The activist daughter and her oil executive father
A former oil executive tells Joe Shute how his daughter’s night in the cells made him change his mind about airport expansion
Among the protesters lined up in front of Willesden magistrates’ court this week was a man with an unexpected CV. Aged 61, with thinning hair, he waved his placard and chanted with a zeal belying both his years and background.
“No ifs, no buts, no new runways,” he shouted from the court steps in clipped Oxbridge tones, as lawyers, defendants and witnesses trooped in.
This was no die-hard climate warrior, but Tim Sanderson, a former BP oil executive who spent a large part of his high-flying career devising how best to exploit the environment for commercial gain.
His daughter, Rebecca, is one of 13 people on trial for allegedly chaining themselves together on a Heathrow runway last summer in protest at the proposed expansion of the airport. The judge presiding over the case is expected to deliver a verdict on Monday on charges of aggravated trespass and entering an aerodrome without permission.
In a statement read outside court by Rebecca, 28, the group said: “We are all pleading not guilty, as our actions were a reasonable, proportionate and justified response to the scale of the problem of climate change, a problem that aviation contributes massively to as the fastest-growing source of carbon emissions.”
Sitting alongside Rebecca in the living room of the family’s large and resolutely middle-class home in Acton, west London, Sanderson admits to a sense of incredulity at his transition from oilman to activist. His unnecessarily large” BMW 5-series is parked outside.
Does he worry what former colleagues will think of this new identity? “No, not at all.” So does he feel like a hypocrite? “Every now and then.”
In the middle of the night on July 13 last year, members of the Plane Stupid group allegedly cut a hole in a perimeter fence at Heathrow Airport before blockading a runway. The ensuing demonstration led to the cancellation of 22 flights and worldwide delays. The first that Sanderson and his wife Jenny, a music teacher, heard of the alleged involvement of the eldest of their four daughters was when she returned home after a night in the cells.
“It came as a complete surprise,” he says. “It was a drawing-of-breath moment as I realised the seriousness of the situation. But it turned quite rapidly to a certain reluctant pride when I saw how sincere she was.”
Rebecca studied psychology at Edinburgh University, and now lives with her partner in Wales, where she works as a social science researcher.
Her parents’ house, however, lies beneath the Heathrow flight path, and as we speak the drone of aeroplanes is audible. “It becomes background noise after a while,” she says.
“We’re in the 20-mile radius of Heathrow, where statistically about 31 deaths a year happen [due to air pollution]. I was quite shocked when I found out that statistic contained my family house where I grew up.”
Her interest in the aviation industry’s impact on the environment, which began while she was at university, led to “difficult dinner conversations every now and then”, and during our interview she sighs whenever her father defends the environmental credentials of oil multinationals.
What of her own well-to-do background, a charge often levelled at activists? “It’s an easy way to do a character assassination,” she says. “But what characterises activists is they care about the issues, rather than have wealthy parents.” Of her father’s unexpected support, she says she is “immensely proud”.
“I never expected to see my dad waving a ‘No third runway’ banner outside a court.”
It would be unfair to depict her father’s career as one entirely preoccupied with profit over the environment. After leaving Oxford with a degree in Philosophy and Physics ,he worked for a spell with the British Antarctic Survey, where in 1979 he published a landmark paper on ice sheet melt leading to sea level rise, which was one of the first to predict the impact of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
And shortly after joining BP, at a cocktail party for young company high-fliers, he recalls arguing with a senior executive about the scientific evidence supporting climate change. The man suggested that Sanderson was a hypocrite for driving a company car, only to be told that the young employee had refused one, preferring a bicycle instead.
But after Rebecca was born, and the family moved to Aberdeen, his principles faltered, and before long he was enjoying the perks of being a top executive, including having a top-ofthe-range company BMW.
Sanderson recognises the gap between his thoughts and deeds, but puts this down to human fallibility.
“One of the big contradictions that I see about climate change and burning fossil fuels is that we all read about the threat and accept the scientific evidence,” he says. “We earnestly switch off our mobile phone chargers and half fill the electric kettle assiduously – and then we go on a long-distance drive or take a plane to New Zealand and burn up all those savings in a matter of minutes.”
Sanderson’s change of tack followed a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 1995. “It gives me some restrictions and freedoms,” he says. “It’s enabled me to do things I really wanted to do.”
One of those things is to reboot his own environmental concerns. “I find the young generation has a sincerity and zeal lacking in my own generation,” he says.
“I think the young generation can show us you can believe something and act in the way you believe you should act. I feel very strongly, with my generation, that we all feel one way but act another.”
Sanderson likes to equate the Heathrow protest to the scene in Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children, where the youngsters step on to the tracks and wave red bloomers at a passing train to avert it from disaster. In the following chapter, the children are praised for their actions despite trespassing on the line.
Whether the judge agrees with Sanderson remains to be seen. But whatever happens to the Heathrow 13, the ranks of future airport expansion protests will be bolstered by one fruity voice – from the twilight, the oilman cometh.
‘Do I worry what former colleagues think of my new identity? Not at all’ ‘This generation has a sincerity and zeal that’s lacking in my own generation’