PEOPLE POWER – A First Hand Account

Andrew Spence was one of the leaders of the 2001 Fuel Protest. Mr. Spence is a farmer and haulier who lives and works in County Durham. As leader of a number of ‘rolling roadblocks’ on motorways and the blockade of the giant Jarrow refinery, Mr. Spence became a national hero during the Fuel Protest, which came close to toppling the Blair regime. This is part of an interview he later did with a sympathetic news outlet.

Interviewer: The 2001 Fuel Protest gave the Labour government an enormous fright and sparked copycat actions which ground several European countries to a halt as well. When and how did you get involved in it?

AS: Right from the very start. I was sitting in the Jolly Drovers in Leadgate with two mates, complaining as always about the crippling price of fuel. I had fourteen wagons on the road at the time. “Why don’t you do something about it then?” I was asked. I’m naturally quite shy at heart, but things were so desperate that I decided that I would. There was a Hunt meeting next door so I went straight round. All the fieldsports people were angry about the threatened hunting ban as well so they were immediately responsive. “How many people here are fed up with the cost of fuel?” I asked, and everyone put their hands up. So we decided there and then to do something about it.

Interviewer: How did you work out where to start?

AS: TransAction had tried rolling blockades on the motorways in the mid-eighties, but had been bought off. We decided to adopt their tactics. We announced that a convoy of wagons and farm vehicles would take a slow drive around the centre of Newcastle the Saturday before the Budget. The Monday before we had a meeting and only five people turned up, but we decided to go on with the protest anyway. We gave the story to the media and kept our fingers crossed as we drove to meet up at Birtley Truck Stop on the A1 near the Angel of the North. We couldn’t even get in! The place was overflowing with more than 300 trucks, tractors and taxis, and TV news helicopters were buzzing overhead. Apart from several fully loaded muckspreaders which the police turned back and everyone got through; we set off and our seven mile long convoy caused chaos! I was threatened with arrest, but we hit the national headlines. Would-be protesters started calling from all over the country and we realised that this could be big.

Interviewer: So how did you build a national network?

AS: I was called by a group of farmers in Monmouthshire who wanted to protest about fuel prices and the fact that the supermarkets and big dairies were making them sell their milk at less than the cost of production. Contacts from other parts of the country came as well and we held a meeting of just over a dozen would-be protest leaders and formed Farmers for Action.

As Gordon Brown hadn’t put up fuel duty in the Budget after the Newcastle demo we decided to hit the supermarkets next. Near the end of 2000 a group of thirty of us turned up late one night and blockaded the First Co-op Dairy in Blaydon. We were there for four hours in heavy rain, but by the end of the night word had got around and there were more than a hundred of us. The Co-op were so concerned that they rousted the Chief Executive out of bed in Leeds and he drove up to see us. We left the minute he arrived, having wrecked their schedules and made our point.

We knew that the protest would get publicity and that others would follow our example. The Co-op knew that too and tried to blackmail their milk suppliers into staying away. So we took sheep and beef farmers instead. Then we found out that they were bringing in sub-standard, untested, French milk to mix with ours, so we extended the protests to milk processors and then supermarket Distribution Centres. A typical Regional DC sends out fifty trucks an hour so even small and short pickets caused them major headaches. This gave other farmers confidence and the protests spread.

Interviewer: Who were the main players and how did you come to switch back to the fuel issue?

AS: Martin Falkingham from Yorkshire, David Handley and Brynley Williams from Wales, Paul Ashley from Cheshire and Maurice Vellacott from Devon were just some of the local leaders I soon got to know. Then Brynley Williams held a protest meeting in a cattle market in Wales and one of the farmers there suggested going to the Stanlow oil refinery. To start with just four tractors and fifteen farmers turned up, but then GMTV ran the story and over 1,000 joined them. The tanker drivers refused even to try to cross the picket lines and the story got even bigger.

Interviewer: So a lot of the success was media-driven?

AS: Absolutely. Media coverage and mobile phones were really what did it. I had three mobiles and they were all going virtually all the time. It was an irresistable story, and from the sympathy we got from the news crews it seemed as though they too wanted to see our little group take the Government down a peg or two. We already had a road blockade planned for that Sunday – cutting off all the main roads between England and Scotland. I went up there but then heard that the lads at Stanlow were coming under increasing pressure from the police and were getting jittery being the only ones blockading a refinery. So I passed the word around at the Alnwick demo, grabbed two friends and we drove by car to Jarrow refinery. By this time we were being followed everywhere by the police, but I just parked the car across the main gate and declared the refinery closed! Several police cars pulled in behind me and they started to argue, but then the next cars arrived and blocked them in too. The the wagons and tractors started turning up, along with the news cameras again. With Stanlow and Jarrow shut down, protesters were soon camped outside every refinery in mainland Britain.

Interviewer: How aware were you of public sympathy?

AS: It was overwhelming. The sight of a group of independent middle class businessmen taking on the Blair regime was proper David and Goliath stuff. Chris Bacon had a removal van with us at Jarrow and by the end of the week it was virtually full of supplies that people just turned up and handed over. We had hampers, crates of whisky, the takeaways all sent food each night. Then a lady brought us a caravan so we could take it in turns to sit and get warm. A local firm donated us a Portaloo. Nationally, one opinion poll found we had the support of 97% of the population, even though lengthening fuel queues were causing them real hardship. They blamed Blair and Brown.

Interviewer: What did the Government do to fight back?

AS: They seemed paralysed until Monday afternoon, but then they got organised and things started to get rough. Police officers who had been friendly suddenly switched to hostility. The Government refused to negotiate, but got dirty behind the scenes.

We all started getting death threats to our families, and the police said there was nothing they could do to help. The calls to mine were traced back (I can’t say how) to Catterick Garrison. The next day the Health Minister claimed that “people are dying” because ambulances couldn’t get fuel. This was a lie because we were in daily contact with the emergency services and let tankers out to keep them supplied whenever we were asked. Now the police turned up in riot gear and kept trying to provoke trouble. On the Wednesday the police used force to break up a small blockade at the Sunderland refinery. I drove down and was arrested for obstruction (I was crossing the road!) There was so much riot gear in the van that they could hardly get me in. I was taken to Sunderland police station, thrown in a cell and threatened and intimidated. But after a while I could hear the horns from several hundred vehicles blockading the police station. I was charged and released on bail (a sympathetic judge later bound me over for six months).

I went straight back to Jarrow, and was carried aloft to a flatback to speak to 700-800 protesters. But I was mentally and physically exhausted (we’d none of us had more than a few hours sleep since Sunday) and I broke down. I had my wife crying on the phone and hadn’t seen my young children for days. I just had to go home.

Interviewer: By the Wednesday the fuel protests were threatening food supplies, and there were reports of angry clashes between motorists – especially in ethnically mixed areas. The country was at a virtual standstill and just a couple of days off serious breakdown. Why did the blockades crumble just as they were really biting?

AS: The media realised this wasn’t just a matter of running a good story any more and started to attack us instead of the Government. They’d built it up, now they knocked it down. The police were clearly spoiling for a fight and we were told/threatened that SAS men were being drafted in to arrest ‘ring-leaders’ and kick off trouble. Our families were being threatened all the time, our livelihoods were under threat from pressure from our banks, and we were shattered. Plus, we weren’t sure we wanted to reduce the country to anarchy. Then there were the black propaganda rumours that one place or another had ‘cracked’ and jacked it in.

I promised my wife I wouldn’t go back, but the phone rang all night. The protesters had left Stanlow on the Wednesday – the police there had played a clever game and had refused to talk to anyone except Brynley, on behalf of the farmers only. He called his boys off (we’ve never forgiven him for that, especially when he was rewarded by being given a safe seat as a Tory Welsh Assembly member) and the morale of the truckers and the public protesters there collapsed.

The lads at Jarrow were nervous that the police were about to start a riot, but they refused to leave unless I told them to in person. So my wife told me to go back. There was a real Dunkirk spirit about the blockade. A mate and I walked down the road to the refinery gates with the world’s media, truckers, farmers and the public lining the way and applauding. What I said next were the hardest words I’ve ever spoken: “We’ve done what we can do. Far more than we thought we could do. Time to call it a day.”

Interviewer: So that was it?

AS: Yes and no. We arranged to leave at one o’clock and were escorted away by the police. But not before we gave the Government sixty days to come up with proposals for a fairer tax regime, and all agreed to take action if they didn’t. But giving them that long was our big mistake; it gave them time to get organised. As you know, they did nothing, so when time was up we called a seven day protest. I led a convoy from Birtley again, with just 80 trucks as we intended to stagger the protest over the whole week. That too was a mistake, because it allowed the media to present it as a damp squib. The next day was Remembrance Day so we all had poppies as we set off on a convoy along the A1/M62/M6/M1 towards London. The police told us that no trucks would be allowed in a “ring of steel” around London, so I told most of the lads to keep away from the convoy. In the end, when we had just twenty left, the police decided we were so weak that they’d let us into London anyway – which was then all the others turned up too and 2,000 wagons clogged up the whole of London! I must be the only farmer who’s ever had a combine harvester outside Number Ten, and I was allowed into Downing Street to deliver a P45 for Blair! Then, as intended, the protest came to an end.

Interviewer: What did it achieve?

AS: The fuel duty escalator was scrapped. Fuel duty was reduced and road tax was scrapped on tractors and cut on wagons. We brought down fuel prices and kept them down well below what they otherwise would have been for years. We made fuel a big political hot potato. We made friendships which are more like being brothers. And perhaps we showed that Big Governments can only push ‘their’ people so far. Mind you, the laws they’ve brought in since give them much more power. For instance, to organise to disrupt the supply of fuel is now classed as terrorism. You’re talking to a terrorist!

Interviewer: Could the same kind of thing be done again?

AS: Not in the same way, no. The changed laws and State preparations make it impossible. But there are ways in which a determined body of protesters could make things very hard for the Government. We learned lessons as well as them. And things would be different if groups of workers in key installations would come out in sympathy. Even if they get threatened with the sack for holding unofficial strikes, no one can be punished for being the victim of a huge simultaneous flu epidemic!

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