Tag: Sunak

1,000 eyes for an eye?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“Also, I guess its permissible for a gentleman to kill children and women, as long as they are peasants”. Jason Lee Burke. Flags on the Bayou.

When Rishi Sunak says “There are not two sides to these events. There is no question of balance. I stand with Israel” he is stating his position in reverse order.

He stands with Israel, therefore there is no question of balance, and therefore there can be no acknowledgement that other side to the conflict can have anything legitimate to say.

Nor can he acknowledge that the ultimate cause of that conflict is the racially oppressive nature of the Israeli state; nor that the balance of power and therefore the balance of death and damage is overwhelmingly in Israel’s favour; with five Palestinians killed for every Israeli.

This year alone 49 Palestinian children have been killed by the IDF and settlers; something that stokes no moral outrage in our media, from our Prime Minister or leader of the opposition, let alone the despatch of two aircraft carrier task forces to the Eastern Med by the United States.

Because Palestinian children being killed is normal, expected, nothing to remark on. The natural order of things. Just as the inexorable dispossession of Palestinians from their land and the entrenchment of racist laws (over 50 of them) in Israel carries on with barely a comment, as though it were a force of nature.

Nothing anyone can do about it. Its just where the power lies.

And so it does. The “West” supports Israel because Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians is like that of the West to the rest of the world in microcosm, and the fault line between the Global North and the Global South runs through the territory controlled by Israel. Israel itself is generally seen as being part of the Global North. The Palestinian territories are definitely not.

Rishi Sunak stands with Israel because it is defending Western wealth and power, and capacity to discriminate and deny wealth and power to others, with force in the same way that the UK and USA do. They are doing it within territory they control, rather than in a series of expeditionary forces far from home, but its the same relation of power that is being “defended”, or enforced, depending on what side of the process you are on.

Power, wealth, dominance. Being seen as human comes from having it. Those who do not have it, the dispossessed, are not, and cannot be, counted as fully human. “Human animals” as the Israeli defence Minister put it. Who deserve their punishment. Kay Burley might not say that “Gaza has it coming” but its the unspoken presumption behind every broadcast and the framing of every report.

Because Apartheid was, and is, not an aberration. It is the normative racial expression of colonial power. And that is shown most starkly in whose lives matter, and whose don’t.

That’s why its possible for Sir Keir Starmer to say that it is legitimate for Israel to “defend itself” by cutting off food, water, power and medicine to all of the two and half million people who are trying to survive in the Gaza strip.

Just think about that for a moment. Imagine it the other way around. Would it be legitimate for the Palestinians to cut Israel off from food, water, medicines and power, if they could, as an act of self defence from the regular bombing and shelling it gets from the IDF? Or is it only acceptable for those that have the power to do so. The strong have the right to defend themselves against the weak, because they can? Might makes right?

This is also normative. It is how the “West”, that embodiment of enlightenment values, “defends” itself against any regime, of whatever sort, that challenges it, from the half million children starved to death in Iraq in the 1990s through sanctions to the 40,000 who died in Venezuela in the last decade.

The humanity of those who die cannot be allowed to come into it. Some lives matter more than others and therefore the deaths of those that do can be pressed into service to create a great tsunami of moral outrage that can justify horror on a far grander scale to restore the natural order of things. The most lurid stories about this – widespread rapes, the beheading of 40 babies on a Kibbutz – are now being quietly withdrawn for lack of evidence. But they have served their purpose on the front pages and social media feeds to prepare the ground for the retaliation; which will be on a terrible scale.

All the more terrible because Israel has suffered the humiliation of having one of its army bases overrun. “Facts on the ground” will have to be reasserted so they can carry on trying to keep themselves safe, not by seeking peace and equal rights for everyone in the territory they control, but by doubling down on the exclusion and repression that has generated this reaction in the first place. The human losses in the immediate term will be appalling. In the longer term, a state that will have to become ever more violent and repressive, simply postpones the point at which this breaks and makes the eventual reckoning apocalyptic.

This is the pattern as we saw with 9/11. Three thousand five hundred people died on that day in 2001. Their stories were told, their loved ones interviewed, their last messages played back, the rubble was sifted through for traces of DNA that could be buried. There was no doubt that these people’s lives mattered. The “war on terror” that the USA unleashed in response killed four and a half million people. Their lives did not matter. The ratio of deaths is over 1,000 to one.

And that is the scale of the barbarism of the “enlightened West”. They kill on such a large scale, with such sophisticated weaponry, in so many places, so often, even at home sometimes against the “lesser breeds without the law” that live among them, partly because they are terrified of the consequences of what they know they have done.

The atavistic fear of the slave rebellion subconsciously acknowledges the terrible injustices done to the enslaved, in terror at their vengeful uprising; and tries to assuage itself by redoubling the injustice, building walls and bombing harder. Impossible to live with that unless you deny the humanity of the people you are doing it to.

And so it is with flags. Showing a Palestinian flag in the UK can now be a matter for the police -as it can be seen as a form of threatening behaviour. Flying the Israeli flag on public buildings at a time they are bombing Gaza more intensely than at any point in the last 16 years, smashing six neighbourhoods, hitting 18 health facilities, killing 1,200 people so far, is considered a fine gesture of solidarity.

In the second wave of the wars for the New American Century, dissent will increasingly be defined as treason, extending humanity to the oppressed considered inhumane.

On one level, its possible simply to turn questions like that of Richard Littlejohn on the front page of the Daily Mail on Tuesday on its head. “How can the British Left make excuses for a terrorist group that murders women and children?” And that would be valid as far as it goes. “How can the British Right make excuses for a terrorist state that murders women and children?” But the deeper question is what the answer is and where the solution lies.

For the Right the conflict in Israel-Palestine is posed as between two ethnic groups. Power relations are ignored, or taken as the natural order of things. So, the motivation for resistance becomes a flaw in character. Evil terrorism from people who can’t accept their place. “The Palestinians have to accept that they are a defeated people” as US neocon Daniel Pipes put it. There is therefore no solution but endless repression to keep those who currently have the upper hand, one of “our allies” and therefore the good guys, in power forever. And, if that looks like a boot stamping on a child’s face over and over again until the end of time, so be it. Not “our” children after all. “Little snakes” according to former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked.

For the Left, the conflict is about power and equal rights and the solution is everyone having them. The slogan “No justice, no peace” is not a threat, it is a description.

“Capitalism won’t solve the energy transition fast enough”

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

These are the notes for a recent speech at my local Constituency Labour Party. The title and the quote at the beginning is from Jason Hickel, who is the Energy editor at the Financial Times; so has something of a horses mouth quality to it.

“There’s too much to do and, given the urgency and the need to get the solutions right, this isn’t a task for your favourite ESG focussed portfolio manager, or the tech bros. The sheer scale of the physical infrastructure that must be revamped, demolished or replaced is almost beyond comprehension. Governments, not Blackrock, will have to lead this new Marshall Plan. And keep doing it. The Western nations that did so much of the damage will have to finance the transition in the developing world – it is astonishing that this is still debated. Massive deficit funding will be necessary.(my emphasis)

For all the clean tech advances and renewable deployment in recent decades, fossil fuels share of global energy use was 86% in 2000, and 82% last year.”

The scale of the challenge

According to Adam Tooze we need to be investing $4 Trillion per year in energy transition. 

Others have argued as much as $6.5 Trillion per year

As the world economy is roughly $100 Trillion a year, between 4 and 6% of it needs to be invested in the transition.

A large sum, but to put it in context, last year (2022) subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to $7 Trillion and Fossil fuel profits were $4Trillion.

This is an opportunity – because there’s your magic money tree…but also a problem, because fossil fuels are so entrenched in everyday life and political power.

Fossil fuel companies have known about the effect of greenhouse gases for 60 years, and have reacted in the same way as the tobacco and asbestos companies did over the links between their products and cancer.

Even now, Shell is arguing that – to be compatible with their interests – Net Zero will only be achievable some time in the 22nd century (so between 50 and 100 years too late).

This entrenchment in political power is seen in Sunak’s latest announcements and more structurally in the high level of climate denial in the US Congress – where Senators and Congresspeople are bought up by FF companies. Showing once again that the USA is the best democracy money can buy.

This leads to a mind boggling level of cognitive dissonance. In 2019 the US military produced a report which stated that the impact of climate breakdown would lead not only to states collapsing around the world, but also that extreme weather events in the US itself would lead to infrastructure and civil society collapsing to a degree that they would expect to be called in to fulfil para state roles, before collapsing themselves from the overstretch that would impose. At the same time, they projected a need to be ready to intervene as the Arctic ice melts, to make sure that the US gets its customary lion’s share of the fossil fuel resources revealed under the ice; thereby helping fuel the collapse that they predict.

Which brings us to a related problem. The ratio of military to green transition spending. In the US, for every $1 allocated to green transition via the Inflation Reduction Act, they are currently spending $18 on their military. And this will get worse as the US and its allies, already responsible for two thirds of global military spending, are sharply increasing it.

The figures on this for China might surprise you. For every $1 they spend on their military, they spend $2 on green transition.

This means two things

  1. A shift from military to green transition spending is an urgent task for the climate and labour movement globally – and therefore the Atlanticist foreign policy framework of the current Labour leadership is as wrong as it can be – and will be thrown into complete crisis should Donald Trump be re-elected next year (which is highly possible).
  2. Countries that see themselves as Socialist are more part of the solution than they are given credit for. The one relatively developed country that the UN considers operates on sustainable lines is… Cuba.

Going back to Tooze to underline this point.

$4Trillion per year needed for energy transition.

Last year, $1.7 Trillion invested in renewable energy, but $1 Trillion was invested in fossil fuels. So, the net gain of 700 billion amounts to about 20% of what we need to be doing. Another way of looking at this is that we need to be doing five times as much as we are at the moment.

According to Tooze, China is the only country investing at anything like the scale and pace we need.

This is underlined by the International Energy Agency that reports that last year China invested 70% more in the transition than the USA and EU put together. And next year the projections are that their investment will be double that of the US and EU combined.

Specifically, in 2024, China is projected to account for 

50% of global solar installations

60% of new onshore wind

70% of new offshore wind.

Labour’s projected £28 billion a year would get us up to US or EU levels; so about half of where we need to be.

This week the IEA put out an updated road map to Net Zero and keeping under a 1.%C increase.

Their essential point is that this is still possible, but only if advance (rich) countries in particular up their targets and ambitions – the opposite of what Sunak has done this week – with an enhanced target of 2045 for Net Zero. No new oil and gas is a bottom line.

To have any chance of getting to that £28 billion, what we need is Just transition bodies with union and community involvement at every level in every sector – so plans for investment – and community mobilisation around them – can be made. This transition can’t happen as a “trickle down” process. It has to be forced up, and the unions in particular will need to take the lead on this, not react defensively.

Writing to the Blacktops

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Writing about the Greenpeace activists who scaled Rishi Sunak’s mansion in North Yorkshire to drape it with black cloth, the Daily Mail headline was:

HOW ON EARTH COULD THIS BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN?

‘As eco protestors scale the roof of the Prime Minister’s family home, which is a humiliating symbol of our supine tolerance of a tiny self obsessed bunch of zealots who disrupt everyday life with impunity.’

So I wrote them the following:

With fires, floods and famines already devastating our planet, the real “tiny, self obsessed bunch of zealots” who will make “everyday life” not just disrupted but unsustainable within the lifetimes of children currently in our schools, are the owners of fossil fuel companies; and the think tanks, politicians and newspapers that they buy to defend their profits. People who went on holiday to Rhodes this year will have had their “everyday life” disrupted violently by the impact of climate breakdown. Its time to end the impunity of the tiny minority who are causing it.

And the Daily Express, with characteristic understatement, HEADS MUST ROLL! JUST HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

So I wrote them this.

Given the increasingly frenzied tone of your articles and headlines on anything related to climate breakdown, and people trying to alert us to the severity of it, I must confess to wondering if your “Heads must roll!” headline was intended to be solely metaphoric.

May I suggest that a suitable set of people who’s head should roll is anyone in government, business or media who downplays the seriousness of the crisis – just ask anyone who went on holiday to Rhodes this year – or slows down the pace of the measures needed to tackle it, putting our children’s futures at risk for short term financial or political gain?

The Express article went on to quote an unnamed Tory MP as saying “I’d say shoot them!” which indicates a state of mind that is a long way from sweet reason.

Why it will be Truss

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The Conservative Party is full of racists and Rishi Sunak is not white.

Watching the Sky hustings yesterday, Sunak came across as much cleverer than Truss. Very quick on his feet. Slightly puppyish public schoolboy enthusiasm. Close your eyes and, y’know, it could be Tony Blair. Look at him and he even has some of Blair’s mannerisms – the parallel chopping hands, the way of remembering the names of questioners in the audience to engage “personally” with them, the fake self deprecation. But being clever could be a problem. “Too clever by half” to lead a Party full of people “tired of experts”. The Conservative Party is full of people who employ people like Sunak to do their accounts. They don’t want to be bossed by smartarse backroom nerds, however slick.

More substantially, “its the economy stupid”.

Truss, 2D cardboard figure though she is, rapidly reduced to speaking clock responses when caught out, represents a continuity of the “triumph of the will” style delusions that fuelled Brexit.

The sense that she is both a Margaret Thatcher tribute act and “continuity Boris” – having been loyal to the shameless charlatan ’til the end – nevertheless indicates that a cosplay version of the real thing is the best they can do now. Thatcher was PM at a time before the reunification of Germany, when the UK cut a more powerful global figure than it can possibly do now. Johnson could genuinely embody “cakeism” because of who he is – Eton, Oxford, Bullingdon, the Spectator. That shameless sense of entitlement that he could always eat his cake because someone else would keep supplying him with more – and his projection that the country could reassert its imperial habits of doing the same – were quite genuine in his case. Bone of his bone. Blood of his blood. For Truss, middle class girl from Leeds, taught, like all of us are in the state education system that the way to get on is to impress others, can’t convince in the same way. At Eton, they are taught that, whatever their limitations, they are the people that others have to impress. Truss can, at the most, impersonate that. And she tries very hard. And it shows.

Nevertheless, on the economics, she is trying to make out that the only reason we are heading for a recession is because people are saying we are (“talking us into a recession”)- thereby neatly inverting reality. Her formula for the immediate crisis is to

  • hold down wages and “stop unions holding working people to ransom”,
  • a Kamikazi Brexit, slashing and burning all residual EU regulations on labour and environment standards within 18 months and possible trade war with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol,
  • trying to keep the economy from tanking with immediate tax cuts, which by and large benefit those who are least badly hit.

This may be based on a calculation that whatever they do, they are likely to lose the next election, so they might as well try to “move fast and smash things”, as they say in management, safe in the knowledge that an incoming Labour led government under Starmer would be too wed to ruling class interests to overturn very much of it.

Her rapidly withdrawn proposal to cut public sector pay to match local cost of living figures – claiming that it was “misunderstood” because it was understood only too clearly that, if you put out a press release claiming “savings” of £8.8 billion based on figures calculated on “savings” from the salaries of nurses, teachers, and police officers, it is not a “misunderstanding” to conclude that it is precisely those people whose wages would be cut – indicates how badly thought out so much of this is.

The fundamental flaw in her idea is that seeking to boom an economy by boosting consumption without investment was exactly what started the global inflationary surge when Joe Biden did exactly that with his stimulus package last year. Underlying all this is the low level of private sector investment, which none of Truss’s programme will boost. Inflation will bite hard into living standards.

Sunak, by contrast, is a “sound money” man. He seems to think it doesn’t matter if human civilisation perishes in rising floods and fires, so long as the books are balanced when it does. The Governor of the Bank of England thinks likewise, hence the rise in interest rates this week. This signals an impending series of clashes between Downing and Threadneedle Streets as the crisis intensifies.

This goes to the heart of the Conservative conflict and the impossible dilemma they face; given that they exist to politically block any solution that might actually work, if that was based on state investment or greater equality. Raise interest rates, keep money tight, and zombie companies, those that are only able to keep ticking over if the interest rates on their debt stays near to zero, go bust. Everyone employed by them loses their jobs, and have to claim benefits. Everyone with a mortgage gets squeezed and cuts back (and landlords with mortgages put rents up). Measures taken to curb inflation leads to recession. Measures taken to avoid recession fuels inflation. Snookered.

On other matters, they are agreed.

Both see the solution to the inflationary spike in gas prices fueled by the Ukraine war – which hits the UK very hard because we have such a high dependence on gas for cooking and home heating in the draughtiest houses in Europe – as a Ukrainian victory. Its increasingly evident that this is a fantasy. The options are a negotiated compromise peace; or a long term frozen conflict (which NATO will go for so as not to lose face). The only way to get an immediate cut in gas, and therefore energy prices, is to push for peace, not keep fuelling the war. Jeremy Corbyn was right to call for the UK to stop supplying arms this week.

Both see the solution to the increased costs of energy from fossil fuels is to double down on fossil fuels. Sunak’s responses to “Net Zero Questions”

New coal mines? “Yes” to avoid coal imports, even though he knows that the projected coal mine in Cumbria would export 80% of its production.

Fracking? “Yes” – where locally supported.

Onshore wind? “No”. Not caveats about local support. In the immortal words of Hermione Granger. “What. An. Idiot”.

And Truss wants to cut the “green levies” on energy bills, even though this is marginal and their effect over the years, in paying for what little insulation has been done, is to reduce bills. She has also made noises about letting the 2050 Net Zero target slip; thinking, like Johnson, that we can get away with a “Climate Pass”. As if the laws of physics will bend because she wants them to.

Both are fully paid up Cold War Warriors against China and both will ramp up military spending, not noticing that Nancy Pelosi’s brinkmanship this week was not at all popular in Taiwan; where, by and large, people are quite content to fudge along with the current ambiguity in relation to the People’s Republic rather than be used as a causus belli by the US (which is a long way away from where the fighting would take place – as it is from Ukraine).

Both favour using racism – deportations to Rwanda just a start, a new definition of Refugee based on the Australian model that dumps desperate people on far off Pacific Island camps, imprisoning and criminalising people for being desperate (and actually wanting to come here and make a contribution) restricting of access to “legal routes” that don’t actually exist. None of these restrictions apply to people who can buy their way in of course.

Truss adds a petty twist all of her own that goes down really well with her audience, in seeking to keep the UK together by goading Scots nationalists. This goes down a ton at 19th holes in Hampshire. Not so much in Glasgow.

With 16 million people already cutting back on food and essentials, even before energy bills go through the roof in October just as the weather gets colder, with the war in Ukraine increasingly going badly for NATO and voices for peace getting louder, with unions taking up the fight to defend their members and even non union workers in places like the Amazon warehouse in Tilbury expressing collective self respect by holding a sit in against wage cuts, with arguments now being heard that we need to redistribute wealth away from profits back to the people whose work made those profits, and the likelihood that our next Prime Minister will be someone who wants to go for confrontational broke on all fronts; we are in for a Winter in which there will be desperate struggles and serious political shifts.

Facing the realities of climate breakdown, the slippage of US global hegemony (with everything that flows from that), the global economic impasse of neo-liberalism – given a local twist of Brexit deepening the stagnation and slow disintegration of the UK, there is almost an imperative for the Conservatives to double down. As the old gods fail, the true believers worship all the harder and the old songs take on a willed manic quality that will be increasingly shrill. We will get political leaders to match. Far from looking after the apple stall, they will kick it over to see which way the apples roll. “Steady as she goes” does not fit times in which time is not on their side.

That’s why it will be Truss.