New green army rises up against roads: They reject the lobbying methods of the established environmental groups in favour of 'direct action'

MINISTERS were warned two years ago that civil disobedience could escalate out of control if they pressed ahead with their road building programme.

Senior officials in the Westminster headquarters of the Environment and Transport departments say that scenes at Wanstead last week - when 600 police and bailiffs struggled to evict 300 protesters from a handful of houses due for demolition to make way for the M11 link road - had been 'widely forecast in government'.

But they say ministers failed to take the warnings seriously and are only now beginning to realise that they face widespread popular uprisings all over the country, linked by an increasingly sophisticated and mobile group of young, green 'flying pickets'.

These activists, whose painted faces filled last Wednesday's television screens, represent the most vigorous new force in British environmentalism for two decades. Generally well-educated and articulate, they reject the lobbying methods of the older-established environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and the Council for the Protection of Rural England in favour of 'direct action'.

Largely unnoticed by Westminster and Whitehall - and the media - they have formed scores of loosely federated 'cells' across the country over the past two-and-a-half years and are increasingly joining forces with traditional anti-road protest groups, even in Conservative heartlands of the Home Counties. They have compiled a database of 1,000 people ready to rush to a protest scene at short notice, and by some estimates have 10,000 active supporters throughout the country.

Ministers are coming to accept that protests will increasingly become the normal pattern wherever they try to build new roads. In last week's arctic temperatures, while national attention was fixed on Wanstead, the new activists were camped out in their 'benders' (tents made of willowpoles and tarpaulin) at site after sensitive site across the country.

Other flashpoints include Wymondham, near Norwich, where they are disrupting attempts to build a pounds 20m 5.4-mile dual carriageway. Ten days ago they severely embarrassed Mr MacGregor, the Transport Secretary and local MP, in his own back yard by reducing to a shambles his solemn attempt to break the first ground.

Local dignitaries were bused to a secret location to meet the minister in an attempt to outwit the protesters. But the activists, calling themselves the Lizard Tribe, got there first and chained themselves to the digger that he was to use. After an hour's red-faced delay, Mr MacGregor had to use a spade.

He tried to make a speech saying such roads were 'what people everywhere want', but was goaded by hecklers into responding to their taunts. Five people were arrested, but later released.

At Leadenham, south of Lincoln, protesters are camped out in Hilltop Plantation, a particularly loved local wood, to try to stop a road being built through it.

At Hulme, Cheshire, activists have pitched their tents around a pond due to be drained to make way for a science park. They claim it is 'the most biologically diverse of all Manchester's 352 ponds', the home of rare dragonflies and '43 species of aquatic animals'.

There are other campaigns in Glasgow, Newcastle and North Wales. And the protesters are celebrating a decision by Sainsbury's to abandon plans to build a supermarket on the outskirts of Yeovil, after they occupied buildings in protest.

Meanwhile, at Wanstead, protesters have retreated to fight again, occupying three more streets further down the route. At their new base under a Leytonstone railway arch, Jeff Weyers, a former Department of Transport employee, says: 'It's a bit like the Somme. So far, after all this, they have got about 1,000 yards of road; they have three-and-a-half miles to build.'

They plan to intensify their campaign on 15 March - 'the Ides of March, the day that marked the beginning of the end of the last great road-building empire' - bringing in 150 protesters to mount daily 'direct actions'.

John Gummer, the Minister of Agriculture, has called them fascists, other Conservatives have tried to link them with the militant left, and Paddy Ashdown, the Liberal Democrat leader, has also attacked them. But John Stewart, chairman of Alarm UK, a federation of 250 more conventional anti- road groups, says they are largely apolitical but have a radical green anti-growth philosophy.

'They are determinedly non-violent, even eschewing verbal violence,' he says, 'and in marked contrast to the far- left demonstrators of the Sixties, often make friends with the security guards opposing them.'

They reject the older environment groups, even the traditionally radical Greenpeace, as too middle-aged, too big, and too much part of the Establishment to succeed. They call them 'multinational corporations'. Although displaying much the same energy as the founders of these groups, they have grown up in a different political atmosphere, where continued rule by the same party has made traditional pressure group lobbying seem irrelevant.

The movement was mobilised in the protests over building the M3 through Twyford Down, where the activists formed useful alliances with traditional Conservatives in Winchester, and were 'legitimised' last summer by the Government's decision to cancel the road though Oxleas Wood in south London.

This has put ministers in a quandary. They feel that they have lost both by resisting the new activists and by giving in to them. 'The lesson is that they should not have got themselves into this position in the first place', a Downing Street adviser said last week.

'People who have been democratically elected to run the country quite legitimately react against such action by people who have elected themselves. But if this takes off, it will be very difficult for ministers. I would not want to be in charge of widening the M25 to 14 lanes in the current climate.'

Rear Window, page 18

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