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What UK school leavers do – and do not – understand about the climate crisis; and why this is a problem.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The conclusions of the December 2024 research report into climate literacy among school leavers in England makes worrying reading. The survey conclusions are republished below.

  • My comments are in italics.

Through asking a selected sample of Year 11 school leavers in England a broad range of questions, this survey presents a nuanced view of climate literacy amongst school leavers. While there is a general awareness of anthropogenic global warming as a cause of climate change and its global impacts, there are several knowledge gaps and misconceptions demonstrated by the responses collected.


Basic knowledge:
While most school leavers recall having been taught about climate change, only just over half remember having covered it in their last year at school.

  • As Climate change is an existential crisis for humanity, for almost half of students to go sailing through a year of school without being challenged to consider any aspect of it shows an alarming level of baked in complacency that we need to change.


There is a general understanding that the climate has warmed, but many overestimate the extent of warming since 1850. This specifically highlights a poor understanding of messaging related to limiting climate change to within 1.5°C/ 2°C, as many school leavers thought that the climate had already warmed more than this.

  • This fits with a sort of “common sense” approach that uses shifts in temperature in everyday experience of weather as a benchmark. In that, a shift or 1 or 2 degerees doesn’t seem like much, but as an average shift across the whole planet, it has enormous consequences. Students will be seeing an increasing series of news items – on TV or social media – that show these disastrous impacts. The fires in LA and recent storms and floods here will be the latest. Stressing that these impacts are happening at just a 1.2C average increase; so increases above 1.5C or 2C will be so much worse, is essential to challenge this. Some students will have experienced climate impacts, like these: 1. “A primary school in Carlisle had classroom windows blown in during a lesson today, leading to kids diving under their desks. 86mph winds predicted and some HTs “bravely” opened. We’ve got a long way to go on the notion of “adapatation” as well as prevention.” 2. A school in Teeside evacuated due to storm damage after students placed on ‘lockdown’ https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/egglescliffe-school-evacuated-stockton-storm-30857248 These are new impacts that will become more common, so staff and students, LAs and Multi Academy Trusts should be aware of them and adapt their risk assessments accordingly.


Most school leavers are ‘fairly concerned’ about climate change but, for those communicating on climate change, it is worth noting that more are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ concerned about climate change than are ‘very concerned’.

  • Without wanting students to be overwhelmed by anxiety, being lulled into complacency is doing them a profound disservice. It provides a foundation based on misunderstanding that allows for policies that backslide in a way that puts all our futures at risk.

Unsurprisingly, there is a correlation between those school leavers who think that climate change will affect them directly and those who are concerned about climate change.

  • The obvious question here is, on what basis does anyone think climate change will not affect them? Recognising that this is a threat to all of us is the foundation for the necessary debates, policies and actions.


A substantial proportion do not appreciate that future global warming can still be limited or avoided.

  • Students should not be left with this false impression. It leads to despair, fatalism, or indifference; none of which will help them address the crisis, either as individuals or citizens.

Causes of climate change
Most school leavers can identify carbon dioxide and methane as greenhouse gases and recognise that greenhouse gases affect the temperature of the Earth, but there are misconceptions regarding their respective sources. Similarly, whilst understanding of fossil fuels as a source of carbon dioxide is generally good, in general, the impact of natural causes of changes in the Earth’s climate and, in particular, orbital changes, are overstated. There is a lack of awareness of the contribution of cement to greenhouse gas emissions and uncertainty around wider sustainability issues relating to the production and use of plastics.

  • The confusion around natural causes is understandable, given that in the long term – before humans -they have been more significant. It is important to clarify this because this fact is used to confuse understanding of what is happening now by ignoring the timescale for variations in the Earth’s orbit and tilt, which are over hundreds of thousands of years, and the impacts of solar activity (which on its own has been having a slightly cooling effect for the last few decades) or volcanoes, which tend to have a significant, but short term, cooling effect when they erupt.
  • The misunderstandings about the causes of carbon emissions probably reflects the fact that a lot of cross school interventions on climate change come under an extracurricullar pastoral heading – like walk to school week, or a recycling drive. This reflects the weakness of whole school learning on climate as such, which will have to become a core part of the curriculum if it is to addressed.

As school leavers indicated a good awareness of which countries are currently emitting most greenhouse gas, but less awareness of per capita or historical emissions, this could be linked to a poor understanding of issues related to climate justice.

  • This is likely to reflect awareness filtering in through media coverage, not school learning. It should be clarified so that students have an accurate picture of
  • 1. who has done what since industrialisation since playing this down is a way to minimise the UK’s historic responsibility as the earliest industrial power and
  • 2. what the per head carbon footprint is – which gives a more accurate picture of how sustainable different societies are than raw totals, though this should also be tempered with an understanding of consumption emissions, as contrasted with production emissions as, in an interdependent world, countries with economies that are primarily service based which have outsourced their carbon intensive heavy industry (like cement production) to other countries nevertheless consume the embodied carbon in their imports in a way that does not show up in statistics based on production.
  • When you get bad faith political actors, and we are spoiled for choice for those, these misunderstandings provides wealthy countries with alibis, other countries to point fingers at, often unfairly, and represents the abdication of responsibility that is being pushed aggressively by climate deniers. For example, India has the third largest carbon emissions by volume, but has a per capita (per person) total of 2.7 tonnes – about half the global average – because it has a population greater than Europe, North and South America and Australasia combined. China has big overall emissions and a per capita footprint double the global average, but this is half the per capita footprint of countries like the USA, Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

Evidence for and impacts of climate change:

Many school leavers are aware of some indicators of a warming climate such as melting glaciers and rising sea levels, as well as of the impact of climate change on extreme weather events. However, there is limited understanding of the geographical distribution of future temperature changes and their impacts.

  • Again, this will be as a result of the absence of systematic teaching and learning about the scale, scope and likely development of climate breakdown. Knowing about melting ice caps is more or less ground zero. If you don’t know this, you don’t really know anything. But being aware of patterns and projections is essential to avoid a solely impressionistic understanding based on a montage of news items as they come in, which, in the UK focus primarily on serious impacts 1. locally, 2. in other wealthy countries, especially the USA 3. in the global South. This also downplays the scale and potential social impact of these events as they already occur, which again engenders far more complacency than we can afford.
  • A set of serious discussions about possible tipping points is also essential to overcome the false notion that climate change happens with remorseless gradualism, implying that when it hits harder we will still be able to outrun it; whereas it is more likely that if we let things get away from us, the harder impacts will be of a greater intensity, faster velocity and so widespread that they could sweep us away like an incoming tsunami.

Mitigation and Adaptation:
In general, the survey indicated low awareness of these two aspects of climate action, and in particular of climate mitigation strategies. Furthermore, there is a varied understanding between these two approaches, with school leavers often misinterpreting mitigation strategies as adaptation. The impacts of keeping pets and eating meat are generally underestimated whereas the impact of switching lights off
and recycling (from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions) is overestimated.

  • The strategies school leavers consider effective are those they have done, or been encouraged to do, at school. Switch the lights off when you leave the classroom. Recycle your stuff. Do schools put what they put in their school dinners up front as part of their climate action plan? They should, and be prepared to have the debate with staff, students and school communities – in the same way that many schools with many Muslim students did when they adopted Halal meat as a default.
  • But, all these examples are in the category of individual actions which, though essential, have too often been used as a distraction to avoid strategic social, political and economic policy choices at society level about use of fossil fuels, industrial farming, construction materials and methods (and who controls those), town planning, transport policy and so on.
  • Whether students can identify whether a given action is mitigation or adaptation, or both, is surely a secondary issue to whether they think they are necessary, for themselves as individuals and/or for everyone as citizens. While its better to be clear, there is a slight echo here of Goveish assumptions that if you can name a part of speech you know how to use language effectively.

Concepts such as the 1.5°C and 2°C targets, and net zero, are very poorly understood. With ‘net zero’ in particular being a phrase which is in widespread use, from the Department for Education’s Climate Change and Sustainability Education Strategy to employers and the media, lack of understanding of it is both surprising and concerning.

  • If it isn’t taught, it won’t be understood. The consequences of average temperature rises of 1.5C and 2C, or worse, are widely published. It should be the core of teaching about what we need to do to limit the incoming damage that students have a firm grasp of these projections and understand the basics of the processes that produce them through the IPCC and that this reflects the firm conviction of 97-99% of the world’s scientists.
  • Given the relentless attacks on “Net Zero madness” and “Net Zero zealots” in the media, having a firm grasp of what the term means is essential to be able to navigate what is becoming an increasingly fraught debate based, primarily, on misleading or factually innaccurate arguments from vested interests with a lot of resources to try to conceptually turn reality upside down. We should not leave our students vulnerable to the suggestion that it is the people who want action for a sustainable future who are “mad” or unreasonably zealous, while those who want to carry on as we are until we hit a series of devastating crises, that we won’t be able to recover from, are somehow the sane ones.
  • Discussions about Net Zero vs Zero carbon emissions raise important issues concerning the limitations of carbon offsets, especially as they are actually used.


If climate education is to raise awareness of green careers and, more generally, to increase hope in our ability to take collective climate action, increased awareness of mitigation and adaptation strategies is vitally important.

  • It is also important for students, who will still be quite young by 2050, to grasp that a failure to decarbonise our society will make us all significantly poorer, even if society avoids collapse altogether. It might help if the Chancellor of the Exchequer had an inkling of this too.


Climate Change in the UK:
In general, there is very poor awareness of the projected impacts of climate change in the UK, the need to adapt, mitigation strategies already in place and of the cost benefits of mitigation rather than adaptation.

  • This, again, reflects the unsystematic and fundamentally unserious character of learning about climate in the UK. These are average results, and some schools do fantastic work, especially if they are signed up to Lets Go Zero, Ministry of Eco Education, Eco Schools, or they have a Local Authority that takes this as seriously as they do in Brighton or Leicester for example, or they have an inspirational Head teacher who is on the mission that, frankly, all Head teachers should be on; but that also means that many schools will be doing far too little in the absence of the thorough commitment to climate education that we need running throigh the entire national curriculum. An example of this is that even an officially supported, and very good, initiative like the National Nature Park has only be signed up to by about 10% of schools. This is absurd.
  • Leaving students with the fundamental misunderstanding that the “costs of Net Zero” are greater than the consequences of failing to meet it – which they will have picked up from deliberately misleading media coverage without a thorough going rebuttal in schools- lays them open to dishonest political manipulation that will put their future at risk.

This will be directly relevant to school leavers’ awareness of the green careers available to them. Whereas school leavers were aware of the contribution of melting ice to sea level rise in the UK, they were less
aware of the contribution of the expansion of sea water as it warms, which has made an approximately equal contribution historically. It could be argued that this reflects a need for science teachers to be able to demonstrate that learning in the sciences has applications and contexts relevant to climate change.

  • The overall conception we should be trying to develop is that every job, every career, will have to be green, because every job will have to be sustainable. There can’t be a “green sector” that maintains peceful coexistence with unsustainable sectors; as the key thing we have to grasp is that we have to make all sectors sustainable and all jobs greener, so the process will be the growth of the former and the shrinking of the latter to ever more residual roles.

Communication:
There is a substantial knowledge gap regarding the level of scientific consensus on climate change, with most thinking agreement amongst scientists is notably lower than it is. This potentially relates to past and present education policy related to presenting a ‘balanced’ argument for global warming. Knowledge of international organisations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is also limited. Trust in climate information from science teachers and the BBC is high, but lower for politicians and tabloid newspapers.

  • This substantial knowledge gap needs to be closed, and fast. This is not simply down to ludicrous notions that it was necessary to have a “balanced” discussion between an almost universal scientific consensus and a few fossil fuel funded mavericks, as if the two had equal weight, but also the previous government’s successful attempt to freeze debate on the social implications of climate change with its “impartiality guidance”, which put campaigning organisations on a blacklist that should not be invited in. This guidance should be scrapped, and the no holds barred debate on how we are going to construct our own futures unleashed.
  • The understanding that the climate breakdown projections we are working to limit are the product of a thorough and painstaking research and analysis, that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a UN body and its findings are subscribed to by 195 governments (out of 198) worldwide; so represents an international government consensus as well as a scientific one is essential. As is the understanding that countries, no matter how weighty they are in the world, that break with the science do not have a valid point of view, but are going rogue.
  • That students trust science teachers most underlines the point that schools have the tresponsibility to present them with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This trust is likely to extend to other teachers in so far as climate is dealt with, as it should be, across the curriculum. There are three levels to our response to this.
  • 1. The current national curriculm review should incorporate climate learning into the national curriculum in all subjects and in an age appropriate way in all key stages. Part of this will have to be turning, appropriate, anxiety into purposeful action, for individuals, schools, communities and in campaigning/debating ways forward to future proof ourselves in a just transition. If it falls short of this, it will not be providing an appropriate curriculum for the Anthropocene.
  • 2. that will require us to campaign for the DFE to create and mandate additional learning to close all of these gaps in understanding.
  • 3. If they fail to do that, we will have to mobilise through our unions and campaigning organisations to produce such material ourselves – from posters, to lesson and assembly plans, to webinars/online learning materials for colleagues to adapt – and push them through during the trade union year of action starting in September, to build such learning into every school’s climate action plan.
  • Trust in “politicians” is low. This isn’t clearly differentiated, because some politicians are more trustworthy than others. But now that we have every Party from the Conservatives rightwards explicitly opposing action to meet “Net Zero” – thereby breaking with the scientific imperative to meet it – it becomes even more important for schools to ground our future citizens in the facts of the world they will be dealing with. As there is no need to teach a balance between scientific reality and denial, Parties that break from the scientific reality, and fail to rise to the challenge of meeting it, are putting themselves outside consideration as relevant forces that should be taken seriously.
  • Students, sensibly enough, do not trust the tabloids. But the BBC, which they trust more, often has its news agenda, and the framework they put stories in, set by them. Looking at trust, or distrust, in social media will also be a vital part of developing critical awareness of bias and manipulation in media coverage. Perhaps counting the number of times that the tabloids attach phrases like “madness” to “net zero” or “swivel eyed” to “targets”, might make a revealing set of graphs…

A personal note

This image is a montage of times. The factory in the background is the Wouldham cement works in Thurrock in 1951.

The photo is on the wall in the Grays branch of Morrisons, which has a nice line in sepia industrial nostalgia. The Wouldham was already a ruin by the 1960s, but there were several other huge cement works along the side of the Thames up towards Purfleet.

Growing up back then on the wrong side of the prevailing winds is probably one reason I’m so prone to coughs. All these plants are now gone. Lakeside has taken their place. The carbon, and pollution, footprint of retail is a lot less than that of cement, which has been outsourced to other countries, which suffer the pollution and have to carry the can for the carbon footprint, even when some of the products are exported back here.

The Wouldham is significant for me in another respect. My great grandfather, John Henry Ellis, worked there and was killed in an industrial accident – falling into one of the storage tanks he worked in in 1931.

Up Yours Elon Musk!

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The current TV advert for the Citroen e-C3 – which looks as though it was directed by the same team as set up the synchronised singing decapitated Marie Antoinette heads at the Olympic opening ceremony this summer- is a funny, elegant French finger gesture to Tesla and Elon Musk.

With David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” pounding in the background, a pair of “artisan” looking young men drive a column of four e-C3s (in a possibly conscious genuflection to the Italian Job) over and through a banquet being held in a chateau by caricatured ancien regime types – all giant bouffant wigs, beauty spots, silk frock coats and enormous dresses – disrupting it and causing operatic shock horror to the assembled aristos. Big, blunt letters announce THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN…ELECTRIC IS NO LONGER FOR THE ELITE before the two drivers go racing away looking perplexed at each other as one of the aristo women appears in the back seat, while other artisan styled “revolutionaries” run aongside with a red flares, red flags and – just to be politically broad church and incorporate that little bit of French bourgeois revolutionary tradition -a tricolour.

This is one in the eye not only for Tesla’s model of high cost, high end, high profit EVs that can only be afforded by the wealthy – which explains why Elon Musk can be so comfortable with Donald Trump, as EVs for him are not for everyone, the poor can be left to drive old bangers, so the Chinese are guilty of “overcapacity” in wanting electric people’s cars – but also neatly skewers his political posture of being the richest man in the world and also “anti elite”.

The e -C3 is one of several cheaper EVs put on the market this year by European car manufacturers, in an attempt not to be overwhelmed by the competition from China. It is notable that the EUs negotiating position on tariffs against potential Chinese imports demands technology transfer as part of the price not to impose them. This concedes that the Chinese companies have more advanced technology and the Europeans are playing catch up. Whether this succeeds in rescuing these companies in the short term, which it may not because it is still a struggle for them to produce EVs profitably, this is projected to reverse the downward tick in EV purchases peculiar to Europe last year, which in turn will have a knock on effect on oil demand in the way that the EV boom in China already has.

The Words of the Prophets…

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…are written on the subways walls, and tenement halls” or, very often, the walls of pub toilets. In the toilet at the Chandos pub, wedged between St Martin in the Fields and the Colosseum, and reached up a narrow twisting staircase lined with black and white photos of opera singers, you’d expect something classy.

Above a startlingly black and white diamond floor, someone has written gnomic messages in the tiny capitalised writing of the obsessive along the grout between the wall tiles. “The World is flat”. “The World is grey”. “Trump is a bump in the road” The last of which can’t help but make you wonder “Where to?” Rather than clean up these rather faint assertions, the pub management has drawn over them in coloured marker; which paradoxically draws attention to them and makes decoding what you can and can’t see underneath a bit of a mission.

Behind the cistern, someone has written, bolder, larger, in green, red and black, “Free, Free Palestine!” then poignantly added “please!” drawing an angry retort in scrawled biro, most of which has been equally angrily scribbled over so only the sentiment “Let us finish the job” can be read. A third person, presumably the one who scribbled it out, has drawn an arrow to the sentiment and added “You did that in 1948”. So, at the pub toilet in the Chandos, as in the Oxford Union, its evident that Israel’s exercise of its “right to defend itself” has blown away any pretence it had at moral standing with every bomb it has dropped, every tactical success lays the ground for strategic failure; and the writing is now on the wall.

Graffiti in pub toilets varies with the clientelle. Back in the seventies in York, when I was more inclined to be a regular than the very occasional visitor I am now, the Spread Eagle in Walmgate seemed to specialise in satire at the expence of John Smiths brewery. Just above the urinal, someone had written, “You don’t buy the beer here, you rent it”. Somone else had added “Don’t take the piss out of John Smiths bitter – you might remove its entire liquid content”. In the more sophisticated refuge of the York Arms, a cosy mostly gay pub tucked snugly in behind Bootham Bar, there was a line in arch and witty comments about anything and everything. Most were a fleeting laugh, but, for a reason that is mysterious to me, this one has stuck. “To be is to do” Rousseau. “To do is to be” Sartre. “Oo be do be do” Sinatra.

A similar mixture of the cod profound and the down to earth was written on the whiteboard on the concourse of Piccadilly Circus tube station that was crowded with people rushing hither and thither in an even busier than usual pre Xmas crush, giving a Hallmark sentiment a practical punch line. “Life is about the journey, not the station – SO KEEP MOVING”.

A sticker in the tube car read “My girlfriend said it was her or Reading – I still miss her sometimes”. My initial thought was that Reading is a nice place, definitely deserves to be a city, but not so nice as to break up over living there, and that this was a strange way to promote its charms; until I tumbled that it was about the football club. The same thought applied though…

Another tube advert illustrated the limitations of synthetic phonics as a method of teaching reading. It read “Whne yuo cna’t dceipher thier priicng bnudles”. I expect that most people reading this will have had no trouble working out what that said, because you’d have been using your sense of meaning and syntax to work with your knowledge of possible letter/sound correspondences (which can vary in English, vowels being especially slippery, as in “I like reading in Reading” or “Gove loves to move”). If the sentence had had a jumbled word order as well as a jumbled letter order, it would have been much harder to work out.

The problem with an over dogmatic phonic approach to reading is the insistence that meaning follows decoding, when it is necessarily very often the other way round. Even when learning the phonemes themselves, its a lot more effective to do so from a word that has meaning for the learner (like their name, or words like “Mum”) than a random list.

The brain works like a very sophisticated version of the spellcheck/predictive text systems that are now on phones. As you type, the system will give you possible options for words that might make sense if they come next. As you type more letters, the words change as the possibilities narrow.

This perception is important from the off, as without making sense being built into the process, there is a danger of what used to be called “barking at print”, where a child might learn to decode the sounds and pronounce the words, but be reading them as a random list. This might get good marks in the phonic screening children in Year 1 have to do, which is set up exactly as a random list, many of them as “non words” to eliminate any input from meaning contaminating the purity of the letter,sound correspondences; but it doesn’t allow lift off into self sustaining reading for pleasure or information – because the activity is abstracted from all that.

More creative mishears. In a discussion on the antecedents of the HTS in the Al Nousra Front and Jolani’s split from ISIS, I misheard the name of the ISIS caliph Abu Bakr Al Bagdhadi as Big Daddy, which conjured a different image altogether.

That Time of Year #5: A train called Barry – Pants Panto and Creative Mishears.

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One of the good things about having ears blocked enough to not quite hear things straight, is that some of the mishears are quite evocative. Getting out of a train the other day, the following, rather poignant message came over the speaker – “We have now reached our destination. When you leave the train, please take all of your longings with you…”

The C2C train that I got out of in Grays station had a name plate. Barry Flaxman. Not quite Thomas the Tank Engine, but quirky in its own way. C2C being owned by TrenItalia, you’d expect something zappier and well travelled, the Marco Polo perhaps, or the Amerigo Vespucci. But those would work better for high speed rail over continental distances. If the Belt and Road Initiative was a European enterprise heading East to Samarkand, Ulan Bator and Beijing, instead of vice versa, the locomotives might have names like that. For a short haul commute between Southend and Fenchurch Street, Barry it is.

An appropriate honour for a man from Southend who spent his life from 1949 onwards campaigning for passenger improvements, died of a heart attack on his way to view a new train in 1998 and whose “timetabling knowledge was the driving force behind the electrification scheme benefits of the early 1960s that brought such a step change in journey time and frequency.” The world is full of barely acknowledged contributions to life being a tiny bit better, made by people unknown outside their own field and tiny circle. Its a pity that the train just has the name, with no further information, leaving it to stand alone in almost anonymous obscurity.

All the same, perhaps Barry himself might have been a bit cross that the train with his name on it was having a problem with its connecting doors on the day I went down; making the carriage with the toilet in it innaccesible from the rear coach. Having indulged in a coffee from Fenchurch Street, which seemed like a good idea at the time, this was becoming more and more of a problem as the stations counted down.

Dagenham Dock,

Rainham,

Purfleet,

Grays.

The train glided into its final destination in what felt like mocking sloth and was in no hurry to let the doors bleep their escape signal. Limping at speed to the toilets in the Precinct and just about making it, or so I thought; there being an “Out of Order” sign improvised in cardboard across the Mens. Knowing that I would never make it back to the toilets in Morrisons before suffering leaks on a grand scale, I expressed my frustration at slightly “Broken Britain” with a satisfying fricative explosion

“F*$*£!!!!”

“No need to swear”, says a concerned woman passing by.

“There’s a disabled toilet. You can use that. Are you disabled?”

“I will be in a minute if I can’t use it”.

My nephew, who is a very talented musician, is now in the band for this year’s Aladdin Panto, with Gok Wan, a Loose Woman and the surviving Chuckle Brother. Most of the music in Panto is what they call “stings”; musical sound effects that punctuate the story and draw attention to jokes. Ba -boom – tisshhh – Ta – daaah! – Wa, Wa Waaaaa! That sort of thing. Not massively taxing, and not a lot of room for solo improvisation, but quite fun.

Meanwhile, at the Thameside Theatre, this year’s version of Snow White has just one named actor – Luke Coldham (who may, or may not, be a cold ham) – playing “Nurse Kelly” – a character I don’t recall either from Grimm or Disney – who looms very large and central in the poster. None of the other actors merits a mention, but they are all smiling happily, if anonymously, enough. Its possible that this is Panto’s answer to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, where he takes two minor but essential characters out of Hamlet and makes their offstage existential angst the centre of the play, posing the fundamental question of what Non Playable Characters think of when they are not being played, but probably not.

And SMILE! A broadside of dentistry to brighten the bleak midwinter – and not a dwarf in sight. What have they DONE with them? The other acts being advertised at the Thameside, and Civic Centre, have a definite nostaglic quality: The Upbeat Beatles, The Jersey Boys, The Roy Orbison story: appealing to people who remember 1963 and think the world has gone to pot since; partly because the Beatles did themselves and got a lot less upbeat and a lot more quirky as a result. I’m not knocking the concerts, I expect they are good fun, albeit in a safe retread sort of way, but its the sheer uniformity of the cultural offer – nothing for anyone under 60, no cultural influences other than an aging transatlantic mainstream: like Radio 2 forty years ago. And the only other piece of Theatre on offer is a stage version of “Allo! Allo!”, the 1980s situation comedy in which the situation is the Nazi occupation of France reimagined as farce. Always good for a laugh, if you don’t have much grasp of what that was actually like.

Luke probably gets a mention, not because he might have been on Eastenders once in 2013, but because he’s a Thameside Panto regular – having played Sarah the Cook in Dick Whittington (who?) Widow Twanky in a former Aladdin production, Dame Dolly Doughnut in Peter Pan, Stanley in One Man Two Guv’nors and must do it well enough to be a bit of a draw. He’s also played Maximilian Robespierre at the Royal Opera House, so he’s not a one trick pony (unless he’s playing him in drag). Like everyone in the Arts, you get the work where you can.

Meanwhile, the Guardian quotes Keira Knightly as saying that her latest Xmas set thriller will “ruin Christmas”. Many of us think that she and Richard Curtis did that already with Love Actually, which will probably be running on a loop on most channels for most of the holiday.

That Time of Year #4. Deck the Halls with plastic holly…

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In the precinct – not a tree, but a simulation of a tree. A geometric shape in plastic. A prefab structure with built in baubles. Tall, pretty in its way, but by definition lifeless and sterile. None of the tension of a real dying live tree, no reflection of the mid Winter dramas of light in the darkness, evergreen boughs, blood berries and spiky leaves. And no aroma; no fresh gusts of pine leaf and sap to quiver the nostrils and refresh the mind.

When the school that I worked in for many years fell seriously foul of OFSTED and we were forcibly academised – which tipped a difficult situation into one that became almost irretrievable – on the first Christmas after the takeover, I walked into the reception area between the Scylla of the Head’s Office and the Charybdis of the Office office, and there, standing in the corner, was a silver, plastic tree (with attached baubles). Frank the Premises Manager had just put it up and was appraising it with his head on one side. Under the old regime we had had TWO real trees. Big ones. One in the reception, one in the Middle Hall, where most Assemblies took place. These were lovingly decorated with great craft and skill by the TAs and the whole school was treated to great wafts of aromatherapy for the whole of December. This was not a box being ticked. There was a heart to it. I looked at the plastic replica of a tree, looked at Frank. We both looked back at it, then at each other. We had the same expression. “Sums it up in a way, doesn’t it?” “Yeah, it does”.

Customers are fairly sparse. The independent cafe in the centre is closed, but the Costa on the corner facing onto the High Street is full of people drinking vast bowls of coffee at the bladder bursting end of the spectrum.

Meanwhile, at the War Memorial, an equal opportunities Remembrance Parade, in crochet, lines up on the bollards.

Fox Hunting by Bus in Search of Nirvana

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On the pavement outside Kwikfit, two of the monks from the Buddhist Temple on Kingsbury Road, resplendent in smouldering saffron and crimson, but simultanously down to earth in grey woolly socks and hats (a sartorial middle way) walk past. One of them has his nose in a leaflet about life insurance, which he might well have need of if he doesn’t look up before he gets to the edge of the pavement.

When waiting for the 324 bus outside Brent Cross, there is always a steady stream of 112 buses heading for the headily named Tally Ho Corner in North Finchley. To give the bus a bit of panache the destination board on the front reads FINCHLEY Tally Ho! as if grinding up Ballards Lane from one bit of nondescript bit of suburbia to another had all the dash of a hunt of sherried up hoorays jumping their horses pell mell over hedges, and hurtling through the countryside in full tilt pursuit of the foxes that now slink around our bins at night – probably at Tally Ho corner too. The arrival must be an anticlimax, but that exclamation mark gives the journey a bit of imaginary zip. In the same way that there is a suburb of Polokwane in South Africa that is called Nirvana. I don’t suppose its all that, but having it as a destination on the front of a bus…wonderful! Saves all that reincarnation.

That time of Year #1. The Nativity with no baby.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In the midst of the great Temple of Mammon that is Brent Cross Shopping Centre, a not quite life size Nativity scene is installed on the first floor. It looks normal enough until you notice that, in the midst of the manger, where the Christ baby should be, there is a void.

As a result the hand and face gestures that should express awe and wonder are more akin to shock and bewilderment, puzzlement or even irritation. Where’s that baby gone? He was here a minute ago?

The Gold and Frankincense seems to have arrived with two of the Three Magi, but there’s no Myrrh for the third. Its obviously a result of something prosaic – some of the parts haven’t been delivered perhaps.

Nevertheless, it comes across almost as a statement of doubt. The absence at the heart of doctrine. Faith without object. Or perhaps as a practical joke, or a Shopping Mall Treasure Hunt – find the missing Son of God and win a Waitrose voucher (bonus points for the missing Myrrh).

A small dog strains on his lead to sniff through the barrier at one of the plastic sheep, trying to work it out.

Labour’s Climate Strategy – strengths and weaknesses.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This was an introduction given at the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group’s energy strategy day. Afterthoughts and updates, like the next few paragraphs, have been added in bold.

This introduction was delivered before Keir Starmer’s speech at COP 29, which made the very welcome pledge of an 81% cut in carbon emissions by 2035, but also included the promise that the government would not “tell people how to live their lives”.

This makes the way we live now somehow sacrosanct- and assumes that “people” are incapable of rising to the challenge of changing it if thats whats needed to secure a livable world for their children and grandchildren. It also ducks the government’s responsibility to implement Article 12 of the Paris Agreement which is a call for mass popular information, education and mobilisation campaigns, to enable society to act collectively to save itself.

Parties shall cooperate in taking measures, as appropriate, to enhance climate change
education, training, public awareness, public participation and public access to information,
recognizing the importance of these steps with respect to enhancing actions under this
Agreement.

As 66% of the public want more action to combat climate change, we should be mobilised to do so. We will have to get to sustainability by marching forward on both the technological transformation leg and the social transformation leg. We won’t get there if we have to hop hopefully on just one of them.

Labour’s strengths and weaknesses

I’d like to stress that there are a range of views in the Greener Jobs Alliance, and these are mine.

To start with a statement of the obvious, it doesn’t look as though the government sees itself as an instrument to mobilise society to transform itself to sustainability.

They treat the climate crisis as an item on a list – limited to a mission to make the UK a “Green Energy Superpower” – not the framework in which everything else has to be posed.

That leaves huge gaps. Some examples.

1.The current curriculum review for schools does not explicitly have addressing the climate crisis at the heart of it, although the current Ministerial team are open to a discussion about it in a way that the last was not.

2.A climate conscious budget would, as a minimum,

i) have raised fuel duty and hypothecated the revenue to keep the £2 bus fare cap and invested the rest in enhanced public transport.

ii) raised a wealth tax on incomes above £10 million per annum, as suggested by Greenpeace – to raise £130 billion over 5 years (1% of GDP) which, they argue, would raise the revenue to cover insulating 19 million homes, cap bus fares outside London at £1.65, and free for under 25s, fund an unlimited rail ticket for £49, provide retraining for the 3.2 million workers at risk in high carbon industries and shift agriculture onto an agro- ecological basis.

That might be optimistic, but its that scale of ambition thats needed, along with a relentless explanation of why its necessary as a national and international mission.

And to play fantasy Chancellor a little longer, a recommitment to the £28 billion a year future proofing investment with a plan for every sector that works with the relevant unions to develop it and identify the skills gaps that have to be filled. This applies to expanding sectors as well as high carbon sectors that will have to shrink.

Reeves and Starmer’s overall strategy is for “growth” – any growth – conceived in completely traditional terms, not framed as transformation. This can sometimes even be framed in a way that undermines the government’s own targets -as expressed in the recent Sun article under Starmer’s name headlined – “I will never sacrifice Great British Industry to the drum beating, finger wagging Net Zero Zealots”.

I guess that’s us. Perhaps we should all get badges.

Also, I don’t know if its just me, but does all this “Great British this, Great British that” have a really early Victorian feel to it?

3. This can also be seen in housing. The challenge is to build 1.5 million new homes a year. The GJA wrote to Angela Rayner in October last year whether all new homes would be

i) built to a zero carbon standard, with a sound level of insulation, heat pumps, electric cookers and hubs, solar panels as standard and no connection to the gas grid (as this would be a wasted investment).

ii) with all essential facilities within walking distance, integrated green spaces and trees, good public transport links and car clubs to reduce the burden of individual car ownership.

iii) zero impact assessments on water tables and sewage and other questions including who will build them? Arguing that there needs to be a plan to expand Local Authority Direct Labour Organisations with a link to local FE colleges to skill up the new workers we will need to do it

iv) And, crucially, the last question. If the aim is to use existing developers, how will you prevent them from blackmailing the government to water down standards to enable them to squeeze in more units, cut the proportion of social housing, sit on land banks and refuse to develop them, or claim that necessary environmental standards impact on their profits too much?

We didn’t get a reply, but there are indications that they could let developers rip through reducing planning restrictions even on the water table and sewage – which is quite extraordinary, given the massive concern about sewage in our rivers – and there are signs of a retreat on a solar panel default after push back from the industry which shows where the battle is. New rules ensuring that no new homes are connected to the gas grid are, however, scheduled to come into force by 2027 and implemented from 2028. The key question now is how stringent the environmental standards for new builds will be and not allowing the developers to kick the costs of meeting them onto households.

All this poses a question for the trade union approach to Just Transition. At the moment, the new TUC Worker Led Transition Team is focussed on enabling a transition in threatened high carbon sectors – cars, cement, steel etc – which is vital and important work, but we also need campaigns for employment that doesn’t currently exist. Construction and retrofit are probably the most promising sector for this.

The TUC WLT have been working since May and you can read about them and find their contact details in the latest Greener Jobs Alliance Newsletter.

Just Transition doesn’t have to mean like for like jobs. I saw in Edie this week that there’s a skills gap for 50% of the jobs projected as “green” by 2030 – which indicates a huge demand and potential, but also a risk if that gap isn’t filled.

4. This also applies to Foreign Policy. David Lammy made a speech in September stating that the government would put climate change at the heart of UK foriegn policy.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if it did?

For him this had three components.

i) A “clean power alliance” to scale up finance for “clean power” in the Global South.

ii) Measures to unlock global finance to “leapfrog fossil fuels” there.

iii) Implementation of the 30 by 30 agreement (safeguarding 30% of land and oceans by 2030).

The problems with this are that the UK went to the recent Nature COP without a plan for 30/30. “Clean power” is sometimes used as a synonym for “green power” but it is also often used, especially in the US, as a specific description for the cluster of technologies being posed as an alternative to renewables; nuclear, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage.

Most crucially, unlocking finance does not mean increasing aid levels – which are still at 0.5% of GDP, with no plans even to get back up to 0.7%.

What Lammy means is trying to find investment opportunities for the City of London/UK finance sector. For this to work it would have to be profitable for them, as banks follow the money; which is why they have invested twenty times as much in carbon bombs as the Global South has received in climate finance since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.

So this is a bit greenwashy, especially as the actual heart of UK Foreign policy is not prioritising fighting the climate crisis, but its strategic subordination to the United States; expressed this week by Starmer “looking forward” to working with Trump “in defence of our shared values” – even as Trump is poised to exit the Paris Agreement and trash all domestic environment protection measures and even the bodies that monitor them.

The question posed by this is the extent to which the government will adapt to US pressure; particularly as this is finding expression here in the alignment of every political force from the Tories rightwards on opposition to “the madness of Net Zero” or the “costs of Net Zero” as they put it. The use of these phrases is now ubiquitous and serves to associate “Net Zero” with “madness“ in people’s minds – pushed as it is by “eco zealots” and therefore by definition unreasonable – without the inconvenience of having to make an argument to justify the association; which they have to do because both are the opposite of the truth. The only thing mad about Net Zero is not reaching it in time, the costs of not getting there are enormous and, indeed, fatal.

As will be the end result of the increased military spending that they falsely pose as keeping us “safe”.

One aspect of US pressure is to sharply increase and prioritise military spending. Starmer is due to announce a schedule for the UK to increase its military spending to 2.5% of GDP straight after Trump’s inauguration, which will do little to appease him when he’s pushing for an eye watering 4%. This is dangerous in itself, but also sucks resources away from investing in transition and/or improving people’s lives; thereby deepening the cost of living crisis and the risk of war.

This is in the context of some EU leaders going to Trump, according to the FT, and suggesting “lets avoid a tariff war and team up against China”; thereby proposing to form a bloc with a climate rogue state against the world’s largest investor in renewable energy.

At the same time they are relaxing their formerly sacred fiscal rules to allow stepped up investment in military production and military focussed infrastructure investment, like strengthening bridges “so tanks can pass in safety” – to prepare for a continental war with Russia which, were it to happen, would kill us all. It is an explicit presumption of the current UK Defence Review that we are in ” a pre war period” with Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, or all four. This is suicidal lunacy and we don’t have to accept it.

In the context of Trump expecting these ruinous increases in military spending from all US subordinate allies, a better course for all of them is to seek peace and mutual security with the targetted countries. In Europe, that means finding a modus vivendi with the Russians that would allow a lasting peace in Ukraine – not just a pause while both sides feel they have to tool up for Armageddon – and a reduction in tensions and barriers across the whole of Eurasia.

5) Lastly, on the “Green Energy Superpower” project, there is good news and bad news.

The good news is

i) the unblocking of onshore wind and solar farms,

ii) the 2.5 times increase in offshore wind in this years Contracts for Difference auction – though this needs to double again next year and stay at that level to meet the 2030 target

iii) getting a fast feasibility study done from NEOS that its possible to get the grid in shape to take on all the new renewable energy sources – and finding that this would cut people’s bills

iv) moving zombie projects out of the planning system so those most ready can go first

…all this is positive and means there will be a substantial increase in renewable energy by 2030.

But,

i) The investment in CCUS and blue hydrogen announced last month is a misallocation of funds that could have more of a climate impact and create more jobs elsewhere.

ii) The failure to maintain the original plan for retrofit means that demand and emissions will be higher than they need to be.

iii) As does the insufficient focus on sustainable transport and the continued low funding for local authorities that makes most local climate action plans well intentioned and doing some good things – from bee corridors to LTNs and cycle paths, public EV charging points, officially approved guerilla gardening, school streets programmes and so on, but not resourced enough to qualitatively impact neighbourhoods.

Above all, and overarching, this is the lack of just transition bodies with mass participation at national. regional and local levels because, if I can misquote Lenin, Sustainability = electrification plus Just Transition Commissions.

What’s wrong with the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign model motion for NEU Conference.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

If this Motion were to be marked as a History essay, it would be unlikely to get high marks for balanced or objective judgement.

More important, it is a motion to pursue the war not to end it. 

All of the horrific consequences of the war, which it simplistically, ascribes to one side in the same way that our self serving media do, are arguments to end it as rapidly as possible, not cheer it on, particularly given the dangers of nuclear escalation. 

Whatever views members have about the causes of the war, we can surely unite in wanting it to end.

Most people do.

1 A Majority of people in Ukraine now support negotiations to end the war. “More than half of Ukrainians polled by Gallup (52%) agree that: “Ukraine should seek to negotiate an ending to the war as soon as possible”, while only 38% want the country to “continue fighting until it wins the war”. This is a remarkable shift compared to a year ago, when 63% wanted to continue fighting and 27% were in favour of negotiations.” From The Conversation. The motion supports the minority view in Ukraine.

2 Majorities in Poland and Italy (both 55%) support a negotiated settlement over supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes to restore the 1991 borders. Almost twice as many also support negotiations over those who argue for fighting on in Germany (45% -28%) and France (43% – 23%) twice as many in Spain (46% -23%) even more than that in Italy (55% – 15%). Even in the UK, with its stifling pro-war consensus in Parliament and media, support for negotiations is now almost level pegging with support for fighting on (32% -36%). The trend in all countries is towards negotiation not endless war. By the time of NEU conference at Easter, on current trends, there will be a majority for negotiations here too. This is partly because only one in ten Europeans now believe that Ukraine can “win”; or that to do so would require an economically, militarily and humanly unsustainable level of military escalation; including crossing nuclear red lines.

3 Supporters of the motion should be asked if they support the £3 billion a year from the UK, “as long as it takes”, and the sharp increases in military spending now being posed as needed to counter the Russians, if not now, then in a suicidal land war in Europe within the decade. Trump is demanding 5%. Neil Kinnock says 4% would be “reasonable”. Kim Darroch says “more than 3%” would be needed. 5% of GDP on “defence” in the UK would require an additional £60 -70 billion a year. This cannot be done without cuts in every other area. Mark Rutte, of NATO, suggests this could come from “health and pensions”, but we can be sure that everything else, including schools – with 76% of primary schools and 94% of secondary schools already being threatened with cuts this year, even before this starts – and investment in climate transition, would be in the firing line too.

This infographic shows the comparative existing balance of military spending between NATO and the Russian Federation. For every £1 spent by the Russians, NATO spends £11. Even the European NATO powers outspend them by a ratio of £7 for every £1. Proposals to double that can’t realistically be described as “defensive”. We should not support it.

The USC Motion point by point.

  1. Self determination has to apply to all peoples in Ukraine, including the large Russian speaking minority in the East of the country and Crimea. The USC position is based on the delusion that there is one united Ukrainian people, which writes the Russians in the East of the country out of history as if they don’t exist and never have. They did, do, and have been asserting their independence since 2014. Any position on the war that does not recognise this is a denial of reality and principle.
  2. and 3. All children deserve a peaceful education on both sides of the front line. Hopefully we can all agree on that. The USC does not acknowledge that the Donbass has been shelled daily since 2014. Schools and colleges have been hit. Children have been killed. Their lives matter as much as those in the West.

Faina Savenkova in the ruins of school №7 in Lugansk. It was not a warehouse or a military facility. Ordinary children studied in this school. But Ukraine destroyed it during its shelling of the city in 2014.

4. Calling for “Russia” to withdraw from “Ukrainian territory” does not recognise the unresolved national question in Ukraine and, as a result, is a call for the Russian speaking population of the Donbass and Crimea to become refugees en masse. Ukrainian military intelligence is quite clear that the people in these areas have “a completely different mindset” (Kyrillo Budanov, head of Ukranian Military Intelligence) requiring wholesale reeducation and anyone “with blood on their hands” would have to be “physically eliminated” (Budanov again). This could well mean all 55,000 members of the Donbass Militia. Hopefully, we can all oppose that.

5. This point is a cover for NATO to step up the war. When funding, munitions, weaponry, special forces and special advisers, “volunteers”, military technicians and satellite data are core to the war effort this makes it clear that this is not support for Ukraine from NATO, it is the Ukrainian government sacrificing its people on behalf of NATO. A neat formula expressing this relationship is President Zelensky’s comment that his aim is to build “a big Israel in Eastern Europe” – that’s to say, a powerful, technically proficient, military frontier state for the US, guaranteeing its interests in “a bad neighbourhood”. The price being paid by the Ukrainian working class for this ambition is appalling.  The fulfillment of this ambition would not be a good development for the working class in Ukraine, or anywhere else.

6. At the moment the Russians are still able to grow their army with volunteers. By contrast, the early surge of volunteers in Ukraine has long subsided and there is now forced conscription with press gangs roaming the streets widespread draft resistance – with films of men being dragged off the streets into military minibuses and putting up a hell of a fight to stay free. In the Autumn there were demonstrations of relatives demanding to know the whereabouts of their sons, brothers, husbands who have disappeared at the front. UAF losses have been horrific, particularly since the start of the Kursk offensive. As a result, Western “supporters” of Ukraine like Senator Lindsay Graham, have been calling for conscription to be extended down from 27 to 18 years old to supply more bodies to feed into the war. President Zelensky has been resisting this so far, for the same reason that the call up age was so high in the first place. With a steep demographic decline since the break up of the USSR, resulting from a low birth rate combined with high emigration, the number of men in their twenties is about half that of men in their forties; so national survival depends to a large degree on not letting them get killed in large numbers. Hopefully we can all oppose that.

7. In the event of peace, the “Western backers” will call their loans in and asset strip the country and no one should have any delusions about that. Having sacrificed their sons for the West, the Ukrainian people will have their resources annexed by it for the privilege.

i) Opposing the Russian intervention without considering what came before is like opposing October 7th without considering 70 years of Israeli occupation. There had been a civil war in Ukraine since 2014, when the overthrow of an elected Russian leaning President by a mass movement in the West of the country, – supported organisationally and politically by the US and EU – led to a rebellion by people in Crimea, the South and the East of the country by Russian speakers who objected to the overthrow of a government they had voted for. This was crushed in Odessa, led to direct Russian intervention and annexation in Crimea and to a war in the Donbass, after the new government in Kyiv sent in the army and strafed Donetsk city with helicopter gunships. This war cost 14,000 lives up to 2022, mostly on the Donbass side of the front line.

Attempts to resolve this war through an agreement (at Minsk) to allow autonomy within Ukraine for the Donbass Republics were conceded by Angela Merkel to be an attempt to “buy time” while NATO trained up the Ukrainian Armed Forces so they’d be strong enough to retake the Donbass by force. At this point, the Russian stance was for the Minsk agreement to be implemented. They didn’t even recognise the Donbass Republics. This came to a head in the Winter of 2021 -22 when the formal process of starting Ukraine’s application to join NATO began.

The Russians had made it clear at least since the US backed Orange Revolution of 2004 -5 (hard to deny that this was a colour revolution, since the name is on the tin) that Ukraine being in NATO was as much of an existential threat to them as the US had seen Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. At that point the US had been prepared to risk nuclear war to get them out. The Russians were saying consistently that this was a similar red line for them. So, in the winter of 2021 -2 they put forward a mutual security treaty as a way to avoid the clash that, without it, they conceived was inevitable, if not now, then later when Ukraine was fully integrated and NATO felt able to chance its arm. NATOs refused even to negotiate on this, either because they thought the Russians were bluffing, or that if they weren’t the sanctions they had up their sleeve would be enough to bring them to their knees in short order. They were wrong about both. But, either way, an alliance interested in peace would have negotiated.

Deliberately pushing across the red lines of a nuclear armed state warning of an existential crisis for it is a level of reckless brinkmanship that puts us all at risk and our movement should be challenging that not supporting it.

ii) See point 2 above.

iii) and iv) All civilian deaths on both sides of the line are to be deplored, as are war crimes committed by soldiers of either side. Trying to present only one side as culpable of this, as this motion does, is reminiscent of editions of John Bull in 1915 banging the drum for recruitment in WW1 on stories of “German beastliness”, and it is dangerously similar to the far-right framing of the Azov battalion (or Benjamin Netanyahu) who see themselves in a struggle for Western civilisation against hordes of eastern Untermensch. In Vietnam, the US forces referred to the Vietnamese as “Gooks”. In Ukraine they refer to the Russians as “Orcs”. There is a continuity in this with the Ukrainian nationalists from WW2 led by Stepan Bandera, who are now celebrated in Kyiv, who fought with and for the Nazis, recruited guards for the concentration camps and massacred Polish villagers.  The longer the war goes on, the more atrocities there will be.

v) The environmental damage is done by the war itself, not just by one side in it. Some of the most productive agricultural fields in the world are mined by both sides. The Nordstream gas pipeline was blown up by the US . The Zaporozhe nuclear power station was shelled by the Ukrainians for months, as was the Kakhovka dam. All these are good reasons for the war to end, not be pursued.

vi) It is the war and resulting sanctions that is disrupting the supply of food and fertilizer from Russia and Ukraine to the rest of the world. Another reason to end it.

vii) What the USC describe as “Russian occupied areas” are Russian speaking areas that rebelled against Ukrainian nationalism in 2014 and are now part of the Russian Federation; so it is entirely logical that schools there follow the Russian curriculum, not that of the state they rebelled agsinst.

viii)  Evacuating children in orphanages and children’s homes from war zones is a necessary precaution to keep them safe. Perhaps the USC thinks it would have been better had the Russians left them in the firing line?

  1. Supporting the trade unions that support the oligarchy that support the war is in contradiction to
  2. supporting campaigns for working class interests, which requires the workers movement not to subordinate itself to its own oligarchy.
  3. 1.2 million of the refugees from the war fled to Russia – which is more than any other single country.
  4. Dissidents are also arrested in Ukraine, some have been murdered.
  5. All refugees should be treated with respect and care wherever they come from and whatever the reason.

The instructions for the Executive do not support a campaign to end the war and the suffering attendant on it. 

All the links they propose are with organisations in the West of Ukraine that support the continuation of the war, and therefore the sacrifice and suppression of the working class. We should reach out to teachers in the Donbass too and should campaign for a ceasefire and peace talks without preconditions.

The NEU already has guidance for supporting refugee children that we should be pressing employers to use for all refugee children.

Photos of children killed in the Donbass by Ukrainian shelling from 2014 onwards on display on the Arbat in Moscow. There are more than 300 of them. Photo Dan Kovalic

A finger of hot schrapnel

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

One afternoon in 1940, before he was evacuated, my dad, his parents and their neighbours were drawn outside their house in Ireton Place in Grays by the shattering percussion of the Hogg Lane Anti Aircraft battery opening up at Luftwaffe bombers heading upriver towards London. Everyone stood in their front gardens and looked anxiously upwards.

The aircraft could not been seen because of low cloud. Bursts of flak puffed amidst it.

The anti-aircraft battery was loud. It was barely a quarter of a mile away at the crown of the Hogg Lane hill, just beyond Wallace Road, the other side of the thin end of the Titan pit and the allotment. Being on the top of the hill, it had a command over the Thames flood plain below. Navigating by eye, Luftwaffe pilots found the Thames a useful routemap up to London, but had to run the gauntlet of dozens of Ak Ak batteries on the way. This map just shows the heavy batteries. Regular batteries like the Hogg Lane one are not marked.

These are Vickers 3.7 inch anti aircraft guns – the main calibre used in the UK during WW2 – about the same as the more well known German 88 mm gun. It could fire a 13 Kg shell up to 9 kilometres high at a velocity of 800 -1000 metres per second at a rate of 10 – 20 rounds per minute (one every 3 to 6 seconds). This is not a photo of the Hogg Lane site but looks similar, with, from memory, four concrete bases in a kind of four petal shape to make a firm platform for each gun, with a concrete bunker in the middle to store ammunition. This was abandoned at the end of the war and was used to play on by successive generations of children – “let’s play over the army barracks” – until the landscape was obliterated by the Chafford Hundred development in the late eighties. Photo Wikipedia

These guns didn’t often hit anything, but it was devastating when they did. At around this time a Junkers 88 was hit flying at 30,000 feet over Purfleet, disintegrating the plane and killing the whole crew of seven. The youngest member of it was 19, the oldest 26.

Standing outside during an air raid is never a good idea. A friend who grew up in Mumbai told me that during the 1967 Indo Pakistan war – the second one over Kashmir – people would initially go up on their roofs to look at the show when the Pakistan Air Force made raids – and many were killed or injured from falling schrapnel – so that was a short lived diversion.

It surprises me that my grandad’s curiosity got the better of the ingrained caution built into surviving almost three years as a teenage soldier on the Western Front. At one point his regiment was redeployed to Ireland, so perhaps I owe his survival, and my existence, to the IRA, whose insurgency got him out of the trenches for a while.

My family and their neighbours were luckier than the people hit by schrapnel in Mumbai.

There was a “ping” as something hit the roof and a piece of metal bounced off onto the garden. A warning in a way. It was about the size of a fat finger, smooth on one side but visciously jagged on the other. Hot too. As no aircraft were hit by the bombardment, the shell fragment must have been “one of ours”. My granddad picked it up and kept it as a memorial for about twenty years, wired down to a piece of hardboard to keep it safe in the glass fronted bookcase with the tiny ivory elephants and three wise monkeys he had brought back from India when deployed there in the 1920s.