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From International Socialism, No. 60, July 1973, p. 24.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Derelict Britain
John Barr
Penguin, 35p
Polluting Britain
Jeremy Bugler
Penguin, 35p
The question of pollution is fast becoming one of the ‘in’ topics – the Financial Times has even organised a seminar about it, at £60 per head (meals and all!). It is a question socialists should also be interested in. These two books provide a good introduction.
John Barr’s book deals with a specific aspect of the problem – derelict land which is ‘so damaged by industrial or other development that it is incapable of beneficial use without treatment.’ Britain has over 130,000 acres of such land – an area larger than the county of Rutland, larger than Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Aberdeen and Dundee put together. Every year another 3,500 acres is added to that total.
Sixty-five per cent of the derelict land is concentrated in six counties – Cornwall, Lancashire, Durham, Staffordshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and Northumberland – areas far from the sight of the Whitehall policy makers. (It would be a different kettle of fish, suggests Barr, if the marl pits of Staffordshire and the clay pits of Cornwall were located in Hampstead.) Waste produced by capitalism is a thing to behold – colliery tips in Scotland, the North, the Midlands, and South Wales; sand and gravel pits in the Thames Valley; china clay pits around St. Austell; the pits in the Bedfordshire and Peterborough brickfields. But it is not confined to heaps and holes in the ground.
The Ministry of Defence owns 600,000 acres of land whose dereliction can rival that of industry – tanks aimlessly churn up 30,000 acres of Dartmoor; Lulworth, on the Dorset coast, is battered to pieces by the Army’s big guns; disused army camps and airfields litter the countryside. The sacking of thousands of railwaymen in the Beeching era has left British Rail with a greatly reduced track mileage and acres of now derelict land, which, because of rising land prices is now becoming profitable real estate.
The rest of the book is a case study of the lower Swansea valley which, for anyone who has never travelled on the train to Swansea, will come as a grim eye-opener to the effects of large scale industrial pollution on a particular area. Jeremy Bugler’s book attempts to cover the whole area of pollution. It opens with a study of the factory inspectorate, whose job includes controlling pollution. Now, the factory inspectorate is physically incapable of enforcing even the minimum safety standards in industry, as any shop steward knows, let alone stopping Rio Tinto Zinc poisoning their workers at Avonmouth, or London Brick belching toxic fluoride fumes into the Bedfordshire countryside. As Bugler sees it, they are industry’s ally – the idea of giving them teeth makes the blood of the industrial polluters and the Inspectorate alike run cold.
The rest of the book deals with pollution in the Mersey, the oceans and the effects of noise pollution which permanently destroys the hearing of hundreds of workers every year. The best chapter is that on the world’s largest brick maker, the London Brick Company, its highly profitable pollution of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and the lunacy of its tie-up with the CEGB.
What is missing in both books is the idea that the working class, the majority of people who have to suffer the effects of pollution, can do anything about the problem. Both authors suggest that acts of parliament, government departments with teeth, an expanded factory inspectorate, will be able to deal with the problem.
Yet in the face of the activities of companies like London Brick, RTZ and ICI, it is an absurd suggestion – we can hardly expect the factory inspectorate or the government to turn and bite the hands that feed them.
Recently, we have seen groups of workers taking on companies who have constantly polluted the environment – RTZ, British Leyland, and Lucas are only three of many examples. We have also seen working-class women in Swansea close down a factory for 24 days in January 1971, which for years had covered their houses with a greasy black soot. The battle in Swansea against United Carbon Black, part of the giant Amalgamated Anthracite Group, still goes on, but the action of those women hit the bosses where it hurt – in their pockets – a lesson which other sections of workers can learn. We live in a world where pollution of the air, rivers, oceans, and lakes is increasing. That pollution is the direct result of the crazy, profit-motivated system we live in. And so long as that system is allowed to continue, pollution will continue and increase.
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Last updated on 23.9.2013