E3G

Address to Green Alliance 25th Anniversary

By Tom Burke

Influence is the art of using the power of others. The Green Alliance has earned its reputation as one of the more influential pressure groups in Britain. The trick to leveraging the work of larger organisations is the ability to build coalitions – to build bridges across issue or institutional boundaries.

This has been the Green Alliance’s core competence. It means success by stealth and letting others take the credit wherever possible. It means thinking well ahead of the issue curve. It means understanding and aligning the interests of others. It means matching patience to passion. And, it means never, ever, mistaking the headlines for the outcomes.

We can be proud of those outcomes over the past twenty-five years. We began the dialogue between business and the environment in Britain. We launched the first discussions of green finance.

We set agendas. Julie Hill opened the debate on GM foods here in 1987 with a lecture by Jeremy Rifkin. It’s hard to believe now, but we had great difficulty in getting someone from Greenpeace to attend. More recently, we launched a ground breaking initiative to explore what children really think about their environment and opened the debate on environmental justice. In today’s terminology, we have been an incubator for new organisations. Sustain, Wastewatch and the Pesticides Trust all arose from Green Alliance initiatives.

We helped the government discover the need for Britain’s first ever White Paper on the environment – a need the present government should urgently re-discover. Knowing that politicians really only listen to other politicians we wrote speeches and held seminars for all the political parties.

Indeed, just last week, I had the pleasure of attending a seminar that Guy Thompson chaired where the Secretary of State spent two hours discussing the environment community’s expectations of a Labour government post-election. I have no doubt that I will soon be receiving my invitations to similar events with the other parties.

There are far too many other successes to mention tonight – from arranging the dinner at which the Prince of Wales first met the environmentalists from his own generation to providing a constant stream of special advisors to Ministers. But no-one could doubt that the Green Alliance is fulfilling its mission of projecting the environment into the heart of politics.