"A companies research group is needed to assess the viability of Tarmac and its subcontractors for targeting purposes, to point out facets of company law that can be used against contractors through the courts (eg is there a case for reporting Tarmac to the monopolies commission?), to discover the home addresses of management through companies house for use later in demonstrations, and to expose internal scandal about companies involved in the destruction of the Down that can be used in publicity against them"

Was this the inspiration for Corporate Watch? From an old anti-roads publication A New Strategy for Twyford (Anon, 1993, p11).

Having started researching Corporate Watch’s history for the Ten Year Anniversary edition of the newsletter it quickly became apparent that we have missed the anniversary by over a year and a half, the first CW publication having been published in May 1995. So here is a brief history of eleven, and a bit, years of Corporate Watch.

CW 1.0

The idea of Corporate Watch grew out of the anti-roads direct action movement of the early to mid 1990s. The same handful of companies kept turning up over and over again (Tarmac, Costain, Balfour Beatty) and people began to realise that there was a need to understand who these companies were, how they operated and where their weak points were. Armed with a little bit of information, protest tactics began to evolve, rather than just occupying a threatened piece of land and waiting for the construction companies to come and trash it, protesters started to take the campaign to the road builder’s doorstep and occupy their offices.

Corporate Watch’s short lived first incarnation published DBFO (see page 6 for more details) from a borrowed desk in the East Oxford Community Centre.

CW 2.0

After a break of more than a year (hence the confusion about when to start the CW history) the second coming of Corporate Watch was unleashed onto an unsuspecting world. Fresh from the aftermath of the Newbury Bypass campaign, Corporate Watch was back and this time it was a bi-monthly magazine. More importantly it was equipped with an analysis that corporations did more than just build roads. As well as articles on road building and construction companies, issue one had articles on McDonalds and the McLibel case, British Aerospace (now BAe Systems), BNFL, RTZ (now Rio Tinto group), and shareholder actions as well as a DIY guide to researching corporations.

Corporate Watch magazine ran to 12 issues between 1996 and 2000, expanding from 24 photocopied pages to 44 printed pages. Issues covered included a range of topics including corporations and the media, housing developments and planning, climate change, genetic engineering, the oil industry, globalisation, water privitisation, New Labour and Big Business, casualisation and corporate psychology. Alongside the magazine Corporate Watch also started to produce more detailed briefings on individual corporations and industry areas focusing particularly on the oil and GM crops industries.

Corporate Watch has had an online presence since early 1997, first piggy-backing on One World online’s website and then on its own www.corporatewatch.org in 1998. In 1999 CW launched the GM-Info website, an interactive map of the UK GM crops industry, field trials and all.

STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENTS

As well as churning out quality corporate critical research and publications, Corporate Watch 2.0 went through several important changes. It moved office twice; first in 1997 to a cramped windowless cellar in central Oxford and then in 1998 to our current building on Cherwell Street (now managed by the Ethical Property Company). Corporate Watch became a workers' cooperative in 1999, putting ideas of non-hierarchical organisation, horizontal structures and consensus decision making into practice. Perhaps most importantly for the organisation’s long-term survival it started to attract funding, first securing rent for the office and printing costs, and then moving towards subsistence wages for all staff.

CW 3.0

A complete change of staff between 2000/2001 and no one really fancying taking on a 44 page regular magazine saw a change of direction at Corporate Watch. What re-emerged was a slimmed down but more regular newsletter instead of the magazine and much more emphasis on the website, email news updates, and stand alone projects. The newsletter has now run to 34 copies since 2001 and is still going strong. The Babylonian Times column, a regular feature of Corporate Watch since the first magazine, was upgraded to its own blog in 2006 (www.corporatewatch.wordpress.com).

A major change to the website was the development of corporate profiles, detailed profiles of key companies in the arms, biotechnology, chemicals, food, construction, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, privatised services and public relations industries. Projects have included ongoing work on the influence of corporations on food and farming, corporations and the G8 2005, more work on the GM crops industry, nanotechnology, the peat industry, ID cards as well as analytical work on the structure and nature of corporations.

Corporate Watch is now a well-established organisation, but our allegiances remain firmly with the grassroots activist networks which we sprang from. While our appeal has become more mainstream, our analysis has remained consistently radical and or readers count on us not to pull our punches. Everything we produce is informed by our critique of corporate power and a passion for empowering people with the information they need to take action.

A CAUSE OF SOME CONFUSION

Way back in the mists of time, before everyone used the internet and email, around the same time as Corporate Watch 2.0 was getting off the ground in Oxford, another group of activists in San Francisco were having similar ideas and established a project also known as Corporate Watch. CorpWatch, as the US Corporate Watch is now known, is an excellent campaign resource, entirely independent of Corporate Watch (UK) and is well worth seeing. They can be found at: www.corpwatch.org. They must be ten as well, so happy anniversary to them too.