Retired teacher. Lives in North West London. Grew up in Thurrock in the 1950's and 60's and consequently spent the first 18 years of his life breathing air that was 60% cement. Active member of the National Education Union (formerly NUT) and Labour Party.
Before anyone gets any impression that the Selby by election represents a mass move endorsement of Labour’s current attempt to drift into office on the back of Conservative unpopularity, all of the by elections on July 20th should provide food for thought.
Selby has been presented as the clearest evidence of a potential landslide, and much made of the swing from Tory to Labour. When you look at actual voters, however, its clear that there is no massive surge of Labour support, with a slight increase on the votes achieved in the bleak midwinter of 2019, but a drop from the high watermark of Corbynism in 2017. This indicates that Labour was able to mobilise some of its core vote in this constituency, but not all of it.
The swing is accounted for by the collapse of the Tory vote, from 33,995 in 2019 to 12,295 this week. A drop of almost two thirds.
A further indication that it is antipathy to the Tories that is driving these results rather than positive support for Labour is show by the votes in Somerset and Frome, where the Conservative vote also plummeted by two thirds, from 33,231 to 10,179.
Its quite clear that most of Labour’s previous voters in this constituency voted for the Lib Dems, whose 13,325 voters in 2017 were barely 3% ahead of Labour’s 10,998. The Labour vote is now less than a tenth of what it was then and is now a quarter of the vote achieved by the Greens, whose vote doubled.
In Uxbridge, the Labour vote was down about a quarter on both 2017 and 2019 from over 18,000 in both years to 13,470.
The Conservative vote, however, dropped by a “only” a half from 25,351 to 13,965. If this is the straw of comfort that the Conservatives are grasping at, it shows how desperate their situation is.
The notion, now being energetically pushed by the Labour leadership, that the Uxbridge result shows the need to back off from any policy that might scare off current Conservative voters is belied by the utter failure to motivate and mobilise Labour’s potential vote in these constituencies. The stances taken on issues like the two child cap on child benefit, that led to the moniker “Sir Kid Starver” circulating all across social media, will hardly have driven our people to the polls with any enthusiasm.
And, as for the ULEZ, this post from Open Democracy indicates that it was the failure to fight for it that was one of the factors that kept potential Labour supporters at home, the opposite of the conclusion that the Party leadership is so eager to draw. As they put it.
…Russell Warfield, a campaigner with the environmental group Possible says – is that there is a “hardened rump” of Conservative, anti-ULEZ, pro-car voters in the outer-London boroughs. And we already knew that: polling shows that, while a majority of Londoners back ULEZ expansion, most Tories oppose it.
Specific polling in a group of London boroughs where councils are taking legal action against Sadiq Khan over the scheme – including Hillingdon, which overlaps with Uxbridge and South Ruislip – found a majority of people in these areas who are deeply concerned about air pollution. (My emphasis)
Just as there is a block of anti-ULEZ people capable of being mobilised by the Tories, there is a group of pro-ULEZ people that Labour could have mobilised had they tried. But instead, the party’s candidate came out against the scheme, Starmer sat on the fence, and the potential Labour voters sat at home.
This poster is displayed on the side of the Dutch Embassy in Moscow and shows the number of people killed in the Donbass between 2014 and 2022.If you walk down the Arbat in the same city you will see hundreds of poster sized billboards memorialising the children killed by Ukrainian shelling into the Donbass in that time. If you go to Donetsk City, you will see a memorial garden for these children. That shelling continues dailyeven now.
Framing an argument to bury the truth
There is a manipulative form of polemic that starts with a particular image, or emotive incident, that is guaranteed to mobilise an empathetic emotional response from a viewer or reader. If you watch BBC News reports on Ukraine, and think about what they are doing as well as what they are saying (and not saying) you will see this in an almost perfect form. Everything is geared to eliciting an emotional, sympathetic response on the calculation that – because emotion always trumps reason – this will then blot out questions about why these events are taking place; because it will be taken for granted who is to blame.
You might argue that that’s what I’ve done here, but images like that above will never appear on the BBC, or in the Guardian, because its the wrong sort of emotional response. The wrong dead children. The wrong sympathy. None of these kids will have Fergal Keane deployed, with sad backing music and beautifully filmed mordant images of grieving parents, your heart strings will not be expertly plucked to resonate with theirs. But they are just as dead. And the imposition of an ideological no fly zone, through the current banning of RT and policing of social media, means that you are very unlikely to see them anywhere else either. But they are just as real. So, this is just a small challenging counter image to stick onto the gigantic montage of images that have created the one sided picture that you’ve been exposed to already.
And if the deaths of those poor people in the pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk this week is to be taken as justification and fuel for sacrificing even more people to pursue this war with an enhanced sense of moral indignation; is that not equally true for the people in Donetsk?
Because in narrative framing, anything that is out of sight is out of mind. In the case of wars, some people’s deaths are framed as their just deserts because they have the misfortune to belong to a people or state targeted by ours. As the infamous Sun headline crowing over Croatia’s ethnic cleansing of the Krajina in the Yugoslav wars put it, “Serbs you right”.
The Climate Movement and truth
There is now a move to align the climate movement in the Global North/West with the war aims of NATO. A press conference in Kyiv at the end of June, with President Zelensky, Mary Robinson and Greta Thunberg, announced a European body to evaluate “the environmental damage resulting from the war, formulating mechanisms to hold Russia accountable and undertaking efforts to restore Ukraine’s ecology”.
A Commission to examine the ecological damage done by the war as such is, however, not what this Commission is. Such a Commission would have to recognise that the way to stop the ecological damage is to end the war. NATO does not, yet, want to do that, so this Commission is structured to attribute all the blame to one side. Participants in this Commission from the climate movement, whatever their intentions, will find themselves providing a moral fuel to continue the war with single minded righteousness: thereby providing a thin green fig leaf for the most destructive militaries in the world. These are now rapidly expanding and increasing their carbon boot print to an unprecedented degree; and intend to use it. This Commission’s effect will be to prolong the war; thereby generating ever greater ecological damage and human loss.
A frame that aims to “hold Russia”… and only Russia…“accountable” means that ecological damage committed by Ukraine or NATO are either outside their purview, or considered not to exist.
Shells and missiles fired by the Ukrainian armed forces are no more ecologically benign than those fired by the Russians. In the case of the depleted uranium shells supplied for British Conqueror tanks, they can be worse. Ignoring this requires a level of cognitive dissonance that can only be sustained by an act of intense will; or generated by a red mist of moral indignation – generated by the the narrative framing above – sufficient to enable people to look straight at it, and not see it.
Anyone arguing that any ecological damage is ultimately the Russians’ fault “because they invaded” should not forget that this war started in 2014; when the Ukrainian Air Force bombed Donetsk city, opting for a military solution to a political crisis. Does anyone doubt that this would have led the Kyiv government being universally denounced in the West as a regime that “bombs its own people” had they been US opponents?
If you think that the road to peace runs through a Ukrainian victory, have another look at the picture of that girl in the ruins in Donetsk, and the picture of the Crimean Theatre students below, and reflect on the fact that the full realisation of Ukrainian/NATO war aims will involve the ethnic cleansing of their whole region; and that Kyiv has been completely explicit about that.
Theatre students in Simferopol Crimea wearing orange and black ribbons and singing songs on Victory Day May 6th 2023. Photo Dan Kovalic. For a view of how Crimea broke from Ukraine in 2014 and what it is like now see Dan’s article with Rick Sterling here.
President Zelensky was quite blunt that this Commission will be “support for Ukraine”, in the context in of him rejecting any prospect of a ceasefire and frozen conflict and promising to continue the war regardless of the cost. That cost will be measured in escalating environmental damage and human lives and the devastation of his country. The remark of the US officer in Vietnam who remarked that “in order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it” haunts his speeches.
Collusion in confusion
Participation in a Commission on partisan lines will by definition require collusion with an a priori propagandist interpretation of any event. Four extreme examples of this that pass for conventional wisdom in the West so far.
The oft repeated narrative that the Russians were shelling the Zaporozhe nuclear power plant, when it was occupied by their own troops. Even after the Ukrainians admitted they were doing it, the media here still tried to muddy the waters. Ukraine being not only willing to shell a nuclear power station but having actually done it is not something they want us to dwell on. Especially now. The statement from President Zelensky at that press conference with Thunberg and Robinson alleging a Russian plan to blow up the Zaporozhe power station in the coming weeks is particularly alarming in this context; because it might be a cover to resume the shelling – with the blame preemptively allocated -as a pivot for global outrage and mobilisation, as argued by Dmitriy Kovalevich here.*
The bizarre accusation that the Russians blew up their own Nordstream gas pipelines releasing up to 350,000 tonnes of methane, doing an enormous amount of environmental damage. It has been a US aim to cut Europe off from Russian gas supplies for over a decade; well before the war. Blocking the certification of Nordstream 2 in February 2022 was a big victory for them. But only a provisional one, because the Russians remained in control of the pipelines and any peace settlement would see them turned back on. Blowing them up rules that out and stops the Russians having that option. It takes peculiar mental gymnastics to imagine that the Russians would destroy their own infrastructure to hand a geopolitical advantage to the United States. Articles by Seymour Hersch detailing US involvement have been largely suppressed in the media here.
The case of the ammonia pipeline blown up in Kharkiv is similar, in that the flow of ammonia from Russia to the West had been shut down by the Russians weeks previously as a tit for tat for the West not fulfilling its obligations under the Russia- Ukraine grain/fertilizer deal; so blowing it up would only make sense for a force trying to cut all potential trade between Russia and the West.
Claims from the UK Ministry of Defence that the depleted uranium shells they have supplied with their Conqueror tanks are really nothing to worry about, repeated in the media with a straight face. The use of these munitions in Iraq has had horrific impacts. For example The Falluja Hospital’s birth defects Facebook page, where medical staff catalogue cases, reveals the striking diversity and quantity of congenital anomalies. Babies in Falluja are born with hydrocephaly, cleft palates, tumors, elongated heads, overgrown limbs, short limbs and malformed ears, noses and spines. The use of these shells will poison wherever they are used in Ukraine for years after the guns fall silent, while the British politicians who supplied them have roads named after them in Kyiv.
A further example and exemplar of the approach that we are likely to see more of in the framework of this Commission is a recent article on Open Democracy Khakhovska dam destruction is part of the climate emergency. This makes the valid point that the dam’s collapse is environmentally disastrous, but then rests the gigantic accusation of “ecocide” on a conditional presumption, that the destruction of the dam is “likely to have been the work of Russian forces”. “Likely”. Not definitely. Not even probably.
“Likely”. So, how likely? If your brief is that all ecocide is carried out by the Russians, it becomes necessary not even to ask this question; allowing carte blanche to the Ukrainian/NATO side to do their worst and just attribute the consequences to the other side. “Likely” is a small word, easily passed on from when reading at speed, but it is an admission that everything that follows by way of emotional mobilisation could very well be applied against the cause the author supports if readers allow themselves to think and question a bit.
Because its a matter of public record that the Ukrainian armed forces have been shelling and firing HIMARS missiles at this dam for months.
Their military and political leaders hastened to delete posts bragging about doing so as soon as it was breached, but many of them have been recorded and are in the public domain.
Taking a step back, there are three possibilities for how this dam was destroyed. Longer analyses of this can be read here and here, but in a brief summary these are the theories.
The Russians blew up the dam to enable them to withdraw troops from the riverside to redeploy them against the main expected thrust of the Ukrainian army offensive further east; even though this would deplete water supplies to the Crimea. Resecuring this supply after Ukraine cut it off has been one of their main military objectives, and remains one. So, it would be an oddly self destructive to imperil it. It has also been reported, from Ukrainian sources, that Russian troops dug in on the east bank of the Dnieper were taken by surprise by the inundation; which would not be likely if their command were responsible for blowing the dam. More to the point, the Russians were in control of the dam. All they had to do to create a flood would be to open the sluice gates. No need to blow it up, so, why do so?
The Ukrainians blew it up to wash away Russian minefields and defensive positions on the lower lying eastern bank of the river. Their earlier attempts to do so, to cut off the Russian forces on the West Bank before their withdrawal last Autumn, are well publicised. So, whatever the case in this instance, it was something they were prepared to do, it was well within their moral compass, with all the consequences that flow from that. They also appear to have been releasing water from dams higher up the Dnieper in order to keep the flood going; which is odd behaviour by anyone trying to minimise damage.
The dam had been so weakened by the long term effects of the shelling and missile attacks on it that a build up of pressure from a greater volume of water building up behind it in the run up to the breach was too much for it; and both the Russians and Ukrainians have had to improvise a response.
Its hard to see the first option as anything other than the least “likely”, but judge it for yourself.
The media narrative in the UK, however, is not characterised by rational analysis or balanced judgement. The sort of spluttering rage you get from Simon Tisdall in the Observer is more characteristic;. “Of course the Russians did it…Only this malevolent Kremlin regime would wilfully inflict human and environmental havoc on so vast a scale…That’s what they do, these mobsters.” The sound of a man shouting down his own doubts because, as he admits “It’s impossible to prove at this point.” Obviously also a man with no memory of the 4.5 million people killed by the “War on Terror”, nor the far greater environmental destruction in Iraq inflicted by us and our US allies nor, more recently Yemen, thanks partly to the expert training provided by the RAF and RN to their Saudi counterparts; not to mention the after sales service provided by BAE systems making sure that their missiles were accurately targeted.
That’s why the argument on Open Democracy that “it is not enough to just lobby against fossil fuel extraction; we must recognise that the end of Russian imperialism is key to the struggle for climate justice” is so disoriented. It lets the the US and its allies, the world’s dominant imperialism, with the biggest military carbon boot print, completely off the hook to such a degree that it lines up behind its war aims. Anyone who thinks that the route away from the environmental damage caused by this war is via a Ukrainian/NATO victory has lost touch with reality; both in the concrete practical terms of the enormous human and environmental damage that would be required to secure one, and the horrendous consequences for the world of a triumphant retooled US alliance seeking to partition the Russian Federation, take charge of its fossil fuel reserves, really get stuck into oil and gas extraction in the Arctic, and get ready for the war in the South China Sea they’ve been pushing for; with Taiwan as the same sort of sacrificial victim that Ukraine has been.
Taking this stance would also sever links with movements and governments in the Global South; where people who have been on the receiving end of the US imperial system for decades see through its pretensions and fear its ambitions. It would be a disastrous course for the climate movement in the Global North to take. This is particularly in the context of governments like the UK cutting its commitment to global climate finance citing, among other things, “the costs of including help for Ukraine being included in the aid budget.”
Instead of becoming partisans of either side in this war, or any other, whatever our individual views, the climate movement here should stand for an end to the war, oppose militarisation, and campaign to get the global military boot print fully included in the Paris process, with a target to measure, monitor and cut it as fast as possible.
Irrespective of what stance you take on the war in Ukraine, or anywhere else, in March last year, US author Meehan Crist wrote the following in the London Review of Books, “One of the worst outcomes of the war in Ukraine would be an increasingly militarised response to climate breakdown, in which Western armies, their budgets ballooning in the name of “national security” seek to control not only the outcome of conflicts but the flow of energy, water, food, key minerals and other natural resources. One does not have to work particularly hard to imagine how barbarous that future would be”.
Crist’s point is simply to describe the world we already have, but a bit more so; and her prediction is exactly what is happening.
The US has raised military spending to $858 billion this year; up from $778 billion in 2020.
France has announced an increase from a projected E295 billion to E413 billion in the next seven years (an average of E59 billion a year).
German spending is rising sharply, from E53 billion in 2021 to E100 billion in 2022 and is set to go further.
Japan aims to double its military spending by 2028 and is also debating whether to start deploying nuclear weapons.
In the UK, the government’s aim to increase military spending from 2.1% of GDP to 2.5% by 2030 comes on the back of what is already among the highest per capita military spends in the world.
NATO, the core alliance of the Global North, already accounted for 55.8% of global military spending in 2021 before any of these increases.
Other direct US allies – with a mutual defence pact – accounted for another 6.3%.
So, the direct US centred military alliances account for three fifths of global military spending and yet they are now raising it further at unprecedented rates. These are the world’s dominant imperial powers, acting in concert to sustain a “rules based international order” in which the rules are written in, and to suit, the Global North in general and Washington in particular.
The carbon boot print of these militaries is not measured under the Paris Agreement. It is, nevertheless, huge and growing; and we can’t pretend it isn’t. At the moment, the carbon boot print of the US military alone is the same as that of the entire nation of France. This is incompatible with stopping climate breakdown; both in the direct impact of production and deployment, the diversion of funds which are urgently needed to invest in the transition, and the potential impact of their use – which could kill us all very quickly; particularly if nuclear weapons are used. John Bellamy Foster’s Notes on Exterminism for the Twenty First Century Ecology and Peace Movements should be required reading for both movements.
Because this military is not sitting idle. The first phase of the Wars for the New American Century – in the form of the War on Terror since 2001 – have been calculated by Browns University at 4.5 million people; three quarters of them civilians killed by indirect impacts of US and allied military interventions. The scale of this is because doctrines like “shock and awe” are not simply an impressive displays of explosive power, but specifically designed to smash energy and water systems, both clean water supply and sewage treatment, within the first twenty four hours of an intervention to reduce surviving civilian populations to a state of numbed misery and demoralisation. “Why do they hate us?” I wonder. 4.5 million people is about half the population of Greater London, or three quarters of the population of Denmark and twenty two times as many as have died in the Ukraine war so far (assuming total casualties of 200,000, most of them military on both sides). It’s a lot of people. *
Their deployment and use more widely against opponents that are more resilient than Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya- which this escalation of expenditure and increased integration of alliances makes possible – would, even if it did not go nuclear, be catastrophic both in its direct loss of lives but also in the disruption of global supply chains leading to widespread economic unravelling. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a war in the South China Sea that closed down shipping lanes would have a rapid impact regionally – “Taiwan’s economy would contract by a third, while Singapore’s economy would fall by 22%, according to the baseline estimate. Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia would suffer falls of between 10% and 15%” – but would have a knock on effect everywhere else affecting 92% of global trade. The attempt in the Global North to set up “secure supply chains” – defining economic policy increasingly around military imperatives (“securonomics”) is not to avert such a conflict, but to make it economically manageable, and therefore more likely.
This scale of military expenditure also dwarfs their domestic investment in combatting climate change, urgently needed because the wealthiest countries put the heaviest weight of emissions on the rest of the world, both historically and through their per capita footprints now: let alone helping Global South countries develop without reliance on fossil fuels. This has a wider implication, with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network reporting that progress towards the UN Sustainable Development goals has been static for three years.
Pledged to commit $100 billion a year to help the transition in the Global South, more than ten years ago, they have never been able to eke out this money, have never hit the target, have tried to use loans (debt trap) instead of transfers, sought to apply conditions and control. The US contribution to that is now aiming for just over $11 billion by 2024. This is now reckoned to be a tenth of what’s needed. This is despite 66% of their populations agreeing that this support should go in, and only 11% against. The contrast with the $77 billion they have stumped up to fight the Ukraine war with no trouble at all in the last year is quite startling. News that Finland is planning to cut development aid to countries in Africa that don’t line up behind the Western line on Ukraine is an ominous sign of how far backwards this could begin to go; with any attempt at global governance through structures like the UN abandoned and notions of international obligation and mutual humanity giving way to even more overtly colonial attitudes and practices than we already have. Although the notion that the Global North can “build a wall” and keep the human consequences of climate breakdown out is a fantasy – as the climate is breaking down behind the wall too – it probably won’t stop them trying.
The USA and its allies pose themselves as “Global Leaders”. They could and should be, as they are the countries with the greatest concentrations of wealth, power and technical know how, communications and education, but they are falling horribly short; because they see leadership as the same thing as dominance – and subordinate everything else to that.
In fact, in 2022, China – usually presented in our media as a negative force on climate – invested 70% more in renewable energy generation than the USA and EU combined, just under half the global total on its own. Next year, according to the International Energy Agency, China will account for 70% of new offshore wind, 60% of new onshore wind, and 50% on new solar PV installations. So, the “international leaders” have a lot of catching up to do.
The US and EU are some way behind, and nowhere near where they need to be. Instead of investing on the scale needed to hold the global temperature increase below 1.5C, they are tooling themselves up militarily to try to deal with the consequences of failing to do so; in an effort to sustain their global dominance. If they are leading us anywhere, its to Armageddon.
A report from the US military in 2019 sums up the paradox. Reflecting that, if climate breakdown continues at its present rate, countries that are already water stressed will be getting beyond crisis point within two decades and that this will lead to “disorder”. Their conclusion was that this means that
1. they will be intervening in these crises, and
2. will therefore need to build themselves in a secure supply chain of water so that the troops who are dealing with people in crisis because their environment has run out of it, will have enough to keep them going in the field!
Reflecting further, that on our current trajectory, climate impacts within the United States itself would lead to infrastructure breaking down, followed by the social order breaking down, followed by the military itself breaking down; as it faced overstretch trying to maintain order as civil society failed. Nevertheless, they also note that the rapidly increasing melt of the Arctic ice shelves and permafrost means that new sources of the fossil fuels that are causing the crisis in the first place to be available for exploitation and that a key task for them would be to make sure that the US gets the lion’s share of them. As a study in self defeating thinking, it can’t be beat.
To repeat the point at the beginning, regardless of anyone’s stance on any given war taking place now, and who should “win” it, its this drive and acceleration of military spending that the climate and peace movements should be combining to hold back – both to avert the growing risk of conflict, because arms races tend to end in wars on the momentum of their own dynamic (which requires a lot of demonisation and conflictual stances to fuel and justify it) and to allow saved funds to be used to avert the climate crisis itself. A bottom line demand is that the military carbon boot print must be accounted for in the Paris Process and a mechanism agreed for reductions to a common per capita level, combined with common measures and investments for increased global cooperation in lock step with it.
*Casualty figures in Ukraine are easy to come by but hard to trust. 200,000 assumes a parity between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries; whereas figures from Mossad, among others, indicate significantly lower Russian losses (at perhaps a fifth to a third of the Ukrainian level) so 200,000 may be a high estimate. One notable feature of this war is that civilian casualties have been a fraction of the military losses – the opposite of the trend from the mid twentieth century onwards; during which “there has been an increase in civilian fatalities from 5% at the turn of the 19th century to 15% during World War I (WW I), 65% by the end of World War II (WW II), and to more than 90% in the wars during 1990’s, affecting more children than soldiers”. From https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.765261/full#B12
Crop burning in Northern India. By the end of the decade almost half the Indian population will be trying to live in an average temperature of 29C. Photo: Ishan Tankha / Climate Visuals Countdown
Coverage of the climate crisis in the media is usually pushed to the margins and framed to deflect serious attention to it. The BBC seems to be on a mission to normalise it, to make it background. The tabloids mix oh goody, we’re going to be“Hotter than Morocco” front pages with shrieking calls for the “Eco Mob” to be banged up so we can enjoy the snooker (or whatever) and weird articles in rightist broadsheets like the Telegraph that spread misinformation – their latest that solar panels becoming less efficient at above 25C is a fatal flaw, not the marginal problem that it actually is – in that peculiarly gloating tone always used by people trying to take refuge from a changing reality in a timeless common sense that has actually long past its expiry date.
In the face of all this, its worth having a go at times, so…
My complaint to the BBC (The World Tonight).
You reported on Antonio Gutierez’s warning that the world is heading for a 2.8C average temperature increase, with all that follows from that, without seriously addressing it – and then didn’t seriously address it. There was no follow up. No comment from anyone else. It was then not referred to again during the summary of the news in the middle and end of the programme.
On any objective judgement, this was overwhelmingly the most significant item on the news and should have been treated as such. None of the other issues threatens the whole of human civilisation within the lifetime of children living now. Simply reporting the warning then treating it as somewhat less significant than the well merited demise of Boris Johnson, or the sad death of Glenda Jackson, is part of the process whereby a fundamental crisis in our civilisation becomes wallpaper, as if it is “something we have to get used to”, as one of your anchors put in in a previous programme, as if we are going to be able to, as if the crisis we are at now is going to stop there.
A warning like that should be stopping the clocks and making us sit up to deal with it, not passing quickly on to all the displacement activity we are busy with while we wait for things to fall apart around us. Could you please, please live up to your mission as broadcasters and treat this with the seriousness it deserves? Thank you
Their reply; which reads like stalling…
Thank you for contacting us and for sharing your concerns about The World Tonight, broadcast on June 15.
However, we’re not able to reply to your complaint without more information. If you could provide us with the specific time at which the relevant news item was heard, we may then be able to address your complaint.
If you’d like to listen back, we’ve provided a link to the programme below…
My response
You asked for details of when the item occurred in the programme. Its 5 minutes 50 seconds in. As the essence of what I was saying was that Antonio Gutierrez’s warning is something that should be taken seriously and be given far more extensive coverage – instead of being mentioned once then passed over in silence for the rest of the programme – the fact that you couldn’t find the clip rather illustrates my point. By contrast, diverting though it is, Boris Johnson’s latest shenanigans will barely be a footnote if there is anyone left to write History in 2100. I honestly despair of your coverage sometimes; like the way that Labour’s pledge to stop new oil and gas exploration on PM on Monday (about half way through) wasn’t debated in the framework of this being imperative but very difficult – leading on to a serious examination of what would need to be done to do it and what changes would need to be made – but a sneery and fatalistic dismissal from Evan Davies and his guest that it could be done at all. Perish the thought that this country might be able to rise to a serious challenge. Not your finest minutes.
The Metro Letters Page is full of letters that their authors think are “gotcha!” challenges, which are actually deflections from having to think through an issue that, if they took it seriously, would scare them shitless. Here’s one I responded to earlier.
Tuesday 6thJune
Kate Taylor (Metro Talk Mon) says that demonstrators from Just Stop Oil are neither “moronic” nor “cowardly” . People cause greenhouse gases and the UK population today is 67 million and will be 77 million by 2050. World population today is 8 billion, up from 2 billion 100 years ago.
Will Kate Taylor and members of eco-groups pledge to have no more than one child, never to travel in a petrol/diesel vehicle, turn off their gas supply, take no foreign holidays, eat less meat, use no mobile phones nor electrical goods and never attend music festivals or sporting events? Eco talk is cheap.
Clark Cross, Linlithgow
Thursday 8th
Clark Cross (Metro Talk Tuesday) says “eco talk is cheap”. What he’s missing is that failure to act on the breakdown of our climate will be very costly in all respects, and sooner than we think.
On our current trajectory 2 billion people will be trying to live in an average temperature of 29C by 2030; including half the population of India.
So, while it’s a bit late for me just to have one child, I have to admit that I’m extremely grateful not to have any grandchildren (much though I’d love them) because the world we are heading for unless we make drastic changes will be a nightmare by the time they are adults.
So, whatever we can do we must do, as individuals and as a society.
Paul Atkin, London
Friday 9th
Paul Atkin (Metro Talk, Thurs) says “we must do all we can as individuals and a society” to fight climate change. The oil, gas and coal-rich countries are still exploiting their reserves, while China, India and others have agreed only to “phase down” not “phase out” coal. What would Paul suggest the UK, with one per cent of global emissions, can do to penalise these countries before we all fry?
Clark Cross, Linlithgow
This was my reply that they didn’t print, perhaps because it poses questions outside any framework acceptable to them.
Clark Cross (Metro Talk Friday) suggests that the UK should “penalise” China and India before doing anything serious to avert climate breakdown on its own behalf.
Leaving aside the suicidal quality of this, and awkward facts that India’s per person carbon footprint is a third that of the UK, and that China is the only country in the world investing in renewable energy on the scale needed – half the global total last year and 70% greater than the USA and EU combined – we are still left with historic responsibility.
This country became wealthy partly through burning vast quantities of coal. Our contribution to the greenhouse gases currently over heating the world is about 7% of the global total. Seven times our fair share. So, we have a responsibility to fulfil there; and we need to cooperate with the rest of the world to do it, not look for conflicts. Time is frighteningly short.
the sky all along the North American Atlantic seaboard turned orange from wildfires in Quebec,
and the two year drought in Northern Italy was broken by six months worth of rain in 36 hours,
and on the first day of “Big Green Week”,
Rachel Reeves announced that Labour’s modest plan to bring the UK up to the European average by investing £28 billion a year into green transition would be subject to “fiscal rules” that meant they would have to “ramp up” to get there.
Despite these brave words from Ed Miliband, “Some people don’t want Britain to borrow to invest in the green economy. They want us to back down. But Keir, Rachel and I will never let that happen. Britain needs this £28bn a year plan and that is what we are committed to”; the way that Reeves framed her argument implied that the “ramp” is likely to be be long and shallow, and the chances of getting to then end of it slight.
This poses a number of questions.
Are we in a climate emergency or not?
Outside the wilder reaches of the Tory back benches and the cluster of delusionary think tanks clustered around Tufton Street and the Spectator, it is generally agreed that we are; so does this not require emergency measures?
As the breakdown of the conditions for human civilisation to survive is a greater existential threat than any we face apart from nuclear war, and certainly more overwhelming than the Second World War: do you think anyone in 1940 would have said, “we are committed to fighting the Nazis, but we have to be fiscally responsible about it and make sure the books are balanced as we do it?”
Given that a failure to invest on this scale will mean that the UK will be unable to match levels of subsidy and support going in from the EU and the USA, does this not imply a collapse in any prospect of “investing in the industries of the future” and therefore the prospect that, as the industries of the past are outmoded and superseded, the UK becomes a deindustrialised backwater – as the private sector investment you want to attract is drawn elsewhere?
As you have previously calculated that £6 billion a year will be needed to meet your pledge on insulating homes, is this an irreducible bottom line, or are you also abandoning your pledge to cut energy bills for everyone “for good”?
As unnamed Shadow Ministers have been quoted in the press arguing that some investment in, for example, housing and transport will be needed that are not part of “the net zero agenda”, how will you make sure that any investment that could contribute to net zero does; as any investment that is not part of the solution is part of the problem?*
If your plan is to “ramp up”, at what point will you start, with how much investment in what projects; and how do you calibrate the return on the investment?
If your problem is a lack of government income, why are you not planning to tax the energy producing companies on every penny of their windfall profits, which would pay for the £28 billion a year several times over?
If these fiscal rules are sacrosanct, will they also apply to military spending and, when there is a choice between military escalation and saving our society, which will take precedence?
*An example that links the two is what kind of housing development Labour will push. There is a world of difference between
the current paradigm of cookie cutter, ticky-tacky houses with poor insulation, with the maximum number of units squeezed in so developers can get the biggest possible profits, built in the green belt in car dependent “amazon deserts” (like an American suburb but meaner)
and 15 minute neighbourhoods built as communities with all necessary facilities within walking distance, good public transport links to larger centres; and made up of homes built at zero carbon standard with very low energy use and bills.
Being in support of “the builders not the blockers” without legislating the latter as standard will mean that the next generation of mass house building will follow the line of least resistance – with developers cutting corners, skimping on materials, maximising units and profitability; and dumping the ensuing problems on a future that is getting shorter and more threatening all the time.
This is, approximately, the text of a speech I gave at the Climate, Class and Crisis meeting at Goldsmiths College on 6th June. The full meeting can be viewed here **with some very interesting contributions from Claire Fuller, one of the founders of XR, who is still very much involved, Damian Gayle, Environment correspondent for the Guardian and Matt Huber author of Climate Change as Class War and a Professor in the Geography and Environment Department at Syracuse University New York and chaired by Feyzi Ismail of Goldsmiths Media Studies Dept.***
I’m going to be speaking in a personal capacity so I can be more heretical, which tends to get more of an interesting discussion. The whole question climate breakdown is a class struggle and it’s a global one; and the working class movement has to step up and lead it because the ruling class is failing to do so.
Globally, I think we have to get a handle on what’s needed and who’s doing what.
There was a very interesting article recently by Adam Tooze which identified that in order to actually make the energy transition we need to be investing $4 trillion a year.
According to the International Energy Agency, last year 1.7 trillion was invested in renewables ( though, as they are including nuclear in that, that’s a little optimistic.
But one trillion was still invested in fossil fuels.
So you’ve got $1.7 trillion going more or less in the right direction, but one trillion going the other way.
So overall, a move of $0.7 trillion in the right direction, but we need to be doing more than four times as much.
So, that’s the scale of what we need to be doing.
Tooze also notes that, of that renewable investment, 49.7% of it was by China; which was 70% more in total than the United States and the EU combined.
We don’t hear about that a lot. We usually get China as the villain of the piece because of its coal fired power stations…
So, that’s the scale of the investment; and those three big continental economies make up more than 75% of the time.
And those figures are confirmed by the IEA for the next year. Their projection is that China is going to account for 55% of new renewable capacity in 2024.
So, whatever your view of China, Tooze ‘s comment that it’s the only country in the world investing on the scale required poses a question for all of us in the Global North/West. Why aren’t our much richer societies/ economies/ polities, matching that, or doing more?
Some of it is that climate breakdown, as well as representing an existential challenge for the survival of humanity, in a more immediate limited sense represents an existential challenge for the ruling class as a class.
Oxfam did an analysis that showed that the top 10% – which is basically anyone or more than about £80,000 a year – will take us beyond 1.5 degrees on their own; which underlines the point that for most of us 80,000 quid is a lot of money, but for people like Boris Johnson, you know that this is a fraction of the “chicken feed” that he said he was being paid to write for the Daily Telegraph, which I think was a quarter of a million a year. So for people like him, a very, very, very high standard of living is is really roughing it: the other phrase he used for this was “hairshirtery”. And, for him and people like him, it would be.
And there’s also very worrying thing at the moment, which is the misdirection of investment into military spending. In the US debt ceiling negotiations last week they agreed to cut welfare but increase the military budget to $850 billion a year.
And that’s going on throughout the Global North. Japan, Germany, are doubling expenditure; Britain’s going up to 2.5% of GDP; and the implication of that is that the Global North, rather than invest in actually combating climate change, is tooling itself up to defend itself against the consequences of failing to do so.
So what do we do, given that it’s the top 10% that run the show, control capital, the markets, buy politicians and set the media agenda?
This isn’t about protest.
It’s not about getting the people in charge to notice in the hope they’ll do the right thing.
They know; and prioritize other things.
The fossil fuel companies put money into climate denial and and confusion in the same way that the tobacco and asbestos companies did about the links between their products and cancer.
The private sector won’t lead.
There’s only 5% of big companies have “gold standard” transition plans. And that’s this government’s gold standard, so that’s probably going to be fairly generous to them.
For small companies, it’s not really on their agenda.
One of the big U.S. Investment banks that withdrew from Mark Carney’s Climate Finance initiative last year did so because they said putting climate concerns ahead of profits for shareholders was “immoral.”
So all of this now requires a kind of massive cognitive dissonance – not simply on their part but across the whole of society; to keep us all thinking in a strange kind of way, with an emotional disconnection from what’s actually going on – and the promotion of all that via the media across society.
That ranges from outright denial, people like the Global Warming Policy Foundation, through a kind of Technical Micawberism; you know, something wonderful and technological will turn up and save us all at the last minute…and with one mighty bound we’ll be free! Just illusion and ideological delusion.
I remember Nadim Zahawi at the launch of the DFE net zero strategy at the Natural History Museum last year saying very, ebulliently “We are going to be saved by the British entrepreneurial spirit!”
Yeah…
OK, so you get denial in various forms.
And it ranges from Sunak, who says it’s “economically illiterate” to block New North Sea oil and gas.
To people like Gary Smith from the GMB, who says it’s “naïve” to block New North Sea oil and gas.
So the first thing is we have a fight in the labour movement.
And we need to organize to have it, and I’ve got a bit of a checklist, which is a bit obvious, you know, grandmother sucking eggs situation.
But we need
a network of Climate activists in each union that’s organized.
Sound policy passed in each union; and on the wider issues, not simply the sectoral concerns, but the overall issues. Because we’ve got to think strategically. We’ve got to think hegemonically. We’ve got to think that our movement has got to lead this fight. It’s not about defending our members from it. It’s about getting ahead of it. Of course, there’s different challenges in different unions.
Taking that policy up to the TUC.
Get the Union apparatus partly organizing around the issue. In the NEU for instance what used to be health and safety is now health, safety and environment and we’re doing things like getting out heat guidance – which never used to be an issue, but it is now. And we’re having our first ever green bargaining reps training at the beginning of July. So that sort of thing is happening. The UCU is way ahead of us btw. They’ve been doing it for about five years longer than we have.
To organize across unions in the same sector. We put a united front together of all of the unions in the education sector, whether they’ve got network or not, around the DFE Net Zero Strategy producing a joint critique of it, and we’re continuing to liaise.
The activists to coordinate across the whole movement. And you’ve got lots of formations for that. You’ve got Climate Justice Coalition, Campaign Against Climate Change, Greener Jobs Alliance.
To take this politically and by politically I mean in a very narrow sense, in slightly Parliamentary sense at this point. Obviously it’s got to be taken up much more broadly in terms of the kind of mobilization Claire was talking about. But in terms of government, because it’s what states do that’s going to make the immediate difference, there’s the whole question of what Labour’s going to do. Because we’re very likely going to have a Labour government and it’s going to be a Starmer led Labour government not a Corbyn led government: so it’s a rather different kettle of fish and the current discussion on North Sea oil and gas and the £28 billion investment, whether they’re going to do it or not, is absolutely the frontline of the argument at the moment. And we’ve got to fight that one through. So, for example, the just transition demands that UNITE says it wants to promote -they should be very clear about what those are, to coordinate that with other people in the movement, and fight that through the Just Transition body that Labour actually has; which UNITE is part of. It’s not a matter of saying ohh we want a just transition but not actually putting it forward. We got to make sure they put it forward. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m sure they will come up with something, but it’s it’s a matter of urgency that they do it.
It’s wider as well, because we’ve got to look at local authorities. Can we get local authorities to set up Just Transition bodies to plan for things like insulation, the expansion of the workforce that we need, training those new workers in the FE colleges, including a climate awareness module so that they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it? So they’re on a mission. Not just doing a job. They’re on a mission and they believe in that mission. It’s about social transformation and linked to community campaigns for local energy generation and things like onshore wind.
Do you know how many onshore wind turbines were put up in this country last year?
2! Both at Keele University. Just staggering.
Just a few points on protest.
I think we’ve got to try to avoid public antagonism.
I don’t think it helps having people, you know, really hacked off – people going about their ordinary business really hacked off – but to target ruling class over consumption, so that you’re actually connecting with all the resentment that people feel about the inequality that we’re going through at the moment – and it’s being put on the right targets; all these people flying about in private jets, why aren’t we targeting that?
And to undercut all this bullshit that you get in the media – that the climate movement is all posh people inconveniencing “ordinary folk”, in the words of Andrew Neil. So you get this stuff from Farage, who says “Just Stop Oil is all posh girls called Imogen and India”, right?
This is from a stockbroker from Sevenoaks who went to Dulwich College and his name is Nigel. Man of the people?
So we have to undercut that narrative.
We’re also going to have to target the media in my view, because it is really poisonous. We are absolutely flooded by denial and drivel; I mean, how many more articles on Phillip Schofield can you take?
And we also need to coordinate the mass actions. I think the turn of XR to mass organization is the right move. The Big One was terrific. It was like a four day outdoor teach in. Everybody was learning from everybody else and it it was brilliant. We need more of that. But I think we need to coordinate it, organise it with other currents; and organise it at key points like the COP. You know, there’s been some students occupying universities recently. Would it be possible to organize a mass wave of that in November? Don’t know… throwing it out there.
Last thing, I think we also need to highlight demands that cut costs and accelerate the transition. Insulation is the obvious one, but what about a demand for free travel cards for every worker, paid for by the employer to facilitate the transition to public transport and away from cars?
To sum up, however we do it, let’s not mourn, let’s organise.*
*I didn’t actually say this bit, but thought about it afterwards as the conclusion I should have used…instead of “er, that’s it” so, to that extent, this text is backdated.
**If you watch the video and look at the machine generated transliteration that runs alongside, it provides hilarious food for thought for anyone who believes that the activity of reading is solely phonetic. The same thing can be seen if you ever watch the transliteration of the News that runs in a strip along the bottom on the BBC 24 hour channel a few seconds after the speaker.
What the machine is doing is taking the sounds it picks up and putting them into words that sound like the sounds. This is the theory of synthetic phonics in action, in an almost pure form, because the awkward middle stage of recognising and attributing a sound to the graphemes (letters) is cut out.
Because there is no reference to syntax, and the meaning of the sentence up to that point, the results are a bit hit and miss. Sometimes accurate. Sometimes gibberish.
Which underlines the point that in actual reading – done by people – the meaning of the text read so far helps guide what you think is coming next; so the recognition of letters and sounds is in a dialectic with that.
Children learning to read do this quite slowly – and you can see them doing it; sometimes reading on a bit before noticing that what they are saying doesn’t match what they are seeing, so going back to have another go. Adults and proficient readers do that too, but at such a terrific pace that its below conscious attention.
***In Feyzi’s intro she says that I was the founder of Thurrock Friends of the Earth in 1971, one of the first local FOE groups. I was actually one of several people, including Angela Monck, Bob Moorman and others, all of us school students; and at that point we had no inkling of climate change, but were worried about nature depletion – all the local elm trees were dying of Dutch Elm disease – and a wasteful use of resources. At one point we picketed the local Tescos about overpackaging and got in the local paper looking purposeful and frighteningly young.
The 26th May is the ninth anniversary of the beginning of the shelling of Donetsk by Ukrainian forces in 2014. For the Donbass Ukrainians that opposed the new Maidan regime this event marked the point of no return. It followed the burning alive of the anti-maidan protestors in Odessa on May 2nd 2014 and Ukrainian forces trying to storm Mariupol that same week. The shelling has continued daily ever since, including today, killing several people. Yet, listen to the news here and there is silence about that. The casualties caused by a Russian missile strike in Dnipro were reported however, and President Zelensky’s comment that this showed the Russians to be “fighters against everything humane and honest” was not put in the context of what his own forces are doing. An enemy of the United States would be accused of “shelling his own people”.
Nevertheless, most people who support the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, or call for a Russian military withdrawal and restoration of the pre 2014 borders, sincerely assume that this would be a liberation for the people who live in the Donbass and Crimea; and that this is where the war would stop.
This interview with Kyrylo Budanov – the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence (the GRU) – by a journalist who has been making a film supporting the Ukrainian war effort released last week, shows that the Ukrainian high command (and journalists) have no such delusions.
Budanov says a number of interesting things in this interview, some of them revealing, some quite far fetched. He is, after all, an intelligence officer, so he has access to a lot of information; but, as an intelligence officer, a large part of his job is to spin false but instrumentally useful narratives. He is also a firm believer in the notion that if you will something hard enough, it will come to pass and that Ukraine will “win”, despite their succession of grinding defeats since the new year and the terrible cost in lives that is the price of carrying on.
At the same time, he is secure enough in the presumed support of his audience to describe what the sort of victory he wants would look like. In the same way that the Guardian is now so sure of the allegiance of its readers to Ukrainian nationalism that they can reveal that, when collaborating with the Nazis in WW2, they killed around 100,000 Poles, a massacre described as “genocide” by the Polish government as recently as 2016.
In the interview’s final section, about what would happen in Crimea if Ukraine’s war aims were achieved (starting 36:57 minutes in) he is quite blunt that “victory” in the sense of military reoccupation would only be the start of a “difficult” “multi year process” of “reintegrating” territories with a population that is actually hostile and does not want to be reoccupied. Three million people with, as he puts it “a completely different view of the world”*. The interviewer uses the euphemism “three million not very devoted people” and Budanov states that those people with an “altered psyche” who can be “re educated” should be – without specifying what should be done with those that can’t, though “physical elimination” is a phrase he uses elsewhere. This will have to be done with a carrot and a stick, as the two only work together; and with a “firm hand”. This will be “hard work” he says.
Many words can be used to describe this scenario. “Liberation” for those 3 million people is not one of them. If you believe in self determination, you can’t support this.
His comments at the end section about “a new security architecture in the world” are put in context by a section “About the Future of Russia” a little before this (at 32.45 minutes in). In this, the interviewer pulls across a map of the Russian Federation – “your famous map” with the partition borders – that Dick Cheney and Zbigniew Brzezinski originally proposed back in 1991 as a way to manage the “Post Soviet space” most amenably for the US – drawn in in thick blue felt tip lines; remarking that “its been shown a lot”. Not in the media here it hasn’t. It might make people wonder a bit.
This isn’t Budanov’s map, but is similar. If you google US aim to partition Russia and click on images, you get a number of variations.
Budanov uses a number of euphemisms about “unanimous transformation” of Russia and the prospective partition being “conceptual”, and speculates that the more defeats the RF suffers the more it will break up, starting with the Caucasus. His confirmation, when discussing the prospect that “new states” will be imposed on the wreck of the RF that, “Russians are well aware of this” gives a tacit recognition that the Russian security concerns raised in the run up to February 24th were real and existential.
His statement “we don’t need Russia in the form that it exists now”, underlines this and, given where the partition plan originated, cannot be defined as defensive.
*If you want an insight into why the people in Donbass might have a “completely different view of the world” – which Budanov suggests is a result of “propaganda” – consider these personal accounts from the day the Ukrainian army started shelling Donetsk city on May 26th 2014. These are from the Donetsk Anti Fascist site.
Marina Kharkova: “May 25 was the last day of peace in Donetsk, as the family celebrated the birthday of my father, a miner. The mood was anxious, restless and tense because of the general situation, but nothing yet seemed to portend tragedy. On the morning of 26, on my way to work, I heard the sounds of flying planes and distant explosions. Everyone had gathered in the largest office and was listening to an employee who lived near the railway station. She cried and told how Ukrainian planes and helicopters had bombed from the air, how their nine-storey building on Privokzalnoye had been shaking, how women killed by shells were lying directly on the pavement bleeding, how the minibus she was travelling in had hurtled away from the danger zone. She sat in silence, clutching her heads, trying to comprehend. Tanya was given water and sedatives – she was so sick. Then, by inertia, they tried to get on with their business. The rumble outside the window increased, though the office was far away from the airport. Ambulances and cars with militia were whizzing down the street. After three in the afternoon everyone decided to stop their pointless attempts to pretend to be busy and drove home. The understanding of what was happening came at once, although the consciousness was still trying to cling to yesterday’s peaceful day. The 26th of May was the point at which “it will never be the same again”.
EIena Hovhannisyan, a biology teacher: “At that time we kept up with the news from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. We already knew how people had been martyred in Odessa, Mariupol and Krasnoarmeisk. I had forebodings of near disaster. It was already hovering over us, but we did not think how tragic, long, brutal, hopeless the events would be. Sometimes it seemed that it was just a bad dream, that I would wake up and everything would be like before. But no. It is an illusion that the war will not touch you. It will touch everyone, sooner or later. We were simply the first to be in the epicentre. And May 26th I will always remember. The warm, sunny weather and the roar of planes in the sky. From the balcony on the side of the airport black smoke could be seen, you could hear explosions constantly. The first shelling, deaths, destruction, grief and pain. Since that day, there would be no peace in Donetsk for another nine years. But we didn’t know it then. And that day was endless, filled with horror and pain. The phones were literally ringing off the hook – everyone was trying to find out what happened to their loved ones, whether they were alive or not. In the evening my son arrived from work; his office was a couple of blocks from the station. He told about the horror in the city, about the dead woman vendor from the station market, about the very young guy who worked as a valet. He was killed by shrapnel from a missile fired by a Ukrainian helicopter. People were falling, screaming, crying, calling for help. Passers-by tried to save the wounded, car alarms howled. The railway station area in any city is the most crowded place. In Donetsk on Privokzalnoye there are markets, shops, banks, the area was teeming with life. They say helicopters flew so low that you could see the pilots in the cockpit. And these pilots also saw that they hit peaceful people. This was not done by some Hitlerites, but by Ukrainians, with whom we lived in the same country. May 26 was the day that turned everything upside down. There is no and will not be our forgiveness for Ukraine. And there will be no return.
From the diary of a Donetsk woman who wanted to remain anonymous: 26 May 2014, from the balcony, I saw planes firing missiles. My husband, coming home from work, told me about the dead in the station square. At the same time as the airport was being bombed, the fighting moved into the city, on Kievsky Avenue linking the city and the airport. People who had lost their jobs or shelter, relatives or loved ones, went to volunteer for the militia. And every day there were more and more of them, including my acquaintances, as the war gradually touched everyone.
It is difficult to describe the sensations of trying to sleep to the sound of shelling outside your windows. The deafening and resounding explosions are somewhere close by. Your heart sinks each time, because no one knows where the next shell will land. But when you see the dawn, you realize that another night is behind you, all your loved ones are alive today.
In addition to the fighting at the airport and the aerial bombardment with unguided shells, Ukrainian snipers shelled the Putilovsky Bridge. This road was then called the “road of death”: civilian cars with people were burnt and shot, and in the Putilovsky Grove there lay the bodies of both civilians unluckily caught up in the active fighting and the militiamen trying to save people. For several days, the bodies were decomposing in the terrible heat: there was no opportunity to pick them up and bury them.
An ambulance was also shot up on the road to Donetsk airport. Its crew, Artem Kovalevsky, the ambulance driver, paramedic Sergei Kozhukharov and doctor Vladimir Vasilievich, miraculously survived and managed to get out of hell.
They told reporters from the local branch of Komsomolka in Donetsk how they managed to survive when Ukrainian snipers shot even those who had managed to run into the wooded area.
Victoria Sergeyevna, neurologist: I was on duty that day, the hospital was far away from the airport, but we all knew what was going on. In the evening, many people of different ages with strokes or suspected strokes were brought to our department. People’s chronic illnesses were exacerbated by the stress. The statistics of deaths from heart attacks and strokes during the war has increased dramatically compared to the peacetime. And these are also our victims of the war, just as innocent as the victims who died under shelling”.
Holland is flat. Everyone knows that Holland is flat. But you have to go there to appreciate just how flat it is.
All the way between Antwerp and Amsterdam via Rotterdam, its as though someone has ironed the landscape. You could play billiards on it, if it wasn’t so wet. Many of the fields are covered in greenhouses; completely solidly; acre sized greenhouses that add to the impression that you are not in a landscape but a simplified two dimensional version of one. It must make a lot of planning much simpler to not have to consider inclines.
The only bumpy bits of ground are dykes and dams. Even the houses are low. Single storey with dormer roofs, so they look like they are squatting on the ground and ducking to avoid being blown away.
Alongside the fields are irrigation and drainage canals. These are also on a level. No need for locks; there are no waterfalls or any sense that anything is not under control. As 25% of the Netherlands is below the current sea level, this is just as well. It makes the country acutely aware of the rapid increase in the sea level rise that is now baked in by climate change.
Like Bangladesh, Holland is one of the most threatened mainland countries. The urgency of the situation is partly counterbalanced by the technological and engineering self confidence that comes from having been reclaiming land from the sea for over 2,000 years. All the same, the level of rainfall gives the impression that the sea is trying to take it back by aerial assault and the scale of the rise now coming is well beyond anything experienced in that period.
Holland is also extraordinarily neat, a tolerance of urban graffiti tags notwithstanding. The contrast with Belgium – which, outside Brussels, looks like a part of France frozen in about 1953 and neglected ever since, presenting itself as the Benelux down at heel twin, at least alongside the Eurostar route – hits you in the face as soon as you cross the frontier in either direction.
Photo: PA
This is the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. Unlike the buildings around it, which have a handsome, distinctive elegance, this is a neo classical imperial brute, with such heavy black bars on the windows that S and I thought it might be a prison. No accident that Donald Trump, when President, decreed that all new official government buildings should be constructed in this kind of neo classical imperial style. Rome casts a long shadow in the imagination of insecure powers seeking the timeless legitimacy conferred by Doric columns. In the middle of the roof at the apex of the pediment is a statue of a muscular Atlas holding up the world; flanked by a pair of lesser figures embodying law and force. In this way, those with wealth and power, whose existence is held up and sustained by the genuinely Atlas like labours of millions, present themselves to the world as if it is them that’s doing the supporting. Its long past time we shrugged them off.
Pushing off from the lights.Photo: SLAW
Bikes are everywhere. People often ride them with a distinctive and very dignified posture; leaning to the rear with very straight backs. And all sorts of people. Tall, grey haired elderly men cycling alongside each other holding a conversation, couples giving each other rides with extension seats on the back, families with the children in a cargo bike style bucket at the front – holds up to three – sometimes with a cover as you can see above, or perched on a crossbar seat or baby seat behind. Mums with kids alongside.
Bike stands at every station. Photo: SLAW
There are bike stands everywhere, bristling along the pavements outside apartment blocks like iron hedges, and bike lanes, clearly demarcated on every road; which are organised as follows: pavement, bike lane, pavement, car lane, trams, car lane, pavement, bike lane, pavement. Standardised. Rational.
Heavy wheeled black electric bikes – known as “fat bikes” – whizz along in the bike lanes too, but the push bikes don’t hang about either. They come not single spies but in battalions. And fast. A critical mass that eclipses the car. What we need everywhere.
No one feels the need to wear lycra (or helmets). There is strength, and normality, in numbers. No one is intimidated by the rain. They just put on sou’westers and ponchos – sometimes not even that – and keep cycling. Bike on through the storm. Bike on through the rain. And you’ll never bike alone.
People prioritise practicality over aesthetics; there were more old fashioned chain guards than I have seen for years and lots of people attach plastic crates – of the sort that you might store beer or milk bottles in – between the handlebars on a frame over the front wheel to carry things in.
No one bats an eyelid if a cyclist rides their bike into a metro station. Railway stations have bike grooves running down stairs for cyclists to have an easier ascent or descent as you can see below.
Young lad gets his bike down the steps without bumps at Zaanse Schans station.Photo: SLAW
The trams are wonderful. Regular, frequent, reliably knitting the city together. The entrance doors are in the middle, exits at the front and back. Immediately inside the entrance doors are enclosed information booths with helpful tourist and transport guides sitting in them to help anyone who might need it.
There are still cars, but motorists are generally outnumbered by cyclists and people using the trams. The deep almost atavistic clang of the tram bell is like a tocsin for car based cities.
The number 12 tram coming into the stop at Concertgebouw in the rain. Photo: SLAW
Names for bands inspired by Amsterdam or that sound better in Dutch: Electric Bendybus. Soul Patch. Schnitzelhaus. Toeslag. Stroopwaffel. Sloterdijk.
Yorkshire tea?Photo PA
The Dutch for full fat milk is Volle Melk and for half fat milk its Half Volle Melk: so literally half full milk. No matter how much you’ve drunk, its always half full.
The Dutch for public urination is Wildplassen, which has a slightly adventurous tone to it; as well as being a bit onomatopoeic. It is, of course, Verboden (and there are street signs saying so). Certainly more so than in London on a Saturday night. Stag dos please take note.
Near the tram stop by Concertgebouw is a little evangelical kiosk, with bibles and tracts, emblazoned with the legend God Zoekt jou; which seems to imply that He/She zeukt you whether you liked it or not. I’m not sure I do.
Photo: PA. Trees at Keukenhof with a decidedly Middle Earth sort of feel
Tulips in Amsterdam. There will be a generational watershed at this point between people who will now have Max Bygraves in their head for the rest of the day, and those that don’t.
Keukenhof (literal translation, kitchen court) is a vast Park about twenty minutes south west of the city that has a spectacular flower display every Spring; mostly tulips. Most flower displays – or greenery in general – are reviving, and induce states of contemplation and reflection that give us a break from everyday pressures, reducing stress as we walk through a Park. When I used to develop migraines at school I would walk home through Hampstead Heath; and the immersion in greenness would usually soothe the worst of it by the time I’d got to Golders Green. A point all urban planners should keep in mind, given the pressure from developers to squeeze in just one more lucrative unit.
The display at Keukenhof is contemplative to an almost hallucinogenic degree. I’d expected to spend an hour or so looking around before getting restless, but we spent the whole day and felt a bit regretful at having to leave. The sheer scale of the planted beds, and the artful juxtaposition of colours and shapes – and the more subtle assault of the aromas – overwhelms the senses into a different sort of consciousness. Who needs drugs when you have a sea of tulips?
When you look long into the floral display…
A small parade of stilt walkers wafting silky wings, floaty trousers and drifty music steps, smiling beneficently down from giraffe height as they pass. A toddler with her eyes wide and mouth agape totters after them with entranced steps, completely awestruck. Pied Piper moment.
The floral display also looks into you. Photos: SLAW
The attached tulip museums inform that tulips originated in central Asia, were named after the turbans worn in the region and the Ottoman Empire, were the subject of one of the first stock exchange bubbles (tulip mania) in the 1630s with, at one point, a single bulb being priced at the equivalent of 67,000 Euros; and that Holland now produces 75% of global bulb supply (but not at 67,000 Euros a pop).
Raskolnikov in the butty shop. There are lots of shops doing sandwiches of an adventurous sort right across the city. Sitting waiting for our order, I glance across at the other customer. A small young man sitting under a personal black cloud, with closed off eyes and a pale complexion, faded sandy mustache, dressed in a black hoody, with the hood pulled up across a black beanie hat, over a black t shirt with a machine pistol logo which, as poses go, is rather menacing, and trousers made for a giant, but cut down to “fit”, jagged and flappy at the bottoms, rent around the pockets, cigarette pack in one, bottle of water peeping out of the other, and exuding an air of misery and menace; until his sandwich is delivered, at which point he smiles and his existential gloom seems to lift into the heavens.
The historic windmills at Zaanse Schans stretch along the east bank of the river Zaans. Only two of them are on their original site. All the others were moved here, along with a number of traditional wooden houses, to make a tourist theme park that would also preserve them. As such it is a reconstruction of the past by concentrating it in one area, rather than an authentic preservation of the area itself.
Inside the windmills of your mind…Photo: SLAW
The windmills are a very impressive piece of early modern technology. The sails, wooden frames with canvas stretched over, rotate at a rapid rate, turning a big wooden gear cog inside that, in turn, concentrates a massive force to rotate millstones or vertical crushers to pound pigment, grind corn, split logs. There is nothing smooth about this, though the synchronisation of the gear wheels is brilliantly thought out, and the forces involved are overt, heavy, dusty; and the whole mill shakes as a crusher hammers down. The rapidity with which timber could be turned into planks gave Holland an advantage in shipbuilding that underpinned its early seventeenth century naval prowess. As this was at the same time as the eighty years war of independence against the Spanish Empire; perhaps Cervantes was making a geopolitical comment about the relative modernity of the embattled powers when he wrote about Don Quixote tilting at windmills.
Built of wood and/or with thatched upper structures, they were very vulnerable to fire and at least two of them had to be rebuilt after burning down in the nineteenth century.
Water logged logs with windmills on the Zaans. Photo: SLAW
In the wooden structures alongside are a set of museums with large shops attached, which are best seen in between coach parties. There are a lot of these and, as the museums are small, tend to jam solid when they are in. The clog museum shows a range of clogs that vary from elegant “Sunday Clogs” – with carefully painted scenes on them – through to betrothal clogs, that an aspiring suitor would hand carve and decorate for his intended – on to industrial clogs, which had a 3cm thick front end that dyke workers could use as a fulcrum when levering up basalt blocks and other heavy weights. The cheese museum is basically a shop run by the Henry Willig company – which makes cheese and chocolate, but not at the same time thankfully – with a short film in the reception area to show how cheese is made. The nice thing about this is that they have stands with people looking Disneyesque in traditional bonnets and clogs – I’m tempted to say that this is a bit “cheesy” – who let you try little slivers of different types of cheese. Dutch cheese – basically Edam – was considered exotic when I was growing up in the 1960s. As a result of being exposed to it at an impressionable age I have retained a prejudice that it smells and tastes of feet and and has the texture and “mouth feel” of rubber. It was good to have this dispelled with some strong but subtle varieties; the characteristically blunt Dutch designations of “young cheese” and “old cheese” notwithstanding. “Glorious goat” is pretty good.
By the Double Headed Phoenix café/bar – which specialises in making their own liqueurs, and gives you a shot of one of them in a tiny glass with squirty cream on top if you ever have a coffee – is the toilet. As most of the visitors are coach parties of a certain age, the queue is a long one. I am standing in a long line behind about half the population of Taiwan when we are suddenly disturbed by a furious woman from New Zealand, venting her frustration that the turnstile both costs and doesn’t work, and that the woman giving helpful advice has put her nose out of joint because she’s telling her what to do- “you have to pay to get in and it doesn’t work, then she says you have to stand on a spot, and it still doesn’t work. I’ll just hold it. I can’t wait to get out of this country!” Hopefully she will have found a toilet she can get into before then. The angriest I’ve seen anyone for days. It all seemed a bit over the top. The woman she seems to have been taking exception to was a young black cleaner; who went out of her way to explain how to get through when I had the same problem with a good deal of grace and charm. Which wasn’t her job, but she did it anyway. I wonder how much of the NZ woman’s angst was bound up in resentment at having to take instruction from a black cleaner? Hopefully not, but, if so, it illustrates that racists are never happy.
The Anne Frank House leaves you emotionally numb. Even when you know what happened. Especially when you’ve read the book. The original building, the warehouse owned by Otto Frank with the secret annexe at the back, is encased in a newer structure. The queue is long and quiet and let in in time slots booked long in advance. Everyone gets a hand set with recorded information that works when you point it at stations on the tour. There are a lot of people going round. Not a lot of conversation. This is not a place to make light of, but no one seems to be ghoulish either. Each station hammers home the story we already know with details we didn’t; and everyone walks through the warehouse, up the steep narrow stairways and into the tiny rooms that 8 people hid from the Nazis in for just over two years – kept alive by a tight group of close friends on the outside – with increasingly grim expressions. They were discovered and arrested in August 1944, just two months after D Day had given them hope, but 9 months before Amsterdam itself was finally liberated on May 5th 1945. By this time, everyone in both families was dead, except for Otto Frank, who managed to survive Auschwitz long enough for the Red Army to get to . His wife and daughters died in Auschwitz or Belsen. Anne was 15.
Anne’s diary, a thoughtful, deeply felt, sharply observed, articulate and witty account of growing up in almost impossible conditions with a threat of imminent arrest, degradation and death constantly in the background, is a deeply humane document that stands as a rebuke and witness to everything the Nazis did and what they stood for. As a narrative about individual people it engages readers empathy in a sustained way that statistics, or photos don’t. We tend to make the former abstract and flinch away at the latter. Primo Levi’s books of memoires about Auschwitz have a similar impact.
This is a spare summary. Hyperbole isn’t necessary. The facts speak for themselves. At a time that the far right is reasserting itself across the Global North, racist narratives are the daily bread of the tabloids and peddled by Ministers at the despatch box, the Great Replacement Theory gets aired at Nat-Con conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, and far right demonstrators in Israel call for “death to Arabs” and “may your villages burn!”; we have to assert implacably that “never again” applies to everyone.
I was also left with a greater sense of admiration for Otto Frank, who made sure his daughter’s diary was published and the house opened as a museum. Frank’s concern when the diary was first making an impact in the late sixties and early seventies to emphasise the human side of it and downplay the politics was something I didn’t think was right as a zealous young activist at the time. While the story only made sense in the context of the Nazis racist exterminism, perhaps what he was trying to do in pushing them to the margins of the story of his daughter’s life was to at least keep her memory safe from being defined solely by the people that murdered her. But, the interaction of the personal and the political has meant that they are now more in her shadow than she in theirs.
A spare, controlled, thoughtful and incredibly resilient man, who looked after the diary while she was writing it without ever reading it because he’d promised her he wouldn’t, his wistful remark after doing so that, however close the relationship, no parent fully understands their child, shows what a good father he was. I get the impression that, having lived through the worst that humanity could do, he spent the rest of his life looking for the decency in people and, because he was looking for it, by and large he found it.
Photo: PA.
With thanks to my daughter, seen here sheltering from the mother of all thunderstorms in the café at the American Book Centre, without whose creative imagination, formidable organising skills and zest for life this trip would not have happened.
Its a little known fact, and not a lot of people know it, that from 1896 to 1898, while he was writing “Heart of Darkness”, Joseph Conrad lived in Stanford Le Hope in Thurrock; initially in a house he described as “a damned Jerry-built rabbit hutch”.
Thurrock has a habit of playing down its historically illustrious residents. At the back of Grays Hall was an arboretum attached to the house that Alfred Russel Wallace built near a worked out chalk pit; after working out the theory of evolution around the same time as Charles Darwin. The story goes that Darwin, having agonised about his hypothesis and hesitating to publish it for about twenty years was bounced into doing it when he heard that Russel Wallace was about to do so himself, securing himself the popular historical status and making Russel Wallace a more obscure figure that only people interested in Natural History will have heard of.
Russel Wallace lived at The Dell for four years from 1872 to 1876, describing the arboretum below it as “a bit of a wilderness that can be made into a splendid imitation of a Welsh valley“. The house was made of concrete, as a tribute to the burgeoning local cement works, flourishing at the time and scouring out bigger, deeper pits progressively to the West; with factories getting ever larger all the way up to the huge excavation that now houses the Lakeside Shopping Centre, filling the air with dust and giving the town a definite sense of nominative determinism.
However, once he left, the arboretum fell into gloomy disuse, becoming an adventure playground, known as “the big woods” to generations of kids plucky enough to scale the 6 foot high walls (which got easier as time went on, as footholds became more secure from repeated use and the bits of broken glass set on the tops, which cut my Dad’s bottom as he tried to get across on one occasion in the mid 1930s, wore away) or brave the tunnel that was like a portal through from the playing fields of Treetops School – running through the gloom listening for the voice of outraged authority heat seeking our trespasses – which we were sure would not be forgiven.
None of us living near Russel Road, or Wallace Road on the estate alongside had a clue who Russel or Wallace were, let alone that they were the same person. And there has, possibly thankfully, been no movement of Social Russel Wallaceists.
The White Hart, shortly before it closed.
This is the pub that gave the town a bad name. A selection of Gollie dolls hanging behind the bar, like as the landlord put it “they used to hang them in Mississippi years ago“. After the notoriety gained from a Police raid that confiscated the dolls last month, they tried to carry on, replacing them with new ones, claiming that the police were over reacting, that there was nothing racist about it, that the landlord being seen wearing a Britain First T shirt was the kind of thing anyone might do – as the landlady said in an odd echo of Prince Andrew logic, “I don’t think Chris is a supporter of Britain First, he was just wearing that shirt because it was convenient at the time” – because, who wouldn’t wear one of those if it just happened to be lying around, and, indeed, who wouldn’t have one just conveniently lying around?
When I took this photo about a month ago, the pub looked stone dead already. No one was going in or out. A contrast with the Theobald’s Arms just over the road, that had a set of lively customers spilling into the road. A disgruntled looking middle aged man with a sour expression, and a face that seemed to be made of red brick dust, was staring balefully out of a first floor window like Mr Rottcod at the beginning of Gormenghast.
They shut two weeks later after two of their beer suppliers – Heineken and Carlsberg – and the company that cleaned their barrels and lines decided they didn’t want their products associated with this and boycotted them.
Probably the best boycott in the world.
Riverside Ward, where The White Hart is, a densely populated area of former council flats built in the seventies and the sort of recent flats shown in the photo above and cookie cutter housing stretching down towards the Wharf. It is the seventh most deprived of the 20 wards in Thurrock. It is 75% White, 13% Black, 8% Asian and 4% other ethnicity, with fewer pensioners and more young people than most. It has a higher incidence of smoking and binge drinking, adult and child obesity and hypertension than national averages; and life expectancy a year lower for women and three years lower for men. It has a much higher crime rate than Thurrock averages, but well below national. Only 43% feel safe going out after dark, but 49% are generally happy with the area. (1)
It returned a Labour Councillor with 1,191 votes to her Conservative opponent’s 386 in the local elections on May 4th this year. Riverside has been consistently represented by Labour, even though at the high water mark of Brexit mobilisation, the combined Conservative/UKIP vote was some way ahead. In 2016, the successful Labour candidate polled 857 votes, just ahead of UKIP on 748, with the Conservatives at 379. The turnout then was 27%. This May it was down to 19%, so nothing to be complacent about. The Conservatives have stood Black evangelicals as their candidates for several elections in a row, which might be suppressing their vote among the white racist component of their supporters.
An info graphic tucked away on the back page of Tuesday’s Financial Times shows why articles have started appearing across the press in recent weeks, rowing back on previous optimism, to project that the forthcoming Ukrainian military offensive is a last throw of the dice.
Confirming the analyses of commentators like Brian Berletic, who has argued from the beginning that this is a war of attrition, the info graphic compared the munitions so far supplied to Ukraine by the US and its allies, with the annual production of those munitions that they can manage if working their factories at full stretch (“surge” production) and the number of years it would take to replenish stocks already expended.
When read in conjunction with comments from Ukrainian military figures that Ukraine is fast running out of the Soviet era S300 air defence missiles that it has hitherto relied on to contest the air space above its cities and the battlefront, this makes a harsh reality check for anyone arguing that the NATO military input into Ukraine should be increased; because, even if you think that’s the right thing to do, its not actually possible.
For 155mm shells, over a million have already been supplied. They can be produced – when really pushing it – at 240,000 a year. It would take 7 years to replenish stocks to previous levels at that rate* and, its quite evident that even if every shell produced went to Ukraine, that would supply around a quarter of the supply for the first year from here on.
155mm precision shells would take 4 years to replenish, Javelin missiles 6 years, Stinger missiles 7 years and Himars systems 3 years.
To significantly increase military production capacity would require
significant investment, that would have to come from elsewhere in the economies, at a time when all the Western countries are undergoing a sharp squeeze on living standards and increasing political turbulence.
time, to make the machine tools, build the factories, put in the infrastructure, train the workers; a matter of years not months.
a rethink about how the Western military industrial complex functions; as it has hitherto been set up to produce very expensive and sophisticated kit that requires a lot of training to use and, because it is so sophisticated, very lucrative for the manufacturers. This is a viable approach when the wars the West was fighting were either relatively short, or low key against opponents with limited capacity who could be technologically overawed, though is not so effective in protracted attempts to occupy hostile countries, hence the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does not hack it at all when what’s needed is the sustained mass production of simple munitions like shells for a prolonged war of attrition; which the Russians are set up to do very effectively, even though they spend a lot less on their military than NATO countries do on average, and far less in total ($1 to every $19 spent by NATO in fact).**
That is a material constraint on the US and NATO because they want sufficient of a stockpile to be able to credibly threaten or fight wars elsewhere. So the longer they have to supply more munitions than they can produce to Ukraine, the weaker their global position becomes.
Hence the increasingly open anger of right wingers in the US who think that engaging in this war is a strategic error; because they want to keep as much powder dry (and missiles in stock) as possible for the war with China they see as the priority to fight before the end of the decade.
This is causing a reframing of the narrative for the forthcoming Ukrainian offensive.
Into the Valley of Death?
Whatever view you take on the rights and wrongs of this conflict, it is hard to contemplate this forthcoming, and much advertised, offensive without a sense of horror for the appalling loss of life that it will require. Like knowing that the battle of the Somme is about to start.
Posed initially as a big push with new Western weapons – primarily Leopard tanks – that would break through Russian lines and lead to a political crisis in Russia leading to a victory and reconquest of all territory up to the 2014 borders, the expectations for this offensive are now being downgraded.
Commentators from Admiral Chris Parry to Daily Telegraph columnists to arch hawk Simon Tisdall in the Observer, are now arguing that, in the words of Admiral Parry, the Russians are “too well dug in” to be shifted much. The logic of this is to try to ward off too much disappointment and war fatigue, such that pressure for a ceasefire and negotiated settlement grows significantly. Reports, from Russian sources, so take them with a pinch of salt if you like – of an increasing tendency for Ukrainian soldiers to surrender and, in some cases, offer to turn change sides, indicates what could happen on a wider scale as the prospect for “victory” is no longer posed as just over the horizon, but as an uncertain and remote possibility in an and unending slog with horrific and remorseless casualties.
So, in some quarters there is now an explicit argument that the aim of the offensive is to gain ground to put Ukraine into a more advantageous position when these negotiations come. The overt call, coming from the Ukrainian military and these same writers, is that the supply of munitions from NATO is insufficient and should be, or should have been, even greater than it has been. The problem with this position is that, in reality, as outlined above, there is insufficient capacity in the Western military industrial complex to provide the level that is demanded. So, it is a demand that cannot be fulfilled. In the event of a debacle these commentators can nevertheless cry betrayal, as reality rarely stands in the way of a politically useful myth.
The scale of the shift in investment required to make it so would require a shift in resources on a scale that could not help but hit domestic living standards very hard indeed; and the militarisation of society that would follow would require dissent to be repressed as treason. The legal case already being taken out in the US against four members of the anti war African People’s Socialist Party for “conspiring to covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda and interfere illegally in U.S. elections” is the beginning of what threatens to be a much wider and deeper process across the NATO countries.
Its possible that this offensive will make no ground at all. That the 50,000 or so troops assembled for it will make little or no headway against heavily fortified Russian positions and be hammered by superior Russian artillery and air power and, ultimately, a concentration of reservists that will outnumber them. It is, however, also possible that a heavy enough concentration of forces could break through and reoccupy territory. The Russians have been evacuating civilians in preparation of such a possibility. This is posed by our press as “abductions”, though, what they’d have them do to keep these civilians safe I don’t know. Given the way the Ukrainian army has tried to use the continued presence of civilians as human shields, the chutzpah here is quite extraordinary.
Whatever the impact, the question of what happens when it runs out of steam – as casualties mount, munitions are used up, soldiers succumb to exhaustion – is rarely addressed. There seems to be a presumption that the Russians will be equally exhausted, will not have military reserves in place, or the political will, to push back; which seems unlikely.
Any assessment of what happens then is necessarily speculative. A successful Russian push back with limited territorial aims but aiming for regime change in Kyiv – as spelled out in tub thumping terms by Dmitri Medvedev – would involve a loss of face for NATO that it would find unbearable. So, a partial occupation of Western Ukraine by some NATO forces as a face saving territory holding operation is being rumoured; with the Polish Army being set up to do this. If this is clearly understood and expected by both sides through back channel diplomacy it could lead to a ceasefire and frozen conflict on pre determined territorial lines and avert the very real risk of direct engagement leading potentially to nuclear catastrophe. If not, we could all be in very serious trouble indeed.
In that situation, the cries of betrayal from the right – and some sections of the NATO supporting left – would be very loud; and there would be every prospect of a lower intensity continuing conflict with Azov type forces trying to conduct raids across whatever DMZ might be set up. Alongside this there would be continuing campaigns to increase military spending in the NATO countries and attempts to line everyone up behind it; and demonise and criminalise those that don’t.
At the same time, the price for the aid to Ukraine, which is in the form of loans, will be called in by the NATO powers and Ukraine’s mineral and agricultural resources will be asset stripped on a grand and ruthless scale from the part of the country it occupies. So much for sovereignty and the rights of nations to self determination. The war time legislation stripping workers of what rights they still had will be reaffirmed in the name of national survival and the oligarchy in Kyiv will make a comfortable living on brokering the deals.
Chinese solutions
There have also been articles arguing that China could put pressure on Russia in order to pull NATOs nuts out of the fire; which is more wishful thinking. Why China should do this when the US is actively trying to mobilise the reluctant population of Taiwan to play the same role viz a viz China as it has managed to get the Ukrainian oligarchy to do viz a viz Russia, is unclear. China’s capacity to broker a peace should not be underestimated. They have managed to get Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations, which has led to a real prospect for peace in Yemen. The recent call between President Zelensky and President Xi opens the door to an end to the conflict that is not primarily framed by NATOs interests; which will therefore be resisted by it. The comment of a US major about the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre in 1968 “in order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it” could end up as the preferred US position on Ukraine, if the alternative involves a Chinese brokered peace.
*These are the FTs figures. Although 1,074,000 divided by 240,000 gets you just under four and a half years, presumably they are taking other factors into account lime depreciation, use on live fire exercises etc.
**A World War 2 analogy might be in comparing the T34/85 and the PZKWV (Panther) tanks. Panthers were designed as an answer to the T34. They were heavier, better armoured, faster, more sophisticated and overall more effective tank to tank, but they were far more prone to breakdown (with only 35% of vehicles considered “combat ready” in 1944) and were more expensive and time consuming to build; so that from 1943 to 45 the Nazis built around 6,500 of them, while in the same period the USSR built29,400 T34/85s.
Urban ramblings 