Nigel Haigh

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Toby Butler: Before we go on to the Institute for Environmental Policy which you just mentioned, that was 1980 that you got involved in that. Now a couple of years before that, which I think is 1978, the Green Alliance was formed, is that right?Nigel Haigh: Yes.Toby Butler: So and you were a founder member of that.Nigel Haigh: I was. Yes.Toby Butler: So can you just explain how that came about?Nigel Haigh: Right. The Green Alliance was founded, the idea of the Green Alliance came from the Liberal Party. Three people prominently with the Liberal Party, Maurice Ash who is the Chairman of the Town and Country Planning Association, and a very rich man, or rather married to a very rich wife. Tim Beaumont, The Reverend, the Lord Beaumont of Whitley to give you his full title was a Liberal activist. Again a very rich man who had given chunks of money to the Liberal Party and become its Treasurer and then it’s President and they rewarded him with a seat in the Lords. So that’s how. But he had been at Oxford where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club. And he’d been in and out of the Labour Party and the Liberal Party. And he became a clergyman in Hong Kong and then he inherited even more money from his Quaker mother’s family. And he came back to London and played a prominent role in sort of the Church of England’s radical wing. He started a magazine and he ran all sorts of hares, started all sorts of hares running. Anyway he and Maurice Ash and one other whose name will come to me, all from the Liberal Party, decided to found the Green Alliance. Now Tim Beaumont had a quite different view of it from Maurice Ash who was a sort of deep thinker but rather muddled I think. Tim Beaumont, I got a phone call from him one day and he said, could he come and see me because he and others were wanting to found the Green Alliance and they wanted me to join. Now the reason he came to me was because he had heard that I convened the British members of the EEB. So that was my sort of ticket. Robin got approached as well.Toby Butler: This is Robin Grove-White.Nigel Haigh: Grove-White, yes.Toby Butler: Who was head of the CPRE.Nigel Haigh: CPRE yes.Toby Butler: Okay.Nigel Haigh: Which was an established body. So I said to Tim, ‘You want to found this new body. What would it do that’s different from the other environmental NGOs?’ And he gave me a reply which I have remembered ever since, he said, ‘Oh they are lovely people but they are the coal face workers. They work their,’ not politically correct simile today I know, but, ‘they work their seams. I mean the RSPB protects birds, the Countryside, the CPRE protects the English countryside, the Friends of the Earth they fight Schweppes bottles or whatever. They are fighting their, at the coal face. The Green Alliance won’t be like that. We won’t replicate what they do at all. Our role will be to inject the ecological perspective to mainstream political life.’ Now so I said, ‘Look the EEB wants to inject the ecological perspective’ and let me come back to that phrase in a minute, ‘into the Treaty of Rome. And we’ve got this proposal to have a manifesto for the European elections in 1979.’ So I told him about that and he got interested in that. So we were on the same wavelength. It would not replicate what the existing ones do, it would have a higher aim to get this new perspective of limits to growth, the ecological perspective that you could- business as usual, continuous unreconstructed economic growth will only lead to tears. That’s got to change. And we’re going to put that idea into the political parties, into the Government manifestos, nothing about the environment in Government manifestos. That’s what will be its role. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll join.’British Library catalogue number: C2037/50 Project clip number: 152