Peace and Nuclear Affairs Officer

For those of you who just can't get enough of this Blog, you can now purchase my overlong and quite honestly fairly tedious memoirs for a purely nominal price online.

Here is an extract from those memoirs - unusually, not involving trade union activity - about one of the best jobs which I, or anyone else, has ever been paid to do;

With the implementation of the Service Plan for DEHCS, my job was in a “generic reduction” group. Five current roles of Research Officer were being reduced to three with the merger of two sections. One of my fellow Research Officers, who was also an activist in the Black Workers Group, felt that the detail of the proposals placed himself and another Black colleague at a disadvantage and - bizarrely - circulated memos around the Department accusing me personally of racism.

It turned out that my accuser was, sadly, experiencing something of a breakdown, which simply gave me my first experience of facing an allegation of racism (something which was rather more common in the rough and tumble of the late 1980s and early 90s than it is in the po-faced twenty-first century). In the event, whilst my job was at risk I was able to apply, as a redeployee, for a fascinating (and better paid) alternative job.

Late in 1988 I became the fourth - and final - person to hold the post of Peace and Nuclear Affairs Officer (PNAO), a job created a few years before to resource and implement Lambeth Council’s Nuclear Free Zone policy. I had been offered the post - on a temporary “acting-up” basis - the year before, when a previous postholder had taken leave, but had declined the offer because the NALGO branch had had - at that time - a policy against accepting “acting-up” appointments.

For a long-standing peace activist, this was something of a dream job which entailed, amongst other things, the production and distribution of leaflets warning local residents of the risks from the nuclear waste trains that travelled regularly through the borough and - most amusingly - complying with the Council’s statutory duty to comment upon the civil defence plans being prepared by emergency planners at the London Fire and Civil Defence Authority (LFCDA) (as it then was).

After a civil defence exercise in the early 1980s had been disrupted by the refusal of many Labour Councils to participate in the absurdity of planning to govern what would have been left after a nuclear holocaust, the Tories had legislated to compel cooperation by local Councils with preparation for civil defence in the event of nuclear war.

Lambeth - along with many other Nuclear Free Local Authorities - adopted a policy of “creative compliance” with this legislation, which meant that someone had to read every detail of the - utterly incredible - plans drawn up by the LFCDA in order to comment critically upon them, whilst publicising to local people the futility of the Government’s policy to plan for survival from nuclear war. 

I had the good fortune to be that someone, meaning that I was paid to engage in the sort of political activity which I had been participating in voluntarily in my own time since I had been a teenager in Brighton.