In 2002, Leeds’ Jubilee Debt Campaign and Trade Justice Movement groups made an unprecedented move; they merged. After six years of leading action on the Jubilee 2000 campaign, Leeds debt campaigners were looking for a new direction. With international trade rocketing up the development community’s agenda, the Trade Justice Movement group was growing in strength and looking for even more support for the cause. After much discussion and debate the two groups agreed they had more to gain by working together than apart, and out of this union Tidal was born.

Back then Tidal stood for Trade Injustice and Debt Action Leeds. The fledgling group spent a great deal of time just getting set up as an organisation, but they did find time to squeeze in a lobby of parliament, a benefit concert for the Jubilee Debt Campaign and a publicity stunt for access to water in Dortmund Square.

By 2003 Tidal was in full flow. With a campaign focus on GATS, events included two public meetings on the issue, a street theatre action with WDM, and a lobby and publicity stunt with 4 Leeds MPs and a giant set of scales! Members of the legendary Leeds cycling crews the Freedom Rickshaw Riders and Speedy Cyclists rode to the G8 summit in Evian, France. Also, remembering that a revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having, TIDAL threw a party to celebrate 5 years since the human chain surrounded the G8 in Birmingham.

This was also the year Tidal launched arguably its most successful campaign ever – the campaign to make Leeds a Fairtrade City. Starting by asking our supporters to send a tear-off slip included in the Tidal newsletter to their councillors, campaigners lobbied the council hard to adopt the new standard. Amazingly, less than a year after the campaign had been launched, Leeds was declared a Fairtrade City on the 5th March 2004. At the time the award made Leeds the largest Fairtrade City in the country.

2004 was by no means a quiet year – we organised a Fairtrade Fiesta at the Civic Hall, a meeting on the Tobin Tax, a World Debt Day penalty shoot-out stunt, lobbied Hilary Benn and held Cloth, a Fairtrade fashion show – yet it seemed tame in comparison with the following one…

2005 was the year of Make Poverty History. An exciting and exhausting year for development campaigners, Tidal led the charge in promoting the campaign in Leeds. The movement was on fire that year, pulling out all the stops to promote the highest-profile development campaign since Jubilee 2000.

Events organised ranged from lobbying Hilary Benn in February, a Fairtrade Fun Day at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the ‘Stay Up for Trade Justice‘ vigil in Holy Trinity Church, to a winter vigil outside the hotel housing the EU’s Development Ministers.

The centrepiece of the year had to be the massive summer march in Edinburgh. Not only did some campaigners cycle from Leeds to Edinburgh – some via Tanzania! – to get there, the rest of Leeds’ activists took one of Tidal’s two specially chartered trains. In total we transported over 1,500 people to the march!

As if all that wasn’t enough, Leeds was awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award by the Fairtrade Foundation for its 2005 Fairtrade Fortnight, and the Surge speaker’s project was launched. Surge was a three-year project funded by DfID to allow Tidal to recruit, train and support speakers on international development issues. As you can imagine, our volunteers were in high demand that year…

In 2006 the movement took a collective break as it rested from the madness of Make Poverty History, took stock of its position and planned for the future. A rally in the summer and Tea Party in the winter kept the Make Poverty History flame burning, but increasingly energy was being poured into tackling the hot new development issue; climate change.

Keen to broaden our knowledge, we invited the Director of the newly formed Stop Climate Chaos Coalition to come up to Leeds and talk to us about the links between poverty and climate change. Inspired by what we heard, we founded Stop Climate Chaos Leeds, and that year held a public meeting on the issue and took 40 campaigners to November’s iCount rally in London.

2007 saw Tidal organise everything from an EPA day of action and lobby of a local MEP to supporting Christian Aid’s Cut the Carbon march and organising Cloth 07, a Fairtrade fashion show. Stop Climate Chaos Leeds became increasingly active, organising a vigil on Briggate, holding a fundraising gig at the Brudenell Social Club, and even finding funding for a one day a week member of staff.

By 2008 both trade and debt were low on the agenda for most national development agencies, but Tidal kept working to make sure the issues were not forgotten in Leeds. We had a packed World Debt Week with a publicity stunt, talk by a campaigner from the global south, and took a coachload of people to Journey to Justice, the Jubilee Debt Campaign’s conference on debt relief. Whilst we also organised a party to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday in The Light and hosted a session in the Schumacher North Conference, 2008 really belonged to Stop Climate Chaos Leeds.

Kicking off with a stunt on the Millennium Square ice rink, SCCL went on to encourage dozens of responses to the Leeds City Council Climate Change Strategy consultation, hold a fundraising ‘Play in a Day’, host two cafés on climate change, flashmob Briggate with the Leeds Freeze, and cap off the year with taking a coachload of people to the National Climate March in London.

2009 was shaping up to be a similar year, but when we heard that Leeds Bradford Airport had submitted proposals to expand its terminal we threw all other plans out the window. With Friends of the Earth, Leeds World Development Movement and dozens of grassroots campaigners we launched the No Leeds Bradford Airport Expansion campaign. Though the expansion itself ultimately went ahead, we won important concessions on curbing the growth of the airport and came within a single vote of total success, an incredible feat given the vested interests we were up against.

As well as supporting the Leeds premier of climate change docu-drama The Age of Stupid and helping run the Engage + Change day of action, we also collaborated with CAFOD, Christian Aid and Leeds Justice and Peace Commission to charter and fill a train with 700 activists to The Wave climate march.

In between all of this campaigning, an enormous amount of work was going on behind the scenes to determine the futures of Tidal and Stop Climate Chaos Leeds. We realised that we shared the same values and could be more effective if we shared our resources, so mimicking the Leeds Jubilee 2000 and Trade Justice groups’ decision almost a decade ago we decided to merge the two groups. We also realised that the issues of trade, debt and climate change were impossible to solve without addressing other issues of global justice like biodiversity, peak oil, and sustainability, so we broadened the remit of our work accordingly.

Finally, we realised that by ourselves it would be impossible to achieve the change we wanted in Leeds. But if we enabled activists to work together, to work more effectively, and we helped more people become activists in the first place, then together we might just be able to create the change we need.

And so we find ourselves in 2010. Now simply ‘Tidal’, we work to coordinate, support and grow global justice activism in Leeds. We’ve developed this website and publish an e-update to keep Leeds activists connected to one another, and are helping groups work together strategically on the general election. But perhaps our most important area of work this year will be to lead the creation of a plan for the Leeds global justice movement. Together we must agree how we will work together and what we want to achieve together over the next few years. This process will be difficult, provocative and challenging, but the outcome of having a united, well-resourced and strategic movement will make the effort well worth it.

So here it is, eight years of Tidal on one page. We prepared this to satisfy curious onlookers, to reflect on where we’ve been, and to record for posterity our story. Oh, and after all that if you’re still hungry for more detail, click here to view eight years’ worth of newsletters.