On Thursday evening, my son discovered this taped just outside our front door. Just next to the drainpipe – which seems appropriate.
This is a year old clipping from the “Sun” written by that deep thinker Jeremy Clarkson.
This follows the delivery of one battered UKIP leaflet a fortnight ago through the letterbox and a Brexit Party leaflet left on the doorstep a couple of months before that; both left over from the Euro Election and both the with address cut out. A very strange version of the 12 Days of Xmas this year.
Clearly someone locally – the same person I presume who sprayed the word “Tory” on every available white wall locally this time last year – including the one outside the Temple on Kingsbury Road -and has since followed up by spraying “Trump” and “Trump – Jesus” on the sides of white (and white-ish) vans on our road – feels the need both to mark his* presence and is irked by ours.
I presume that whoever it is who stuck this up – and I have two ideas who it might be – is really relieved that the country dodged a bullet last December and does not have to shoulder the burden of a government that would have made it a fairer, greener place, would not have contracted track and trace out to SERCO and presided over the worst per capita death rate in Europe and would not now be crashing out of the EU with no deal. Lucky us!
Possibly a sexist presumption, but I’d bet fifty quid its a bloke.
With all the pathetic, posturing, patriotic hoo-ha around getting the vaccination programme authorised first- nothing like authorising a vaccine developed in Germany by Turkish immigrants for a US company manufactured in Belgium to make you “Proud to be British”- and hyped up just in time to give everyone false reassurance before the Xmas relaxation of restrictions generates the same sort of third wave as we saw in the USA after Thanksgiving – the quantity of vaccine currently available has been downplayed.
The UK currently has 800,000 doses. As everyone has to be vaccinated twice, that’s enough for 400.000 people. Considering vulnerable groups, there are 3.2 million people aged over 80. In addition there are 1.3 million workers in the NHS and 1.5 million working in adult social care, so its not going to stretch very far very fast.
A million more doses are due next week, but even if that rate of supply is kept up it would take until the end of January just to do all of the over eighties; assuming that no front line workers are going to be covered at the same time.
Because it is going to take a long time, even to vaccinate the most vulnerable, any delusions that its all over are very dangerous. If you add that to Jonathan Van Tam’s argument that the virus cannot be eliminated and we are going to have to live with it forever, a worrying variant on herd immunity is starting to re-emerge.
Rather than seeing the vaccines as a tool to eradicate the virus, the logic of this is that if the most vulnerable are vaccinated, it becomes an “acceptable level of risk” for everyone else to go back to normal before they are vaccinated and therefore still in danger. This will be posed in macho, character building terms about not hiding under the sheets for fear of the virus. But to mangle one of Van Tam’s metaphors, even if all the penalty takers get on to the train that is just pulling into the station, not only will the train be travelling very slowly once it sets off, it doesn’t actually have a destination and will just keep trundling along for ever and ever amen.
The approach to schools during the tightened restrictions that have just ended has been a dummy run for this. It rapidly became apparent that secondary school students were the age group with the most rapid viral spread – but schools were kept open. The relatively small dent in viral spread made by the Mockdown, compared to the previous one in the Spring can partly be attributed to this.
Although the government in Wales has finally moved to distance learning for the last two weeks of term, without the UK government following suit – and also keeping restrictions in place over Xmas as tight as they were during Eid and Diwali – we will be heading for a third wave in January and the vaccine programme will barely dent it.
When Boris Johnson said this time last year that he had an “oven ready” deal with the EU, he neglected to point out that the oven was broken.
He is now breezily assuring us that an “Australian style” deal won’t be too bad; as retailers warn of price rises and supply shortages of everything from food to medicine.
An Australia style deal is no deal at all. Mongolia and Afghanistan have the same “deal” with the EU as Australia does. But, Australia has a certain “White Dominion” atavistic “kith and kin” resonance with a certain kind of Tory voter, all positive associations of Barbecues and beer on Bondi Beach, aspirational Neighbours style suburbia and just a little bit of “common sense” casual racism. Johnson could say “Mongolian style deal” or “Afghan style deal” instead, but that would go down as well as yak milk with these people, so he doesn’t.
Of course, Australia is currently trying to negotiate a closer trade deal with the EU, while the UK is pulling away. Total Australian trade with the EU is significantly smaller than that of the UK.
This may be partly because Australia is 9,000 miles away from Europe, whereas the UK is right on the border.
When considering the percentage of imports and exports, the difference weight of EU trade is even more stark.
The EU is Australia’s third largest trading partner but the UK’s most important.
What also has to be factored in here is that just under half of Australian trade with the EU is actually with the UK – for historic colonial reasons – so the proportion with the rest of Europe is even smaller than appears here. It is therefore less of a problem for Australia to be trading with the EU without a deal than it will be for the UK in three weeks time.
No deal means World Trade Organisation terms. That means tariffs, costs, hold ups. The cost of that will be borne by all of us and it will hit the worst off hardest and will form part of the austerity offensive already being carried through; as the costs of COVID are pushed downwards in lost jobs and cut or frozen wages while the government pulls patriotic poses, ramps up the hostile environment, lines up organisations like the EHRC to pursue culture wars, forbids any teaching that encourages “victim narratives” and pursues a rightward shift in the media environment – because they don’t want a institutionally conservative commentator that passively reflects their line, as the BBC does, they want a cheerleader generating zealous enthusiasm for the traitor hunt that is already well under way; and will be ramped up to shrieking pitch as the “easiest deal in History” fails and lorry drivers stuck in Kent queue up to piss in bottles.
When you get used to a certain state of mind, and certain conditions of life, events that shake it become emotionally destabilising. Having cultivated – even appreciated – a certain level of agoraphobia for a long time, going out yesterday morning induced a shocking elation. I found myself walking through the mist loudly whistling one of the most emphatic tunes from Shostakovich’s 5th. Quite what Shostakovich would have made of that – given that he wrote it as a pastiche of accessible, popular music – “tunes that the people could hum” – I’m not sure. How many layers of irony there are in that I don’t know.
When – and if, because you can never rule out this government just never solving the problem – we are out the other side of COVID restrictions, a lot of previously humdrum social activities will take on a manic and explosive edge.
Having got used to the gloom of living inside a false narrative, I felt a similar elation when Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party was lifted; reminiscent of Basil Fawlty’s comment “Happiness? Oh yes. I remember that.” Withholding the Whip and the subsequent silencing of dissent by administrative methods meant that we were back to business as usual with an ever extending ban on discussing anything that might relate to the issue; now extending to resolutions on sponsored bike rides to raise funds for Palestinian children.
Mid winter casts the day as twilight at noon and the ten magpies that were perched and preening in the tree opposite have taken flight one by one. Ten for a bird you must not miss. I counted them all in, and counted them all out again.
Its odd having to use money. The actual stuff. A blue note with Churchill growling in the corner. I remember those. The story is that his defiant look in the picture was a response to having his cigar taken out of his mouth before it was taken. The Jam song “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” comes to mind with the line about the Queen’s head on a coin being “smiling, beguiling” – which I always thought was “smiling big Eileen”, could never understand and thought that perhaps it might have meant something in Woking. Even so, the Queen’s head on coins in never smiling; always both graven and grave. And “beguiling” for any of her images is a bit of a stretch.
A teenager zips by on an electric scooter, his toddler sister hanging on to the handlebars like grim death.
Along the Hyde, a mural showing car sales from “between the wars” – a phrase that could describe any time really – has been painted over. Although it was probably not original; a conscious piece of nostalgic reproduction and marketing – a Ploughman’s Lunch in wall painting form – its another link gone with the engineering past of that stretch of the Edgware Road. Formerly the site of the vast Airco factory that produced the Royal Flying Corp’s aircraft in World War 1 and was, by 1918, the largest aircraft factory in the world with the most up to date equipment and which, without the state support that sustained the industry in France and the USA after the end of the war, went bankrupt by 1920. Those who refuse to learn the lessons of history…
A pair of wagtails dance and flit in the ghost space between the Loon Fung supermarket – where interesting vegetables and an extraordinary variety of mushrooms live – and the currently shuttered Bang Bang Food Hall.
I hope its not mawkish to think it appropriate and fitting that in Tim Brooke Taylor’s final appearance in “I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue”, he finally made it to Mornington Crescent.
The writing was on the wall for Dominic Cummings – remember him (?) – when Lindsay Hilsom called out to Joe Biden after Trump’s “Red Mirage” had faded enough for it to be clear that he would be the next President of the United States – “Mr Biden, do you have a comment for the BBC?” and Biden replied, “BBC huh? I’m Irish”.
Johnson had a pre-arranged call set up with Ursula Von Der Leyen from the European Commission timed for the Saturday after the Presidential election – enough time for the dust to settle and to be sure which way the wind would be blowing.
Had it been Trump, and the former administration’s policy to undermine the EU with Alt Right nationalist currents – the better to subject it in general and Germany in particular to its economic requirements – it would have been full speed ahead for No Deal; and Cummings would still be in place. As it is Biden, with a position of getting the EU on board with the US Cold War on China, and the wind towards London now blowing very cold indeed, Johnson is in the now familiar position of having to make a screeching U-turn and try for any last minute basic deal with the EU that might still be on offer; and Cummings had to be out the door with his box.
Johnson is definitely not flavour of the month with the incoming team in Washington. One Biden insider described him as “that shape shifting creep”; leading to some of the quick policy moves we have seen in the last week. The sudden increase in military spending is an attempt to show willing to beef up the UK’s traditional role of Robin to the USA’s global Batman – nothwithstanding the perception that most of the rest of the world has that Batman acts like The Joker most of the time.
The need for a deal – as being adrift in the North Atlantic with both the EU and the US offering a cold shoulder is not a good place to be – does not mean that one will be pulled out of the bag. The negotiations are still being led by Lord Frost – an incarnation of Rosbif at its most truculent – who seems to think that mulish intransigence is a winning strategy; so they might mess up even this. However, a deal is now much more likely. The details remain to be seen, but it won’t be a good one.
It will cost us, as these estimates from a study from the LSE indicate. (1)
Cumulative hit on UK economy by 2035.
The inclination of the Labour leadership to either vote for it or abstain is problematic. This will be a bad deal. If you vote for a deal you own it. You become complicit. Unless there is a deal that includes the UK in the customs union – thereby resolving the crisis with Ireland and blocking off the deregulation and Americanisation of the UK economy that is the purpose of Brexit from the point of view of the ruling class fraction that has driven it – Labour should vote against.
What is very clear is that Keir Starmer has been relaxed about a bad deal in a way that would have had his supporters apoplectic on social media had it been Jeremy Corbyn taking the same stance. There was an eery silence from former keyboard warriors in “Labour Against Brexit” when Starmer let the possibility of an extension to the transition period go by without a whimper. The football chant “Its all gone quite over there” comes to mind. Without presuming that Starmer is a “closet leaver” – though he was always more prepared to embrace opposition to Free Movement than Corbyn ever was – this indicates that the Labour right is far more Atlanticist than it ever was Europhile.
They are more comfortable with a Biden Presidency than they were with Trump – as Trump is the USA with the mask off – but they would still have always lined up to “stand with America on the world stage”; and all other policy – including disciplinary policy – flows from that.
One of the odd features of getting older is that things start happening to your body. “Popeye elbow” is a soft swelling on the elbow that looks like a golf ball – or one of Popeye’s elbows – that doesn’t hurt and you can get away with not noticing until people around you say “Argh! What’s happened to your elbow?!”
Popeye was one of those cartoons that always had the same essential plot. Like Whacky Races or Scooby Do or, come to think of it, all of them. Briefly summarised in the words of a US Civil War General whose name I’ve forgotten who said – “Little guy’ll always beat a big guy, if the little guy’s in the right and keeps a comin’“. Which – in the case of the US Civil War – is underlined by the way the Confederate little guys lost even though they kept a comin’ in the worst of bad causes. In the case of Popeye, Bluto might have said “I’d have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for that meddling spinach.”
Leafy Vegetable in a can as superpower.
When I was six, I took everything literally and on faith – from stories in Sunday school to TV cartoons. I assumed that if a can of spinach would work for Popeye, it would work for me. Eating this miracle stuff would turn my sparrows kneecap biceps into surging powerhouses with tanks and battleships running through them to the accompaniment of some of Sousa’s brasher marches played at a tempo brisk enough to clear a playground full of bullies. I thought of it as a kind of personal nuclear deterrent.
It was not easy to come by in Thurrock in 1960. Eventually my parents found some small tins in a dubious looking shop in Southend Road. Not big round tins like Popeye’s, but small flat things that might have contained sardines in a previous life and could have been leftover iron rations from the Korean war. It was, of course, disgusting. And had no effect on my sparrows kneecap biceps, nor make me impervious in the playground.
The same brash Sousa marches – designed to make you feel invincible AND happy – were much in evidence in the online films of last Saturday’s pro-Trump protests in Huntingdon Beach in California. This was not huge – a few hundred – but had the wild celebratory air to it of people trying to convince themselves they had won. Denial as collective delirium; or possibly collective delirium as a condition of denial. People gathered at an intersection to cheer each other as gigantic SUVs festooned with the stars and stripes drove up and down like they were cruising the strip in a Beach Boys song.
They believe what they have to believe to make the reality around them bearable. They probably believe that they would have won if it wasn’t for those meddling Venezuelan voting machines – the latest straw to be grasped in Rudi Giuliani’s increasingly comic attempts to fool enough of the people enough of the time to bluff a different reality into being. Its interesting to note that the same machines were in use in 2016 in the same states without anyone batting an eyelid, and were adopted because they are so accurate and fraud proof – an ironic comment on the continual US claims that Venezuelan elections are always fraudulent because they keep returning Socialists to power. A gaslighter has to have some power to bluff with. Without it, he is left with the minority of the people you can fool all of the time. But there are a lot of them.
The Trumpist slogan – “can 70 million be wrong?” would skewer them on a paradox if they were self aware enough to think it through. The legitimacy of Trump’s vote is taken for granted and banked – the fraudulence of the other side equally taken for granted and discounted, so the possible counter slogan “…if 80 million say so” does not register with them. Although the momentum on their own side is smaller than that of the Democrats, that momentum is real and likely to sustain them into the bumpy period ahead.
The USA will remain in crisis. The delusions that stoke it will become even wilder, as the unbearable reality of a loss of global primacy sinks in subconsciously.
Something similar was on show in Wilhelm Furtwangler’s performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony to celebrate Hitler’s Birthday in Berlin on 9th April 1942, with Goebbels and other top Nazi’s in attendance. This was the subject of a recent Radio 3 programme “Is this the most dangerous piece of music ever written?” (1)
April 1942 was a point at which the Third Reich was at the peak of its power, but it must have been apparent to anyone – with any realistic sense of the balance of forces – that the only way from there was down. The Soviet Union had not succumbed to Blitzkreig and, after Pearl Harbour, Nazi Germany was also at war with the United States. Hitler’s fantasy, that the Soviet Union could be defeated almost as quickly as France, died with thousands of his troops in the frozen mud before Moscow in December 1941 and – as Vasily Grossman notes in his extraordinary novel Stalingrad – the upcoming Nazi summer offensive would only be on the southern sector of the Eastern Front, not the whole front – North, South and Centre at the same time – as they’d been able to manage the previous year. They were already weaker. But still strong enough to harbour delusions.
Furtwangler’s performance of the Ninth encapsulates this moment. The only word to describe its tempo and volume is demonic. Schiller’s hymn to humanity is turned into a thunderous shriek of ubermensch triumph – made manic by an awareness of impending disaster. The fierce urgency of then.
Furtwangler – who stayed in Nazi Germany as a significant cultural figure, but never joined the Party – has been defended with the argument that he created this ferocious performance as a piece of shocking satire or grubage; the contrast with the universalist, humane orthodoxy of what the Ninth is meant to represent designed to generate a realisation of how far the Nazis were outside it. The problem here is that the Nazis knew very well what they were and gloried in it. Goebbels, a man used to generating social force from false narrative and wedded to the notion of “triumph of the will” thought the performance was wonderful.
This difficulty with cultural satire being taken straight is also illustrated by the fate of Johnny Speight’s character Alf Garnett. The central character in Speight’s situation comedy “‘Til Death do us Part”, Garnett was an unreconstructed bigot. set up as a figure to be mocked. But much of the audience not only identified with him, but saw his tirades as a vindication of their own world view. Someone was thinking what they were thinking; and they were on the telly.
Warren Mitchell, the Jewish actor who played Garnett – brilliantly, all seething frustration and choleric rage leavened by pathos – earned a crust in the seventies with a one man show called “The Thoughts of Chairman Alf”, in which he would put on his battered raincoat, pork pie hat and West Ham scarf and monologue in front of audiences all over the country who had turned up, at least in part, to see themselves reflected on stage; then went out and voted for the National Front. What that must have done to his soul I can’t imagine.
Sellotape marks at top and bottom indicate that this has been stuck in a window.
It is an old battered UKIP leaflet from the European elections of 2019. Not one sent to me. The address panel has been cut out to remove any evidence of who it was sent to. A few months ago a similar leaflet from the same election- from the Brexit Party this time – was lying just outside the front door, also with the address panel cut out.
I assume that this is a piece of low level harassment from one of my neighbours who knows that I have been very active in the Labour Party- possible the same person who spray paints “Trump – Jesus” on the side of white vans. I have a fairly good idea of who this might be and, for now, have a watching brief on it.
We have a guard Dimetrodon. It belongs to the children who live in the flat beneath us. With staring eyes, gaping sharp toothed jaws and jagged sail, resplendently moulded in luminous yellow and orange plastic, it basks on the granite cube that acts as a doorstop for the outside alcove; a repository for any manner of garden junk that we don’t mind getting covered in spider webs and snail trails. No one has moved it. It seems at home there.
One morning last week it was gone. I thought at first that the twins downstairs had claimed it back, but then discovered it lying on its back on the concrete hard standing that used to be the base of a garage – in the days that cars were small enough to get up and down the alleyway at the back of the flats and whoever it was who lived here then had one.
Picking it up to restore it to its rightful warning perch, I saw that its front toes were missing. Something – a fox maybe – curious to see if this odd looking thing might be prey – had lifted it, trotted into the backyard and sliced off the most exposed limbs with teeth like razors, drawn a conclusion – two parts taste to three parts edibility – and dropped it before going off in search of new adventures.
So, for now, its back. No less fierce, but toeless and slightly humbled.
“The food here is terrible. Yes, and such small portions.” (1)
“Hmm. This is burnt AND undercooked.” (2)
This is Boris Johnson’s ten point plan for the Environment with comments (in italics). This “plan” is an almost random curates egg of proposals with no overall strategy – other than a series of hopeful nudges at the private sector in the hope that it will take up the slack and fill the gaps between the limited and truncated ambition and the almost laughably small commitment the government is putting in to realise it; bringing to mind the two jokes above.
“Imagine Britain when a Green Industrial Revolution has helped to level up the country.”
You might have been able to achieve this by voting Labour last December, but for now you just have to imagine.
“You cook breakfast using hydrogen power before getting in your electric car, having charged it overnight from batteries made in the Midlands. Around you the air is cleaner; trucks, trains, ships and planes run on hydrogen or synthetic fuel.”
The poverty of imagination in this vision is almost numbing. Imagine instead that you don’t need to go to work by car every day because there is effective broadband that allows you to work for home more often; nor have to pay through the nose to use a car to travel, because everything you need is within a fifteen minute walk or cycle ride; with longer journeys covered by clean, efficient electric buses, trams and trains or community car clubs.Imagine fewer vehicles and less space required for them, with car parks turned into parks with bike hangars; with a car scrappage scheme paying for travel passes and electric cycles.Imagine your home properly insulated and fueled with renewable energy – and imagine no homeless because we have built an additional 500,000 council houses to passivhaus standards.All of this is doable.
“British towns and regions — Teesside, Port Talbot, Merseyside and Mansfield — are now synonymous with green technology and jobs. This is where Britain’s ability to make hydrogen and capture carbon pioneered the decarbonisation of transport, industry and power.”
Towns and regions and cities all over the world will need to be synonymous with green jobs. This has to become a global norm. Hopefully Britain will do its bit in this global process without striking vainglorious poses about world beating systems – or Apps. CCS will be important for heavy industries but research into it has been going on for a long time without viable results – and can be a fig leaf for carrying on as normal while we wait for a technological solution that might not come. It is not a basket to put most of our eggs in.
“My 10-point plan to get there will mobilise £12bn of government investment, and potentially three times as much from the private sector, to create and support up to 250,000 green jobs.”
“Potentially” – “up to.” So, maybe not even that much.£12 billion of government investment is – frankly – peanuts – and compares pitifully with the £27 billion earmarked for expanding the road network; not to mention the sums being pledged by comparable countries in Europe.
Not exactly “world beating” is it Boris?
The Green Jobs Task Force was announced a couple of days ago with the supposed aim of generating 2 million green jobs by 2030; yet here we have a plan aiming to generate “up to” just 250,000 (an eighth of that figure).Are they making this up as they go along?
“There will be electric vehicle technicians in the Midlands, construction and installation workers in the North East and Wales, specialists in advanced fuels in the North West, agroforestry practitioners in Scotland, and grid system installers everywhere. And we will help people train for these new green jobs through our Lifetime Skills Guarantee”.
And there will be an airport in the Thames Estuary and a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland and, and..Moonshot, what moonshot? Typical broad brush fabulism from Johnson. What are the specifics? How many? Where? Doing what? What funding is committed to apprenticeships in the desperately needed areas and who will manage the transition?What is the plan for overhauling the curriculum?
“This 10-point plan will turn the UK into the world’s number one centre for green technology and finance, creating the foundations for decades of economic growth.”
In your dreams Boris! If you look at the patents filed for renewable energy technology, the UK doesn’t even get its own column, being bundled in with the “rest of the world”. China is right out there in front with 7544, with the USA trailing on 2059, Germany on 571 and Japan on 89. So the UK is well below that. (3)
This ten point plan has neither the ambition or the imagination to stimulate a more positive and creative contribution to the global effort we need from this country – preferring instead post imperial fantasies of being back up where we belong: a slightly greener gated community.
The phrase “decades of economic growth” implies that this can be growth of the sort we have now – with an ever intensifying pattern of worktaking over our entire lives and making depression an epidemic, compensated by accelerated consumption to fill the holes in our souls; overlaid ona widening gap between people in poverty and insecurity and those who need the FT “How to spend it” supplement to work out how to dispose of more money than they know what to do with; rather than the growthin security, health, care, wellbeing, community and shared cultural creativitywe need.
This Plan could well be retitled, “everything must change so that things can stay as they are.” (4)
“One — we will make the UK the Saudi Arabia of wind with enough offshore capacity to power every home by 2030.”
This is the least we can do.All this is already planned for and on the stocks.There is no mention of onshore wind which the Conservatives have gone out of their way to discourage; hitherto favouring fracking and now fantasising about mini nuclear power stations instead.Perhaps people should be given the choice as to which they prefer in their local area. The comparison with Saudi Arabia is another absurd vainglorious pose. Saudi Arabia exports vast quantities of oil. This programme does not even supply all domestic energy demands.
“Two — we will turn water into energy with up to £500m of investment in hydrogen.”
The prominence given Hydrogen here implies that it will be the main plank in replacing natural gas for heating and cooking, rather than looking to going wholesale with electricity generated by renewable sources – either on the grid or on local grids or using heat pumps.There is no rationale here – or exploration of alternative costings – for why they have gone with this. However, the investment allocated is so tiny that it won’t make much of a dent in any transition they have in mind; and there is that wonderful get out of jail free phrase “up to” again; so it might not even be that much.
“Three — we will take forward our plans for new nuclear power, from large scale to small and advanced modular reactor.”
There are no specifics here nor any rationale. The small modular reactors are unproven technology. So is the technology currently being built at Hinckley point for that matter, which is already over budget and off target. Investment in nuclear takes a very long time. It is also absurdly expensive compared with wind or solar power – and becomes more so as time goes on. the government is committing to a herd of white elephants. (5) The excess costs for taking on this less than optimal option will be paid for by everyone’s energy bills.
Mean costs per megawatt hour of electricity.
“Four — we’ll invest more than £2.8bn in electric vehicles, lacing the land with charging points and creating long-lasting batteries in UK gigafactories. This will allow us to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans in 2030. However, we will allow the sale of hybrid cars and vans that can drive a significant distance with no carbon coming out of the tailpipe until 2035.
Five — we will have cleaner public transport, including thousands of green buses and hundreds of miles of new cycle lanes.”
After decarbonising the energy grid, which the proposals above fumble, this is the most important sector to get a grip on. Emissions have been rising, largely because car companies have been pushing SUVs and there are more cars on the roads overall. SUVs also have a negative impact on road deaths for anyone unfortunate enough to collide with them.
The ban on new fossil fuel car sales from 2030 is welcome, though the loophole for hybrids implies that they don’t pollute. They do. And they should be included. SUVs should also be phased out as rapidly as possibleand the companies that build them fined substantial sums every year they continue to do it.
A green transition in transport does not simply imply a 1:1 swap between fossil fuel cars and electric cars, but a significant shift away from cars altogether. The investment in gigafactories will be more significant in the transition to electric public transport. Unlike most cars, buses are in almost continuous use. This can be done much quicker than the snails pace currently projected even by TFL – the best run local transport network in the country. In Shenzen in southern China, they converted every single one of their 16,000 buses from diesel to electric in one year (2016). Where there’s a will…Making the most rapid transition also requires a coherent national transport plan – both to tie city neighbourhood together and provide a web of connections for rural areas too. That requires investment in public transport that is genuinely public.
The level of investment in bike lanes is absurdly small. “Hundreds of miles”, when you consider that there are 247,100 miles of roads in the UK.
“Six — we will strive to repeat the feat of Jack Alcock and Teddie Brown, who achieved the first nonstop transatlantic flight a century ago, with a zero emission plane. And we will do the same with ships.”
Air travel is significantly down as a result of COVID. Heathrow expansion is probably dead. Much to the relief of anyone who lives anywhere near the airports, who have reported a wonderful release from a constant barrage of noise.There is no mention here of the need for transition for workers being made redundant by this industry. A Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines competition to build a zero carbon emissions aircraft capable of getting across the Atlantic is another of Johnson’s imperial nostalgic wheezes and as fanciful as the Thames Garden Bridge.Serious work on reducing the carbon emissions of shipping is crucial however, and tacked on as an afterthought it seems. Nothing is spelled out here about how this is to be done, nor who will do it, nor is any investment earmarked.It should be.
“Seven — we will invest £1bn next year to make homes, schools and hospitals greener, and energy bills lower.”
Must try harder. The schools sector alone needs £28 billion by 2030 to get to zero carbon. Retrofitting housing would be best done through a national plan using local authorities to grow skilled direct labour workforces able to utilise economies of scale with a rolling programme starting with the worst off estates and areas. The current system of grants for homeowners via accredited local installers – of which there are too few – leads to an incredibly inefficient and time consuming system in which improvements are made in penny packets by those most able to afford it – whose energy bills are then subsidised by those that can’t. A perfect example of an unjust transition. The Conservative obsession with treating all situations as an opportunity primarily to benefit small business plays well with their base – mostly small business people – but is the retrofitting equivalent of growing wheat in flower pots.
“Eight — we will establish a new world-leading industry in carbon capture and storage, backed by £1bn of government investment for clusters across the North, Wales and Scotland.”
The small total of investmentimplies that this will be about as world leading as the COVID App and not especially immediate in its impact; and therefore more likely to be playing the role of a fig leaf or gesture to allow business as usual to carry on.
“Nine — we will harness nature’s ability to absorb carbon by planting 30,000 hectares of trees a year by 2025 and rewilding 30,000 football pitches’ worth of countryside.”
If you work out that the mean average size of a football pitch is 0.72 hectares, this means that the proportion of land in the UK scheduled to be rewilded in this plan looks like this.
And the annual tree planting total very little more.
“And ten — our £1bn energy innovation fund will help commercialise new low-carbon technologies, like the world’s first liquid air battery being developed in Trafford, and we will make the City of London the global centre for green finance through our sovereign bond, carbon offset markets and disclosure requirements.”
An energy innovation fund is a good thing, but the aim should be to produce the most usable technologies for the greatest number of people – not follow the commercial imperative that means it will follow the demands of the people who can afford it: thereby skewing research in the wrong direction.“He soon became a specialist, specialising in diseases of the rich.” (6)
“This plan can be a global template for delivering net zero emissions in ways that create jobs and preserve our lifestyles.”
A global template cannot be one in which every country claims it will be world beating and a world leaderanymore than everyone can be above average. It does appear to be a plan to “preserve our lifestyles” as they are now – with no reflection that if they were duplicated across the world we would need three planets to sustain them – with strenuous efforts put in to avoid anything that might actually make them better but don’t follow a commercial imperative.
“On Wednesday I will meet UK businesses to discuss their contribution. We plan to provide clear timetables for the clean energy we will procure, details of the regulations we will change, and the carbon prices that we will put on emissions.”
Let us see how much of a contribution comes from business and, conversely, how much contribution they are given. Hopefully the process of managing this will not be outsourced to SERCO or companies run by friends of the cabinet.
“I will establish a “task force net zero” committed to reaching net zero by 2050, and through next year’s COP26 summit we will urge countries and companies around the world to join us in delivering net zero globally. Green and growth can go hand-in-hand. So let us meet the most enduring threat to our planet with one of the most innovative and ambitious programmes of job-creation we have known.”
It would be nice if we were going to. But this plan is a feeble shadow of what is needed. The government currently has polices that will get to a fifth of the 2050 target. This plan will barely improve on that because only a third of it is new money.An investment of £68 billion would create 1.2 million green jobs in the next two years. The TUC and others have presented the government with detailed plans that it has not picked up on. The consequence will be mass unemployment AND a failure to meet the green transition targets we so desperately need.
A conventional trope of mainstream discourse about Donald Trump’s base of support – from Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” onwards – is that they are primarily rustbelt rednecks. People who in France – with due allowance for the superiority of American dentistry – would be referred to as ‘les sans dents.” This is reflected in a certain discourse on the left that portrays his vote as primarily that of the “left behind”.
This is not the case.
The figures are very clear. Biden had clear majorities among people earning below $100 000 a year. Trump a clear majority amongst those better off. A similar mystification happens in the UK about the Brexit vote; with mainstream commentary – and some left currents – reinforcing the notion that its heartland was in places like the former Red Wall – whereas in fact its strongest concentration of support was in prosperous small town Southern England – Hampshire having the edge over Hartlepool.
Biden’s support among the worst off increased by 4% over Hilary Clinton’s result in 2016 in fact.
Polarisation by ethnicity is even more pronounced. Ethnicity overlaps with class. The median white household income in 2018 was $66,000. The median Black household income was $42,000. Putting these two together makes it clear that the bulk of Trump’s working class support is likely to be white. The potency of racism in Trump’s base – with dog whistles increasingly replaced by trombones – should never be played down.
However, given the depredation of the pandemic and the shambolic response to it by the administration – with casualties in 8 months running at four times the level of total US losses in eight years of the Vietnam war – the question has to be asked, why did anyone vote for him at all? Further, there was a slight increase in Trump’s support among Black and Hispanic men and white women.
The proportion of the electorate made up by these groups is this.
Some of the explanation for this is economic.
Trump has never been a “sound money” Republican. He is a real estate chancer who doesn’t pay his taxes or settle his debts – and he took that approach to the economy as a whole. So, while the main gainers from his huge tax cuts were the wealthiest of the wealthy, his failure to be remotely concerned with “balancing the books” meant that he did not carry out an austerity programme; and the resulting natural growth in economic activity meant that average wages went up across the board (from £63.9K median income in 2016 to $68.7k in 2019). Although this is simply a continuation of a trend started under President Obama (1) – and the same goes for economic growth and employment rates overall) this appears to have influenced a significant number of voters who are grateful for any small mercy they can get.
The result of that is a budget deficit of staggering proportions; which is coming home to roost for the next administration. Trump’s approach here could be seen as the application of an imperial Labour aristocracy strategy – the economic equivalent of “we’re going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it.” The US economy is going to expand, and the rest of the world is going to pay for it. “USA! USA!”
The implications of all this for what’s going to happen next are also stark. Voters who voted for Trump were 75% motivated to vote FOR him. This was less the case with Biden, far more of whose voters were motivated primarily to vote AGAINST Trump. This was not by accident. Biden ran on a “character” and “competence” ticket – more concerned to show himself to be a safe pair of hands than give many firm commitments about what he’d do with them. Something that might strike us in the UK as familiar.
This is underlined by votes for the House and Senate, in which expected Democrat gains were not achieved.
The line of the centre and right in the Democrat Party is to blame the left for this. This ignores something fundamental. AOC has put round figures showing that every single Democrat candidate for the House of Representatives who campaigned for universal health care got elected – whether they were in previous Democrat or republican strongholds. Universal Health Care is supported by 72% of Americans – but it was not mainstream Democrat policy; which is represented more faithfully by Blue Dog West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin who proclaimed to MSNBC news that “we (sic) can’t afford Medicare for all. We can’t even afford Medicare for some”. An approach that plays well with the Democrat Party’s corporate donors but hardly a motivator for its working class supporters. Similarly, a $15 an hour minimum wage IS Democrat policy – but they did not campaign on it in a series of crucial areas – like Miami Dade County, where it was on the ballot as a specific proposal for local law and was passed by 25 points, while Biden barely scraped a majority by 3 points.
Even while mobs of Republican hard core protestors were demonstrating outside counts chanting “Stop the count!” or “Count the votes!” – depending on where they were – Trump confidante Chris Christie blithely announced that the challenge for Biden was whether he wanted to “unite the country” – with the people trying to steal the election from him – or “unite the Democrat Party”. This was echoed by mainstream media commentators who argued – and perish the thought that there was any self interest involved here – that the election result showed that the USA was a “centre right country” and Biden should now unite with the Republicans to isolate and crush the wing of the Democrat Party that actually has some answers.
Take that course – looking for national consensus on the terms of the right – and disaster looms in the mid terms and then the 2024 election.
Urban ramblings 