My history of modern England is based largely on newspaper reports, usually contemporary with whatever is being described. Since the British impound all government records for thirty years and then release them selectively, and the Official Secrets Act makes it a crime for anyone to reveal, without authorization, any information acquired by him as a public employee, contemporary histories of Britain are typically undocumented, vague, lame, and opinionated or, when they are memoirs, self-serving. Such legal prohibitions on the flow of information are obviously significant in a country where doctors and nurses are public employees. These restraints necessarily render all data suspect. Where poverty and unemployment are endemic, educational attainment is low, and pollution is uncontrolled, as in Britain, there is no reason to be much impressed by statistics indicating a high average life expectancy, for example.
At the same time, the secretiveness of the government and the potency of the laws restraining the press assure that newspaper versions of events will be more than fair to the government. Most of the information I use has passed through a filter of official approval, simply by virtue of the workings of the Official Secrets Act and the government’s exercise of prior restraint, and because of regular, off-the-record briefings of journalists by government, which are a major source of news. The information to be found in the British press is alarming enough, however incomplete it may be, to provide material for a dozen sobering volumes. It is absorbed by the public very quietly, which means that the government has made a fair estimate of public passivity. In fact, the greatest burst of official admissions about the scale of contamination and the fecklessness of Sellafield’s management arose just at the time that the planned expansion of the plant and the construction of a similar plant at Dounreay, Scotland, were made known. Why this should be an effective way of managing public reaction I cannot speculate, but the government has encountered no important resistance, so, within the British context, the government must be seen to have handled it all very smoothly. Admissions of incompetence seem to ingratiate, and to enlist loyalty in their public. Admissions of past mismanagement seem to be accepted as earnests of good intention. American opinion was, of course, unruffled. So, again, all this alarming news alarmed no one, the plant grows and prospers, and the little earth is still without an ally, despite all the funds and clubs and naturalists, or because of them.
This book is essentially an effort to break down some of the structures of thinking that make reality invisible to us. These are monumental structures, large and central to our civilization. So my attack will seem ill-tempered and eccentric, a veering toward anarchy, the unsettling emergence of lady novelist as petroleuse. I have had time and occasion to note the disproportion between my objective and my resources. If I accomplish no more than to jar a pillar or crack a fresco, or totter a god or two, I hope no one will therefore take my assault as symbolic rather than as failed. If I had my way I would not leave one stone upon another.
I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured while we were all bemused by supposed monuments of value and intellect, vaults of bogus cultural riches. I feel the worth of my own life diminished by the tedious years I have spent acquiring competence in the arcana of mediocre invention, for all the world like one of those people who knows all there is to know about some defunct comic-book hero or television series. The grief borne home to others while I and my kind have been thus occupied lies on my conscience like a crime.
This book is written in a state of mind and spirit I could not have imagined before Sellafield presented itself to me, so grossly anomalous that I had to jettison almost every assumption I had before I could begin to make sense of it. My writing has perhaps taken too much of the stain of my anger and disappointment. I must ask the reader to pardon and assist me, by always keeping Sellafield in mind — Sellafield, which pours waste plutonium into the world’s natural environment, and bomb-grade plutonium into the world’s political environment. For money.
Part One
The first questions that arise in attempting to understand Sellafield, and more generally the nuclear and environmental policies of the British government, are: How have they gotten away with so much? and Why on earth would they want to get away with it? To put it in other terms, why should the relationship of those who govern Britain to its land and population be that of a shrewd adversary contriving to do harm for profit? For decades the British government has presided over the release of deadly toxins into its own environment, for money, using secrecy, scientism, and public trust or passivity to preclude resistance or criticism and to quiet fears. Such extraordinary behavior cannot have a motive in any usual sense, since it is in no one’s interest. It has, however, an etiology and a history, in which the institutions which expedite it and the relations it expresses evolve together. This is of more than casual interest to Americans, because there is no stronger cultural force than atavism. Our past is a good commentary on the future we seem to be preparing for ourselves.
It is often said that Britain has no written constitution. If a constitution is a body of law that defines the fundamental relations among the elements of a society, then Britain has an ancient one indeed, solidly encoded, enshrined in literature, in history, and in an array of institutions. The core of British culture is Poor Law, which emerged in the fourteenth century and was reformed once, in 1834, when it became the Victorians’ notorious New Poor Law. It remained in force until 1948. Then it was superseded by the Welfare State, in which its features were plainly discernible.
In essence, Poor Law restricted people who lived by their labor to the parish where they were born, and mandated assistance from the parish for those who were needy and deemed deserving of help, while wages were depressed to a level that made recourse to such help frequent. This often meant entering a poorhouse, institutions whose wretchedness made them, over centuries, objects of the minutest study to generations of philanthropists. Working people who were forced to accept parish assistance, and whose destitution was absolute, and who were found otherwise worthy of aid, surrendered whatever rights they may have had. Or the fact that they had no rights was thoroughly and ingeniously exploited once they accepted this status. Under the Old Poor Law, before the 1834 reforms that made the operation of the system more punitive and severe, child paupers, that is, the children of destitute parents, were given to employers, each with a little bonus to reward the employer for relieving the public of this burden. The children would be worked brutally, because with each new pauper child the employer received another little bonus. To starve such children was entirely in the interest of those who set them to work. Aside from all the work the child performed under duress, its death brought the reward that came with a new child. The authorities asserted an absolute right to disrupt families, and to expose young children to imprisonment and forced labor. The invasiveness of the Poor Laws was never impeded by the development of any system of assured legal rights, with which the entire institution would have been wholly incompatible and out of sympathy. Leslie Scarman, a member of the House of Lords and a legal authority, has written: “It is the helplessness of law in [the] face of the legislative sovereignty of Parliament which makes it difficult for the legal system to accommodate the concept of fundamental and inviolable human rights.”5 More to the point, the social history of Britain has never reflected any sense of the unconditional value of human lives or any respect for the modest baggage of person and property, the little circumference of inviolability on which personal rights depend.