mp->> Are there specific actions you feel were really successful? In terms of both being personally empowering and also successful at achieving the goals of the action. A lot of the camps and stuff around the road protests, ultimately, the roads were built. So, whatever your notion of the success of the action was, maybe you could talk about it that way.

Dee->> Yes, well, we're hardly ever successful. About the only thing I've been involved in which actually for the time being achieved its aim of deterring a road was the Oxleas Wood campaign, this little wood in south London, which actually was saved. That was very good that it was saved, but I didn't find it a particularly inspiring campaign. I suppose, yes, well, we do get hit with despair a bit, and mad wild hopes. I think the idea that what we're doing really is just flinging a few seeds in the wind that may take root, maybe not now, but some other time. I mean, at base, I suppose I am a bit depressingly despairing. I think probably we are doomed, really. The world is probably going to turn into a horrible place, that I wouldn't like to live in, that we are going to wreck all non-human life in it. I'm not really interested in living in a world with no non-human life, no independent autonomous other species.

But, there's just a chance that I could be wrong, and there's just a chance we can sway it, if we try, if we try. On June 18th, after the gold banner had gone up which was a quote from Winstanley, a four hundred year old quote, saying, "The Earth is a Common Treasury for All," a friend came up to me, most emotional, and he was saying, "If only Winstanley could see it!" If only Winstanley knew that four hundred years after he wrote this thing, there it was, in the City of London, and it was a quote from his Watchword to the City of London. And I saw that my friend was absolutely right. That was absolutely an inspirational thought to think what Winstanley might've thought. Only, unfortunately, time moves a bit faster these days than it has in the last four hundred years. It is almost inconceivable to me to think that things can actually still have an effect four hundred years hence. Because it seems to me that four hundred hence either we've lost or we've won. But maybe I'm being simplistic, there. Things are usually much more complicated than you think.

I'm not totally despairing. I suppose I do take inspiration particularly from unpredictable things. Like how magical Claremont Road was. It wasn't just a protest. It was far more creative than just saying, "We don't want a motorway here." It showed a sort of wild flowering of anarchic human creativity. And that was very wonderful. It's things like that which give me an imaginative boost and a bit of hope.

 

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• Oxleas Wood
  A high-profile anti-road campaign. The original government plans involved a river-crossing, the destruction of a large portion of Oxleas Wood, and the destruction of Bleak Hill (old haunt of notorious highway-man Dick Turpin). Due to vociferous protest, and to the great expense and negative PR the government faced during the Twyford Down campaign, plans were put on hold. This made it the first road-building project to be postponed, and possibly scrapped, due to public pressure. DoT ownership of a road and fifty houses in the area, and possible road construction plans for a more limited project, still threaten, however.
  
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• Winstanley & his Watchword to the City of London
  Gerrard Winstanley was a leader of the radical Diggers movement during the English Revolution/Civil War. The Diggers took over areas of public land, living and laboring cooperatively, sharing the produce and resources of the land, with a respect for the equality and dignity of each person, regardless of status, wealth, class or gender. They rejected private property and the laws which protected private ownership of resources which by rights should belong to all. In his 1649 open letter Watchword to the City of London, Winstanley wrote that "the earth shall be made a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind (Everie man, both Male and Female) without respect of persons," and proclaimed that, even though he had written about and publicized his beliefs to great effect, he came to believe that "words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act thou dost nothing." The issues of enclosure of common land for private use and economic injustice resonate across the centuries, and Winstanley's values, vision, and actions remain relevant today.
  
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