Category Archives: Articles

#JezWeCan : A Personal Account of the Death & Potential Resurrection of the Labour Party

Posted on by
Reply

“I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

When I was five years old I watched my grandmother, with narrow eyes and a heavy sigh, tear Labour’s 1995 manifesto into pieces. She left them on the kitchen table and went straight to call head office and cancel her party membership, breaking generations of family tradition. At the venerable age of five all I knew about politics was that we had two choices – Labour and Tory – and Labour were ‘the good guys.’ So I asked her why she’d left.

She told me that Tony Blair had scrapped something called Clause 4: a promise to put the public in charge of the services they needed and the places where they worked. “It’s about the right of ordinary people to control their own destinies,” she explained. It was a bit poetic, perhaps an echo from a more optimistic generation, but she was absolutely right. That’s what it’s always been about and precisely what’s at stake now.

15383196425_954591f9ea_o

I didn’t think much about Clause 4 growing up. But I did think a lot about was the war in Iraq. I was 12 when it started. We watched the historic anti-war march in London – the biggest march in British history – and then watched the government go to war regardless. That was when I learned that democracy in Britain was not working the way it was supposed to. It was our first truly televised war, and I was transfixed by the coverage: dispassionate reporters parroting official sources while women wept over their kids in ruined buildings, endless parades of tanks, Iraqis fighting and dying in the streets while our artillery boomed like the voice of an angry god. I watched as the party that said it couldn’t afford to educate me managed to finance all those long years of occupation, during which time the truth about the WMDs, the civilian casualties, the military incompetence, the oil interests all spilled out into the light of day.

In their desperation for an ‘electable’ leader too many have been willing to sweep these crimes, which once horrified and enraged us, under the carpet. Some are even tapping an argument or two from the man himself, whose considered position is “even if you hate me don’t vote for Jeremy Corbyn.” I put it to anyone willing to swallow that line that they have forgotten the fundamentals of what the Labour Party is for and how it became a political force to begin with.

labourThe People’s Party? 

Things had been going wrong for a while by the time Blair came into power, of course. In 1976 the flows and fluctuations of our free market system cast Britain adrift in an economic crisis and forced Wilson’s Labour government into a £4 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Of course there’s no such thing as a free lunch with the IMF – in exchange they forced Labour into deep spending cuts and wage controls. By 1979 the unions were going on strike just to be heard by their own party. Conceding to the IMF’s terms had put Labour on the opposite side of the fight from its core supporters.

That dividing line has been in place ever since. Opposition to the Conservatives through the Thatcher years was a unifying force, but the 1990s dawned on a new era of personalistic, poll-based electioneering. To maintain profits in the post-war economy, corporate interests had painstakingly cultivated a new culture of individualism. Brands developed personalities and so did their products. Buying those shoes or that car became an expression of who we were, or aspired to be. You no longer had to be American to buy into the American Dream.

Psychoanalysts and focus groups were becoming an intrinsic part of doing business, and the rise of Thatcherism brought this ethos into the political establishment as well. Inspired by Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign strategy, which was guided by focus groups of swing voters, the Blairites wanted to ‘modernise’ the Labour Party. Their argument wasn’t about policy or even politics. It was a marketing strategy. After eighteen years of Tory rule they were determined to win power. It was no good banging on about exploitation, social justice and the working class, they insisted. No one was listening anymore. No one wanted to self-identify as working class, since the rise of cultural consumerism and political individualism made it a source not only of struggle, but of shame. We could all be aspirational consumers now – and if you weren’t one, you had only yourself to blame. No one could sell a socialist manifesto in a climate like that.

Of course, politicians aren’t supposed to work like that. They’re not car salesmen. They’re supposed to have real values and convictions; to put the public interest first; to respect us enough to win votes through actual debate, votes that are supposed to be more than a commodity you bid for; they represent a mandate of trust from the people. But New Labour had just won a leadership election, led by a bright eyed young Blair promising to bring down taxes, benefit scroungers and young offenders. It was a manifesto pulled straight from the focus groups of suburban swing voters. Clause 4 didn’t stand a chance.

Diagnosis of a Dying Party

Over the past twenty years we’ve seen where this ‘New Way’ leads. Today the party’s active base is a fraction of its former self, its relationship with the unions in tatters and its relationship with my generation non-existent. There is no question about it. Whatever was achieved by his government can never mitigate the damage done to our public services, not to mention to our international standing after an illegal invasion that destabilised the Middle East and a fifteen-year long War on Terror that has divided our communities and eroded our civil rights. Under Blair, the Labour Party lost its vision: the vision that gave us the post-war welfare state and gave the party its sense of self.

Nothing showed this up so well as the general election. Miliband, most agree, was a thoroughly uninspiring leader and he ran on a thoroughly uninspiring platform of ‘austerity-lite’. The right is quick to claim it was the ‘lite’ and not the austerity part that cost him victory. But as has been repeatedly pointed out and ignored, his tokenistic leans to the left, like trading the bedroom tax for a mansion tax and freezing energy prices, were usually the only thing boosting popularity at all. Labour used to win elections on slogans like this: ‘The rich man’s power is in his purse, the poor man’s power is in his politics. Don’t surrender your power to the rich man, he already has too much. Vote Labour.’ But as others have argued, by adopting the Conservative line on austerity (‘cupboard is bare, credit card maxed out, fiscal responsibility for the poor’,) Labour was just kicking the ball towards its own goal.

15383153675_d51dc2fbec_oThe Labour Party has been chasing power by any means necessary. It was the wrong choice in 1994, and it’s the wrong choice now. As a strategy it reflects an existential crisis for a party whose leaders have forgotten it wasn’t built to seek power for its own sake; that being in government was only as good as it empowered them to empower labour (that’s us – the public.) So we lost faith. Call it social democracy, loony leftism, call it a cat with a hat on, it’s about social justice. We’re about social justice. And when it became clear that the Labour Party was no longer fit for that purpose, we left.

Lifelong advocates like my grandmother left. People like me never joined. Ken Loach helped set up Left Unity. Mark Steel spent his time with the People’s Assembly, since it was representing labour values better than the party. (Both of them have been banned from voting in the leadership election.) The whole of Scotland broke a century of tradition and jumped ship to the Scottish National Party. We flooded into the Green Party, into new radical organisations and humanitarian NGOs, founding and joining whatever might help fill the hole left by the quiet moral death of the party. Disenfranchised and disillusioned, many just stopped doing anything at all, and in a self-fulfilling prophecy became what the Blairites always wanted: 15286607298_4a9b8c9d6a_opassive consumers.

What all of us (particularly Labour’s leadership candidates) need to understand is this: even if you want to, you can’t realise labour values with nothing more than passive consumer votes and a Labour Government in Power. Why? Because a Labour Government actually acting on Labour Values will necessarily go head to head with powerful vested interests: the energy companies, the landlords, the corporate media, the banks. And to stand up and win that government needs more than passive consumers at its back. It needs a politically engaged, self-educated and empowered electorate; strong trade unions and a mass movement ready not just to go out and vote, but to organise, demonstrate, even strike for our rights. It needs the things Corbyn’s been building outside Westminster all this time; that only he has the credibility to bring back to the party.

Open the Flood Gates

Blair’s way was never going to win us a better world. Today it can’t even win a general election. In 2015 Labour tried to play Blair’s game again but this time they lost, because Britain is not the same country it was twenty years ago. Twenty years ago the middle class was learning to aspire, wrapping itself in the mythology of the Self Made Man and preparing finally to put its eternal faith in the free market system. Today we are living in the smoking wreckage of that system. We had to bail out the bankers who lied for profit, and got paid our money by MPs who lied about their expenses. We’re drowning in debt and lining up at food banks. We’ve seen the BBC harbour paedophiles and the police harass black kids in our cities. Things are so bad, the top half of the country wants to leave. This does not inspire confidence. Public trust in these key institutions has never been so low, and with our faith so clearly misplaced we are becoming interested, again, in what my grandmother said *it* was all about: people controlling our own destinies.

The labour movement built the Labour Party to make that possible for everyone at a time it was the privilege of wealthy white man. My whole life I was convinced that the best of the Labour Party was confined to history books and sepia photographs. But last week I joined over 100,000 others and signed up as a supporter. This huge influx has the party leadership quaking in their suits. The Blairite group Progress, described by one of its own members as “an unaccountable faction dominated by a secretive billionaire” which has in turn dominated the party for years, now stands in the shadow of a tsunami. From this vantage point it’s clear that the leadership race is about much more than the next leader. Clearly they will stop at nothing to wreck the vote. One thing Yvette Cooper has right: it’s a battle for the soul of the Labour Party. And it’s a chance for us to correct that historic mistake I witnessed at my grandma’s kitchen table, when the party chose power over principle.

That makes him our best defence against the rise of the already bloated far-right, because he represents a break with the establishment driven by politics of hope, not hate. His straight talking sincerity, sorely lacking elsewhere, is raising the confidence of a betrayed nation. Despite his staunch anti-racism it’s even proving as popular with UKIP voters as with the Left. It would be a mistake to underestimate the array of forces he could unite behind him.

Whatever their differences, a vote for anyone else is a vote for austerity. The anti-austerity Syriza party in Greece and the SNP in Scotland swept the board because they promised real change; the same reason there’s a black man in the White House. The right said it would never happen. His supporters said ‘yes, we can,’ and they did. And if Labour could find the courage to be what it once was – anti-war, anti-austerity mass party – it could take the country by storm.

They said Syriza and the SNP weren’t credible. They said a black man in the White House wasn’t credible. But people can overcome a lot when they believe real change is imminent. If Labour could find the courage to be what it once was – anti-war, anti-austerity mass party – it could take the country by storm.

2015-08-26 15.58.23But here’s the point: even if he lost, at least we’d have the chance to build something we believed in again. So if you’re lucky enough to have a vote – and if the party let you cast it – ignore Tony Blair and vote Corbyn for all the reasons he says you shouldn’t. Do that, and rather than accepting it, we could fight back against whatever’s gone so wrong in our country, that one of Parliament’s only consistent voices for peace, democracy and social justice gets less of a hearing than the one former leader who should definitely be in prison. That’s the fight that really matters. There Is An Alternative. All this vote determines is whether the British Labour Party can be part of it again.

Originally published by The Critique

Democracy, Equality, and Survival: A Call to Action on March 28

Posted on by
Reply

fb cover (1)

Reading This Changes Everything, I started asking a lot of new questions. A number of us in the British student movement campaigning against war and austerity were increasingly perturbed by the lack of concern about climate change among some of our peers, even though we knew that extreme weather is displacing more people than war now, and that the destruction of the planet’s life-support systems would make it impossible for progressive politics to fulfill its promises. I was frustrated when activists cautioned: “The welfare of pandas and ice caps is a middle class concern. You just can’t mobilize around it.” Particularly maddening was a rather bleak sense that they had a point.

tce coverWhile the British Left may have been on the back foot since Thatcher, things had reached new lows for us twenty-somethings; we’d grown up with the relentless, televised War on Terror, and a Great Recession that should have discredited free-market fundamentalism but instead was being used as a battering ram to destroy what was left of the British welfare state. We had been reduced to defending the last of the gains made by our grandparents, things once taken for granted: universal rights “from the cradle to the grave.” Climate change seemed like one too many fronts to be fighting on.

My friend Francesca Martinez, the comedian and campaigner, often complained about this attitude: that there wasn’t any room in the Left’s agenda and anyway, climate change was too depressing and distant. For her, the problem was the lack of positive vision in a movement defined by what it opposed; speaking across the country, she encountered an appetite for an inspiring, justice-based alternative. And when a friend of mine (now my partner) showed me Naomi’s 2013 speech at the founding convention of the Canadian union UNIFOR, on why organized labor should join the climate fight, the implications of her message finally sank in: that this crisis was a historic opportunity, a planetary demand for system change.

Around the same time, some friends and I were launching a new project called Brick Lane Debates, to experiment with new ways to get people engaged with politics. Frustrated with both the passive lectures of the “Old Left” and horizontal forums too tied down in procedure to get much done, we wanted to synthesize good organization with meaningful participation. And we didn’t just want debate, we wanted music, comedy, culture; to build a vibrant, inclusive community animated by the ideas we thought could change the world.

Our first Brick Lane Debate was about climate change, and brought together a new constellation of campaigners with a growing group compelled to action by Naomi’s analysis. We had all joined the People’s Climate March, which provided beautiful, bold confirmation that you can mobilise around the climate. We were particularly inspired by the leading role played by organized labour in New York—but with honourable exceptions, it was largely absent in London. Unless we could join the dots between war, austerity, and climate catastrophe and quit leaving the environment to the environmentalists, we concluded, we would be giving up the single most powerful case for democratic system change we will ever see.

That’s the message that is striking a chord with growing numbers of young people. And that’s how This Changes Everything UK was born. March 28th will bring hundreds of people together with leading campaigners and climate scientists for a participatory gathering. At workshops taking inspiration from the Brick Lane Debates model, we’ll talk about the connections between the climate and economic crises, share visions for an alternative future, and discuss how to grow the social movements we need to get us there. From anti-poverty and environmental organizations like War on Want, Friends of the Earth, and the Young Greens, to radical campaigns like Fuel Poverty Action network, Occupy, and the newly launched Join The Dots, people are ready to stand up for all these ideas, together.

And the time is right, it seems to us, for such a symphony of radical voices to be heard. In the UK, the historic scale of the People’s Climate March was just the beginning. Vigorous grassroots campaigns against fracking have been erupting in sleepy rural communities. And the recent surge in Green Party membership here reflects not only concern for the climate, but also deep disillusionment with the narratives being regurgitated by our political establishment and their megaphones in the mainstream media. Public trust in government, the press, and the police has never been lower, while participation in political protest is at an all-time high. Meanwhile, we see progressive coalitions transforming the political landscape in Greece and Spain.

Old assumptions about what is impossible or inevitable, or what people have the capacity to care about, have no place in the new movements that are emerging. If there was ever a moment to change everything, it’s now.

tcepanaorama

***

Like us on Facebook and follow @TCEuk on Twitter. We’re still organizing the format and structure of the March 28th gathering, so if you’d like to get involved or think your organization could help lead one of our workshops, drop us an email at thischangeseverything2015@gmail.com.

Originally posted by thischangeseverything.org on 24th Febuary 2015fb cover (1)

Facing Up to the Climate Crisis Part II: The Great Green Wash

Posted on by
Reply

Nature may ‘not discriminate’, but capitalism does. It will be the social classes – and countries – with the least responsibility for climate change will be hit first, and hardest. In 2004 the British government’s Office of Science and Technology produced its report, Future Flooding, which predicted up to 3.6 million Britons at risk of severe flooding by 2080 thanks to rising sea levels and rainfall. ‘Socially disadvantaged people will be most adversely affected’ it admits, because ‘the poor are less able to take out insurance against floods or to pay for the damage.’

15292219060_7bee7bec9a_kThis logic applies far more drastically to the global South. Even a 2°C rise in temperatures will create a global refugee crisis and hit agriculture internationally – a food system centralised, standardised and rendered utterly inadequate by the profit motive. Our capacity to adapt is reduced every day the free market has the run of food production. This has already undermined biodiversity to the point where three quarters of all cultivated plants are now extinct and their inferior, genetically modified substitutes are locked up in highly profitable intellectual property rights and free trade deals. Food prices will skyrocket and people will starve.

There has been a tendency in this debate to lay climate change at the feet of humanity as a whole and ‘progress’ as a concept. ‘Anthropological climate change’, they call it. But most of human history has been shaped by a world of scarcity, not the hyper-consumerism and over-production that we see around us in rich industrial nations. And let’s not forget, for 3 billion people on this planet, scarcity and deprivation still define the world. The climate change narrative of the global North is not the only story; the under-development of the South and exploitation of the poor in every country are as much a part of the system as wasteful consumerism.

Capitalism is different from what came before. No previous society has accumulated and concentrated wealth on a comparable scale. The ecological crisis is a symptom, the most deadly symptom, of a social crisis in human beings’ relationship to our environment. It makes more sense to talk of capitalist, rather than anthropogenic climate change.

In contrast, the culture of general responsibility that’s been cultivated by environmentalists like Hans Jonas has undermined the green movement in some very significant ways. In zeroing in on ‘consumer culture’ it fails to strike a chord with many. Millions of us living in this wealthy, competitive, consumerist society are working hard and still have to choose between eating and heating our homes. In that context, ‘consume less!’ is not a rousing carrion call. Particularly not when the carnival of consumption at the top of society has just rolled right over its own global financial crisis and wastes resources at an industrial rate. It is an argument utterly insensitive to the realities of working class life. At its worst, it scapegoats the poor while protecting the sensibilities of wealthy benefactors like Coca-Cola and Unilever.

Whenever it is articulated as a matter of personal moderation or asceticism, the campaign against climate change draws a curtain over the very worst of the capitalist system. It obscures the starring role corruption, inequality and exploitation. It creates confusion, helplessness and guilt. The political culture of neoliberalism has a gift for that. You can see it in the shame people are made to feel when driven to food bank in their thousands, in a rich free market where anyone can succeed if they deserve to. The neoliberal art is the individualisation of social problems. And well it might be, because it has to answer for an 80% increase in global emissions since 1970.

This is not about whether small actions by individuals – recycling the rubbish, cycling to work – have value, they do. But the value is symbolic. In an act like that we can advocate transition, but we can’t achieve it. The systemic wastage of our entire economic system, from production and construction to energy and consumption, play the overwhelming and decisive role in destroying the planet. To be clear: system change will require everyone to accommodate changes in the way we live, travel and consume. But it’s not an annual Ryanair flight to Costa Rica that’s blowing holes in the ozone layer. The really inconvenient truth is that individual acts count for nothing unless the system changes too. And pretending otherwise has crippled the campaign to stop climate change.

As Howard Zinn said, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” No matter how small you make your carbon footprint, this train is still speeding over a cliff. We have to start talking about the system, or there is no hope for change. Already what use was ever made of renewable energy has been almost eradicated by standardising production for bigger profits. Yet that exact capacity of human beings to make conscious changes to the way we reproduce our existence is what makes change possible.

15292246928_3e532a1429_kOn the other hand, obfuscating the power of wealth and class not only divides the movement, it naturalises climate change. It is not natural law that productivity or population growth threatens the environment. Natural fertilisers that make farm land more productive without damaging the ecosystem were a historic discovery of the 15th century. Whether every ounce of profit is squeezed out of an innovation or it’s used to more efficiently meet the real needs of the population and minimise deforestation – that’s a choice we make collectively, as a society. The insanity lies in thinking that activity which harms our environment or our species can be classified as ‘growth’ of any kind.

Reactionary arguments from the likes of Jeffrey Sachs about population exceeding the ‘carrying capacity’ of the earth are a direct result of this refusal to look capitalism in the eye. Non-coercive population reduction strategies such as improving women’s living standards, education and access to contraception have proved successful and should be valued on many counts. But demographic change is slow, and the need to curb our carbon emissions is immediate.

Given that context, challenging the right to life for millions should not come before challenging capitalism. This is the tone of discussion in Washington memos that describe the US as a ‘fortress’ amongst the anarchy of a world consumed by flood, fire and war that re-balances the earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ through mass-extinction. Yes we live on a finite planet and no, it can’t support an infinite amount of life. But that capacity is determined first now by how many life, but how we live. At present we live in a society that produces far more than we need it to and still manages to deprive most of us of the basics.

‘Productivism’ – production for its own sake, for profit – prevails in this world because capitalism is a system based on accumulation. In such a system, innovation in productivity will only ever mean more production, market expansion and the manufacture of consumer demand to meet it. This is an inevitable consequence of the private ownership of the means of production. As the renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter observed: “A stationary capitalism is a contradiction in terms.” We cannot obtain meaningful environmental regulation within capitalism for the same reason we can’t achieve meaningful financial regulation. As Marx wrote in his Critique of Political Economy, “capital cannot abide a limit.” It will always seek to circumvent or transcend it in pursuit of greater profits.

Steady state theorists who argue for an end to population and economic growth, have been miles ahead of the Left in identifying the immediate significance of the planet’s natural limits. But the tradition has a frightening right-wing current. It has done since it began with Thomas Malthus in the 1700s. Thanks to this political lineage, too often those who focus on population and consumption ignore poverty and the ‘consumerist’ struggles for better pay and conditions that it breeds. There are honourable exceptions, like George Monbiot, Peter Victor and Caroline Lucas, who incorporate a respect for ecological limits within a relevant political perspective and broader concern with social justice. Still, not only would any movement that relied on the panacea of no-growth have little relevance for the global South, which demands its right to development; it excludes millions in the North blighted by poverty, unemployment and exclusion. We could build a growth-less system with a static population, at peace with the earth but characterised by all the inequality and oppression of today; but that’s not sufficient to inspire the mass-participation required to get us there.

At the end of the day the steady state is not a complete social project, or even a campaign – just a (vital and urgent) quantitative constraint. Capping growth is not enough; we need all sections of society drawn into a complete, collective re-definition of what we mean by ‘economic progress’. That means extending a critique of capitalism to its very heart: its law of value which makes money the aim and the measure of all life on earth.

I would put the case, as Naomi Klein, Daniel Tanuro and others have done, that climate change is the best illustration of where the capitalist system is heading and the most powerful case against it. Any kind of reconciliation with the climate would require the abandonment of $20 trillion existing fossil fuel infrastructure and 80% known fossil fuel reserves (all owned by corporations), de-centralisation, reduced production and working hours and a massive equalisation of wealth – all entAllirely opposed to the interests of the capitalist system. Only a society which puts the economy under democratic control and recognises equality as a pre-condition for such democracy, can move beyond the paradigm of commodity production and even identify – let alone protect – that which is priceless.

15478513492_6d2ac99a4f_kYou can read Part I here

Originally published by the Huffington Post

All photography my own

Facing Up to the Climate Crisis Part I: Capitalism vs. the World

Posted on by
Reply

The impossible is happening. The People’s Climate March was a global day of action of historic proportions. Over 30,000 people took to the streets in London. New York City hosted the biggest march climate march ever, with religious and labour leaders coming together with scientists, environmentalists and 400,000 Americans. People protested in 166 countries demanding system change. Even the Rockerfellers are divesting (sort of). In Paris just over a year from now, the UN will be holding its Climate Change Conference, widely considered by experts to be our last chance to reach a radical and binding agreement on carbon emissions before planetary catastrophe becomes unavoidable. So if there was ever a movement who’s moment had come, it’s this one and it’s now.

PCM 1

Yet much like the system it challenges, this is a movement filled with contradictions. Is it a movement against capitalism, or a movement within it? We live in a world where Coca-cola, a corporation which hires thugs to murder trade unionists in Latin America and systematically steals drinking water from India’s poor, can be considered a legitimate partner to ‘save the polar bears’ by WWF; where Unilever, one of the world’s most powerful corporations and leading food monopoly with an atrocious labour and environmental record, ends up sponsoring the People’s Climate March. Much depends on where we draw our lines.

The American Dream of pointless over-production, which offers thirty kinds of smartphone all designed to break down but can’t allocate the resources to keep our local libraries and hospitals open – that dream has been globalised, and they call it ‘economic growth’. Co2 emissions, driven by deforestation (at a rate of around 36 football fields per minute) and the burning of fossil fuels, have reached historic and deadly levels. By even the conservative estimates of the IPCC, this will flood major cities, destroy whole societies, create a global refugee and food production crisis – it will change the world forever, unless we start reducing emissions within the next year and leave 80% of known (and owned) fossil fuel reserves in the ground. But despite all the campaigns and the summits, to recover from the financial crash within the confines of capitalism, global emissions were allowed to shoot up in 2010 at a faster rate than at any time since the Industrial Revolution.

All solutions are viewed through the lens of, and ul15478612912_fb82c841d5_ktimately nullified by, the demands of commercial viability. We see this battle between cost efficiency and actual efficiency being played everywhere in the market’s warped attempts to tackle global warming by promoting the worst and most inadequate alternatives – from ecologically destructive, inefficient and expensive biofuels undermining food security in the South, to the dangers of nuclear power in a highly militarised capitalism which cuts corners whenever it can afford to. The result, to quote Ban Ki-Moon who seems to grasp the consequence if not the cause, is that “we have our feet glued to the accelerator and are hurtling towards the abyss.”

It’s been the same with carbon trading, a climate-saving measure reduced to a money-making slot machine. Total emissions keep rising while hospitals and universities are obliged to buy extra credit, big business is making money trading and gambling on the carbon market while energy companies pass the costs onto consumers. The price on emissions, by IPCC estimates, is five times too small to discourage the Big Polluters. But perhaps worst of all, current rates are big enough to create an apparent conflict of interest between the climate and the majority of working people who struggle to pay their energy bills.

PCM 3

The danger is real, immanent and almost too big to comprehend. For twenty years, the science has been ignored while campaigners work to wrestle concessions from a political system held hostage by big business – and with an annual profit of at least €1,325 billion per year (equivalent to the GDP of France), there’s no business bigger than the hydrocarbon business. Corporations have bought off scientists, journalists and politicians left right and centre. As leading climate scientist James Hansen put it to the US congress, “CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing… [they] should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

But whether it is more ‘pragmatic’ to tackle capitalism explicitly or to ignore it, is a question of whether it’s possible for climate constraints to be respected following strategies determined by commercial potential. The answer, in short, is a resounding ‘no’. That is simply not possible in an economy dominated by corporate interests whose nature is to exploit catastrophe rather than prevent it. The UNDP estimates that genuinely ecological economic development of the South would require an $86 billion per year wealth transfer from North bypass reliance on fossil fuels – and capital flows are still moving in the opposite direction. That corporate monopolies of intellectual property rights have been allowed to obstruct this transition and save millions of lives is a supreme indictment of the free-market system. The Big Six agribusiness multinationals are already patenting ‘climate change crops’ at a rate of knots.

We saw when the poor were left to fend for themselves during Hurricane Katrina, how ill-equipped the market system is to protect even ‘the Western poor’. In fact New Orleans’ budget for sea wall maintenance was cut from 2003 to finance the War on Terror, during which they were receiving a sixth of the funds they requested. Separating the hurricane from its political context is impossible, and there is a lesson in that.

The 2009 Copenhagen Summit was a final straw for many. The world watched as the emphasis slid from stopping global warming to funding ‘adaptation’ – grants and loans extended mostly by the countries responsible for past and present global warming, to those most endangered by it. Funding is determined not by need, of course, but by their openness to ‘clean’ investments from Northern multinationals. Even though world’s oldest industrial powers are overwhelmingly responsible for historical and current climate change, Western leaders have the gall to offer IMF loans parcelled in exploitative conditionality agreements to help poorer countries pursue ‘sustainable development’. The delegate from Tuvalu famously equated the funds with Judas’ thirty pieces of silver. More than that, it’s the mass crime against humanity that will define our times and it will cost millions of lives. It’s time to make a change.

15291995739_5d2b65981b_kClick here to read Part II

Thanks go to the following authors, who’ve done excellent work on this subject on which this series of articles draws heavily: Naomi Klein, Daniel Tanuro, George Monbiot, Vandana Shiva & John Bellamy-Foster.

Originally published by the Huffington Post

All photography my own

Ten Reasons to Get Active & Stop TTIP

Posted on by
Reply

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will be the biggest international ‘free-trade deal’ in history. It will standardise EU regulations with their almost non-existent US counterparts. Negotiations are secret and over 90 per cent consultants are corporate lobbyists, which is more than a little suspicious.

After decades of deregulation, this time the corporations are launching a direct assault on the very principles of environmental regulation, public services, labour rights, civil liberties, environmental and banking regulation (of course), and even basic safety standards for the food we eat. As if that’s not enough, it will also give multinational corporations the power to sue democratically elected governments for implementing any policy that threatens their profit margins – even if those are the polices we voted for. It’s no exaggeration to say that almost every legislative victory won by progressive forces since the Second World War has cause for concern over TTIP.

ttip

Today a national day of action called by No to TTIP brought about 700 protesters to the Business Innovation and Skills Centre in central London to protest as local actions were held across the country. The London contingent marched to Smith Square and hosted its own football match (corporates vs. greens) with a carnival atmosphere cultivated by circus acts and face painting.

The demonstrators heard from comedian Mark Thomas, the writer David Graeber, and Green MEP Jean Lambert, plus speakers from Friends of the Earth, the World Development Movement and War on Want. The day followed a successful national tour of public events, but the campaign is only just beginning, so show your support and get involved…

Top 10 reasons to get active and stop TTIP…

1. Banking deregulation – and the further reduction of capital controls and undermining of what little regulation has been introduced since the financial crisis, has of course been aggressively driven by the British government on behalf of its financial sector allies. Back in 1999, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act didn’t get much press – it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. It had been in place since 1932, meant to prevent a repeat of the Great Depression by separating the carnival of casino investment from our high-street banks. Eight years later, the global economy was trashed again by the same financial sector interests that broke it in 1929. There’s a moral to the story which applies to TTIP: if it sounds more technical than political and international finance is pushing for it, it’s a threat. We learned that lesson in 2007-8…

2. A threat to jobs & labour rights – while Cameron promises TTIP will create jobs, its Western equivalent, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico contributed to rising poverty and unemployment across the board, costing an estimated 1 million American jobs. The European Commission itself admits TTIP will encourage corporations to go to the US and wherever labour is cheapest and unions weakest, galvanising a global race to the bottom, pushing wages down even further and causing ‘prolonged and substantial’ dislocation for European workers.

3. The end of public services – worsening the threat of poverty and unemployment is the destruction of social safety nets, as the red carpet is rolled out for US companies to bid for healthcare contracts threatening to ‘destroy the NHS’ according to some MPs. Leaked documents have exposed the lack of any safeguards to defend such basic services. TTIP threatens to stand the whole anti-cuts movement on quicksand, pitting the movement to reverse privatisation against international law itself. The corporate onslaught against Slovakia‘s relatively leftist government since 2006 foreshadow what’s to come – already one foreign private healthcare company has seized €29.5 million in public assets for their attempt to limit private profiteering in healthcare, and another is trying to block the Slovak government from providing universal healthcare cover.

4. Civil liberties – remember the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, rejected by the European Parliament following massive public opposition? Thanks to Wikileaks, we know that TTIP threatens to slip in key elements of it under the table, undermining data privacy laws and forcing internet service providers to monitor copyright infringement and threatening exemptions for schools, libraries and the disabled. More draconian restrictions on intellectual property can restrict access to essential goods, from food crops to medicines, for millions around the world.

5. Destroying the planet – threatens environmental regulations of all kinds, and is expected to add an extra 11 million metric tons of CO2 emissions, undermining the incremental steps the EU took under the Kyoto Protocol. Leaks have also revealed TTIP also opens the flood gates for mass exportation of oil from the Canadian tar sads, as well as shale gas from fracking in the USA, effectively putting a ball and chain on environmental and community campaigns in both countries while normalising these damaging and dangerous practices here in the UK. Of course the government is quick to point out that the degradation of our ecosystem and basic conditions for life on this planet is acceptable because we’ll end up with lower gas prices – assuming energy companies pass their savings onto consumers (which they don’t tend to do). Sure, maybe some of us can shop around – but as Jeremy Hardy says, it ends up like match.com: you evaluate an endless stream of pretty unappealing options until you get so tired you end up getting screwed by one of them.

6. Poisoning your food – TTIP will also set us on the road to American supermarket isles, where genetically modified foods and meat treated with hormones and growth promoters will not only be on the shelf, but might not even be labelled as such. Environmental impacts and animal welfare will also likely slide off the bottom of the agenda. Research has shown these products can pose grave threats to human health, animal welfare and the natural environment. Public opposition and safety concerns were at the heart of making them illegal under EU law.

7. Stealing from the South – if it passes, the introduction of TTIP will re-double pressure on developing countries to adopt the same (lack of) standards and really put the ‘shock’ back in the shock doctrine. It will marginalise developing economies like India, China and Brazil while robbing poor countries of what little sovereignty they have left over their economies. For much of the global population it will lead to worsening poverty, dispossession and instability.

8. Destroying our democracy – TTIP will legalise ‘investor-state disputes‘ allowing companies to sue governments at taxpayers’ expense in corporate courts whenever their policies undermine corporate profits – anything from re-nationalising key industries and public services (like the NHS) to preserving existing regulations on wages, corporation tax and environmental protection. Trying to articulate alternatives in the face of a suffocating political consensus on cuts and neoliberalism is hard enough, without it being enshrined in international law. Thanks to NAFTA, Canada has been sued $250 million by a US energy company for respecting Quebec’s referendum against fracking.

9. America – you have to hand it to the USA: it’s a brave new world over there. Despite being the world’s richest economy and strongest superpower, it’s the most unequal country in the developed world. TTIP is about letting the corporations that profit from that mess run rampant throughout the world, and dragging our regulatory standards down to their level. It leads the West in levels of incarceration, mental health problems and violent crime. It’s also managed to maintain some of the poorest health standards in the developed world alongside the most expensive and least effective healthcare system. As any progressive American can tell you – we don’t want to go there. But that’s where we’re headed.

10. The race is on – TTIP was not supposed to enter the public domain, but documents have been leaked by Green MEPs, Wikileaks and others. Now it’s been exposed, people across the world are taking action. One of the downsides of trade deal that will impact so many different sections of society for so many different reasons is that it creates a lot of common ground for progressive campaigns. As a threat to social justice, civil liberties and the environment, TTIP should be seen as a natural unifier, as illustrated by the broad range of organisations pledging support – from the People’s Assembly and War on Want to STOPAIDS and the Jubilee Debt Campaign. It comes at a time when building broad-based opposition to the neoliberal agenda has never been more urgent. If TTIP passes, it will strike at the heart of everything the left is fighting for. A trans-Atlantic threat calls for trans-Atlantic resistance, as it looks increasingly like all these campaigns will be won, or lost, together.

Published by the Huffington Post 12/07/2014

Lessons from the Snowden Leaks

Posted on by
Reply

The surveillance programmes exposed by Edward Snowden reinvented the term ‘Orwellian’. Yet while in the USA thousands marched in solidarity with Snowden and against what he exposed; congressmen demanded resignations from their spy chiefs; and authoritative institutions ruled bulk data collection illegal – in London, with honourable exception, all I hear is crickets; and the sound of Britain sliding to 33rd place in the Press Freedom Index. That silence is as much a threat to civil liberties as the surveillance itself. 

snowdenpic38 Degrees’ petition demanding a public inquiry into the Tempora surveillance programme is stalling before 5,000 signatures despite the fact leading intellectuals, journalists, political leaders and human rights groups have vigorously condemned it. Leaks proved it was kept secret precisely because Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) anticipated a strong legal challenge against this gross violation of civil rights. But instead they’re getting away with it, and journalists are the ones taking the heat.

The US may be engaged in a witch hunt but Snowden still enjoys a higher approval rating at home than either Obama or Congress, while in the UK, less than 20 per cent of people consider the surveillance state too intrusive and most disapproved of the leaks. Unlike Washington, Berlin, Paris, even Jakarta – we’ve had no mass protests either. This is partly a problem of coverage – while scandal after scandal has blazed across the front pages of all Europe and rocked administrations from Berlin to Jakarta, they are being systematically ignored by the bulk of the British media. But there is more to it than that.

Not six weeks into my first job and I was on the phone to GCHQ, the most guarded faction of the British secret service. I was requesting an interview for my film Watching the Watchers, assuming, correctly, that if they said no to Glen Greenwald, they’d say no to me – but it was worth a shot. The Guardian was more helpful. I paid a visit to their London offices for my first interview, with their resident expert and former security editor, Richard Norton-Taylor. He reeled off an impressive list of case studies: torture, extraordinary rendition and war crimes; arms deals with foreign dictators; spying on peaceful campaigners and blackmailing journalists into betraying their sources. But what really hit home for me astute observation that governments, when they need to conceal embarrassing or illegal activity, will always ‘fly the flag of national security’ because it invokes deference.

This has been a strong historical tendency in British political culture. Britain has more CCTV cameras per inhabitant than any other country in the world and, as one Spiegel journalist wrote, many Brits see GCHQ as the: “amiable gentlemen in shabby tweed jackets who cracked the Nazis’ Enigma coding machine in World War II” – even if they have launched the most ambitious programme of global surveillance in history.

When the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, was being grilled over the leaks by a home affairs select committee, he was interrupted mid-sentence by the voice of Jo McCarthy, who had apparently possessed the body of Labour’s Keith Vaz. “Do you love this country?” it demanded. If we had a constitution that enshrined our civil right to privacy (or a Human Rights Act our prime minister wasn’t trying to wriggle out of,) things might get muddy here. But for men like that, Project Tempora is just an expedient line of defence in an endless and borderless war on terror. And if that terrifies you, or you simply maintain that the public has the right to what Snowden gave us – the chance to decide – well, that’s just unpatriotic. Rusbridger’s response was artful. We are patriots, he affirmed, and one of the things we are most patriotic about is our tradition of respect for democracy and press freedom.

David Cameron claims the Guardian’s coverage of the NSA leaks shows no sense of ‘social responsibility’. In fact, it has proven the Guardian to be one of the few mainstream media outlets left in this country with any semblance of social responsibility left. Increasingly news is seen as a product and citizens as consumers instead of participants in a dialogue that should be directing our elected representatives. No wonder then, that three quarters of people in Britain think the mainstream media ‘sometimes or frequently lies’ to their audience.

This question of defining the media’s responsibility is also the missing link in the debates around press reform. Bending the rules for stories that might sell papers but serves no real purpose – like the phone-hacking of Milly Dowler – is indefensible. But if the Watergate Scandal had been broken by a phone hack, would the ends not justify the means? If blowing the whistle was what it took to expose illegal MP expense claims (which it was) or secret US bombings designed to perpetuate the Vietnam War (which it was) then they are best considered acts of courage. And if similar tactics had been able to prevent the Iraq War by exposing the truth about weapons of mass destruction, that would be grounds for a Nobel Peace Prize.

In time it will become clear that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Edward Snowden, who has done us an immeasurable service and demonstrated that, even working at the heart of the secret state, people are not machines. However powerful the pressure to conform, to take the cheque and keep quiet, there will always be those who, moved by injustice, will speak out. But it counts for little, unless we all speak out together.

orwellquote

Originally published by the Huffington Post 10/04/2014

Stop the Student Sell Off

Posted on by
Reply

After four years as a SOAS student, I’m about to graduate with a considerable amount of debt, albeit not compared to those now paying historic £9000 tuition fees. If you borrowed money from the government between 1998 and 2012 to pay for your education, George Osborne has, or intends to sell your debt on to banks and private companies. The government has already sold off all pre-1998 loans – worth around £900million – at a massive loss to the public purse. The rest of us will make them around £40billion.

The sell-off will transfer millions from public education into the pockets of private companies. With most students already graduating with over £50,000 student debt thanks to fees, cost of living and youth unemployment rising about as fast as the value of a university education is falling. That is money they said they needed for schools and universities. But this move embodies the complete disdain this government has for the very principle of universal, public education. They fear it because, to quote Nelson Mandela, “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

They think they have a mandate to do what they like with education now now. Ever since the carnival of fraud, greed and negligence that is free-market finance sent the global economy into cardiac arrest (again) and was bailed out to the tune of £130billion the establishment has been calling it ‘national debt’, a ‘structural deficit’, an ‘imbalance on *our* credit card’ – whatever the line is that best offers an excuse to sell the public services won by people in Britain after World War II. Which they really rather want to do.IMG_8215

#StopTheSellOff

It took a Freedom of Information request to get any documentation on the student loan sell-off in front of the public, and even then 90% was redacted. The government has made its promises about leaving interest rates alone (while reserving the right not to), but we know what their promises are worth – students have not forgotten Nick Clegg’s historic betrayal over fees, and Cameron’s abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance.

Though billed as a money-saving measure, the sell-off is no such thing. The Higher Education Policy Institute has concluded in its report that the policy is based on ‘highly uncertain and optimistic assumptions’ and underestimates the cost to the public because it fails to account for the fact that once in private hands, the government makes nothing on interest repayments. Like rising fees, privatisation costs far more in the long run than it saves in the short – never mind the social cost.

The British education system has always been one of the most stratified in the world. But the neoliberal restructuring now underway throughout education, disempowering students & staff while opening up universities to private investment (and all the strings that come with it) threatens to shift university forever out of the realm of right and into that of privilege.

This restructuring, combined with savage and politically motivated cuts to public funding impoverishing all but the most ‘fiscally viable’ departments, all falls within the broader context of the Tories’ calls for Permanent Austerity – not to pay back the deficit, but to normalise for the next generation a system in which fundamental rights, to education, healthcare and security, are reserved for those who can afford it. This is not just about what kind of education we want, but what kind of society we want for those that come after us.

When they said Cut Back – we said Fight Back

Losing the tuition fee vote in parliament on ‘Day X’ in 2010 – the climax of the student revolt – was my induction into student politics (not the most inspiring moment to show up). But in the years that followed I probably spent a greater proportion of my time on political activity than actual studying.

I was always pestered by the thought of my little cousins back home, too intimidated by the growing financial barriers to risk of ‘investing’ in their education; or as graduates sunk beneath toxic debt-burden that threatened their homes, their families; robbed them of their independence and forced them by the necessity of survival to accept the materialistic, careerist values of the Neoliberal Age rather than follow their passion, as I had. My grandmother had always impressed upon me the importance of education as the key to freedom, especially for girls. She had wanted to study astrophysics but her working class Mancunian background put it far beyond her reach (not that women were allowed to study physics back then anyway).

My sense of that history, and fears for the future, made a powerful motivator that I feel as keenly now as when I started. The students are the lucky ones, I reasoned, and that gave us an obligation to fight for what our grandparents fought for after the war, and is now being stolen from us. The myth of dignity and security “from cradle to grave” is dead – what we are witnessing in Britain today is the worst decline in living standards since the 19th century. Child poverty is at its highest now since the war. Not since Queen Victoria has inequality in this country been so vast. The government’s austerity policy amounts to a systematic and spectacular theft by 1 per cent; but it is generating resistance.

99% of us Are In It Together

The Student Assembly Against Austerity, now backed by the National Union of Students, has been building a campaign of resistance to the sell-off on campuses up and down the country. We successfully petitioned 75 MPs to sign an early day motion against the sell off and coordinated a national week of action in February, with students taking action in over 50 universities, going into occupation at Exeter University and holding a protest and ‘debt-in’ in central London.

Student protests against privatisation and the real decline in staff wages have prompted an escalation of the campaign by management and police to criminalise it, which climaxed with mass arrests of students in central London last December. Ultimately, the students’ success will depend on our reaching beyond campus and taking a leading role in the broader resistance to austerity, which in so many other ways is exploiting the 99% to pay for a crisis created by the 1%.

The People’s Assembly Against Austerity is now the largest anti-cuts coalition in the country uniting social justice campaigns, trade unions and community groups in opposition to cuts across the board. That the Metropolitan Police is now deploying water cannon on the streets of London for the first time explicitly to ‘control protest against on-going and potential future austerity measures’ shows that they know what we know: that the potential is there for a mass movement of people in this country who will not stand for the trashing of public education any more than the dismantling of the NHS, the emergency services, the libraries and public spaces, the abolition of the welfare state or the rise of right-wing racism that follows. The Student Assembly will be playing a central role in these campaigns moving forward while we continue to fight the student loan sell off.

The students were alone in 2010. We were the first to come out on the streets. But now there is a movement of resistance building real national force and giving us the collective potential to take on the government – and win. So whether it’s on your campus or in your local community – get involved, and march with us on 21st June from the BBC that has too long ignored us, to a festival of resistance outside the parliament that is counting on us giving up and going home. They shouldn’t hold their breath.

IMG_8311

Originally published by the Huffington Post 12/06/2014

All photography my own

UPDATE: the privatisation of the student loan book was subsequently dropped