Newspaper column on campaigning - 12th June 2012

A member of our group had a 'First Person Column' published in the Leicester Mercury today. The Mercury haven't put it on their website so we thought we'd post it on ours - enjoy :-)

"At Friends of the Earth stalls, when we ask people to support one of our campaigns we often get the same response - 'What's the point? It won't make any difference.' Some people think that they are powerless to change the world around them. And yet campaigning has been shaping our country since the early days of the union movement, when the Tolpuddle martyrs started marching for better working conditions.

The environmental movement has continued this tradition of fighting to improve things and we've had some amazing successes. Friends of the Earth's 'Big Ask' campaign was launched in 2005 and demanded legislation which would place a legal duty on the Government to achieve big cuts in the UK's greenhouse gas emissions. Local groups around the country attended festivals, organised public meetings and spread the word through the media. 130,000 people contacted their MP and when the Climate Change Act was passed into law in 2008, the Government acknowledged that tireless campaigning had brought it about.
Last year, when the Government tried to illegally slash the Feed-in Tariffs for people generating their own electricity from renewable sources, Friends of the Earth challenged them in court and won. Support from Friends of the Earth members and campaigners made this possible. The result is that thousands more people and community groups have been able to afford to generate their own green electricity, helping themselves and the planet.

There are local examples as well. Aylestone Meadows nature reserve was saved from an entirely inappropriate football development by a well organised campaign, co-ordinated by several local groups. Over the past few years, Leicester Friends of the Earth has been campaigning for the City Council to take positive steps to reduce carbon emissions. We researched the Council's environmental policies and then wrote a Green Manifesto of policies that we thought needed to be implemented in Leicester. We organised a petition in support of this and had meetings with councillors and there has since been progress towards several of our recommendations. One of which, our request for 20 mph speed limits on all residential roads in the city, found its way into the local Labour Party's election manifesto and then into the new Local Transport Plan. Another petition of local people, demonstrating the widespread support for lower traffic speeds, has raised the profile of the issue even further and the Council are now looking at ways to implement this policy. Campaigns can sometimes take years but they do make a difference, and the more people who get involved, even just by signing a petition, the greater the difference we can make.
As Sally Hawkins asked in her amazing speech at the end of the film Made in Dagenham, 'When did we decide to stop fighting?' Friends of the Earth hasn't stopped fighting - campaigning works, and there's still a lot to do."

Hannah Wakley