Personal history


This page is to establish that Monbiot comes from an extremely  privileged background and is  a member of an extreme right wing, Conservative  Party  family  at the very heart of the British establishment.  That is  why he has a  public profile as a Guardian journalist . The old school tie. Fighting the class war from the top down, not the bottom up. There is no personal animosity in the following,  just an attempt to understand the source of Monbiot's extremely negative world view.


Like many of the leaders of  the  Green movement, Monbiot is descended from aristocracy.

His own ancestors lost their land over 200 years ago. Descended from the French Ducs de Coutard, they fled their estates outside Tours in the Loire Valley in 1789, when the local peasants, stirred by news of Revolution in Paris, began redistributing fields and occupying chateaux. The family slipped across to England and changed their name from Beaumont to Monbiot to evade revolutionary spies.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/occupying-the-moral-high-ground-1346850.html


Conservative  Party  family

Raymond Monbiot, George's father, is a businessman and heads the Conservative Party's trade and industry forum. He was Michael Heseltine's constituency chairman until they fell out over his leadership challenge to Margaret Thatcher. Rosalie Monbiot, George's mother, Tory leader of South Oxford district council for nine years, now serves on various local quangos and committees.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/enter-the-cleanshaven-adventurer-hero-1618791.html

Monbiot attended Stowe Public School

Annual full boarding fees:     £29,895 

http://www.isbi.com/viewschool.asp?school=2116-Stowe_School



Good at work, bad at sport, with heterodox opinions and a crippling stammer, I would have been bullied at any school, but at boarding school the bullying was remorseless and inescapable. Sometimes it lasted through much of the night. To have “sneaked” would only have made it worse, so from the age of eight I was thrown upon my own puny resources. It is hard to believe that the teachers didn’t know what was happening: perhaps they thought it was “character building”.

Less visible, but just as prevalent, was sexual abuse: new boys were routinely groped and occasionally sodomised by the prefects. Sexual assault was and possibly still is a feature of prep school life as innate as fried bread and British bulldogs.

http://www.monbiot.com/1998/03/26/acceptable-cruelty/


Oxford

I had an unhappy time at university, and I now regret having gone to Oxford, even though the zoology course I took was excellent. The culture did not suit me, and when I tried to join in I fell flat on my face, sometimes in a drunken stupor.

http://www.monbiot.com/about/



On May morning, I was distressed to see that the police had erected metal barriers along the parapet of Magdalen Bridge. Since time immemorial, Oxford students have demonstrated the principles of natural selection by jumping off the bridge and impaling themselves on old shopping trolleys. Now that this tradition has been brought to an end, it surely behoves the police to find some other means by which Nature might be permitted to run her course.

http://www.monbiot.com/2003/06/27/diary/

Monbiot's father


The father of George Monbiot, Britain's leading anti-globalisation campaigner, is Sir Raymond Monbiot CBE, the deputy chairman of the Conservative party and an executive who made the family's fortune working for Campbell's global canned-soup empire 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/jan/08/greenpolitics.conservatives


Raymond Monbiot, former vice chair of the Conservative Party was behind rule changes to exclude members from voting for the leader 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4220346.stm 



In the final days of IDS, Peter Oborne pointed out Ray has wider responsibilities than drawing up reform plans:

'It should be borne in mind that Monbiot is one of the men in grey suits whose heavy duty might be to hand the party leader a bottle of whisky and a revolver in certain circumstances.' 

http://daviddavisleader.blogspot.co.uk/2005_05_01_daviddavisleader_archive.html


George Monbiot speaking  at the Conservative party conference 2006 while his father was deputy leader:video 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,1887360,00.html




Sir Crispin Tickell (mentor)

Sir Crispin (Tickell) was President of the Royal Geographical Society from 1990 to 1993 and Warden of Green College, Oxford between 1990 and 1997, where he appointed George Monbiot and Norman Myers as Visiting Fellows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin_Tickell


Sir Crispin Tickell, member of the eugenics Huxley clan.

He is also a patron of population concern charity Population Matters, (formerly known as the Optimum Population Trust), and told Radio 4's Today programme that the ideal population for Britain could be around 20 million. As a member of Lord Rogers' Urban Task Force, Tickell counselled against spreading cities saying that we need denser living, that young adults should not expect to leave home straight away, and that older relatives could live in 'granny flats'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin_Tickell#Public_Impact 


“This book is rightly attracting attention, and raises issues that have long been neglected or deliberately buried … It should make people think; and as the author well says, if we do not like his ideas, then think of better ones. He believes that leaving things as they are is not a serious option. He makes his case.” Sir Crispin Tickell, Financial Times

http://www.monbiot.com/books/the-age-of-consent/