Environment minister pied as he tried to GreenWash the governments destructive environmental policies.

On 2 Febuary at around 3pm, a group of peo­ple under the guise of fic­tion­al com­pa­ny ‘Green­wash & Co’, did a satir­i­cal per­for­mance at a talk being giv­en by the cur­rent UK min­is­ter for the envi­ron­ment, David Miliband, at Edin­burgh Uni­ver­si­ty. The min­is­ter was then pied in the face by a lone pie-bear­er in an unre­lat­ed inci­dent.

One Mem­ber of Green­Wash & co said
“We are here to put a green sheen over the ter­ri­ble envi­ron­men­tal track record of the New Labour gov­ern­ment. Our assis­tance was thought to be par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant giv­en the pres­ence of the Rt Hon. Mr Miliband as fig­ure­head of the gov­ern­men­t’s lat­est wave of envi­ron­men­tal spin and green rhetoric. With air­port expan­sions, road build­ing schemes and con­tin­ued ille­gal for­eign pol­i­cy in the scram­ble for oil con­trol, the gov­ern­ment need all the help they can get in green­ing up their image.”

Anoth­er Mem­ber of Green­Wash & co said
“Green­wash has become a wide­spread and very harm­ful issue in the fight for envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Now any polit­i­cal body or cor­po­ra­tion can reel off a few well-placed buzz­words or imple­ment an insub­stan­tial pol­i­cy and appear ‘green’ with­out real­ly hav­ing to make any seri­ous changes. This is lulling peo­ple into a false sense of secu­ri­ty. The pur­pose of protests like this is to show peo­ple what lies beneath the rhetoric and to wake up to the in-action and spin that sur­rounds us regard­ing envi­ron­men­tal issues. Ques­tion every­thing: ‘green’ is not always what it seems.”

Green­Wash & Co use satire and pan­tomime to per­form a new kind of polit­i­cal protest through clown­ing and audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion. They aim to change the grounds upon which protest is con­duct­ed by per­form­ing at a cul­tur­al lev­el and mock­ing exist­ing pow­er struc­tures so as to reveal their con­tra­dic­tions, untruths, spin and con­trol. They have a strict­ly non-vio­lent phi­los­o­phy and always try to keep things as light heart­ed as pos­si­ble despite the incred­i­ble seri­ous­ness of issues like cli­mate change.

The group stormed the talk with a ban­ner say­ing “GREENWASH pol­lut­ing real­i­ty with rhetoric” and got straight to work clean­ing all of those dirty gov­ern­ment poli­cies and brush­ing all of our car­bon under the car­pet (through the car­bon mar­ket). The crowd cheered at the well humoured the­atrics but after a few min­utes as the secu­ri­ty amassed, the per­form­ers made a dig­ni­fied exit to the applause of the crowd.

Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in a total­ly unre­lat­ed inci­dent an autonomous indi­vid­ual call­ing him­self Colonel Crust used the the­atrics as a dis­trac­tion to thrust a veg­an short-crust pas­try con­fec­tion into the well kept hair of Rt Hon Mil­liband. Wit­ness­es said the min­is­ter appeared dis­pleased until he tast­ed the bright green cus­tard and was present­ly sur­prised by the qual­i­ty of the pie.

You can con­tact David Mil­liband to con­grat­u­late him for his Green-wash­ing abil­i­ties via his email address, david.miliband (at) defra.gsi.gov.uk