The juxtaposition of the headlines from the Guardian and City AM, as they flopped onto the mat this morning, was unintentionally instructive. “Fight for peace” is in inverted commas perhaps because the Guardian has a vague historical memory that “Peace through Strength” was what all the great powers were relying on in the run up to World War 1, and it worked really well; until it didn’t.
And his comments on climate change are “absolute garbage”. I suppose being an active fifth column for Trump means that he has to say “garbage” instead of “rubbish”.
Richard Tice can’t do History. The global heating we are currently experiencing is beyond anything that human civilisation has ever had to contend with. The longer term cyclical swings in global climate arising from variations in Earth’s orbit that have been the fundamental drivers of Ice Ages and periods that have been far hotter than today take place over tens of thousands of years are not an explanation for our current period of rapidly increasing temperatures. That can be explored here.
Explore further here. Myth busters 2. Was it really hotter in the Medieval Warm Period?
Richard Tice can’t do Maths. He says that the scientists who agree with him are “not a minority”. The scientific consensus that human activity is generating climate change has the support of 97 – 99% of scientists across the world. However you look at it, 1 – 3% can’t be described as anything other than a minority.
He also says that the costs of dealing with climate change are an insupportable burden. In fact, the costs of not addressing it will be far higher, even if we manage to avoid social collapse.
That can be explored here. Mythbusters #3 “It’s gonna cost you?”
Richard Tice can’t do science. The basis of science is to pay attention to what you can see going on. His claim that “there is no evidence” for human generated climate change is like a toddler closing his eyes, sticking his fingers in his ears and chanting “la,la,la, I’m not listening”. He and his party are not only out of step with science, but also with popular opinion; not because the rest of us have been brainwashed but because we notice the wildfires and the floods and the increasingly extreme weather, are worried about our childrens futures, and because we are not members of a Party being bankrolled by fossil fuel interests.
He says that the actions of the sun and volcanoes have more effect on climate than greenhouse gas emissions. He does not note that volcanic activity cools the planet*, sometimes severely for short periods, but cannot explain the way that it is heating, nor that current levels of solar activity would also be cooling the planet if left to itself. While natural cycles and events of this sort have heated and cooled the planet even more dramatically than current human activity, these are events that are outside our control, and are not an immediate cause of the global heating we are seeing now, which is down to the burning of vast quantities of fossil fuels. Nor should the impact and velocity of this be minimised. The rate of global heating in the coming decades is projected to be in the order of 65 times the rate during the last deglaciation. We are driving ourselves fast off the map. Whether we drive ourselves off a cliff or not is a matter of choice.
In the immediate period ahead, we are looking to try to save human society from the worst consequences of this, and no political force that abdicates its responsibility to do so should be given the time of day.
Explore further here. Mythbuster 1. “Phew! What a scorcher!” Overheating is good for you?
There are indeed “experts”, who are telling us we are in serious trouble and need to take urgent action, “vested interests”, like Tice and the Carnival or reactionary grotesques and “swivel eyed anti net zero zealots” at the ARC Convention this week, seeking to “rebuild the foundations of our civilisation” on lies, fantasies and racist paranoia, and “then people who tell the truth” like the IPCC and the climate movement.
Tice and all of those who can’t face the truth are dinosaurs having a last hurrah.
*There is a caveat on this that some extremely large eruptions unleash large quantities of greenhouse gases which can have a significant heating effect.
George Monbiot’s comments about the war in Ukraine on BBC Question Time last week are completely disorientated, and disorientating for anyone who swallows them.
His columns in the Guardian are often a haven of well argued, deeply felt sanity in a time when the impasse of capitalism, the decline of US hegemony and the ever mounting climate crisis are driving most columnists in most papers well off the rails and up the wall, but the one entitled A Trump win would change my mind about rearmament (Guardian 5/7/24), was profoundly confused, and underpins the line he took on QT.
He argues that Trump’s Second Coming should “end… our abiding fantasies about a special relationship” without reflecting that, in abusive relationships, abiding fantasies are often clung to harder to avoid having to face facts. There is no doubt that the British ruling class will cling to it as hard as it needs to.
As it is, few, now, have any delusions that this relationship is one of equals. A deferential cringe is built into it, and everyone knows it. The relationship was abjectly summarised by Tony Blair when he told the British Ambassador to Washington to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there”. We have seen what this looks like on film. “Yo! Blair!”
What makes it “special” is being one of the closest US henchmen in their global dominance: one of the “five eyes” countries that share Intelligence gathering (the US and what used to be called the “White Commonwealth”) that is at the core of their system of alliances.
George spells out what this has been about, listing just a few of the brutal and deadly military interventions and coups “we” have been party to since the Second World War – Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza – with the US as number one and the UK desperate to believe that its number 2.
Although he recognises that these alliances, with NATO as its core, defend a rules based order that “favours capital over the democratic state”, he doesn’t draw the structural conclusion that this also constitutes a Global North military bloc forged to keep the Global South in its place. So, the interventions he mentions were, and are, not random pieces of malevolence that just happened to happen, but systematic attempts to assert global power and dominance. This is posed in these countries as “defence”.
The military forces at their disposal are the tools do do this job, and the stronger and bigger they are, the more they can get away with doing it.
So if, as George argues, our principle is that we are opposed to “imperialism, fascism and wars of aggression”, we have to recognise that not only do we live in a core imperialist state ourselves; one that has committed many wars of aggression in our lifetimes, but that that state is integrated into the system of alliances that guarantees the existing unjust global order.
We therefore have to restrain its capacity to carry out these wars as an act of solidarity with its victims in the rest of the world; in the first instance those in Gaza.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz was a guest at the NATO summit in July and Israel has had representation at the alliance since Turkiye lifted its veto in 2016, and a cooperation agreement since 2017. The ongoing US, and UK, arms and intelligence supplies during the genocidal IDF operations in Gaza underline what this alliance is for.
George argues that the UK and EU have “leant on the US for security”. What this means is being part of the world’s most aggressive and high spending military alliance. NATO accounts, with its allies in the Pacific, for between 67 and 75% of global military spending (depending on how you measure it). The strongest powers within it – the US, Japan, Germany, France – are boosting their military spending rapidly (Germany and Japan doubling theirs); while simultaneously complaining that it is not “realistic” to expect them to stump up their promised $100 billion annual contribution to help the Global South develop sustainably. In fact, just the increase in NATO military spending since 2015 amounts to $543 billion a year (with a total spend in 2023 of $1341 Billion). So, building up military capacity gets five times as much commitment as the promise to alleviate climate breakdown in the Global South – a promise that has never been fulfilled.
That looks like this.
George, nevertheless, argues that a Trump restoration would be “a threat to our peace, security and wellbeing” not so much because the US would
but because he thinks he would break up NATO, supposedly in cahoots with President Putin; citing his remark that he would be quite happy for Russia to invade any NATO member not spending as much on its military as Trump wants it to and would “end US support for Ukraine” which would “allow Putin to complete his invasion” teeing up “an attack on a NATO country within five years”.
This is where George’s argument aligns with that of other Guardian/Observer columnists and editorials, including the increasingly frenzied Simon Tisdall; one of whose columns last year condemned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as “overly fearful of nuclear escalation”. Perish the thought that anyone would be worried about that. Tisdall’s critique of last year’s NATO summit was, as ever, that it did too little to escalate the war in Ukraine. No fear of nuclear escalation for him; arguing for no fly zones in the West of the country and missile strikes into Russia, for an alliance that is not “afraid of a fight” in face of the threat that an incoming Trump Presidency would try to force a peace by accepting a partition of pre 2014 Ukrainian territory because he is, as the Observer editorial puts it on the same day, “a keen admirer of Vladimir Putin”.
This profoundly misreads whats going on. Trump is in no kind of bloc with Putin. He’d like to break Russia from its alignment with China, though that ship has long sailed. What Trump is trying to do now is to bully subordinate European allies into taking most of the military weight in Europe off the US. This is so it can concentrate on China; which he sees as the main challenge to the US world order. This will be costly for the countries that do it, but that is of no concern to Trump. Thats the price they have to pay to stay in the kind of “special relationship” with the US that allows them to be at the table and not on the menu, even if it means they will be increasingly relegated farther below the salt.
Trump is not a diplomat. He does not issue quiet threats on secure telephone lines to allow appearances to be kept up, as Joe Biden did for Obama. He is a corrupt wheeler dealer with mob boss characteristics. He doesn’t spare anyone’s feelings. He bullies openly, so everyone is clear who the boss is. Remember his official visit in 2018? That calvalcade of armoured limousines that was longer than the Mall? Those hideous Osprey aircraft repeatedly buzzing London’s airspace?
And it is already working. 23 of NATOs 31 non US members now hit the 2% target, “more than twice as many as two years ago” according to Jens Stoltenburg and the only way is up, with Germany already committed to 3.5%. Job almost done.
So, when George says the “UK and Europe will need to find the means of defending ourselves against a Trump regime and its allies” he misses the point that the UK and EU countries are the allies of the US and, as everyone in the new cabinet is keen to point out, the UK will accomodate to whoever is in the White House because it has to, so they will remain core allies of “the Trump regime” too. David Lammy is quite explicit about that, saying that Trump is “often misunderstood” over NATO, and pledging increased UK spending to stay in the club. Increases in military spending by European countries is exactly what Trump wants. It won’t be used “against a Trump regime” but to facilitate it, and cover its back in Europe so it can go after China.
The key point for the climate and labour movements therefore is that the policy choice to sink or swim with the US alliance will clash with having to break from it to resist climate breakdown. A very concrete way that this is posed is, when it comes to priorities, will the Starmer government jump to Trump’s tune and increase military spending to 2.5 or 3% or even 5% of GDP, or does it put those resources into its mission for clean energy by 2030? They are unlikely to be able to do both.
Trump wants to pull some US military resources out of Europe to concentrate on China because the US can’t do both any more. Thats why commentators like Tisdall are spinning fantasies. NATO has been unable to supply Ukraine with enough material to “win”, because it can’t.
Some pro EU commentators like Timothy Garton Ash argue that this gives the EU the chance and need to step up and become a serious military power in its own right and George now argues “I now believe we have to enhance our conventional capacities, both to support other European nations against Russia and…perhaps to defend ourselves”.
This presumes that the Russians are at war because they are on some crazed mission of global conquest. In fact, their stance throughout has been to seek mutual security pacts so that they don’t feel under threat from NATO; which, at the moment, they do. This has been the case since Gorbachev proposed a “Common European Home” in 1991. The US and NATO have never accepted that and it has been a US mission to break up any mutually beneficial economic arrangements, partcularly between Russia and Germany, the better to maintain US dominance of the continent.
Seeking such a peaceful arrangement, following a ceasefire in Ukraine, using the war as a terrible example of what everyone in Europe should agree that we need to avoid, is the preferable, alternative course to rearmament and war preparation.
Because George should think about what he’s saying. If there is a war in Europe, even if it stays conventional through some miracle, it will look like Eastern Ukraine or Gaza on a gigantic scale. The attempt to “defend ourselves” militarily will be suicidal, even if nuclear weapons can be kept out of it. War won’t “defend” anyone. Mutually assured destruction can be done conventionally if alliances are not “afraid of a fight”. The danger in proposals to seriously retool the UK, and other, military industrial complexes to be able to fight just such a conventional war of attrition with Russia by the end of the decade, is that this carries its own momentum and will become a self fulfilling prophecy, displacing diplomatic alternatives. If the UK military gets into a position to “fight and win a war in Europe”, the UK ruling class will be tempted to try to do so.
An alternative approach that would avoid economic ruin and a step by step escalation towards war, would be to welcome the US departure and seek mutual security arrangements with Russia in a “common European home”, as Gorbachev put it. A localised version of that was, after all, what the Russians were asking for in the Winter of 2021, which NATO refused even to discuss.
The US uses NATO to maintain its own dominance over Europe – political, military, economic. Which is why Trump’s threats to reorder it, with the US pulling back its commitments to nuclear and air cover and the European powers expected to dramatically increase conventional forces on the ground could end up as an own goal.
A recent poll showed strong majorities in the UK in favour of both NATO and retaining the UK’s nuclear weapons. This is because these are framed as a way of keeping the population safe from overseas threats.
This begins to crack – and you get a mass anti war movement – when that mask slips. In 1980, the incoming Thatcher government, eager to turn the screw in the Cold War and gain compliance with stationing US medium range cruise missiles in the UK, scored a spectacular own goal by issuing a civil defence booklet to every household in the country called “Protect and Survive”, as a guide on how to survive a nuclear war (with no more equipment than you’d find in the average garden shed). After decades in which the “nuclear deterrent” had been motivated as a way to make nuclear war unthinkable, it suddenly became apparent to every household in the country that 1. the government was actively contemplating having one and 2 that the self protection measures outlined in the booklet – like making a do it yourself shelter (for one) by unscrewing your bathroom door and putting it over you as you took shelter in your bathtub – were absurd.
Millions of people realised that it was our government that was putting them at risk and the sense of vulnerability that had always generated a strong anti nuclear and anti war sentiment in Glasgow – as the nearest city to the Holy Loch base of Polaris, and then Trident, submarines – became more widespread – and linked up with the reaction against the monetarist crash that also came in with Thatcher. “A few more years of this government”, as one old campaigner in Bermondsey put it, “and we’ll all be living in tents surrounded by cruise missiles”.
Altered Images: People with sharp eyes will notice that there is a blur, like an inverted shadow, just under the front bumper of this car. This is where the number plate is in real life. Thinking it discourteous to the car’s owner to identify it that precisely, I found what I thought was a rubber/block out tool in the “edit” function to cover it up; which turned out to be an AI tool to erase parts of a photo you might not want and replace it with something that looks like the background. Images have always been fakeable, and to some extent the camera has always lied, as well as enhanced; but now anyone can do it. The saving grace of this is that it is so obvious, once you look. A bit like AI as such, close to reality, but a bit off. As Eric Morcombe might have said, “you can see the join”.
On the Reform principle that everything was better in the old days, this is an Austin Cambridge from the 1960s, but adorned with a St Georges flag badge that no one would have used back then. Perhaps its a bit unfair on the car, which is clearly loved, and has a sense of humour. A sticker in the back rear widnow reads “In rust, we trust!” Of course, Reform doesn’t much like the 60s, a decade forged in reaction to the loss of Empire. With the possible exception of 1966.
Romanians in the High Street in December, singing Christmas Carols. There is often music there now. A young woman this afternoon was singing Bowie’s Life on Mars from Hunky Dory, an album with a lot of songs I feel compelled to sing along to, regardless of who’s watching. Take a look at those
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh, man, look at those cavemen go
It’s the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh, man, wonder if he’ll ever know…
I tell her she has a voice and a half and make a small offering. There’s a slightly hollow feel to all this, as the quality of the music and the performances is much better than the audiences it gets, which is rather sad. Just a few rather alienated looking shoppers drifting slowly past and not paying a lot of attention.
A damp Tuesday morning and there’s a guy playing the guitar in a style that has the sort of echoey spciousness you get with Mark Knopfler or, on a good day, Hank Marvin. As I limp up from George Street, the tune seems familiar, but I don’t recognise it until he starts singing.
They wanted me to go to rehab…
But I said, No, No, No!
I don’t have the time…And my Daddy says I’m fine…
He finishes just as I draw level.
“The sad thing is, her dad was wrong, wasn’t he…”
A smile and a nod.
“Lovely version, by the way” and another small offering to add to the tiny number of coins in his guitar case.
Meanwhile, up at the big, all the things you ever might need at knock down prices store thats where Marks And Spencers used to be, and had a closing down sale for about six months…
Better able to plan ahead than the old one?
A magnificently retro poster in the local laundrette, that has probably been on the wall there since it opened in 1967. Built to last. Better than the Austin Cambridge anyway. The styling was quite old fashioned even then. The wasp waisted, stylish woman in high heels and tight knee length dress (because you always dress up to do your washing) has a feel of 1962 about her. The washing machine is clearly happily besotted with her.
In the exit corridor in the local Morrisons, between the toilets and the foodbank donation box, there’s a display for a firm that does patios and front garden paving. Blown up Before and After photos provide a visual focus. The before pictures show unkempt and bedraggled front lawns. Next to them are “neat and tidy” areas of paving.
I look at them a bit depressed, and the salesman takes this to be a sign of interest and asks if I want to find out about what they do, how they do it etc etc.
I point out, in a friendly sort of way, that what they do looks like a desert. Its lifeless.
He says that unfortunately that’s how they make a living.
I reply that there are a lot of people in that sort of situation, but what they are doing is helping create a problem with flash flooding, because there is no exposed ground to absorb any of the extra rain that we are now going to be getting every winter.
He points out the “soakaway” – a small drain in the middle of the paving (an absolute bottom line for this kind of total paving approach, which at least drains excess water run off into the soil below, without which the sort of storm we are now getting will just overwhelm the drainage system and add to flash flooding lower down as the water gushes back up through the drains) and says that there can be a lot of ground in back gardens.
My response is that thats fine as far as it goes, but removing all the greenery from the fronts of houses makes streets souless and sterile, citing the way that grass verges have been paved over and trees rooted up to make way for cars to park, and hedges have been replaced by fences or open paved areas making streets feel bare, mean, lacking in rest. Parting shot, with a smile, “we need more greenery”.
He shrugs and smiles back, and waits for the next prospective customer.
I think any trees strategy for Local Authorities should incorporate a hedges campaign, to offer whole streets financial aid to replace fences with hedges, opening up a small amount of extra ground, but also greening our streets, providing habitat for birds and insects to complement the bee corridors and wildflower sewing in the local parks and surviving grass verges.
On Air Force 1 overflying the “newly renamed Gulf of America” last week, Donald Trump boasted that his approval ratings were at 49% and “no one has ever seen numbers like this before”. Seemingly so. His numbers are worse than those of any other post war President, apart from himself last time.
The conclusions of the December 2024 research report into climate literacy among school leavers in England makes worrying reading. The survey conclusions are republished below.
Through asking a selected sample of Year 11 school leavers in England a broad range of questions, this survey presents a nuanced view of climate literacy amongst school leavers. While there is a general awareness of anthropogenic global warming as a cause of climate change and its global impacts, there are several knowledge gaps and misconceptions demonstrated by the responses collected.
Basic knowledge:
While most school leavers recall having been taught about climate change, only just over half remember having covered it in their last year at school.
There is a general understanding that the climate has warmed, but many overestimate the extent of warming since 1850. This specifically highlights a poor understanding of messaging related to limiting climate change to within 1.5°C/ 2°C, as many school leavers thought that the climate had already warmed more than this.
Most school leavers are ‘fairly concerned’ about climate change but, for those communicating on climate change, it is worth noting that more are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ concerned about climate change than are ‘very concerned’.
Unsurprisingly, there is a correlation between those school leavers who think that climate change will affect them directly and those who are concerned about climate change.
A substantial proportion do not appreciate that future global warming can still be limited or avoided.
Causes of climate change
Most school leavers can identify carbon dioxide and methane as greenhouse gases and recognise that greenhouse gases affect the temperature of the Earth, but there are misconceptions regarding their respective sources. Similarly, whilst understanding of fossil fuels as a source of carbon dioxide is generally good, in general, the impact of natural causes of changes in the Earth’s climate and, in particular, orbital changes, are overstated. There is a lack of awareness of the contribution of cement to greenhouse gas emissions and uncertainty around wider sustainability issues relating to the production and use of plastics.
As school leavers indicated a good awareness of which countries are currently emitting most greenhouse gas, but less awareness of per capita or historical emissions, this could be linked to a poor understanding of issues related to climate justice.
Evidence for and impacts of climate change:
Many school leavers are aware of some indicators of a warming climate such as melting glaciers and rising sea levels, as well as of the impact of climate change on extreme weather events. However, there is limited understanding of the geographical distribution of future temperature changes and their impacts.
Mitigation and Adaptation:
In general, the survey indicated low awareness of these two aspects of climate action, and in particular of climate mitigation strategies. Furthermore, there is a varied understanding between these two approaches, with school leavers often misinterpreting mitigation strategies as adaptation. The impacts of keeping pets and eating meat are generally underestimated whereas the impact of switching lights off
and recycling (from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions) is overestimated.
Concepts such as the 1.5°C and 2°C targets, and net zero, are very poorly understood. With ‘net zero’ in particular being a phrase which is in widespread use, from the Department for Education’s Climate Change and Sustainability Education Strategy to employers and the media, lack of understanding of it is both surprising and concerning.
If climate education is to raise awareness of green careers and, more generally, to increase hope in our ability to take collective climate action, increased awareness of mitigation and adaptation strategies is vitally important.
Climate Change in the UK:
In general, there is very poor awareness of the projected impacts of climate change in the UK, the need to adapt, mitigation strategies already in place and of the cost benefits of mitigation rather than adaptation.
This will be directly relevant to school leavers’ awareness of the green careers available to them. Whereas school leavers were aware of the contribution of melting ice to sea level rise in the UK, they were less
aware of the contribution of the expansion of sea water as it warms, which has made an approximately equal contribution historically. It could be argued that this reflects a need for science teachers to be able to demonstrate that learning in the sciences has applications and contexts relevant to climate change.
Communication:
There is a substantial knowledge gap regarding the level of scientific consensus on climate change, with most thinking agreement amongst scientists is notably lower than it is. This potentially relates to past and present education policy related to presenting a ‘balanced’ argument for global warming. Knowledge of international organisations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is also limited. Trust in climate information from science teachers and the BBC is high, but lower for politicians and tabloid newspapers.
A personal note
This image is a montage of times. The factory in the background is the Wouldham cement works in Thurrock in 1951.
The photo is on the wall in the Grays branch of Morrisons, which has a nice line in sepia industrial nostalgia. The Wouldham was already a ruin by the 1960s, but there were several other huge cement works along the side of the Thames up towards Purfleet.
Growing up back then on the wrong side of the prevailing winds is probably one reason I’m so prone to coughs. All these plants are now gone. Lakeside has taken their place. The carbon, and pollution, footprint of retail is a lot less than that of cement, which has been outsourced to other countries, which suffer the pollution and have to carry the can for the carbon footprint, even when some of the products are exported back here.
The Wouldham is significant for me in another respect. My great grandfather, John Henry Ellis, worked there and was killed in an industrial accident – falling into one of the storage tanks he worked in in 1931.
My speech at the “Trump Climate Disaster” Rally outside the US Embassy (11/1/25).
The new US Ambassador that Trump is installing in that Vice Regal fortress behind us – and, I’ve got to say that that’s a very wide moat they’d got there, which makes you wonder what they are anticipating – is a guy called Warren Stephens.
Stephens is an investment banker from Arkansas, whose company holds huge oil concessions in the Gulf of Mexico (which Trump wants to rename the Gulf of America). He is also a climate smartarse – someone who likes to use pseudo scientific one liners to deflect from the seriousness of climate change, which are only convincing for those determined to be convinced and unwilling to ask any questions to puncture their own delusions.
He will have two jobs above all.
One will be to push the UK government off its agenda for green transition.
Trump wants “no windmills” in the USA and “no windmills” in the North Sea.
If renewables are abandoned, the limited reserves in the North Sea means that, even if they were maxed out, they would be unable to fill the gap in energy needs; which would have to be made up by very expensive imports of US Liquifid Natural Gas, which we now know has a carbon footprint 33% worse than that of coal.
If the government succumbs to that pressure -which is being pushed “patriotically” by the Conservativbes and Reform now as Trump’s Fifth Column, with the media in a screaming descant in support – it would be a spectacular act of self harm that will impoverish people on a grand scale and make climate damage a lot worse.
His other main priority will be to push the US militarisation drive.
Trump wants NATO allies spending 5% of their GDP on their militaries. Thats more than double the current average.
Neil Kinnock seems to think that 4% is “reasonable”.
This is NOT because they are under any threat militarily. Direct US allies account for 2/3 to 3/4 of global military spending already (depending on what estimates you use).
This collosal concentration of coercive power polices the transfer of $10 Trillion from the Global South to the Global North every year.
This is why countries want to join NATO. It makes them part of the imperial core. As Anthony Blinken put it, “if you are not at the table with us, you’re on the menu”. The problem now though is that being at the table with the US is a bit like having dinner with “the late, great Hannibal Lecter”, as Trump might put it. You can never be sure when the host is going to trun round and take a bite out of you. But you can be sure that he will do so at some point.
Doubling that level of expenditure cannot be seen as a defensive measure. It only makes sense if they are planning wars of aggression.
That is explicitly proclaimed by the UK Defence Review, which talks of being in a “pre war situation”, and there is overt talk of the British Army having to be ready to fight a major land war in Europe within the next ten years. This is completely mad and suicidal.
The impulse for this is partly that the US is losing ground to China very fast economically, but also because, in the context of the climate crisis, US society as it currently stands – and the wealth of the feral billionaires who are running its government – can only be sustained if they can put the Global South in general, and China in particular, back in its box.
They are fully aware that the climate crisis is real. All the denialist stuff is just prolefeed. An example of this is the US Army Report from 2019 that argued that,
This would be extreme cognitive dissonance if they did not have a perspective where they could maintain a per capita carbon footprint the size of a Diplodocus, so long as most of the world barely has one at all.
So, the United States can no longer pretend to be anyone’s elses future, not even its own.
The problem they will have with this is that the costs of carrying through this massive shift of resources into militarisation will lead to massive economic and political crises.
To be specific. For the UK to spend 5% of its GDP on its military would cost an additional £60 -70 billion a year. Mark Rutte of NATO has very kindly suggested that this could come from Health and Pensions. Nice. We can be absolutely clear that it would also have to come from green infrastructure investment.
Flood defences? Why would we need those when we can trust to luck?
Ditto investing in fire prevention, because there’s no problem with wild fires is there?
Insulating homes? That would have to go. People can stay patriotically cold.
Electrified railways and affordable public transport? Who needs that when there’s weapons to buy?
So, if the government capitulates to this pressure we will face
All to defend a “rules based international order” in which – as we’ve seen this week with the US sanctions on the International Criminal Court as punishment for the Gaza indictments – the US makes the rules, and the rest of us are expected to follow the orders. The US is not interested in global leadership, it is interested in global domination.
You can’t build a wall to keep this out.
Millions across the world will resist this – including in Europe and the US itself. Trump’s polices are likely to blow up in his face. His tariffs, if imposed, will be ruinous.
People do not want to be poor. They do not want to be killed in a war. They want more action to keep us safe from climate breakdown. Let’s mobilise that majority, with the trade union year of action from this September as a lever.
I’ll end with an advert. Just down the road from here, on Clapham Manor Street, is the only trade union owned pub in the World, called, perhaps inevitably, Bread and Roses. On 23 January at 7pm it is hosting a showing of the latest Reel News film about the inspirational GKN Firenze factory occupation, and another supporting Vauxhall workers resisting Stellantis closing their plant.
Everyone is welcome.
The current TV advert for the Citroen e-C3 – which looks as though it was directed by the same team as set up the synchronised singing decapitated Marie Antoinette heads at the Olympic opening ceremony this summer- is a funny, elegant French finger gesture to Tesla and Elon Musk.
With David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” pounding in the background, a pair of “artisan” looking young men drive a column of four e-C3s (in a possibly conscious genuflection to the Italian Job) over and through a banquet being held in a chateau by caricatured ancien regime types – all giant bouffant wigs, beauty spots, silk frock coats and enormous dresses – disrupting it and causing operatic shock horror to the assembled aristos. Big, blunt letters announce THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN…ELECTRIC IS NO LONGER FOR THE ELITE before the two drivers go racing away looking perplexed at each other as one of the aristo women appears in the back seat, while other artisan styled “revolutionaries” run aongside with a red flares, red flags and – just to be politically broad church and incorporate that little bit of French bourgeois revolutionary tradition -a tricolour.
This is one in the eye not only for Tesla’s model of high cost, high end, high profit EVs that can only be afforded by the wealthy – which explains why Elon Musk can be so comfortable with Donald Trump, as EVs for him are not for everyone, the poor can be left to drive old bangers, so the Chinese are guilty of “overcapacity” in wanting electric people’s cars – but also neatly skewers his political posture of being the richest man in the world and also “anti elite”.
The e -C3 is one of several cheaper EVs put on the market this year by European car manufacturers, in an attempt not to be overwhelmed by the competition from China. It is notable that the EUs negotiating position on tariffs against potential Chinese imports demands technology transfer as part of the price not to impose them. This concedes that the Chinese companies have more advanced technology and the Europeans are playing catch up. Whether this succeeds in rescuing these companies in the short term, which it may not because it is still a struggle for them to produce EVs profitably, this is projected to reverse the downward tick in EV purchases peculiar to Europe last year, which in turn will have a knock on effect on oil demand in the way that the EV boom in China already has.
Donald Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte want NATO members military expenditure increased to “Cold War levels” and for member countries to adopt a “wartime mindset” in order to prepare for a perceived threat from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Neil Kinnock has just stated that 3-4% would be a “realistic” level to reach.
Part of this mindset is a preparedness to sacrfice health, welfare and pensions to fuel the military machine required to fight a war with Russia in Europe that would be suicidal for all involved if it actually broke out.
The UK’s “Defence Review” is framed in a similar “pre war framework”, posing Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as “the deadly quartet”; a good name for a jazz band, but geopolitically infantile.
The threat is posed most sharply in relation to Russia, largely because NATO is now evidently losing its proxy war in Ukraine. This impending defeat is being posed as a lever to militarise European society on the presumption that a Russian win there means that they will then threaten to invade the rest of Europe.
This is simply insane.
If you look at the balance of military expenditure between NATO and Russia, even after a sharp increase in Russian spending forced by the war to 7-8% of GDP, the imbalance in NATOs favour is overwhelming, because the combined GDPs of the NATO countries are almost incomparably bigger than Russia’s (which is smaller not only than the USA among NATO countries, but also Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada and barely larger than Australia).
If the argument from all quarters on high in this country is that “the world is becoming a more dangerous place”, its quite clear from this which countries are making it so in Europe. If the Russian level of expenditure shown in the yellow column is posed as a terrible threat by NATO, how much more threatening is NATOs current expenditure for the Russians?
To underline this with stark figures, with overall NATO spending in 2024 at $1185 billion and Russia’s at $109 billion,
So, the question posed by this is already, who exactly is under threat from whom?
Trump and Rutte, and now Kinnock, propose to raise NATO military spending to “Cold War levels”. That was around 5% of GDP between 1970 and 1987. That would double the imbalance above and set NATO up for an offensive war with a collosal military advantage of 14 to one, even if the US kept out of it, and 22 to 1 if they were involved.
This reality is revealed by the decision of the EU to break its own fiscal rules and raid its levelling up funds to finance war preparations which, among other things, involves strengthening bridges so that “tanks may pass safely”. Were they concerned that columns of Russian tanks would be steamrollering West they would be weakening bridges so they couldn’t pass at all.
This is leaving aside the political feasibility of a Russian offensive, even if it were militarily feasible – which it obviously isn’t.
It beggars belief that a war of this sort is being envisaged with a nuclear power. The same people who argue that the UK’s nuclear weapons “keep us safe” and shouted at Jeremy Corbyn “would you press that red button, Mr Corbyn?” seem to think that a land war in Europe which, given the balance of forces, would be aimed at regime change and the balkanisation of the Russian Federation and have nothing to do with “defence” would not lead to the trip wires for use of these weapons being crossed.
It is a suicidal course.
It would also impoverish us in the meantime.
Every item cut instead would improve people’s lives. The best that can be hoped for increased military spending is that it doesn’t give our lords and masters the tools to end them.
All this flows from the strategic self subordination of Europe to the United States. As this recent article argues, the new situation for Europe is that the US is leading them into war with the continent’s strongest military power, Russia, at the same time as it deliberately undermining European rivals’ economies. It amounts to a US policy of subordinating Europe through a combination of military and economic warfare.
This is a lethal combination for Europe, the most serious threat to the entire continent since at least the end of the Cold War and in a broader sense since the end of the Second World War.
So, the fight against war, and the fight against austerity, to defend our conditions of life will have to go hand in hand.
Urban ramblings 