in Italy. The heroes are two whistleblowers, a British civil servant and an Italian engineer (one gets the distinct impression of a book written with the film rights very much in mind!). The book i s marred by a record number of misprints and by i t s cardboard 'antinuke' characters: a secretive and rather gawmless american and an anal FoEer who's been having an affair with an Italian terrorist (who i s of course plotting to blow up the FBR). Can you imagine the Poland St mafia keeping such company? A good read, but not as good as it could have been. Chain Reaction i s a nuke movie now showing in London. Made in Australia it's essentially a conventional carchase thriller, spiced with 'sex interest' and some garbled nuclear waste leak shock horror. The nuclear 'baddies' are very bad-fascist nuclear security police, callous corporate executive etc; the goodies are ambivalent-a sexist hard drivin? male and a bohemian environmentalist, plus a sensitive woman. Maybe a fair rendition of contemporary Australia, but a difficult film t o base a useful UK campaign on. So this is no China Syndrome, but its imagerywith the basic message that nuclear power means totalitarian security measures-will no doubt get across to audiences. Finally, if you're new to nukes or just poor, get the new edition of Walter Patterson's Nuclear Power, whkh has just been published by Penguin at Â£30. The nuclear follies have moved on a little since the first edition came out in 1975, and the new one sums up the new with a nine page postscript which is the only difference between this edition and the first. Makes Fred Hoyle look like Walter Marshall. CHS/DE/MJI

Brits-

The Origins of Britain Lloyd & Jennifer Laing boutledge 197 pp. Â£7.95

o n e of the chief blessings of democracy is that it gives us liberty. Liberty to speak-to criticise if we think fit. Liberty to listen-to both sides of an argument. We shouldn't neglect this great advantage. In this country secret police don't enter our houses to destroy wireless sets that can 'get' foreign broadcasts. It is not a crime here, thank Heaven, to listen to the other man's point of view. Guard this freedom to listen-and use it. E. J. WWER

u _ _>

THIS wartime ad comes from Raynes Minns' Bombers & Mash, a social history-cum-cookbook of the women's end of the Hitler War: highly recommended to those too young to remember ration books, compulsory cod liver oil and the other sweet uses of austerity (Virago, 206 pp. Â£4.95) Given in full are some 150-odd 'recipes for , a fuelless, meatless and sugarless world' including the famous Woolton pie: TIr inn'-editntsfor this pie can be varied , according to the vegetable* in wawn. Potato, d e , cauliflower end carrot make a good mixture. Take 1 Ib of them, d i d , 3 or 4 spring onions, if possible, 1 mspoon -table extract and 1 tablespoon of oatmeal. Cook altogether for 10 minute* with just enough water to cover. Stir occasionally to prwent the mixture from sticking. Allow to cool, put into a piedish, sprinkle with chopped parsley and covu with a crust of potato or wheatnwal pastry. Bake in a moduen oven until the w r y is nicely browned and u w e hot with brown gravy. Enough for 4 or 6, If you are short of fat, urn this pie-crust which Is made without fat: mix together 8oz wheatmu1 flour, 1 lwal teaspoon Irking powder, a pinch of salt and lpinch of powdwed sage if liked. Stir in neatly % pint of cold milk, or milk and water. Roll out the mixture and u u It uyou would an ordinary crust, but crw the pie hot.

'WHEN our fathers first came to this land, they found it empty: therefore It is ours to keep': thus the Afrikaners, and thus, more recently, the Welsh. Bunkum in both cases, of course, but a romantic lie is always handy when there's arson, vandalism and intimidation to be justified: the fascists know that. When the Welsh's iron using Celtic forebears came to Britain around 700 BC it was already filled, perhaps overfilled relative to the worsening climate and primitive agriculture, with Bronze Age 'Beaker' people, whose heyday, the time of the final building of Stonehenge, already lay in the remote past, some 1400 years earlier. And Stonehenge I was started 500 years before that, around 2700 B.C.; megaliths had already been used for tomb building for 1300 years. And before that. The point i s that prehistory covers an immense span of time relative to the 'state history' we get at school, and one of the many things it-can teach us, if we wish to learn it, is that we were all immigrants once. The Lainga tell the story of the waves o f incomers that started with the 'Clactonians' about 250,000 BC, who chased bison through a ' leafy paradise of oakwoods' via the flint merchants o f Grimes Graves and the priest astronomers of Silbury, to the rheumatic and undernourished late Bronze people that the Celts settled among (peace ably and slowly, it appears). All t h i s is done in a refreshing and unpretentious style; this is the first of a five volume series entitled Britain Before The Conquest: Part 2, Celtic Britain is also by Lloyd Laing and can be recommended, particularly to English people who wish to understand their conservative and individualist Celtic neighbours better without swallowing a lot of sentimental nonsense. The closing remark shows how little things have changed in this tight little island in three thousand years: 'Britain'sinterest lies not in Its cultural brilliance, but in the fact that it is a cultural backwater of Europe, where old traditions die hard ' Chris Hutton Squire

. ..

Squatting..qdited and published by Bay Leaf Books 240pp Â£4.9 pb, Â£1.50 hb. SINCE 1968, more than a quarter of a million people have 'walked into an uninhabited house owned by someone else and proceeded to set up home, without seeking permission and without paying rent': not that squatting started in 1968; the book deals with the first post-war squatting boom of 194516 when returning heroes found that there was nowhere to live. There i s an article by Colin Ward putting squatting in a historical perspective 'we are all descended from squatters', he says, and claims that property owners are 'the ultimate recipients o f stolen land, for to regard our planet as a commody offends evqy conceivable principle of natural rights'. Squatting can be an act of desperation or sheer necessity (as tramps throughout the centuries have lived in uninhabited houses), but the recent wave o f squatting has tended to be a more self-conscious political movement. Some squats, such as taking over the Ideal Home at the Ideal Home Exhibition, or Centrepoint, have been mainly symbolic gestures while others such as Prince of Wales Road, Elgin Avenue or Freston Road have been real experiments in community living, often very successful. Squatting opens up tne possibilities of different ways of living outside the usual options. I was involved in a squat where 60 people took over a huge, beautiful, empty house in Bloomsbury Square, originally built and liveA in by Nash (he Architect (not to be confused with Nash the Slash, the well known singing star). There were disagreements over whether to pay electricity bills, and other quarrels, but for a few weeks there was an intense communal energy generated. A useful article 7s There Life After Squattinu '? shows the way three years after sq-ztting Seymour Buildings, the Co-op formed effectively own the buildings. Iwould have liked to have seen more discussion of the possibilities of co-ops and short-life housing (such as I live in at the moment), because as a squatter you are liable to be evicted at a moment's notice. I realised squatting i s not all a fun adventure, after spending a morning in the rain retrieving some of my clothes from the skips in the street. A t the end of the morning the workman who had just wrecked the house I was living in advised me 'to get a decent job'. The book mentions that squatting organisation i s 'at a low ebb' at the

moment, and it could have been a focus for a new initiative. However,.the book is painstakingly put together, it's lucid, well-packaged, amusing and serious. The standard of illustration is superb; within i t s wide limits it i s a cornucopia of excellence. A series of photographs o f squat workshops, city farms, playgrounds and shops effectively counteracts the media image of squatters as degenerate layabouts who are likely to take over your house if you pop out to the chip-shop. Use this book tofind out about squatting, don't find out the hard way like Tony Allen: 'I . thought squatting was a yoga position until m y landlord discovered eviction'.

FLATTERY begins at home, so let's kick off with a puff for Martin Ince's Space (Sphere 21 5 pp. Â£.SO), a characteristically breezy account of 'the final frontier' from Sputnik via the Moonshots to Peter Glaser's Solar Power Satellites. The reaction to the excitements of the Apollo landings made many groundlings think that Space was vieux jeu and irrelevant to our pressing problems. Martin shows clearly how wrong this is: it may be used for peace or war, profit or public relief; at present space programmes are determined by the jostling of vested interests, all eager to have a go, usually not on our behalf but always at cur expense, unchecked by public opinion. A well-informed popular book like thisone will do something to remedy this by showing us what a lot is going on: what it doesn't do is tell us what i s the correct 'rad tech' line on, say, O'Neill's Space Colony. Any thoughts on that one, Godfrey? Living Thinkwork (CSE Books 187 pp. Â£3.50 is Mike Hales' account of his working life as a chem,ist at ICI and at university, mixed in with his political and personal life and some abstract theory about work and labour power. Correct ideas, Mao told us, arise from social practice; Mike makes clear that they don't come springing up fullyformed, they have to be cultivated; recommended to all alienated scientific workers. Down There-an illustrated guide to self-exam (Sophie Laws, Onlywomen Press, Â£0.50 i s a booklet written for women about self-examinationof the vagina and cervix, with the aid of a speculum. It contains instructions on

use of a speculuhl and also some information on cervical erosion and eversion and vaginal discharge; diagrams and photographs-some of the latter i~iifortunatelyrather out of focus-make up the illustrations. Onlywomen Press (38 Mount Pleasant, London WC1) also provide speculums for sale at 85p each. Don't buy the booklet unless you have one. Element Books tellus that Sona o f the Man Who Came Through, ~ o u a a s Lockhart's fictional (?) account of meetings with a European Don Juan, which we described in UC 41 as 'a book full of heart, inspiring and uplifting', i s now available as a paperback at Â£4.50 Finally, the latest handbookfrom the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers is Woodlands by Alan Brooks; like i t s predecessors, it is ringbound, durable and practical, and can be recommended to anyone lucky enough to have a wood t o manage or thinking of planting a new one, a task which can be heartbreaking to the unwary as one disaster after another overtakes one's carefully tended saplings. If we don't want to leave a crewcropped countryside to our grandchildren, we all must plant some trees ourselves; one good source of 'transplant' (trees up to 1%') native trees not mentioned by Brooks is the Centre for AT, Machynlleth (personal callers only). The detailed section on / coppicing i s just what our Californian cousins need. (T87pp, Â£5.5 + 90p p&p from BTCV, 10 Duke St, Reading 1).

Undercurrents

DECORATING and painting co-op? I f there is room i n yours for me t o o please contact Box number MS.

BOOKSHOP: Come and visit the One World Shop. 78 Eversholt Street. London NW1. Adjacent t Euston main line s t a t i o n . ~ es t a a wide Of from and UHURU Collective is looking for energetic, radical people t o work i n about the Third Posten. S E L L y o u r solar p o w e r e d sauna here! S t i l l o n l y 4p education packs Human Rights. our wholefood shop, help rebuild a word; b o x nos. Â£1.25C o p y d a t e f o r UC46 is our vegetarian cafe, and take part in Justice and Peace, Disarmament. our newly developing Resources We want t o stock a wider range c A p r i l 29. All ads m u s t b e P R E P A I D please. radical Any s u ~ ! " i O n s Centre. The work is varied and mini demanding, our wages are low, but the shop for a few hours each we COMMUNITY RESIDENTIAL Ceramics course i n should increase after the cafe has re-opened. Please contact us for a we":0me. Telephone 01-388 580 ESTABLISHED communal house- far north o f Scotland. Instruction job description at: 35 Cowley CONSULT Oracle mail-order hold in Wales-Hereford border town i n throwing, glazing and hand(0865) bookservice. Over 2.500 titles o n . seeks members. Possible involvebuilding. Peat ash glazing and raku. Road. Oxford:. Dhone 48249. parapsychology, the occult, ment in cafe, wholefood shop o n Sae L y t h Ceramic Workshop, by mysticism &divination. We stock Premises. Some workshop space Lvth Art Centre. Wick. Caithness. CONTACTS books on Astrolow. Earth available. Write: Medwell,4 Church POLYMATH (44) crossing over the Mysteries. ~ ~ ~ ' s . ~ s y c h i c S t r e t , Kington, Herefordshire. HANDwE'Av'NG, 'embrokeshire bridge seeks the company o f residential courses on organic Research, Phenomena. ClairvoyORKNEY Islands. 2 semidetached smallholding. Small groups, indivi- others. Write: 82, Southbury Road, ance, Meditation, Dreams. Rehouses, would easily convert t o dual tutition. Beainners and Enfield. incarnation Magic, Witchcraft, one substantial property Large Folklore & Mythology, Alchemy experienced hangings, belts, DIVORCED man 58 seeks unoutbuildings, could suit w o r k s h o ~ s ltapestry, spinning SAE Martm Kabbaiah. Spiritual Healino. Heal attached lady interested i n UC cottage nousrw Large garden. Weatherhead Penwenallt Farm and ~ o o d ~ b f o r m Yoga , and muc type topics with a view t o sharing paddock, central situation, lovely cilgerran, ~ y f ~ d . more. Send 50p for 44-page catafarmhouse with 19 acres North views. Â£33,00 0.n.o. Tel. Finlogue to Oracle Books, 3 8 Mount York Moors. Box HR or phone stown 306. WORK Pleasant. London WC1 CAP. 028 76456. GRASSROOTS wholefoods and COUPLE with young children, HOLIDAYS PUBLICATIONS herbs. Members needed for Â£10,00 capital and small craft collectively-run wholefood shop i n SHROPSHIRE holiday i n craft business, seek others in similar I N The Making: 'The First British circumstances. Aim: t o buy a place Glasgow. Experience of wholefoods Whole Earth Cataloaue'and a orientated house. Beautiful in the country with a view t o self- an advantage. Write to us at: 498 countryside, ideal walking, cyclir revised ' ~ l t e r n a t i v e k n ~ l a nand d children welcome. 8.8. and E.M. sufficiency. Ted and Fliss Williams, Gt. Western Road, Glasgow G.12 Wales' (Scotland). Probable 116 Knowle Road, Sparkhill, or ring 041-334-1844. Â£ per day per person. Carol, combined publication. Comments, Birmingham B1 1 3AW. Yarborough House, The Square, suggestions, reviews, recommendaTHE Centre for Alternative Techtions, clippings, updates, etc. Bishops Castle, Shropshire. Tel CARTWHEEL aims t o grow into a nology has summer vacancies for please to: Earthworks, c/o 1 2 05883 31 8. village community based on cowholefood caterers, for six months Garnet St, Lancaster L A 1 3PN. operation, common ownership, from mid April, t o work i n the UNIQUE holiday on organic consensus decisionmakina. and R U R A L Resettlement Handbook. restaurant at our A T demonstraholding with 77 acres o f woe Second edition revised and caring for people and the-earth. tion centre and in our cafe at nature reserve within Exmoo Our national contact address is now Machynlleth. We need someone enlarged. 220 pages of practical, National Park. Sea 4 miles. Eigni 6 Crescent Rd,. Kingston Hill, financial, legal, social and personal who is competent at caterina camouflaged caravans, modern . information about rural resettleSurrey. administration as well as cooking, toilets. Sae please - Cowley Woe ment. A n essential reference book WOMAN and three children wish to and a friendly personality is essenParracombe, N. Devon. Parra-2lX for rural dwellers, aspiring smalltial. Salary is based on need and escape nuclear family and COUNTRYSIDE Conservation. holders. armchair resettlers. fairly low, b u t compensations .,and communlity in south of England. Spend your holidays working on everyone concerned with the include beautiful Box no. PIC. Practical conservation projects countrystde. 0n.y Â£ 8 0 post free a cooperative atmosphere, and a throughout Britain. in the compa WE are hooina to form a housina hiah level of oersonal resoonsibilitv' from Rural Resettlement Grouo of friendlv. .people 5 Crown Street, Oxford. cooperative buy and live and autonomy. please write for . who share vou interest i n country matters. Onetogether i n a large house, somefurther details to: The Cooking L I V I N G on the land.. i n yearor two-week tasks this summer where i n central London. 4 of us Job, Centre for Alternative round Canadian conditions or include clearina a oond t o create are looking for 3 ir 4 more: i f Technology, Machynlleth, Powys, summer living in the most heavily an oner re1uge.n ~ioucestershire interested, please write t o Andrew, Wales. reinforced authentic tipi made. repairing Snowdon's overtrodden Box AM. Send Â£ for tipi book mailing I would like t o meet others with footpaths, rebuilding dry stone and information (no cheques AGRICULTURALLY based appropriate skills, with view t o walls in the Peak District and housing association wants members forming a computing co-op. Dougg, please) t o : Heritage Tipi, Box stabilising sand dunes i n ~ait-hnes 910, Calgary, Alberta, Canada t o expand. Interests: organic 7 Queensdown Rd, London â ‚ Send us a SAE for details today. T2P 2J6. ecology, alternative technology. 8NN, 01 -986 3455. British Trust for Conservation Cashlmortgage prefereable. Volunteers, 10-14 ~ " k eStreet, Â£1,50 4 0 acre riverside retreat. Members will have own I have a backaround in electronics, Over 500 more properties Â£30 Reading, Berkshire, contained units. Send SAE and computers and librarianship but Â£15 per acre. Farm, river, lake, long letter t o Box T A . can turn my hand to most things ETCETERA island and coastal. Red tapeless practical. Are there any collectives 8-1 1% financing. Most areas COOPERATIVE farm: This is an ANTI-NUCLEAR peace badges, or commumtiesout there i n need upland mixed farm (73 acres, Canada, USA. Adding Australia, stickers, T-shirts. Sunny smiley dairy cows, sheep, arable). We need o f such skills? Richard Pollard. NZ, and lower-price UK from badges 20p. 12 c m stickers 20p. more people involved with farming. 8 2 Melbourne Avenue. Dover, December. Four current CanAm Giant 45 cm stickers Â£1.00 TKent L T l 6 2JD. Other ~ r o i e c t ssuch as aardenina. catalogues: Â£6.25: Sealand, shirts Â£1.50 Free catalogue. Larg cheese-making, workshops etc. Ivy Cottages, Tockholes, Darwen, bulk discounts. 20 Kelso Road, WORKERS needed for non-sexist Interested in livingand working Lancs BB3 ONA. Leeds 2. 0532446795. creche collective, phone David on with other people and kids. ~~~l THE Coming Age: magazine of the ASTROLOGER offers birth chart Bright0n 692367. letters and SAEs please. Sandrieas living matriarchal tradition. 45p, including personal analysis o n Farm, Thrimbv, f'enrith, ~ u m b r i a . EDINBURGH Cvrenians are Lux Madriana (UI, 4 0 St. John St, cassette tape o f character and looking for full-lime coluntary Oxford. future Â£2. For written analysis WorKers at their city hostel and work send for details:- John at their farm outside Edinburgh. COURSES Willmott, Millbrae, Bunessan, PEACE NEWS for non-violent Both communities house men Mull, Argyll. revolution. Reports, analysis, THE Wider Politics of Cooperatives 118-301 of various institutional news o f nonviolent action for and other Alternative Projects. backgrounds. Pocket-money, HOROSCOPES drawn and analysi social change, building alternatives Conference April 16-23rd. Cost termination-grants, and time-off from an antisexist, radical, theraand resisting the mega-machine. Â£4.0 a day, half for children. accommodation are provided. peutic perspective. Emphasis on Covers anti-militarism, sexual Booking deposit Â£5.0 Write t o Write t o Bob Stewan, 12a Forth directions for change and growth. politics, ecology, decentralisation, St. Eo nourgh or pnone Tony Laurieston Hall, Castle Douglas, Â£ down t o Â£ for low income: etc. 25p fortnightly, Â£9.5 for a McGowan 031.229.7067 (six Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. time, date and place of birth t o year's sub. from 8 Elm Avenue, Tel 064 45 275. Enclose an s.a.e. months minimum period is Nick Totton, Beach Cottage, High Nottingham. preferred). for more information. Bentham, via Lancaster.

RUG.

Undercurrents 45

(UNDERCURRENTSBOOKS THE BOOKS listed below are available by mail order from UC; prices include postage and packing. All orders must be prepaid. Practical Solar Heating

I ...

W n McCartney E2.80 " a m~terptoceDIY text, jargon-free English; technology

fully domystifled; a bit of social context; conatructbn details ao complete barely a twiat of a spanner la omitted."

Radical Technology

Q o d f f vBovie 6 Peter Hamor E4.50 "~clrnport8ntthing 18toworkon all fronbatonce, the home, Iff neighbourhoodand the workplace. We muat be-realistic amf full of fantasy, attend to public need* and individual oorfckXJTiÃ‘ create a balancecd mental and manualwork, a m ~ u r e of city and country life, focua on immediate problems and build for the future, live Ih earnest and just for (un, confront and compromise. HaveourcakeandeaHf?Why

not?"

&Woof Psychoanalyst -M.--dFMTom-E3.=

- ..

A pfctkl manual of e x e r h s derived from the Karen ~ 8 c h o o lset , out in cartoon 8 t t i p f m t wRh an emphmia on c<Ã‘ jugof~-frÃexplanation. Intended for use by group* of two or more. 4

-- Li--

COSMIC BINGO Frank Ham's natural desire t o put down the unscientific sin o f catastrophism (UC44 Letters: Dinos~uriana)has led him into the opposite error of 'Gaianism' or 'God'11 Fix It'. Catastrophe;,, like it or not, are like love at first sight: they happen all the time; the trouble is that science, which is the study of regularities, doesn't know how t o handle them. How would FH account for the late cretaceous marine extinction? I draw his attention to Gartner & Kearney's paper in Geology (12 708-71 2) wlvrc they propose that it stemmed from earthquakes which, by opening n rift between Greenland and Norway, allowed the brackish, previously isolated Arctic ocean t o flow out into the denser, mor more sahne waters of the other oceans; the extinction might have occurred in a single generation as those species which couldn't cope with the salinity change failed t o breed. Or, to take a more immediate and material example from my files, how about Funafuti, an EUice Island atoll, which in the space of a few seconds on the night o f October 21, 1972, was extended into a rampart 18 km

long, 37 m wide and 3.5 m above sea level as a cyclone scooped up 2.8 million tons of coral rubble from the sea bed - . -- (Science 21 181). Now that's kitastiophic change for you! li's natural that stuck of this island of greys and gruadualness we find it hard t o accept that fate is indifferent and capricious. Hence the vogue for alchemy, marxism, etc. . Nonetheless, the universe does change suddenly. Even at the human level we are at the mercy of unpredictable events: revolutions, epidemics, crazes, and accidents. God does play dice.

SPRING SALE Any ten of the back numbers numbered below for only Â£3.50Or, even better, all thirty for only Â£9 surface mail, worldwide. Single copies 45p. We regret that Nos. 1 to 7, 9, 11, 13, 19 and 20 are completely out of print. Centre for AT, #deninc; P i n u ndio; Bulldin# r a d Wind thMry;Hamamicimx Comfk 7 4 BRAD. London'Âuuuxh. 8 earth W

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Luds AerospaÃ§Crtbtppk; Binf~dlMck:Community Technoloo; Comtek 71. Alternative Culture (3); Allernative Health &rvia. . u c p & AT; Jack Mundty. Overwa~AT: Hillside Coltefa; Buildii 6 nature! e i r r r y Shutter &sign; Allenutive Tachnotow in India. ' W h o NM<to Mukom?? Biodymmic prdeninr. Wind gmnretor proRreureport;Invwtor dmiÃ§nIiwulÃ§h& jobs; Productionfor mrdi W p W 8 H e b W NAITA; Citizen's Hand, ( i d a n w e . ; Tna I . DIY mw towns, W-iuffloient to& houses; Lifupui;P h d n g . InnerTechnology: Saw yourown ned. Computer teyhuiKinr, 17th century ndicd &m;Dominr. K ~ r l u nphototlt. Worwn &AT. AT 1t h e Third World: I d e v u t teclmolop; 21x1 clua apitduM; Chimae Ã§ciÃ§i>c S u p w i ~ c k e cGreen bin, Hydxfponks; L*y HiÃˆÃ Good squat guide b u g e n of counter.~:ultuirBroMctttht: Hticll; Nuclwpolicy: IronÃ§cÃ§farh u n m m n . PeaermarÃˆio<ÃDIY pnnl A doctor writ*.; Intend: Porenoia pinmr (11; SlonÃ§hÃ§~ Prim*! therapy. Cod wur; Fish Fmiw 11,: R ~ D D Irevulutionim; ~ Free rÃ§dio Seabrook Nukms & unmns; Fish lannmi 12). W u f n v r ; Lomi* stoves ChÃ§r4Ã§Poi Solarcolleizor. VHF trÃ§nt>nuttÃ§rPuwK Powr(2) Chicken's lib: Namibian health: Windwle; VHF truuoitUr 12). Duncan CampbU on Ur Etvewfroppen,I-ortirtryChum A cidw ouldnf. Emotional p t e w ; Findborn, Compost6 communuun (2). Waf r p c An- AalhÃ‘m Oa community radio. Punk Thtll^nd.Potitiv* SfboUÃ‘ AT k the Poitupuse revolution-. TkÃ Ruuiana w n ' t coming; Boil

14 15 16 17 18 21 22 23 24 25 26 repun;NewArAccw^OriuMycroftinC.Growincdope;PftdMfin(;ELF. Soft energy: turd politic#; Fast breeders; Tools for ~ u l fl u 27 BrookhowAmpf-ndco-op: fid~f~Th.Shikm:DNWooifatow. W i n d d e ; Tvind; Atlfntu: Mondmton, AT& the Star; C o r d i a l AT, 28 Behaviour . Mod.Bicycle planing; Urban w~t*laDll:CmWilÃ BidMiC Women 1Emray: Winkate. N t ~ C I e ÃE§m w , Fmminisuapiuna 29

Hugh Pete F o o d politic*: 31 modmy

Factorytuminr. Additive*: Wholafood co-op.; C o i cm~monuncuhuni D o l i Poulon. ~ GrundÃ‡din Ecopolitica: British row) to Ecotopit; I.nrue: N u k r & the UIIKXW Worken' plliu; UKAEA, DIY VHF transmitter. Shottom M i c m Planning; G d n cidw Urban wutmhnd: Natioiul puk.; ShÃ§Uni Country life: WWOOFiw ATworluaop; Entrfyoptioiu&employiMM. CO-OP h 8 i o n ~cr~b*pl>l<;u%cs'l?k E U t h c l ~ (; ' ~ ~ k l d d Qwiriisrty; Feminid anti-nukeism Ian Lloyd: E-rinc Rural rÃ‘lfty Comtek 79: Wave power Teamwork Trtinini T n n . Campa* for the North: DIY Woodslove denim; l>cceiitreBniq AT,'Gmntaon. Children 1t i e . E n v l m n m e n t : Future perfect: City jungl..; Alic.; Flysheet camp*; MÃ Gaia; Community schooln& service; Free Ã§cbool Third world emrxy; FA0 food conference; Street fightin' mm; D N biom; compost;Ecotopoly: Envimnmenfl education:Kann Silkwood. ~

c~np&lt% . .

32 33 34 35 36 37 We like t o get y o u r letters and hope that t h e magazine will provoke debate: but we prefer i t if y o u r letters are short a n d to the point. Then, we can print more letters.

BADGES: You smoke - w e choke available. Contact Loughborough 843214 (Leics) 6-7pm. and dying t o give up. 30p each, Â£ for four, ask for bulk prices: H E D G E H O G equipment f o r Alexander, 3 3 Buckingham Street. carders: soinning ,.,heels; ~~~~~~l Brighton BN1 3LT. fleeces Â£1.10-Â£1.90/lCarded H Y D R O P O W E R? D.C. motor, wool sliver E2.25-3.00lib. Completi Handcarder repair kits Â£4D.I.Y. w o r k i n reverse as d y n a m o Drum Carder construction booklet 700 r p m . 230 volts, 28 amps. Â £ 3Tussah Silk E5.501250gm. Will fit in large car or small van, or can deliver. Â£60Also heat pumpupper Hartfield. East Sussex,

Commune8: Co-opÃ§rativwork 39&anarchim. Peme's polemic,

FÃ§ir~nd.Chnatunu.Comaiui

Wiindpo-rr Inc.. Scandinawn AT. Fu8lOn: Wave power LoÃ§lpMaiVuwdiu. Depqrunmq E m Third World Rip-off: Canals. Jobs& SocMIChtn~.French AMuiuUÃ‘ C o - o p w t t o r 8 F e l r &a: Winds o l changc: Working collcclivcly: Oreaimti labour Madianditms. Ciipitalism iindcftops: Dc1lt.T: Co-*lit Protopia: Convi~ial computing: Manifesto for the 80s; END. Kyshtym: NATTA: Testa: Darr~eus windmill design; Parale Radio. Bombs into windmills: Atoms for peace; Land reform - no thanks; Greentown; Life without T.V.; E.S.T.; Propertarians. Media Special: Pen pushing; 4th world: Arts council; Open radio campaign; Derek Jarman interview: RufTTufTCreem PufT., I'S

40 41

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WHAT'S WRITTEN BORED?LISTLESS? Why not write for Undercurrents. It's not just a magazine of 'radical alternatives and community technology';we're becoming asamizdat of the new ignorance as well. As an open forum for radical and alternative ideas, we depend on a steady flow of unsolicited articles to fill up the paper. Here are some guidelines to encourage you to get busy: CONTENT: Undercurrents has no fixed line; our bias is practical, pragmatic, personal and optimistic; ideological, general and downbeat piecesare much lesswelcome. If in doubt, ask us. MONEY Undercurrents does not pay for contributions but authors get a free one year sub for each article printed. FORMAT: Articles should if possible be typed double-spaced with generous margins, on one side of the paper only. LENGTH: The normal maximum length is three pages (300 words plus pictures); longer articles will be reluctantly considered for publication on their merits. STYLE: Articlesshould bewritten in plainEnglish, withshort sentences and plenty of paragraphs. SPARE COPIES: Always keep a spare copy of anything you send us; both our editors and the Mails are fallible! PICTURES: Photos should be black and white, prints not transparencies; line drawings should be in blackink on plain paper; cartoons are always welcome wecan redraw them if necessary. REVIEWS: are always welcome; also suggestions of titles for review and offers to write in future issues. NEWS, SCANDAL AND GOSSIP: are also needed, particularly from outside London and from abroad.

UNDERCURRENTS is the magazine of soft technology and hard politics, published every two months by Undercurrents Ltd., a company registered under the laws of England (No. 1 146 454) and limited by guarantee. Tenth year of issue. ISSN 0306 2392. EDITORIAL OFFICE: 27 Clerkenwall Close, London EC1R OAT. Tel : 01-253 7303. ACCESS: The UC editorial collective meets every Wednesday evening from 8 p m on t o cobble the magazine together, pay the bills and gossip, adjourning as early as possible t o the back bar of the Crown Tavern. These meetings are open to all friends of the magazine. The office is not staffed at other times but Simon Woodhead. our subscriptions coordinator and factotum, is usually working there on Wednesday afternoons; on other days there is often a member of the collective in the office around 2 p m opening the mail. Outside these times times urgent enquiries may be addressed to Chris Hutton Squire on 01-261 6774. DISTRIBUTION: within the British Isles by Fulltime Distribution, 27 Clerkenwall Close, London EC1 OAT, tel 01-251 4976. I n the US by Carrier Pigeon, Room 309, 75 Kneeland St., Boston, Mass 021 11. Our US mailing agents are Expediters of the Printed Word, 527 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10022. PRINTER: Western Web Offset, 59 Prince St., Bristol 1. COPYRIGHT: The contents of Undercurrents are copyright: t who permission to reprint is freely given t o n o n ~ r o f igroups apply in writing, and sold t o anyone else. CREDITS: Undercurrents 45 was put together by Chris Hutton Squire (Features and Reviews), Peter Culthaw (Features), Nick Hanna (Newsand Letters), Tam Dougan (News), and Peter Glass {What's On), aided and abetted by Simon Woodhead, Dave Kanner, Stephen Joseph, Bill Flatman, Dave Elliott, Godfrey Boyle, Helen McEwan, Lowana Veal, Martin Ince, V H ,Val Robinson, Doug Bollen, and some parsons unknown. Typesetting by Jenny Penning; (01-226 12581, Community Typesetters (01-226 62431 and Pamela Yaomans (01-749 34081. Cover drawn and designed by George Snow. Our thnks to the Collective A t Large for advice, encouragement, spontaneous contributions, etc. COPY DATE: Undercurrents46 (JuneIJuly) will be on sale on Saturday May 30;closingdate for last minute items is Wednesday April 29.

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