Why did the famous Scottish composer write the simple, but haunting piano piece Farewell to Stromness?
The answer: it was part of a well-orchestrated campaign against proposals to build a mine on the Orkney Islands.
The simple proposition was that if the mine was built, the world could bid farewell to Stromness, an ancient town that dates back at least to the sixteenth century when wars with France closed the English Channel and shipping instead went north.
Back then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, writing a hit classical music piece was an effective way into the heart of the establishment.
These days, it’s a question of getting the establishment to play its own game.
Does the UK government want to live by the high standards it sets itself, currently branded as ESG, but formerly known as CSR?
The campaigners outside the Mines & Money conference in London this year had a particular beef against Dalradian, the aspirant gold miner in Northern Ireland that is currently owned by a Canadian private equity group.
The same group of people have also been in evidence protesting at the offices of the Crown Estate and elsewhere in England and Northern Ireland.
What do they want?
No mining in the Sperrin Mountains in County Tyrone!
When do they want it?
Now!
The question is: will they get it.
Permitting mines is a tricky business in the UK, but for three completely unrelated reasons.
The first is that for a small country, where open space is at a premium, especially in the south of England where most of the major decisions get made, the default position is almost always to refuse permission to build anything on open land.
Yes, the government gets its own way with roads and other infrastructure hospitals. But it has to be careful what else it does, otherwise its MPs will get kicked out at the next election.
Paving paradise remains a hot-button issue well into the twenty-first century, nearly 50 years after Joni Mitchell took a more popular approach to issues broadly similar to the ones Peter Maxwell-Davies was also addressing.
The second issue is jobs, money and peoples’ livelihoods generally. The last significant mine that was permitted for production in the UK was the Cononish gold mine in the Grampians in Scotland.
Support for and against this mine broadly broke down on class lines.
Those that wanted the countryside unsullied were generally city folk who took day trips into the Grampians at weekends.
Those that wanted industry in the area, and by extension a gold mine, were largely local folk based in and around the nearby town of Tyndrum, who desperately needed the jobs to keep their town alive.
The locals won. And what is significant is that they won even though Cononish lies in a natural park. If mining can be shown demonstrably to be in the local interest, mines do get permitted in the UK.
The third issue is that when it comes to mining the UK government doesn’t know what it’s doing. Wags may argue that this doesn’t apply only to mining, so let’s say instead that mining is an area in which it particularly doesn’t know what it’s doing. And the reason is simple enough: that hardly any mining now takes place in the UK.
Remember how the miner’s strike divided the UK in the 1980s, and that the left in politics came out in support of the miners and the right were against?
That wouldn’t happen now, and certainly not in this particular case, which was a strike over the future of the coal industry.
Would any left-wing activist anywhere in the world now put themselves in the front line to keep a coal mine open? It seems doubtful. So times change, and so do fashions in environmentalist and activist causes.
Be that as it may, by decimating its own mining industry in the 1980s, the UK also wiped out any expertise it had at a governmental level when it came to the granting of licences and permitting, or otherwise, new projects.
So what will happen with Dalradian?
The smart money must be saying that if the ongoing protest movement continues to make as much noise as it has been making, then mine development will be shelved.
Dalradian’s own website is much given over to citing the benefits the project may bring to the Sperrin Mountains and even invites visitors to customise their own letter in support.
But all that will be of little avail if the protests continue.
Why? Because the mining industry itself has now woken up to the existential threat that ESG poses.
On one level, mining will always happen, because the commodities it provides will always be needed.
But on another level, if ESG concerns are not met, no-one will ever be allowed to make any money out of it again.
So, the wider industry won’t hesitate to throw the Dalradian project to the wolves if it deems it unable to justify itself in ESG terms.
And the simplest and arguably the most important way for a mine to do that is to win the locals over to its side. That’s what Scotgold did at Cononish, and it was a long and painstaking process.
At this stage, it seems likely that this is what the new generation of aspiring lithium and tin miners in Cornwall and Devon will also do.
Dalradian, though, is more of an even bet.
The methods of kyboshing a mining project may have changed since Peter Maxwell-Davies’s day, but the prevalence of information nowadays means that if anything an anti-mining movement can shout more loudly than ever.