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A SECRET group of developed nations conspired to limit the effectiveness of
the UN’s first conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. The
existence of this cabal, known as the Brussels group, is revealed in 30-year-old
British government records which were kept secret until this week.

The Stockholm conference was set up in response to rising concern about
damage to the environment. It ended with a ringing declaration of the need to
protect the natural world, and the UN Environment Programme was set up as a
result.

But the ambitious aims of the conference organisers, who included Maurice
Strong, the first director-general of UNEP, were held in check by the activities
of the Brussels group, which included Britain, the US, Germany, Italy, Belgium,
the Netherlands and France.

The group was “an unofficial policy-making body to concert the views of the
principal governments concerned”, according to a note of one of the group’s
first meetings written by a civil servant in the British Foreign and
Commonwealth Office. “It will have to remain informal and confidential.” This
meeting took place in July 1971, nearly a year before the Stockholm conference
opened.

Many of the arguments the group employed would sound familiar to today’s
anti-globalisation protesters. The group was concerned that environmental
regulations would restrict trade and also wanted to stop UNEP having a large
budget to spend as it saw fit. Foreign Office papers say the group “made real
progress on this difficult problem”, though without specifying how this was
done.

The group seemed unconcerned about what its stance would mean for poorer
countries. Its chief aim in the diplomatic jockeying during the run-up to
Stockholm was for developed countries to get what they wanted “and perhaps be
less worried about making it a success for developing countries”.

This unalloyed self-interest won it few friends, and the notes record that
Strong had already been grumbling about the group’s activities. “We may get some
criticism from the Swedes and others [and] we must be careful when expanding the
group not to include awkward bedfellows,” the note adds.

A more concrete idea of the group’s aims can be gleaned from a note laying
out Britain’s position prior to a secret meeting in Geneva in December 1971, one
of a number of such meetings in the run-up to Stockholm. Written by an official
in what was then the Department of the Environment, it says that Britain wanted
to restrict the scope of the Stockholm conference and reduce the number of
proposals for action. In an indirect reference to what would later become UNEP,
the paper says a “new and expensive international organisation must be avoided,
but a small effective central coordinating mechanism…would not be welcome but
is probably inevitable”.

It then goes on to detail the subjects that Britain wanted left out of the
Stockholm action plans. At the top of the list were controls on sonic booms from
aircraft and pollution in the upper atmosphere. These measures would have
seriously damaged the economics of the Anglo-French supersonic airliner,
Concorde.

At the time, Concorde was already in deep trouble, with only the British and
French national airlines likely to buy it, and earlier in the year the British
Cabinet had discussed axing the plane. Arguments raged about whether the noisy
plane would be allowed to land in New York. Controls on sonic booms could have
sounded its death knell.

The British government was also firmly opposed to any international standards
regulating environmental quality or polluting emissions. It feared that any
international agreement might force it to clean up its act. “Universal
guidelines…could cause moral pressure for compliance with philosophies of
doubtful validity or benefit,” say the papers.

Despite the efforts of the Brussels group, the Stockholm conference is widely
recognised to have been a watershed. Though the group’s lobbying ensured the
conference focused on only a limited number of subjects, such as transboundary
pollution, UNEP later tackled a wider range of topics such as the problems of
deforestation and urbanisation.