Problems with waste disposal.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Arguments between allies can sometimes be fiercer than those with the enemy. Especially in conditions of defeat, in which consolation prizes – and dealing with an opponent our own size – can loom very large. Having gone over the top myself on a number of occasions – not least during the 2019 Green New Deal composite meeting at Labour Party conference (which lasted 12 hours and became more heated as the scale of the differences shrank) – I don’t want to claim immunity from this, nor that everything I ever said, nor everyone I ever said it alongside, was completely right – but would like to argue that a style of debate framed in Manichean moralism is not the best way to get light, and is guaranteed to generate more heat than is useful.

In the current argument over the Edmonton incinerator, there is a tendency for both sides to talk past each other, and neither side to acknowledge difficulties raised by the other. That is a good way to make sure that the fewest possible lessons get learned, while alliances that are needed to go forward on a broad front become fractured. Rhetorical excess, a Waltham Forest Councillor claiming that the campaign thinks that waste can be turned into “unicorn farts” and campaigners arguing that Councillors on the North London Waste Authority are guilty of “social murder” – makes rifts personal and painful and hard to overcome on other matters.

When I visited a far flung rural part of South Africa in 2005, one of the many things that struck me about it was the complete absence of waste disposal services at a Municipal level. On one level, anything that could be reused was. Organic waste was fed to the pigs. Toy cars were made from wire, tin cans and bottle tops. Old crisp packets were wrapped around twigs and sewn together to make beautiful table mats that glowed like stained glass. But, a growing amount of the overpackaging from a newly opened supermarket that could not be found an alternative use ended up just discarded. When I asked the head teacher of the local primary school what they did with excess rubbish he said, “We throw it into the Bush.” Household by household, at the ends of people’s backyard plots there would characteristically be a hole in the ground which contained the burnt out remnants of the household rubbish. So, charred tin cans jumbled among melted plastic and a lot of ash; partially covered with soil.

In the UK, and other “advanced”, “developed”, wealthy imperial predator countries, waste disposal is a collectivised version of that. The waste that we can’t, or fail to, reuse or recycle, we bury or burn.

Or, we dump it on countries in the Global South. Out of sight, out of mind. This is cheaper than developing a proper recycling structure in the home country.

  • In 2020, the USA exported 620,000 metric tonnes of plastic waste to developing countries.
  • The EU exported 2.37 million metric tonnes of plastic waste as part of a total waste exports of 38.4 million metric tonnes. This is a 70% increase since the turn of the century.
  • The UK exported 525,000 tones of plastic waste last year (12.7% of its total plastic waste), with about 40% of it ending up in Turkey.
  • All this counts towards “recycling” targets in the exporting countries, even though, in practice, once the shipping containers arrive and the importer has been paid, with recycling facilities even less developed than in wealthier countries, they are often get rid of it as cheaply as possible, dumping it or burning it. No one is checking. Win, win for the traders, lose, lose for the rest of us.
“Plastic bottles and garbage on the bank of a river” by Horia Varlan is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Push back from the stronger parts of the developing world, principally China, is leading to pressure on the exporting countries to get their house in order, but in immediate terms is leading to a fall in plastic recycling rates in the USA and an increase in incineration.

Between 1992 and 2021, China took 106 million tonnes of plastic waste, more than half of the world’s total; mostly from the USA, UK, Germany and Japan. Starting slowly in 2010, then accelerating in 2017, when 24 different types of recycled waste were banned as imports, China has now banned all solid waste imports.

Reduce

I think everyone can agree that the sheer quantity of waste has to be restricted at source. The UK generates 23 million tonnes of household waste every year (394 kg per person – more than four and a half times our average body weight). Commercial and industrial waste is greater. 43.9 million tonnes in 2018. Household, Commercial and Industrial combined, however, amounts to just 31% of the total of 222.2 million tonnes generated in 2018; with Construction Demolition and Excavation accounting for 62% of the rest of it.

Reuse

A bottle deposit scheme has been delayed and delayed by the government. Reusable nappies and milk deliveries using glass bottles tend to be the preserve of people who have the time or money to use them. Local authority initiatives can and do dent totals, but national legislation can make a more significant difference.

Recycle

In the UK overall, recycling is slowly increasing, at around 45% of the total; better in Wales and Northern Ireland than England and Scotland. The quantity of residual waste has, however, been at a plateau since 2013 (inching down from 551 Kg per household to 537Kg in 2019- after almost halving from 1046 Kg per household in 2000/2001).

In North London, recycling rates are stuck at around 30%. Islington has a target to get up to 36% by 2025. London overall is aiming at 65% by 2030. This is partly through improving capacity to deal with contaminated loads.

Residual waste from North London is currently incinerated at Edmonton, and has been since 1969. It is the plan to replace the old, clapped out, incinerator with a new one that has led to a ferocious debate about whether this is the right way forward.

The campaign against a new incinerator makes a number of forceful points that

  1. Rates of recycling can and must be increased and we need to construct a circular economy.
  2. Building an energy from waste facility cements in a demand for an ongoing supply of residual waste and reduces the incentive to increase recycling.
  3. A Mixed Waste Recovery Plant could get recycled waste levels up qualitatively; and a Review might enable this to be developed instead.
  4. Incineration produces GHGs and particulate pollution, at 1 tonne of CO2 for every tonne of waste burnt.
  5. No one would even contemplate siting such a facility in, say Belgravia.

Councillors supporting the proposal argue that –

  1. Rates of recycling can, must and will be increased, and this is part of the waste management plan, but, even with the London target being met by 2030, which is by no means guaranteed, there would still be 35% of total waste unrecycled and having to be disposed of, either in landfill or incinerated. At present 70% of waste is residual. Even state of the art Mixed Waste Recovery Plants still leave about 26% of residual waste, which still has to be disposed of.
  2. The currently unrecoverable waste has to be dealt with now; and no one is campaigning for the current incinerator to be shut in the absence of an alternative. The rate at which the current incinerator is breaking down makes its replacement a matter of some urgency. A decision to scrap the existing plans and go back to the first stage of a lengthy planning process would both increase costs and delay a viable replacement; and either keep a clapped out and technologically outmoded facility burning waste for longer than it needs to, or consign hundreds of thousands of tonnes of residual waste to landfill while the discussion goes on, in the absence of anything else concrete to do with it.
  3. Each tonne burnt saves 20Kg of CO2 per tonne of waste compared with use of landfill. This is just 2% of the total, but its clear that landfilling is worse (and everyone agrees on that).
  4. The IPCC figure for what they consider to be “climate relevant” CO2 emissions from incineration is actually significantly lower than the campaign’s figure of 1 tonne for 1 tonne. “Assuming that carbon dioxide emissions from MSW incineration average 1 Mg per Mg of waste, then of these CO2 emissions 0.33 (0.50) Mg are of fossil and 0.67 (0.50) Mg are of biogenic origin. In subsequent calculations, the proportion of climate-relevant CO2 is figured out as an average value of 0.415 Mg of CO2 per Mg of waste.” Nevertheless, this is still a lot of emissions. Around 294,000 tonnes a year.
  5. This will be dealt with in the medium term by Carbon Capture and Storage. CCUS capacity has tripled in the last decade, mostly in heavy industry, but is still massively below target, at 40 megatons globally, not the 100 megatons projected in 2010. However, at present, there are 24 CCUS facilities working or being constructed, and another 35 being planned globally, each with an average capacity of 2.6 million tonnes a year: so CCUS looks technically feasible, though the cost – construction capacity and timescale for affordability – is another matter.

Both these sets of arguments have force. For Waste Authorities beginning to plan a way forward, Mixed Waste Recovery looks a very positive option, though it does still have a residual waste element and most such plants incinerate it. I have not heard of any other options. The pollution and carbon emissions produced by this make it a matter of urgency to shrink this through reduction at source, maximum reuse and maximum recycling.

In the immediate situation, the decision to build the new facility has been made. The extent to which the campaign’s prediction that this will stall attempts to increase recycling or reduction of waste at source is fulfilled depends on the extent to which this is built into the next set of waste management plans and campaigns to change behaviour en masse can be made to stick.

Stop the War. Cut the Bills

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

From Labour List this morning, with my emphasis.

Ofgem’s chief executive Jonathan Brearley told MPs today that the energy regulator expects to increase the cap on energy bills by more than £800 in October. The cap is currently £1,971, having increased by £693 in April.…

He said, looking beyond October, Ofgem are “managing between two extreme versions of events.

One where the price falls back down to where it was before – for example, if we did see peace in Ukraine. And one where prices could go even further if we were to see, for example, a disruptive interruption of gas from Russia,” he said.

So, a continuation of the war, and deepening the sanctions on Russia, leads directly to energy bills that are increasing 23 times greater than wages and 38 times greater than benefits, and could, as Brearley states quite clearly “go even further”.

The UK government’s bellicose interventions against peace negotiations will come back to bite it. As it will bite Labour too unless it starts mobilising for peace.

Tales from the Riverbank 3. Go East Old Man!

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

London. It’ll be lovely when its finished…

Having made it to Hampton Court on our last riverside walk, Jamie and I plan to head East from Tower Bridge to the Thames Barrier, exploring on the way the murky dockside past of some of our ancestors.

On the way down to Tower Hill, a convivially crowded tube is full of people in a state of Bank holiday relaxation, chatting in a variety of languages – as we do in London – blissfully oblivious of offending Nigel Farage in absentia.

Looking at the fragment of Roman Wall still standing opposite the Tower, Jamie expresses a desire to climb it; taking parcours into Spring Heeled Jack territory.

On the North side of the Tower there is a statue that at first we take to be a war memorial; but on closer inspection proves to be a memorial to Construction – and other – workers killed in industrial accidents. Erected by UCATT, the construction workers union (part of UNITE since 2017) it has the same physical look as military memorials; and is very much modelled on them. A solid looking bloke in bronze, staring into the distance/future, wearing a hard hat instead of a tin bowler, with a spirit level over his shoulder where a rifle might go, and a tool belt where his ammo pouches and dagger would be. Recent wreaths from UNITE, probably laid for worker’s memorial day on April 28th, lie at the foot of the plinth. Not a ceremony of remembrance anyone much makes a fuss of. But, they shall not grow old either… (1)

Setting out, down the wide steps Eastwards into the St Katherine’s Dock basin we go. Between 1828 and 1968 a working dock, when “brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk” started to come in in warehouse loads, stacked high in tall storehouses of fast blackening yellow brick, designed with the same early industrial brutalism as Kings Cross station and having that harsh beauty that functional confidence can confer if built in sufficiently grand dimensions; but now just a marina full of yachts, mostly white and sleek, and fringed with hotels, restaurants and bars for the sort of people, mostly white and sleek, who can afford them. Jamie suggest that it would make a great scene for a chase sequence in a spoof Bond film, with characters hopping from boat to boat. One of the yachts, appropriately enough, is called “Moneypenny”. Moored along the West side is a Thames barge, blunt nosed. solid, red sails furled, ready for a fair days pay for a hard days work; but kept for legacy display and exhibition reasons, just as the heavy overhead winches and pulleys on the warehouses are; mighty pieces of machinery painted glossy black and reduced to a decorative reminder of how far the world of money has moved on from mere mechanics. To one side is “Gloriana” a recreation of an eighteenth century Royal Barge with a sixteenth century name built for the Diamond Jubilee in 2012, and probably due a run out for the Platinum one later this summer- all red and gold, sharp prowed and elegant; a cabin for Royalty to loll in at the back – with Dieu et mon Droit carved above – and seats for rowers to plough the river with their oars in at the front (no God or rights for them). Brassy. All that’s missing is a crowd of musicians on other boats playing the water music; all trumpets and timpani. A wagtail gilded with delicate yellow under feathers dances delicately alongside, its light liveliness a kind of mute mockery of our pretensions to be able to design anything as sublime as it is.

Wapping High Street and the streets off it is more or less free of cars, but there are lots of people on rented bikes – chatting as they go – and joggers, mostly with earpieces in and proper kit. One woman has blue lipstick; which must be some sort of statement. The street is mostly luxury gated apartments, converted warehouses seven storeys tall, hemming in the cobbled road like a canyon, with, to landward, side streets leading to quiet social housing estates and, on the river side, sliced with neglected narrow alleyways leading to steep, treacherously slimy stair ways down to the river; which sucks and sloshes angrily with a smell of salt and sludge and a legacy of green slime far up the walls. A place for a quick scuttled escape to a waiting boat were there to be one there. But not a place to hang about. There is a definite sense of threat about it. The sort of alley way that might lead to a secret trap door to the hideout of an eighteenth century villain like the Spectre in The Valiant. Or a place a pirate might have been hanged, or chained up for the tide to drown him. Among the surviving pubs, which look like the sort of places that would have been really rough half a century ago but have scrubbed up nicely, even though they have a lot of the dame sort of shiny green bricks they used in Victorian public toilets, all gleaming glass and brass, scrubbed wood and real ales, is the Captain Kidd, which has a painting of him on the gibbet as part of its sign. Further up is The Prospect of Whitby, which says it is the oldest riverside pub in London; founded in 1520. The Inca Empire still had 12 years to run when they started. A list of all the monarchs since Henry VIII underlines just how long they have been pulling pints on that spot. There is room for just one more after Elizabeth II, which may or may not be prophetic.

Walking alongside the river for a short patch where it is accessible, we hear a distant chanting, slightly menacing, like a football crowd. It seems to be coming back in the direction of the Tower of London. Not possible to pin down. The swish flats built to look swashbucklingly futuristic by Michael Heseltine’s Docklands Development Corporation in the 1980s – an abortive model for a megalomaniac vision of a wholesale urbanisation of the North Bank of the estuary as far down as Southend jokingly referred to at the time as “Heselgrad” – are looking a bit battered close up. Weathered. Stained. Pooped on by gulls. Rickety and rotted a bit in places. The old pre war LCC council estate flats look as though they will be in better shape for a lot longer. Recently built estates look much more solid than either. Very square, but with handsome dimensions. Bright green privet hedges – a gesture at a Garden City revival perhaps – have the feel of holograms, as though we are walking through one of those computer generated scenes of what the new estate will look like when it is built and the sun is shining and it is inhabited entirely by fit, well dressed people who have places to go and things to do.

At the point that the Regents Canal meets the Thames we walk across a solid looking bridge, looking down at a flotilla of swans nosing around looking for food among the flotsam of plastic bottles and footballs and trying to groom themselves with water that is the colour of diahorrea. Needs must. As we near the far end, lights begin to flash and a siren sounds at both ends of the bridge as barriers begin to descend; so everyone scuttles off. Water is pouring out through the lock gates, with streams of algae spiralling out towards the river like an unappetising green sauce. As the lock gates open, so does the bridge. The whole thing lifts slightly, then swings away from our side to the left, upstream, with a stolid certainty, pivoting on the far bank and coming to rest parallel to the channel of water. Three two masted boats, crewed by quite elderly people and flying Dutch flags at their stern, cast off from the bollards inside the lock and motor swiftly through and out onto the river in a rapid convoy; before the bridge swings inexorably back, and settles itself down with a sigh and a solid THUNK. The small crowds of cyclists and walkers gathered at both ends are made convivial by being held up together; a common experience of no great significance in itself, but the power and the weight involved in the way that the bridge moved, making the forces we use for small everyday experiences visible is humbling and exhilarating; if the grins people are giving each other is anything to go by.

The river is busy all the way down to Greenwich and small children point and laugh at the river clippers; which are large, sleek and powerful and growl through the water like apex predators, churning a foaming wake. Fast orange speed boats operating out of St Katherine’s Dock, bounce across the surface with screaming tourists imagining they are in that chase from the imaginary Bond film- a riverine version of a white knuckle ride. Not to be outdone, a Police boat with its siren going hurtles down river towards Greenwich- sometimes taking flight momentarily – leaping forward in a series of stomach turning jumps; either giving chase to person or persons unknown, or late for tea, or having fun. A boat decorated with Horrible Histories logos lurks alongside former execution sites to give people that Weren’t we awful…! frisson. One of the slower tour boats, heading back up river, is full of people singing “Bring me Sunshine”– in a rather heartfelt way. This may be the possibly the same lot who were chanting earlier so menacingly, but now seem to be in a much mellower mood.

“Bring me sunshine, in your smile

Bring me laughter, all the while

In this world where we live,

There should be more happiness

So much joy you can give

To each brand new bright tomorrow…” (2)

I have to explain the cultural echoes this has for my generation; as it means nothing to today’s. It could be a prayer. You could intone it like an Anglican vicar if you add the words “Oh Lord”… at the beginning. Certainly of its time. Tomorrow might well be brand new, but its not likely to be very bright, and very few young people think it is opening up for them; with 75% in a recent survey afraid of what it might bring, 54% that humanity is doomed and 39% actively considering not having children.

How not to take a scenic photo. Greenwich in the gloom, with the Cutty Sark’s masts centred, the Royal Naval College to the left, and Jamie in silhouette in foreground.

Greenwich from the other side presents as a montage of architectural styles – the stately elegance of the Royal Naval College, reclines with aristocratic languor, stretching effortlessly along the waterfront with green hills behind it. Alongside, and towering above it like an outsized Igor to the College’s Doctor Frankenstein, is a huge Victorian power station; vast vaulted brick halls, foursquare towering chimneys like the stiffened upturned legs of some dead beast, thoroughly Orcine, a hunk of Mordor built on the lawns of Arcadian fantasy.

Walking North up the East side of the Isle of Dogs and the river empties. Only the occasional Clipper prowls beyond Greenwich, giving a sense of abandonment and a quiet that feels a bit eery. On the far side, near the O2, a few dry docks are still working, a Go Cart track makes an enormous noise, and tiny figures can be seen walking across the top of the O2 like a queue of penguins on a very round ice floe. The South end of the Isle is not like the North, dominated as it is by gleaming towers of finance capital. Cubitt town was built on lands reclaimed from swamps as late as the 1840s. Housing estates from before “Docklands” dream in the sunlight, children throw stones into the oncoming waves in old dry docks, one of them, closed off from the river, is covered in algae, smooth and flat like a bilious billiard table dotted with cast off plastic bottles buoyed up high in the airless water beneath, while lots of people in new Shalwar Kamiz’s for Eid head for relatives houses. The ward that elected the first ever BNP councillor in 1993 now feels comfortably multicultural, with people of all descriptions chatting in the street. Another memorial to dead workers stands quietly by the waterfront. Six Fire fighters killed in a fire and explosion on a now demolished wharf in 1969 – a plaque from the Brigade and one for their union alongside each other; their names listed.

At the point that the River Lea reaches the Thames, we have to walk across a flyover on the A13 – an umbilical cord to home in my case (3) – in search of the Orchard peninsular; which was the site of a shipbuilding yard owned by my great, great, great grandfather (via my Dad’s paternal Grandmother’s line), Benjamin Crispin Wallis. The yard’s main claim to fame is to have built the paddle steamship Ruby for the Diamond Gravesend Steam Packet Company in 1836, claimed at the time to be “the fastest in Europe”; 160 feet long with two 50 Horse Power engines capable of 13 and a half miles per hour; allowing her to get to Gravesend ahead of all rivals in just 1 hour and forty minutes. This was such a success that he was bankrupt within a year. He was back in business by 1852, listed in the London Commercial and General Directory of that year as a Barge and Boat Builder at Orchard Place Blackwall, but went bust again by the end of the decade; “occupation 1859: Bankrupt.” His creditors received 1 shilling and 3 pence for every pound they were owed. (London Gazette July 24th 1860). He died in 1877 at 77 years old. (4)

Orchard Place is a backwater along Bow Reach that is almost as hard to get to now as it always was. Cut off by the Lea’s meanders, and the basin of the East India Dock, with no public transport, seen as an island by those who lived there and those who shunned visiting it; it was desperately poor. Marked dark blue on Charles Booth’s poverty map, denoting “very poor, casual, chronic want” – only black – “Lowest class, vicious, semi criminal” was rougher. People worked in the industries that grew up around the docks, notably rendering whale oil from blubber, glass polishing (mostly women) a lucky shift at the Docks for those with enough cash to buy drinks for the foremen in the many pubs, or “toshing”, scavenging along the shoreline for useable goods, or lumps of coal to use or sell. Largely isolated from the rest of London, three families dominated – the Scanlans, Jefferies and Lammins. A school report from the Bow Creek School noted that, “of 160 children in the school, 100 were Lammins”; which must have made taking the register interesting.

Lammin? Here.

Lammin? Here.

Lammin? Here.

Some of these children were reported as asking their mother for a candle, “so we can watch the rats”. Made our own entertainment in them days…

The view from the A13 flyover looking South across Orchard Place. To the right is the entrance to the East India Docks. Ahead is the river and Greenwich. The Wallis yard, I think, was where the flats are to the right. The Thames Cable Car can just be seen on the Greenwich side – a ski lift to nowhere much.

At the end of the peninsular there is a cafe in a prefab unit, which has a black cab on the roof with a tree growing through it, where we rest our aching feet and eat a vegan buttie (bit dry).

Across the flyover looking down to the right at scuzzy Leaside industrial leftovers, big, broken wooden drums dumped in piles, buddleia growing through the concrete of an industrial graveyard – ahead to the Tate and Lyle factory – Baking Britain Golden – a last citadel of production left isolated in brownfield desolation – and to the left to the Victoria Dock; which for a moment we are disoriented by; as it is so broad it looks like the river has been moved (by Jonathan Strange perhaps) or the universe has been turned inside out around us. The Thames Cable Car – the Dangleway – sways high up 300 feet over our heads and we wave back at some kids who are very excited to be in it.

Finally, the Thames Barrier and journey’s end. The park alongside is full of families out for Eid and the river flows muckily too and fro.

On the tube back, I notice in our reflections that we are sitting in a disturbingly identical way.

  1. Deaths of front line workers in recent years, thanks partly to “health and safety gone mad”, have gone down quite sharply from 2.1 per 100,000 in 1981 to 0.44 per 100,000 in 2021. A total of 142 in 2020-21 (mostly falls from height or being hit by a vehicle) mostly still in construction and agriculture, with a much higher rate of deaths for the over 60s. Lest we forget, the death rate from Covid in the same year was running at about ten times that rate for front line workers in jobs like health, care and transport.
  2. The theme song for Morcambe and Wise. Having known it for years- and assumed it was a late Music Hall type variety song – I’m slightly surprised to find that it was written and composed by Willie Nelson. This is his original. I think I prefer theirs, which is gentler; somehow ordinary, a couple of blokes singing a song with no great passion – but with a kind of sincerity; and definitely with the right notes in the right order.
  3. Billy Bragg has a song about it – an Essex version of Route 66 (Dig the scene, on the A13). How could you not?
  4. Research by Jonathan Clarke.

Massive Majorities favour transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

On the heels of a survey by Onward showing that the UK Conservatives could shed 1.3 million votes if they backed off their pledge to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, a survey for the World Economic Forum by IPSOS shows.

  • More than four out of five people globally think it important that their country make the transition.
  • That this majority is strong in Global North countries like the USA and Canada, with 3 out of 4 in support.
  • But even stronger in Global South countries like China, Argentina and Peru, with more than 9 out of 10 in support. The report notes, “Citizens of emerging countries were especially adamant about it.” This is likely to be because, not despite, the much harsher impact of the current increases in fossil fuel costs there.

Support among women – at just under 9 out of 10, is even higher than support among men, running at just over 4 out of 5.

Bad news for Nigel Farage and Lord Lawson.

The Very Hungry Capitalist – a cautionary tale for kids.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Long ago in the lie of the lands, a tiny new capitalist hired a labourer.

On Sunday morning the work was done and – pop! – out of the labour came a tiny but very tidy profit.

The little capitalist started to look for more.

On Monday he exploited one enclosed field, but he was still hungry.

On Tuesday he exploited two slave ships and sugar plantations, but he was still hungry.

On Wednesday he exploited three colonies, but he was still hungry.

On Thursday he exploited four steam engines and coal mines, but he was still hungry.

On Friday he exploited five cotton mills, but he was still hungry.

On Saturday he exploited thousands of automotive plants, tobacco factories, machine plants, oil fields, munitions factories, rubber works, real estate developments, power stations, banks, hedge funds, tech start ups and…

…that night he had a recession!

On Sunday the capitalist bought back his stock options, and he felt much better.

Now he was still hungry– but he wasn’t a little capitalist any more. He was a big fat monopoly capitalist.

He bought a small rocket, called Green Oblivion.

He wants to fly to Mars because he’s exploited everything here, the planet is burning up and the animals are dying…even the beautiful butterflies.

But he is still hungry…

Images from.

Enclosed field https://files.libcom.org/files/images/library/hay.jpg

Slave ships https://aoxoa.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Slave-Ship-Fredensborg-II-1788_jpg.jpg

Colony https://cdn.britannica.com/73/152473-050-F8E3E857/Official-paper-watercolour-procession-East-India-Company.jpg

Pit head. https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=early%20coal%20mines%20winding%20gear#id=B549067ACC369CA3FFFAE96DC8606EA3087CE952

Cotton Mill http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZMxguiyaWGo/T-SMvImaa6I/AAAAAAAAFVE/wgTMohLyJn8/s1600/Lewis+Hine+-+Bibb+Mill+No.+1.+Many+youngsters+here.+Some+boys+were+so+small+they+had+to+climb+up+on+the+spinning+frame+to+mend+the+broken+threads+and+put+back+the+empty+bobbins.+Macon,+Georgia,+1909.jpg

Factories https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=vw%20factories#id=1FCE397B9C9AB1396756B21D27019C34F1252364

Capitalism isn’t working http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BtVWJijQ1LE/T0iy276CBxI/AAAAAAAAAHM/xGa3hzbGKxo/s1600/capitalism+isn’t+working2.jpg

Rocket https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/BlueOrigin.jpg

At the sign of the suicidal ostrich.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496
“Misery to motorists” (and others) last summer, caused by unmitigated climate breakdown, partly caused by motorists.

Shadow Justice Secretary Steve Reed’s call for injunctions against Just Stop Oil protestors, “Motorists were already being hammered by prices at the pump, and now millions can’t even access fuel. The Conservatives need to stop standing idly by and put an end to this disruption that is causing misery for motorists” is posed by the Party leadership as “where the voters are” and “a commonsense position. Our position on climate change is strong and this doesn’t change the fact we think it’s the most pressing issue facing the planet, but we’re recognising you don’t solve it by annoying workers.”

If climate change “is the most pressing issue facing the planet”, that should have been flagged up as “the most pressing issue” in Reed’s comments; along with recognition that what Just Stop Oil is doing is a desperate response to an emergency that the government is not addressing. Especially in the week following the IPCC report described as “frankly terrifying” by former UN climate secretary Christiana Figueres. As one expert put it “It’s not about taking our foot off the accelerator anymore—it’s about slamming on the brakes”. Motorists take note. Jamie Reed take note. As Tyneside Mayor Jamie Driscoll noted, “these protests should not be necessary”. The government should not even be fantasising about opening new oil and gas fields, as doing so puts us in even greater danger, but they are actually going ahead and doing it.

Instead of condemning them for that, and talking up Labour’s alternative, Reed lets them off the hook, turns all his fire on the protestors, outflanking the government in authoritarianism; and thereby reinforcing Priti Patel’s narrative that the argument about climate is between the mass of people on the one side – who just want to get on with their lives – and a “criminal”, “woke minority” on the other; who are self indulgently warning that if we carry on with our lives in the way we currently are, there will be no livable planet sooner than we think.

This is taken further in “light news” programmes like Good Morning Britain, where campaigners are routinely ganged up on by the two presenters – who say things like “we don’t want to keep talking about the facts” and “this is a complicated issue. Just Stop Oil is a simplistic slogan, a bit Vicky Pollard” – reinforced by right wing headbangers who call them “fascists” and “terrorists”.

This is a bit beyond the parallel that a lot of commentators have drawn with Don’t Look Up. The presenters in the film are trivial minded and ignorant, incapable of taking on board the scale of the disaster that’s coming. On GMB, they claim to be aware and worried, but not enough to take any action themselves – perhaps by devoting sections of their programme to exploring this “complicated” issue in a way that mobilises people to act on it and requires political leaders to set up systems to enable that. Instead they are actively and cynically trying to undermine the need for rapid changes; and replace discussion on how to do it with belittling ad hominin attacks designed to make the most active and concerned people look mad. And, seriously…Vicky Pollard? If anyone is saying “Yeah, but No, but Yeah, but No” its a government that is expanding offshore wind while going for new oil and gas at the same time.

The logo for programmes like this should be a suicidal ostrich.

Reed and the Party leadership might think this good electoral politics, but the dynamic of comments like that is to take us away from dealing with climate change, towards just locking up and shutting up the people who are most motivated and concerned about saving all our futures. A disagreement on tactics with Just Stop Oil, that the targets for their actions should be those most responsible for causing the crisis, is a second order disagreement. “Workers” should not only not be being “annoyed”, but its the job of everyone who takes climate breakdown seriously – whether that’s JSO or the Labour Party – to mobilise them as active participants and leaders in the transition to a green society.

The bankruptcy of an “anti- imperialism” that sides with imperialism.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The recent article on Labour Hub from Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval – reprising the Euston Manifesto in a French accent – makes up in tetchiness what it lacks in analysis. Without dropping to their level and accusing them of “stupidity”, I’d like to put some of their assertions and arguments under a bit of scrutiny in the hope that, even in the impassioned polarisation of current arguments, a bit of light can be generated amidst the heat.

Their argument, that the Left has more than one enemy, is a statement of the obvious that no one could disagree with. What they don’t do, however, is examine the actually existing power relations between different states and draw any conclusions about who the main enemy is.

Since the object of the argument is the reality of imperialism, and how that is revealed in the Ukraine crisis and war – as the latest front line of an aggressive expansion of the NATO alliance right up to the borders of Russia – lets examine the forces involved and their scale.

  • Russia has a GDP slightly smaller than Italy and spends $62 billion on its military.
  • NATO includes all the major imperial predators on the global stage, corralled into one bloc by the USA so that it can intervene at will throughout the rest of the world; knowing that all of its smaller rivals will be lined up behind it (or, in the case of the UK, trying to jump up and down alongside it in a desperate attempt to be noticed and approved of). It has a collective GDP 20 times the size of Russia’s and its military spending is 19 times as much (before recently announced increases which will make this gap even bigger). NATO is the military lynch pin of the global imperial system centred on the United States. Russia is not included in it.

The proportionate military spend looks like this.

These are from 2021. Very large increases are planned by Germany and the USA from this year. UK military expenditure is also increasing.

A quick glance at this imbalance should put paid to any notion that the NATO powers face any kind of threat from Russia’s military, that “Ukraine is just the start” or that revived “Great Russian chauvinism” or “neo Stalinist fascism” is about to steamroller across Europe, restore the Russian Empire and put paid to “democracy”; and therefore plans to significantly increase military expenditure have any “defence” rationale at all. Offence is another matter.

Even more absurd is any notion that that the active expansion of NATO across Eastern Europe since 1991 – amassing East Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia into the bloc, with Ukraine, Georgia and Bosnia added to the active waiting room in 2022, following a US Ukraine Security Agreement signed in November 2021 – has been a passive act; let alone “reactive” in Diderot and Laval’s words. The ante has been consistently upped from the US.

The Russian response to this has been to try to be incorporated in it; or to seek “common security arrangements” in Europe with it. Approaches have been made repeatedly since 1991 and consistently rebuffed by the USA. So, no incorporation , no accommodation, just inexorably increasing pressure.

So, Russia has reacted with aggressive defensiveness when this pressure has got too much.

  • defending the South Ossetian enclave after the Rose Revolution installed a pro US President in Georgia, who launched an attack on it-
  • and, in Ukraine – reacting to the 2014 US backed overthrow of a President who had just signed a trade deal with Russia rather than the EU – by annexing Crimea and moving forces into the Donbass; after the rebellion there was about to be crushed by the Ukrainian army and Azov battalion.

The expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders is not simply a matter of “humiliation” for Russia, as Dardot and Laval put it. It is an existential military and political threat; and seen as such across the full spectrum of Russian political opinion. It has been repeatedly stated as a red line which will lead to a violent reaction if crossed. This is not a mystery to NATO or the USA. It takes a real act of will to ignore it on the Left. The question is, knowing this, why did the USA and NATO push across it and provoke the reaction they had been warned about?

Dardot and Laval explain that in reaction to the Russian response, “pacifism is not an option” and “the immediate imperative is to help the Ukrainians resist” and “let’s not play non-intervention again”. So, theirs is not an anti war stance.

  • They would have no sympathy with the Italian and Greek airline and rail workers who have refused to move NATO munitions to stop fuelling the war.
  • In arguing for arms to be sent to Ukraine until the 2014 borders are reestablished they are calling for the forcible reoccupation of the Donbass and Crimea, against the wishes of the people who live there. So much for self determination and human rights.
  • They are in favour of anti war demonstrations in Russia, not anti war demonstrations against NATO in NATO countries.
  • They don’t specify how far they want to go to “intervene”, but NATO is intervening already. And Dardot and Laval line up behind it.

They try to cover this by turning their polemical fire on “campism”, which they characterise as “one sided anti imperialism”, even though they themselves are forming a bloc with their own imperialism and its allies. You can’t get more “one sided” than that.

They argue that “my enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend”,

  • but pose a delusionary framework in which there are no hierarchies of power, as though we were already in a multi polar world,
  • and at the same time pose the actions and values of any powers opposed to the dominant imperialism as worse. “The terrible reality of Communism in either Russia or China” or “post colonial regimes” during the first Cold War.

This follows the well worn trope of every “human rights” intervention by the US and its allies, that the enemy of the day is the new Hitler. So, in practice, my enemy’s enemy is more my enemy than my enemy is. At best, the currents that espouse this sort of position are an opposition within imperialism, not an opposition to it. Firmly in their home camp.

This is not a new phenomena on the European Left. It has been the dominant tradition of Social Democracy since 1914. Lest we forget, at the outset of the First World War, the overwhelming majority of Socialist and Labour Parties across Europe voted for the war budgets of their own countries to “defend” them against the threatening barbarism of their enemies, firmly subordinating themselves to the barbarism of their own ruling classes. At the start of the war, there were already plenty of atrocities to choose from. Looking only at those committed by the other side became almost a moral imperative to justify looking away from those committed by our own. Plus ca change. Plus c’est le meme chose.

As the Left in the imperialist countries has stagnated in reformist parties – sometimes allowed into government if self consciously subaltern enough – or small revolutionary currents with a weakness for syndicalism, and nowhere overthrown capitalist rule; revolutions have taken place at imperialism’s weakest links, in countries that are poorer, with lower standards of living, smaller infrastructure development, often devastated by the struggle and having to build up economic, health and education infrastructure almost from scratch. These have faced military threats, and interventions, from the USA and its allies, and constant economic pressure. The Labour movements of the Global North have been at best ambiguous about the struggles of these countries, with small solidarity movements largely outweighed by an insular condescension, even on the far left, which has considered the judgement of small Western European groupuscules on what is or is not “socialism” to be of more weight than, say, the Chinese Communist Party; which sees itself as a Marxist Party, is running its country with significant success and has 90 million members.

Following in this tradition, Dardot and Laval are quite clear than in a confrontation between developed capitalist countries/imperialist countries/the Global North/ the “democracies”/the “international community”/the “West” (delete description according to political taste) and any actual challenge to it, even from countries that see themselves as Socialist, or “post colonial regimes”, in the final analysis, they plump for the former.

They seem to presume that the “West” supporting dictatorships – and invasions and coups and terrorist movements – across the Global South was a function of the old Cold War, and seem unable to explain why it is a constant feature of what they have continued doing since. The dramatic shift from the “End of History” in 1991, the USA’s dominant unipolar moment, in which it was possible to imagine that the future of the world would be to become a gigantic American suburb, to the current moment in which the USA is for the first time since 1871, no longer the World’s largest economy in real terms is registered in the Global South by a series of political realignments around the Chinese model of investment led development , but in the Global North by a movement among both the ruling class and labour movements that could best be described as “nostalgic”(in the UK ranging from the swashbuckling imperial delusions of Brexit to Keir Starmer’s oddly retro political framing; so he looks like a Labour Prime Minister, but a Labour Prime Minister from the last century). The US is no longer able to subsidise its allies in the way it did after World War 2. It doesn’t generate the capital any more. In fact, it sucks it in, and this has a destabilising effect, primarily on the Global South but increasingly on its allies; the stagnation of Japan since 1989 being a stark example. And this is driving an increasingly delirious domestic politics in the US too.

Because the USAs global dominance is slipping, it is using its armed forces to reassert itself, pushing beyond previously sacrosanct red lines and provoking confrontations – today with Russia in Ukraine and, if it gets away with it, tomorrow with China in the South China Sea. This is designed to spark conflicts it can “win”, lead on to regime change in its interests and the Balkanisation of rival powers before China, in particular gets beyond its threats. It is this that is the threat to world peace, just as it is the current wave of US driven sanctions that is the biggest threat to the wellbeing of the global population, as this briefing from No Cold war makes clear.

We should always bear in mind that this is the country that

  • dropped more munitions on Iraq on the first day of the second Iraq war than the Russians have managed in the whole 5 weeks of the Ukraine invasion,
  • carpet bombed Vietnam, killing 2 million people,
  • imposed sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s that killed 500,000 Iraqi children (a price “worth paying” according to Madeline Albright)
  • killed up to a million Iraqis in the ensuing war,
  • is currently imposing sanctions on Venezuela which have killed 40,000
  • and on Afghanistan which have led to a situation in which a million children are on the verge of starvation.
  • We could add to this the situation in Yemen, ably abetted by its UK vassal, backing the Saudi intervention which has killed almost 400,000 people according to the UN, has directly led to a cholera epidemic and “the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.”

This is what global misleadership looks like. That’s what imperialism IS. That is why the USA is the main enemy, along with our own ruling classes, who are aligned with it. No other country has the capacity to inflict so much pain simultaneously around the world. No other country has 800 military bases in other countries or the capacity to use the world’s financial system to “make the economy” of any given target country “scream.” That’s why an “anti US lens” is essential to any sense of proportion on global developments and, whatever we might think of their opponent in any given conflict, or of what they do in the course of it, a victory for the US is a defeat for all of us and no one on the Left should aid or abet it.

We can add to this the complete failure of the USA – and the ruling class more broadly – to lead humanity in combatting our greatest collective threat; climate breakdown. This is the clearest indication that the capitalist class – through its most powerful states – is no longer capable of leading humanity anywhere except to disaster. The USA is spending 14 times as much on its military as it does in combatting climate change. China is spending one and a half times as much on climate change as on its military. The USA would need a change of regime to begin to do what is necessary.

This shows that imperialism will kill us – in more ways than one.

Dardot and Laval, writing in France – which is about to have a Presidential election between a fascist matron and a centrist blancmange, vying with each other for who can demonise France’s 6 million Muslims the most – note that the other enemies of the Left include “dangerous ideologies” which support “forms of oppression and domination, notably religious”, giving an unmistakable genuflection to the boorish laicity that is barely distinguishable from the Islamophobia that runs virally through the French Left and disables its anti racist solidarity. The only Presidential candidate, in this context, that they take a pop at is Jean Luc Melenchon, the only Left candidate in spitting distance of Len Pen and Macron, presumably on the basis that “the honour of the Left” would not be safe with him.

Their attempted parallel between Ukraine and Palestine – that the Left should support the nationalist side of Ukraine in the same way it supports the Palestinians – shows exactly what is wrong with their argument. For the Palestinians to be free, they would either have to have equality within a common state with Israeli Jews from the river to the sea, or, if this could not be achieved, a viable separate state. The cause of the rebellion in the Donbass against nationalist Ukraine in 2014 was that equality was no longer guaranteed for the Russian population. Support for nationalist Ukraine is therefore – in fact – more like support for the current state of Israel than for the Palestinians who are oppressed by it.

Their central argument is that what they describe as “great movements of democratic emancipation” throughout the world have an independent dynamic and take place completely independently of outside influence or support or direction.

They lump together in this

  • movements like the Arab Spring; that developed organically from large numbers of people rebelling against economic conditions that were becoming sufficiently unbearable that the inhibitions of a repressive state and the ingrained habits of just getting by and making the best of things could be overcome in a great rush of inchoate solidarity – which the US struggled to get a grip on and divert
  • with movements that have been described as “colour revolutions” because they followed a script written in the State Department and could be most accurately described as creatures of it. As good capitalists, the US State Department can’t help themselves in branding these events, even though doing so is a bit of a giveaway that they are their products.

Dardot and Laval argue that “the peoples have free will and they are not the puppets of the great powers” which is true up to a point. Free will is nevertheless often expressed in a way that does indeed make the movements concerned a creature of Foggy Bottom; and given the weight of US finance, expertise and media power, it can be very hard to avoid being suborned by them. The contrary also applies. The existence of the USSR provided a pole of attraction for movements in the Global South/Third World which, at the time, tended to take a secular form and aspire to socialism in some form. The collapse of the USSR meant that such forces have tended to dissipate and be replaced by millennialist style religious movements. The current rise of China is leading to significant political realignment. Each struggle in each country is a unique combination of common elements, but whatever the local specifics, none is innocent of the influence of outside forces. Sometimes this is simply the weight of example or cultural aspiration, sometimes the power of investment or trade, sometimes conscious manipulation and intervention.

The USA, in particular, runs a vast international network of human rights organisations and social media networks, funded through the National Endowment for Democracy, and it intervenes everywhere. Sometimes it initiates a movement. Sometimes it moves in on one and bends it to its will. They have cultivated an international network of “democracy activists” and hold cadre schools to refine their tactics and compare notes. Anyone involved in these networks will in practice be acting as an agent of the USA. Many of them are conscious of that and proud of it.

Some rebellions are not in the USA’s pocket. These tend to be the ones that are demonised by it. Hezbollah in Lebanon is one, the Houthis in Yemen are another, as are the Cubans, Venezuelans and Bolivians.

So, the question is what is the relationship between any movement and the US and its local relays. This is not predetermined, as we make our own history, but not – as Marx once noted – in conditions of our own choosing.

  • Dardot and Laval argue that ISIS was not the inevitable result of the Syrian uprising against the Assad regime, but the involvement of the USA and its local allies certainly helped push it that way. ISIS has been in some ways an irregular frontier version of Saudi Arabia.
  • Similarly, the Rose Revolution in Georgia didn’t have to end up with military adventurism from President Saakashvili, but US involvement and the prospect of NATO membership certainly encouraged him.
  • And in Ukraine, the dynamic of the Maidan movement was inexorably towards the far right. The least that can be said about US involvement is that it inhibited that not at all.

Sometimes the US is aiming for regime change, sometimes to create chaos as a preferable alternative to a government that does not do its bidding.

The current sanctions being imposed on Russia by the US are going to have an immense blowback across the Global South that will be more severe the longer they are in place. Millions are being thrown into poverty right now. The rebellions that erupt as a result will be almost certainly too much for the US to handle. The US war drive is leading to Global chaos and misery. No support should be given it.

Ukraine; How can this war end?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

We are living through a nightmare. The logic of war is escalation and demonisation. Each horrific event fuels the next, justifies retaliation, and righteous vengeance screams a descant in the headlines. Once a war starts, the bloody toothpaste is out of the tube, the eggs are smashed, and there is no putting them back together the way they were.

When Tariq Ali writes in the London Review of Books (24/3/22), “no one knows how this will end”, there are a number of possibilities; most very grim indeed.

1. It could escalate out of control into an open clash between NATO and Russia; and we stumble into a Third World War. This is openly discussed. The shadow of the mushroom cloud that has hovered in the back of our nightmares for most of our lives is bigger than ever, and beginning to preoccupy waking thoughts. The USA has 3,500 nuclear warheads. Russia has over 4,000. The “independent” UK Trident fleet is an auxiliary of the US and would fire when they did.

The explosive power of these warheads is many times those of the atomic prototypes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Use of these weapons would be fast and devastating. Neither Russia nor the USA has a no first use policy, so each would be nervous of the other’s itchy trigger finger. Hundreds of millions would die in a matter of hours and human civilisation would not survive.

Its a moot point whether it would deserve to.

It should be noted that each Trident submarine carries 24 missiles, each of which has 8 warheads that can be independently targeted, so each missile has 192 times the explosive power of the single warhead shown here..

President Zelensky’s call for a No Fly Zone is an invitation to Armageddon. Journalists thinking it makes good emotional copy to promote it, need to get a grip on the scale of the fire they are playing with.

2. The conventional war bogs down into a long term stalemate; or a limited Russian tactical victory leads to no durable settlement, leading to an Eastern European version of Afghanistan in the 1980s. This is a scenario that Hillary Clinton and others project with some relish.

The current pattern of NATO powers fuelling the fire with weapons deliveries would continue. Snipers are being trained for this eventuality. The consequences of this for Ukraine would be to make it a permanent war zone.

The consequences for the rest of the world would make the current impact on oil, gas and bread prices spiral ever upwards – leading to successive waves of impoverishment and upheaval across the planet. This Briefing from No Cold War spells out just how devastating the US Sanctions regime will be for the Global South if they are not brought to an end quickly.

And the resources we need to invest in green transition are being diverted to arms budgets. Great news for Raytheon, Lockheed and BAE systems; a medium term death sentence for the rest of us.

3. A deal is done on the basis of Ukraine remaining outside NATO and ruling out deployment of missile systems on its land, no Russian occupation of Western Ukraine, recognition of the decision of the people of Crimea to join the Russian Federation and an autonomous arrangement for the Donbass.

This would recognise a number of realities. Russia does not have the forces to occupy Western Ukraine even if it wanted to. Ukraine is being used in a proxy war by NATO which it has nothing to gain from. The people of the Donbass and Crimea do not wish to be part of a nationalist Ukraine, even a neutral one. A settlement on these lines could begin the process of de-escalation and rebuilding, allow refugees to return to their homes and limit the damage to the rest of the world.

The scars would take a long time to heal, but this is probably the only basis on which they could even start to. Such a deal would be perceived as a betrayal by the Ukrainian far right and a defeat by the US, so they will try to prevent it in the first place and undermine it if signed. With feelings running as high as they are, they would be cutting with the grain unfortunately.

4. The Russian army loses its will to fight and pulls back in disarray, leading to forcible recapture of the Donbass and possibly even Crimea, NATO rampant right up to the Russian border, political repercussions within Russia and a colour revolution movement pushed by the US to consolidate its advantage and gain control of Russia’s vast fossil fuel resources via a docile and subordinate leadership; which may or may not involve Balkanisation of the country on the lines proposed by Dick Cheney in 1991.

Pro US oligarchs in office in Moscow would break their bloc with China, allowing the US to use its colossal military advantage (3,500 nuclear warheads to 350) to fight the conventional war in and around Chinese territory that is now an openly discussed project there. Steve Bannon argues that such a war would have to be fought by 2024. Former Trump Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defence Eldrige Colby, who crafted Trump’s 2018 Defence strategy argues, in his book, The Strategy of Denial, for a “limited” conventional war centred on Taiwan.

Colby’s calculation is that such a war would damage the US economy by 10% but the Chinese by 40%. Therefore, the USA “wins”. The millions of people who would die don’t get much attention: collateral damage.

The current state of the war on the ground – Russian withdrawal from around Kyiv and consolidation in the East and South – and the limited progress in peace negotiations, do not give a clear indication of how things will go, but whatever is going to happen looks like a long and gruesome slog.

The best hope is a settlement along the lines in 3) the outlines of which are being discussed in the peace talks; and the sooner the better.

Look up! Wake up! Stand up for your rights!

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496
A youth who is worried by the future too often. Atleliers Populaires 1968

The only war that matters is the war against the imagination/ all other wars are subsumed in it. Diane Di Prima.

A sense among young people of being silenced in the face of impending disaster is even more relevant today than it was in the late 1960s.

A survey for Teach the Future by Bath University asked 10,000 young people across the world in 2021 for their views and feelings about the future in the context of the climate crisis.

76% were afraid of the future.

54% thought that humanity is doomed.

39% were actively considering not having children.

That is a tidal wave of anxiety that will come out in all sorts of pathological forms if it is denied or silenced, but generated positive action from 2018 on; with the wave of school strikes that built up to millions taking part across the world by September 2019. This generated a supportive movement among parents, teachers and other educators, to change the curriculum as an agent of change for our whole society; anticipating the shifts we will need for a sustainable society, so that we are actively making them.

This is driven by the reality of climate breakdown.

As I am writing this, the Storm Eunice is howling outside and the rain splattering on my window after a week of storms. A world that felt mostly safe for most of my life no longer does. Switch on the laptop and climate crisis impacts are all over it. They are hitting the Global South hardest, but are coming home to roost in the Global North too. No one is going to stop it by building a wall.

The mobilisations in response are the human fuel for change.

A government serious about making a transition to sustainability would learn from it, work with it and use it to galvanise more people to act on the scale and with the urgency we need, with schools acting as community hubs. Actually implement Article 12 of the Paris Agreement, which mandates governments to educate their whole people to understand the scale of the crisis and the measures needed to overcome it.

Instead – alongside the most minimal steps forward in the DFE Net Zero Strategy – we have new guidance on “Political impartiality in schools”. which is designed to keep this movement within safe bounds for the government.

The headlines that heralded this announcement all screamed that this itself is anything but politically impartial, with student movements protests on climate, Palestine and racism; critical views of the British Empire or figures like Churchill specifically mentioned as “woke” issues – or “left wing brain washing” – that would be suppressed by it. This is an attempt to speak power to truth.

The actual guidance is far more subtle than a Daily Express headline is capable of and plays on the fact that teachers are – in general – far more fair minded and conscientious and far less partisan than, say, a government Minister. The law on this matter is quite specific and limited. “Partisan” views are those which support one political Party over another, or put forward one solution to the exclusion of all others. The guidance has some quite unexceptional points that just about every teacher would use in any case, that if stating a personal view, identifying it as such and saying that other views are available, or, if there is a genuinely contested argument, pointing out sources of differing interpretation. A similarly mature approach might be welcome in some of our newspapers. Debating an issue of concern to students, or organising clubs to pursue it, is not, in itself “partisan”. However, the liberal use of the word throughout the guidance creates the impression that it might be; with the intention of inhibiting both teachers and students from exploring the issues involved without feeling there is someone looking over their shoulder waiting to dob them in to the DFE thought police. As there very rarely is, this is an attempt to set such an inhibition in people’s heads. We shouldn’t let it in.

Presenting issues in a “balanced” way is less of an issue than whether an issue is being presented truthfully. The problem comes when the presentation of awkward facts for those in power gets interpreted as partisan and ruled out of order. This is the US Alt Right playbook to control narratives expressed in the accents of the British civil service. Much of the framing of the discussion on History in the press suffers precisely from this sort of cherry picking. Attempts to look at the history of the British Empire from the point of view of the colonised as well as the coloniser, for example, lead to really jumpy reactions from people who would like that perspective to remain suppressed; whether that is in the classroom or the National Trust. This is not because people are unaware that the elegant stately homes they love were built with the proceeds of slavery, but that they’d really prefer not to be reminded of it. Its because they know that this is a fact that they find it so disturbing; and so resort to disavowal. Look straight at something, and pretend its not there. There’s only so much reality one can take, after all. The “war on woke” is designed to sustain existing unbalanced views and hagiographies in a way that turns History into a series of self serving myths, and any questioning of them into heresies. None of us should be intimidated into ceasing to question or challenge.

There is an attempt running all the way through the guidance to inhibit the expression of any view that might be interpreted as partisan, as well as a staggering lack of self awareness of the partisan views of the government itself – which this guidance acts to disguise.

On climate in particular, a little humility would not go amiss from a governing Party that

  • abstained on the Parliamentary motion to declare a climate emergency,
  • still contains the organising cadre of climate denial and delay in the form of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group,
  • has for the most part come very late to any recognition of the scale of this crisis,
  • has a default to backslide, and a Net Zero Plan with targets that its own Parliamentary watchdog says it will undershoot by 80%.

These are awkward facts. Not contestable because they are on the public record. Would it be “partisan” to point them out? What would the “balance” be? It is the weakness of government responses to the scale and enormity of the crisis that has fueled the student protest movements and strikes.

The relatively tepid language of the guidance acts as the soft cop to the hard cop role of the tabloids, which are primed to go after examples of “woke” teaching in the same way they did in the 1980s when some schools tried to teach that it was ok to have two Dads or two Mums, which led to exactly the same sort of accusations of indoctrination – teaching kids to be gay – “its political correctness gone mad” etc etc etc with hues and cries at school gates from parents frightened their kids were being “turned gay”; allowing the Conservative government to introduce Section 28 and ban teaching that gay families were ok. They don’t talk about that much anymore, but they do have a pretty consistent record of being on the wrong side of history.

Let us consider Scenario A – dealing with climate breakdown – in the new DFE guidance on “political impartiality in schools” in the context of their overall edict that “You can discuss political issues with pupils, and their interest and engagement in these should be encouraged. However, you should not promote partisan political views to them, or encourage them to participate in specific political activity, including protests”.

The paradox of this position is that it is a truth universally acknowledged that the cure for an otherwise disabling level of anxiety is to take action against the causes of it. Depression and despair sets in where such action is blocked. The driver of the fear in the survey is that most young people feel that their governments are failing to tackle the problem on the scale and at the speed needed to resolve it. it is the gap between the knowledge of the crisis and the paltry scale of the actions being taken to deal with it that causes despondency.

In Scenario A the government acknowledges that there is no justified argument against the reality of climate breakdown, the reasons for it and the disastrous consequences of failing to deal with it, neatly disowning a noisy faction of its own back benches, as follows.

“Teaching about climate change and the scientific facts and evidence behind this, would not constitute teaching about a political issue. Schools do not need to present misinformation, such as unsubstantiated claims that anthropogenic climate change is not occurring, to provide balance here.“

So, there is no requirement to cover the sort of nonsense put out by the Global Warming Foundation to provide “balance”.

However, where teaching covers the potential solutions for tackling climate change, this may constitute a political issue. Different groups, including political parties and campaign groups, may have partisan political views on the best way to address climate change.

This part of the topic should be taught in a balanced manner, with teachers not promoting any of the partisan political views covered to pupils.

In other words. Its ok – in fact its desirable – to have a debate. Partisan views can be expressed in a lesson, so long as there is more than one of them. Not only that, but its also ok for teachers to express a personal view, as long as it is clearly identified as such, and its made clear that other views are available.

Its in the area of potential solutions, that go beyond technical matters to how we organise society and deal with issues of justice and fairness in the transition we have to make, that open debate is essential. The government’s model of education tends to emphasise the transmission of “knowledge” – an old fashioned passing down of truths from authority figures – and they tend to interpret debate in the same way as manipulation by authority figures. What they seem to have missed is that so much of the debate, with “partisan views” fiercely expressed, has been led by students who have felt let down by the absence of content, absence of urgency and absence of organisation and mobilisation in schools and communities. In so far as any progress is being made at all, including by the DFE, it is down to them. It is no job of a responsible teacher to try to shut them up.

The whole point about trying to forge a just transition is that we are making it up as we go along, no one has all the answers and to find them we have to let a hundred flowers blossom and a thousand schools of thought contend: so we can (all) look up, wake up and create our own future.

Suburban Spring Procession

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

On a warm bright day in March

In the precession of the anthropocene equinox

Before the clocks were turned back to thirteen

On the pavement opposite

Beneath the quiet mock Tudor flats

And the frothy white blossoms

And the dusting of green hints of Summer

On bare late winter branches

Three figures like a tiny carnival.

A Spring Procession too early for an Easter rebirth.

A lardy man in the lead

Carrying a white frame for windows

In meaty carpenter’s hands

With rectangular spaces for icons of various sizes

Frames within frames.

A Mum in a headscarf hauling a rope

Pulling a happy boy on a big green bulldozer

His legs lazily turning with the pedals

Venus and Cupid?

Madonna and Child (in a material world)?

A second, back up Mum behind

Keeping pace with a determined jaw

Pushing a three wheeled heavy duty push chair

A Chelsea tractor of the pavements.

Together becoming more than the sum of their parts

All heading East in single file, equally spaced, equally paced

Finding significance in coincidence.

With thanks and apologies to Rudyard Kipling (How the Rhino got his skin) and George Orwell (1984 opening lines).