Tag: climate-change

Forest Loss is a Disaster for Humanity

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.11.25), continuing a series on climate issues and priorities. Faith in the UN Climate Conference COP30 is at a realistic and informed all-time low, not least that government pledges of funding to the Global South have been proved as empty promises over the past ten years. But for Starmer to withdraw from the smallest of pledges after the Tory Johnson being an initiator … of protecting rain forests, ffs … is of such political symbolism as to not go unnoticed or without comment. A government totally in hock to big agrobusiness including the Palm Oil lobby. What a wretched idiocy this entire Labour government truly is.
As for the Herald’s chosen headline, blimey mate, deliver me unto obscurity.
My preference would be:

Forest Loss is a Disaster for Humanity

Unexpurgated below:

A central feature of the Capitalist mindset is to view everything and everybody as a potential commodity with a monetary value. Possession confirms the ownership not only of the “thing” but its potential value. This can be applied to people in the capitalist market place – we are products and commodities, our labour-value and our CV’s to be bought and sold.
But not everything can have a price. Some things are priceless. Like forests.
The debate at this week’s COP30 – the United Nations annual delegate Climate Conference of all parties of interest – centres upon the “Tropical Forests Forever Fund”, so far supported financially by 55 countries including Germany. The British Prime Minister Starmer has refused to donate despite Britain having been key to setting up the Fund.
Absurdly, Starmer’s more scared of upsetting the far-Right climate deniers and his oil company friends than the threat of social disruption from weather extremes and climate chaos. The ultra-nationalists are demanding we don’t look beyond our national borders, whilst the climate doesn’t recognise nations, cultures or religions and is set to disrupt all life on Earth. We are all at risk from extreme weather caused by climate change and all need to act to minimalise the causes.
As the sixth largest economy in the world, the UK has money. All the nonsense about “broken Britain” obscures the political priorities for increasing spending tax money on armaments, military forces and subsidies to fossil fuel companies. Trees are clearly less important than tanks and fighter jets and the oil to fuel them.
Trees are also far less important than billionaires, obviously. The numbers of individuals hoarding more than one-thousand-million pounds each has tripled in 5 years to 3,000+ bloated fat cats, these fools amassing more than sixteen trillion (that’s million-million) dollars between them (the UK’s GDP is 2.5tn per year). They could, as Starmer points out, donate to the Fund without losing sleep. But they won’t.
Trees are less important than all “market imperatives”…or are they? The COP30 process is focused upon trees with good reason. They produce our oxygen! Owning ten million gold bars is of little value if you can’t breathe! Trees covering the size of eighteen football pitches were destroyed last year every minute, of every hour, of every day in 2024, doubling the amount lost in 2023.
Consequently, the release of the carbon dioxide they stored – 4.1billion tonnes last year through burning alone – has continued to warm the Planet and pollute the air we breathe. Agricultural clearance for short-term profits from land-speculation rather than food production, and wildfires more frequent as a result of hotter temperatures, are a great threat to our global security.
Trees firmly rooted in the ground are of far greater value than stripped landscapes. It takes a tree upwards of thirty years before positively sequestering greenhouse gases, so the loss of a forest today creates a thirty year gap in that natural maintenance of atmospheric balance. The current rate of replanting is well below the rate of destruction, but it’s that gap in functionality that is the biggest problem. There is no way to maintain the natural equilibrium. It’s tipped.
The loss of forest is a disaster for all humanity. And it’s the big corporations, headed by the big billionaires, who are driving the land speculation gambling on stock exchanges. They must be stopped and held to account, but at the same time we have to ensure our taxes help pay for forest protection right now. And since money doesn’t grow on trees we have to make trees a political priority for funding.
Why? The Amazon, where COP30 is taking place, is tipping from a carbon sink – the “Lungs of the World” to a carbon emitter. Likewise the great forests of New Zealand, Nicaragua, Sumatra,Alaska and Canada, Australia and the Andes, New Guinea and the Congo are all burning. The vast Siberian forests lost their status as a carbon sink years ago through fire and drought – the release of methane from the permafrost there 100 times more powerful a climate heating gas than carbon dioxide.
We have to stop cutting trees. And yes, replant, but the young saplings won’t be of help in time. We have to urgently cut down the rate of emissions from fossil fuel production ever faster if we want to survive. The UK Budget is all wrong.
With global heating emissions now one third higher than in the last one million years, and average global temperatures speeding past the 1.5C manageable limit, we are all in trouble whether we live in a rain forest or urban sprawl. The extremes are deepening fast – the hottest year on record, the hottest decade on record, the season creep, the mass extinction of plant and animal species…
The Climate Emergency is the single greatest threat to us all. Join us and protest on Saturday 15th November from 11am at Guildhall Square, and join our workshops all afternoon at Sherwell Church Hall, North Hill to discuss what we can do to save the Planet…and ourselves.

COP30 – Stop Climate Denial! Act Now!

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My weekly comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.11.25) continuing to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of tax-funding the capitalist climate chaos. The climate denial is orchestrated, massively funded and coordinated across the global capitalist ruling class. They may be raising war against each other, but they combine against any and all opposition to their acquisitive lust for accumulation of personal wealth. Little matters like climate collapse with billions of ordinary people displaced and dying cannot get in the way of this anti-human system of competition and destruction.

Stop Climate Denial – Act Now!

On Thursday 6th November, UK Prime Minister Starmer will attend the COP30 Climate Summit of world leaders in Brazil. It will be a fleeting visit. This last-minute decision is more a reaction to political competition than any commitment to reducing global heating emissions or preventing climate collapse.
The sudden almost doubling of Green Party membership following the election of Zack Polanski as “left-wing” leader could take more voters from Labour than Reform UK was able to. The majority of voters recognise climate change as a real and present danger, even if they don’t want tax rises to deal with it. Labour has to pretend to “Green” credentials even while maintaining core commitment to the future of the fossil-fuel economy and infrastructure – the industries that are destroying the Planet at speed.
From the Right, the flailing Tory Badenoch is competing with Farage to be the greatest “climate denier”, of use to Starmer in being able to argue we must not go too far or too fast.
Climate action is under attack with false claims that the cost of living crisis and job losses are caused by green policies and ‘net zero’. But the UK is facing increased heatwaves and drought, alongside more extreme floods threatening homes and farmers’ crops. The impacts of climate breakdown are already here, and are hitting hardest those who have actually done least to cause the crisis. Here in the UK, temperatures reached a previously impossible 40C record in 2022 with higher to come. Our workplaces and homes are poorly equipped to cope with these heatwaves, which cause not just stress and discomfort, but thousands of excess deaths.
But current government policy is hopelessly influenced by the corporate fossil-fuel lobby instead of concern for the safety or food security for the working class. The UK government currently provides at least £17.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies and support per year – the highest level since 2016 despite the gross inefficiency in price, infrastructure and climate-heating emissions of the fossil-fuelled energy system compared with renewables.
Starmer’s policies will result in a slight increase in fossil fuel subsidies over this parliament compared with the previous Tory Government, totalling an estimated £87.5 billion over five years. Little wonder the world’s big banks have handed nearly $7tn (£5.6tn) in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the failed COP21 Paris Agreement of 2015 to limit carbon emissions. No major bank has yet committed to stop funding new oil and gas fields or coal capacity.
The fossil-fuel industry is too highly profitable compared with renewables for climate collapse to get in the way. The billionaire speculators gambling on the stock exchange are not going to let the government get in the way of a rise in the projected share prices of oil and gas in 2040. Yet extraction has to stop now if we are to survive.
The Labour government has pledged £22bn for projects to capture and store carbon emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production, unproven technologies that cannot possibly contribute in time towards the scale required for reducing harmful carbon emissions. Indeed it is a Trojan horse for extending the life of planet-heating oil and gas production and an entire waste of tax money.
Reform UK has pledged to scrap all climate action just as the UK experienced its hottest summer in history with widespread drought across England. Reform UK’s Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Dame Andrea Jenkyns says climate change does not exist, and has declared war on climate action, describing wind and solar as ‘eyesores’ whilst promoting fracking in the British countryside.
The world’s largest oil and gas companies made £437billion profit last year and are still asking for further tax subsidies for the North Sea drilling. Unite the Union identifies the average household to be paying more than £500 to energy companies profits, not services.
The UK-based oil companies pocket at least £20bn a year from the tax-payer, with an extra £2.7bn announced this year, far more than the entire cost of support for refugees and asylum seekers – but you won’t hear any complaints from the far-Right about such subsidies for the super-rich! Blame the super-poor!
As environmental tipping points are crossed and the crisis rapidly deepens, scaling up renewables, energy storage and efficient usage has to be the priority. Transformation to green energy policy is cheaper, cleaner and job-rich. Start by ending all tax reliefs for the trillion-dollar oil and gas corporations and collect the due taxes.
Continued support for the fossil fuel industry goes against the interests of working people in the UK and globally. We shall be protesting for climate action in Plymouth on Saturday 15th November, and debating all these issues at the Climate Summit in Sherwell Church Hall, North Hill, in the afternoon. Join us!

Climate Change is a Working Class Issue still

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (2.9.25), reflecting on the floods – of rain rather than flags! But the two are linked, the flag-waving ultra-nationalists and racists denying climate change to a person. There are polarised divisions, not to be undone by keeping quiet or being nice! We’re fighting for our children and their children … climate change is an existential threat.

Unedited below:

Those affected by floods in Plymouth through the last week have been shown sincere empathy by our entire community. Waking to leaking ceilings or sudden torrents of water pouring through our homes is a traumatic shock as well as a long-lasting costly clear-up and remedial project.
Most if not all of us seeing the media coverage have the immediate intellectual acknowledgement of climate change. We all know it now. Extremes of weather are routinely breaking records, whether temperature peaks or torrential downpours, the erratic conditions now responsible for more moorland fires, farmland droughts, basement floods, transport disruption, and uncertainty about the future.
The damage to our once-stable climate is accelerating, the various impacts of human-released carbon gases trapping heat in the atmosphere, feeding on itself and amplifying the power of nature’s dynamic forces. For more than 50 years the impact of carbon-emissions has been known and tracked and yet still the system of production adds more carbon dioxide to heat-up the world.
For those of us mopping-out our living spaces, the voice of Kemi Badenoch, leader of the beleaguered and discredited Tory Party, calling for the extraction of more, nay “all”, oil and gas from the North Sea has to feel like a direct snub to our plight, but also a call-to-arms. You see, the last Tory government accepted that there is a Climate Crisis and we have to cut emissions.
The sudden perverse rise of the conspiracy-touting far-Right in Britain has shifted the climate debate away from observable as well as scientific facts towards a fresh denial of any problem whatsoever. Not only Badenoch but Starmer is jumping to the tune of Farage and ending the drive to net-Zero by 2050 (or ever), a target of emissions reductions very attainable but wholly inadequate in itself.
It is an ideological offensive against any and all calls for curbs on unbridled, unfettered free-market corporate drive for profits. Badenoch is championing the oil and gas companies, even damning any of the false-hope new technologies like carbon-capture-and-storage currently being funded.
The claims are false – gas prices have caused the high energy prices in the UK, and more reliance on gas will not reduce our domestic bills – they’ll increase. More North Sea oil won’t help tax revenue either, oil is privatised and the corporations receive tax-breaks and subsidies and those companies export most of what they find.
Badenoch’s claims are characteristic of the corrupt lobbying for the interests of the big corporations at the expense of the beleaguered working class.
We campaigned with Insulate Britain, calling for government action on refurbishment of no less than 14 million homes in England and Wales needing urgent upgrades to protect us from the extreme weather. We were vilified in the Press, and the governments of both parties have refused to consider our evidence and experiences. Indeed, some of us were imprisoned for daring to call-out their intransigence.
Climate activists continue to be persecuted and criminalised for trying to expose the depth of the immediate and worsening catastrophe. Just look at the weakening of the so-called Gulf Stream and the very real impact on our entire ecosystem in the very near future. You want to protect our children? We have to stop emissions now! Just Stop Oil!
Climate change is a working class issue. Governments and Corporations are doing nothing to help or support the adaptations needed. Trade unions have always fought for workers rights and for the changes needed to make society better for us. We have solutions to the climate emergency. Trade unionists in the 1970’s designed and engineered the first wind turbines, heat pumps and electric public vehicles as part of the “Lucas Plan” never invested in by the Corporations finding profits much larger in the production of weapons of war.
Renewable energy production does not generate the massive size of short-term profits for the super-rich – and that’s the challenge! State investment with significant tax claw-backs from the fossil fuel industries must fund a National Climate Service that can create the millions of climate jobs needed to adapt our social infrastructure.
Plymouth Trades Union Council is working with the Plymouth Hub for Climate Justice to build the climate movement as a force to shift government and corporate policy back to Green. Climate Jobs in their millions, protection for homes and communities, integrated and accessible public transport.
The urgency is palpable. This Autumn we launch the trade union year of climate action, with a key moment of global solidarity in November when world leaders meet for the UN climate negotiations in Brazil – the COP 30. Join our protest and Climate Summit on November 25th at the Sherwell Centre.
The right-wing politicians, whether Labour, Tory and Reform UK speak only for the profits of the oil and gas industries. Only about their profits. Farage wants to scrap the already paltry regulations that protect workers and householders. Badenoch wants more emissions. Starmer has little in the way of plans for energy transition, and wants the end of green incentives for employment transition. This lot don’t listen to workers and aren’t going to help us.

We have an autumn programme of actions and events. Join us: https://plymouthhub4climate.org

Build Climate Action!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.7.25) calling for a fight for climate action, alongside everything else! If anyone hasn’t read the Met Office report, conservative in the extreme yet painfully dire in its predictions and concerns, then do so. In any case, out of existential self-interest or global climate justice, rebuild the climate movement, now!

Unexpurgated below (not my chosen headline!)

We need a Heat Strike! So say the majority of trade unions across Britain and beyond. Employers are failing to recognise the threat from high temperatures to its workforce, politicians have refused to identify a top temperature with stated conditions in which it should be illegal to be forced to work.
The national campaign, Heat Strike, has won huge support from workers everywhere following the third heatwave of the year.
Drivers sat in poor quality commercial cabs have recorded 42 degrees centigrade whilst stuck in traffic. Bus drivers required to manage 9-hour shifts in 32-35C. Cafe kitchens and warehouses, and many small offices and shops, are recording temperatures impossible to function within, employers uncaring and unready to supply any remedial equipment, workers fainting from dehydration.
The UK is not an air-conditioned country. Unlike most of the Western world, our housing and buildings are not built or equipped to ensure comfort or safety during extremes of hot, cold or flash-flooding caused by Climate Change. Our natural environment is in crisis, seasonal dissonance e killing plants and insects.
According to the EU Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 12 countries and some 790 million people around the world experienced their hottest June ever, Baghdad’s 49C feeling like 65C.. Temperatures were particularly extreme in Europe, 45C in places with two ‘exceptional’ heatwaves. Wildfires are raging, destroying urban areas as well as wildlife, a water-shortage in Hamburg, Germany and Spain’s hottest day ever recorded hitting 46C.
Humans cannot survive for more than a few hours in temperatures over the body temp of 37C at 90% humidity, making it essential for access to cool spaces and liquids.
The Met Office says this is the new normal. Globally, June 2025 was the third-warmest on record, continuing a heat streak in recent years as the planet warms as a result of humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases. It’s not over, and next year will be hotter still. Europe is warming several times faster than the global average, the sea levels rising around the UK faster than anywhere else, storms and coastal erosion destroying homes. Last winter was the UK’s wettest, with sudden deluges – 2-4 times the average rainfall last September, the cost of water ingress very high.
Heat-related deaths in England and Wales are predicted to rise 50-fold over the next half century if adaptations are minimal. Fatalities will climb six-fold as the planet warms and an ageing population becomes more vulnerable. Add to that the food shortages caused by harvest failures and transport disruption, alongside country-wide water shortages – the result of inadequate investment by profit-hungry private companies – and we cannot continue as we are.
Even the most crazed conspiracy theorists have stopped arguing that Climate Change is a hoax, now saying we have to roll with it or blaming some deep-State contrivance. Climate change is not about belief – t’s a fact. It used to be that only the far-Right and the ignorant argued against tax-investment in climate damage reduction
Yet now, the UK’s Labour government stands alongside USA in cutting investment in adaptations and emissions-reductions to a minimum, investing in more fossil-fuel extraction and use compared with plans laid only a few years ago. We need shaded streets not concrete boulevards, retrofits to millions of homes, increased water storage and energy conservation. We need a National Climate Service to coordinate adaptations, as a matter of extreme urgency.
Whilst all the scientific predictions broadcast by Greta Thunberg’s Youth Strike for Climate have come true, and worse, the campaign clamour for action that peaked back in 2019 has now died down despite evidence of the climate emergency being plain to see. Climate appears not to be an electoral priority.
But the people swept away in flash floods in Texas, USA, last week are a minuscule fraction of the havoc being wreaked right now by the heating of the atmosphere and oceans across the world. Contrary to Trump’s repeated one-in-a hundred-years false propaganda, the Americas are suffering repeated crisis costing their economies trillions of dollars a year. Transnational Finance Corporations, including the world’s biggest bank, JP Morgan Chase, are publishing reports to affiliates identifying huge and immediate threats to “business as usual”.
But businesses are looking for opportunities to make more money rather than invest in safety and slowing-down the chaos: pharmaceuticals can make big money out of malaria spreading through the northern hemisphere; insurance companies can limit liabilities by ending cover for homes on floodplains.
It should be no surprise that bosses don’t care about what happens to us. Corporate government won’t invest in our social infrastructure. The only solution for the working class is to down tools, take strike action to force employers to put in the adaptations we need to survive. Climate is a working class issue. Climate activism must rise again and trade unions have a key role to play! We are launching a Year for Climate Action from September 2025. Join us!

Tony Staunton
President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

Damn the Hedgefund Short-termists of the oil and gas Corporations – Climate Change is Here and Now!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.3.25), originally seeking to make links between war and climate but edited to a narrow rant against BP and climate denial. I’ll return to war next week.

Climate Change is real and here now

The latest scientific report on what we call the Gulf Stream, more technically known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system (or AMOC for ease) has reasserted evidence of it slowing down, predicting dire consequences for weather in Europe and the East Coast of the USA and Canada.
The Gulf Stream will turn-off. In the meantime its’ slowing down will produce worsening extremes in our weather. At the same time the Polar Vortex is crashing and the Jet Stream has gone into paroxysm too.
The climate is tipping. We are witnessing extreme floods and fires, seasonal dissonance, continuous temperature records broken, ceaseless increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (the cause of global warming), yet we’re repeatedly told there is nothing to worry about.
Politicians act upon the words of the big oil companies to suggest we can overshoot the limits of stable climate, even if experiencing extremes of weather for a period, because new technologies will be developed that will reduce the emissions again and rebalance the climate.
This is a Big Lie! The limited tax-cash they are diverting into funding false solutions such as carbon-capture and storage and modular nuclear reactors are impossible to produce at the scale necessary or in time to stop climate and economic collapse, even if they can be made to work.
Yet we are told we can safely continue with business as usual: burn more coal and wood, extract more gas and oil, chop down more forests.
Oil and gas make higher profits than any other form of electricity generation or fuel supply, hugely exaggerated by over-pricing and tax-subsidies.
The fossil fuel corporations refuse to risk lower dividends, their shareholders now revolting against any shift away from continued extraction. As part of the class war, the fossil fuel companies are fighting back against climate action, determined to increase their already record profits.
Last week, British Petroleum (BP) announced a £10bn profit in 2024 but is shredding all plans for green energy production or any net-zero emission targets.
BP dropped its “Beyond Petroleum” pledge to cut oil and gas production by 40% by 2030, instead planning a 20% increase in investment in fossil fuel projects, slashing renewables by 70% and breaking its agreements with the UK Government.
Oil and gas corporations receive £billions in tax-subsidies. Banks are investing over $1trillion in new oil and gas extraction, UK-based Barclays even investing a fresh £1.7bn in coal-fired power stations!
Compare this. The UK government spending needed to achieve net zero in the UK by 2050 is only £4.3bn, some 0.2% of our annual Gross Domestic Product, less than all the subsidies currently paid-out to the corporations largely responsible for global heating emissions.
Wind and solar have cut energy costs by two-thirds and the majority of the world is moving away from fossil fuels. Yet right now, the UK and USA is shifting in the opposite direction in defence of oil.
“Drill, drill, drill!”
Climate science identifies that the accelerating changes to the climate will collapse these fossil fuel investments to pieces with as great a force as a world war. Without priority investment in climate adaptations, economies will be devastated by food shortages and disruption to production, the jobs reliant on the fossil economy no longer safe.
For the protection of the majority, trade unionists are clear: climate change is real, happening now and deadly; the cost of emergency transition away from fossil-fuelled production should be paid for by the fossil fuel corporations – not workers jobs, pay and social conditions; and international aid is essential to support climate reparations worldwide. Just stop climate denial!

Climate Catastrophe Knows No Borders

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.1.25), returns to the climate catastrophe given the coverage of the LÁ wildfires. The impacts of extreme weather are weekly reports on the mainstream news, yet constantly downplayed, the causes denied. How long can they keep this up?

The unedited version below.

“It won’t happen to me”, the self-protective technique that breeds denial. People elsewhere are sofa-surfing with friends because their house is flooded. “It won’t happen to me”. Neighbourhoods engulfed in flames, homes and life memories destroyed in moments by wind-whipped flames. ‘It won’t happen to me”. Climate refugee the sudden new status when the insurance company refuses to pay-up. “That’ll be other people, not me”.

The climate catastrophe knows no borders. The fires in California are happening every year now, yet the hundreds of thousands of wealthy evacuees speak of shock and awe. Those flooded-out in middle-England speak, wide-eyed, of their horrific loss, family members drowned, employment income disrupted, homes waiting for years for reparations.

Extreme weather extreme polarisation in human society. The rich can rebuild, those without serious wealth left to flounder. The media obsesses over the catastrophe hitting Hollywood celebrities, but says next to nothing of the far greater calamity that has engulfed the poor of the Carolinas following the record-breaking hurricanes, or indeed those flooded out in the same week in the South of Manchester, northern England and Wales.

The priorities of the Capitalist system are all wrong. We can spend billions on weapons of mass destruction but not have the infrastructure to put out forest fires of build flood defences. And TV news ensures both fires and floods receive far more airtime than the fires from the bombs raining down in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, nor the extreme weather flooding in the refugee camps created by the wars. In this age of catastrophe the media keeps us diverted and distracted from the reality.

Farmers report each morning of another 4cm of rain overnight, the crops destroyed weeks ago and the soil becoming unusable, devoid of substance and nutrients. Birds die in their hundreds of thousands, bees mistake the season and starve, the extreme switchback between sudden freeze and unseasonable heat tricking all plant life into false starts and destructive ends.

2024 was the hottest year in 100,000+ years. Unprecedented in modern human history, and trending hotter, faster.

The warming doesn’t necessarily make the weather sunnier but simply more extreme. We’re very wet then very cold then unseasonably hot within the same week. We are living in an historically unique era of rapid climate change, now called super-warming, all the environmental drivers accelerating beyond any accurate modelling. The authorities could be excused for being caught-out by the rapidity and chaos…were it not for the fact that all this was predicted decades ago. Not only were the true causes denied to ensure inaction, but today, the adaptations required to protect us all are not in place and probably too expensive to be rolled-out in time without a systemic change of priorities.

We’re on our own. Climate change is far more powerful than any war, but is producing more war as resources and food production are pushed to the limit. Climate change is far more disruptive than the wildest dreams the most deranged terrorist. Whilst humans have always migrated across the world, climate change is producing a scale of forced migration never before seen.

Governments and authorities pour tax money into subsiding farmers for activities that deny the fact of climate change. Governments increase military spending to eye-watering proportions and at the expense of social welfare and infrastructure. Taxes are raised to ensure subsidies to the fossil-fuel companies that are warming the atmosphere and oceans towards extinction.

Public money for transformation away from global heating emissions in time to stop social collapse is cutback and cut again and again. There’s no money at scale to address the depth of the climate crisis. Those of us who try to sound the alarm are damned as crazies or extremists, and falsely imprisoned on criminal charges that used to be used only for the most murderous villains.

Corporations invest, not on any products that can slow-down the rate of climate collapse, but on gambles about the new necessities that extreme weather will produce. The pharmaceutical companies are investing in the hope of the new pandemics and insect-borne diseases produced by the warming of the climate. Fossil fuel corporations are investing in more oil and gas fields on the basis that, well, it’s too late to worry about the coming collapse – make the cash while we can.

The ancient definition of madness is the condition where a human being is detached from reality and unable to understand or manage the world around them. It is in that sense that human society, Britain as a prime example, has descended into a collective madness. The degree of denial is the very definition of extreme disconnect. It seems the penny only drops when it’s too late – it is you who are flooded out, burned down, electricity cut-off, without staple foodstuffs, reliant on polluted water.

History has shown that social collapse, a condition of the sudden loss of all givens, takes between three and five days before the descent into dog-eat-dog survival. Prevention requires governments to have pre-prepared contingencies and effective call-up ready and in place “just in case”. Our experience of COVID-19 proved such preparation was not in place for a pandemic. This winter’s floods have proven, early-on, that the services that exist are quickly overwhelmed – rescue, medical and insurance services grossly insufficient.

When we say we need the economy shifted into a new set of priorities similar to when governments have to move into a “war-footing” we are sneered at and jeered. But not by those whose land is swamped, homes are destroyed, friends are drowned, income is ended by weather events. We should not have to wait until each of us is affected. The purpose of governments and the taxes they raise is to protect and resource. They are failing us, all of them, absolutely.

Religion is Political

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.12.24) getting over-philosophical (it’s the time of year) and challenging all orthodoxies. No more Business as Usual (if we want to survive). Seasons Greetings, the unexpurgated version below:

We are constantly warned of extremism. Not only the terrorism of car-driving, gun-toting or axe-wielding fanatics but the social orators of various fundamentalisms, political as well as religious.

We are taught to see those who haven’t been raised to our orthodoxies as potential threats.

We are told to be cautious of those who wear the symbols and emblems of a religious group or engage in mass rituals. A society with a regime that requires specific behaviours of all citizens, stopping all they would normally do in order to respect a specific religious date, is to be frowned upon as an example of anything from forced indoctrination through to mass hysteria. Oops, there goes Christmas!

All religion stems from the primordial human need to understand why we are here as well as why we die. The apparent impossibility of answering those questions opens the door to an all-but infinite number of explanations. Events and situations that are unconscionable are explained by the wisdom of god or gods who do know that which we cannot know.

Religion offers hope amidst the pains of living, and a heart in a heartless world. Faith allows acceptance of fallibility, the inhuman actions of human beings, the unreasoned and unreasonable.

Because Faith seeks to define acceptable behaviour, it is deeply political. Politics is, after all, about how people live together and behave towards each other. And so, as religions develop and grow they become organised and led, by leaders, enrobed and ordained with the word of god, to tell people how to behave.

The histories written into religious scripts convey the lessons of humanity over time, but are nevertheless written down by human beings. Ancient scriptures are reinterpreted time and again, and subjected to the censorship or acceptance of those with the power to have them published or burnt. The stories and the rules are changed over time. Crude tenets are nuanced into everyday rules of social relations. The scribes and their editors possess immense personal power. And all personal power corrupts.

There are some material reasons for religious rules. In a world without fridges it was a good rule of thumb to not eat red meat riddled with disease. Should you be starving you may still be tempted to eat a pig or a cow, even if the King threatened you with punishment. But if it is god’s word, punishable with an after-life of eternal pain and damnation, you may rather starve to death in pursuit of life in the hereafter.

The rules laid down by god are not to be broken so lightly as the laws decreed by men. And so the church has power, political power. Most organised religion tells us we are born into a place in the social structure as ordained by god, and we should accept rather than challenge our rank in the class system. But the decrees laid down by the church change over time, determined by the prevailing social conditions. The religious edicts of a feudal society have to be turned-over as a new ruling class develops – the Capitalist mercantilists taking over political power from the landlords.

The ruling class power, its wealth and standing army, determines the rules of the church, not the other way round. Monasteries are burnt to the ground, bloody wars are waged between rival sects.

Catholic versus Protestant, Sunnis versus Shia, Hindu versus Buddhist…and within each there are challengers from the Left and the Right, doubters and zealots.

All religions involve battles for power. The power of ideas, accepted or rejected by those with the wealth and armies to enforce them. To a point where all ruling ideas are the chosen ideas of the ruling class.

It’s all about power and control on Earth, not Heaven.

People learn how to think within the confines of the society and natural world we are born into. The teaching we experience in school reflects the ruling ideology, the curriculum determined by the ruling class, the behaviours enshrined in the prevailing religious order. We try to behave and accept even when those ideas make little or no sense – do we starve or break the laws in order to survive?

It is the contradictions between what we’re told to believe and what we actually experience as the world around us that foment revolutions.

Those of us who dare to challenge the ruling class also challenge the ruling ideas, and are heavily damned should that include defying the ruling religious norms. We can be proclaimed as “ungodly”, a charge far worse than being “illegal”. Yet all beliefs change with the times.

And so there are times when the enforced religious rules no longer make sense and place the people in grave danger. They have to be defied, as does the ruling class who proclaims them. With an elite of billionaires ruling over mass poverty and requiring authoritarian compliance to the money-god, we are living in such times.

In this era of escalating warfare and climate catastrophe our priority must be to organise for human welfare not religious or political dogma. That means opposing both imperialist and religious wars threatening nuclear annihilation. It also requires we challenge the consumerism producing the climate-heating toxic emissions and throwaway plastics that are killing the Planet. These are not matters of belief but observable facts.

Christmas needs a rethink.

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Small Farmers are Being Exploited by the Rich

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (26.11.24) wanting to rage against Jeremy Clarkson’s racist anti-working class smug privileges, but having to stay publishable. The reality is the propaganda emanating from the billionaire media corporations and their lackeys overwhelmed all reason and any honesty about the situation facing farmers. And much of the Left sided with the far-right landowners. A knee-jerk political illiteracy. Just because Starmer put a tax on the Rich but we don’t like Starmer, doesn’t mean we support the Rich. Starmer should and could have gone a lot further, and the nature of the inheritance tax means most of the wealthiest in society will not have to cough-up any more into the public purse for the next four year, according to Rachel Reeves in her toadying address to the CBI yesterday.

Anyway, that wouldn’t get into print. And the following was further edited-down to get in:

Farming has workers too!

Trade unionists know a lot about farming. The false divide between “city folk” and “rural communities” has been promoted ceaselessly in the media as if one of the great divides amongst the British people. It is nonsense.

The great divide is social class. The farming community is not not one homogenous mass. Far from it. The difference in lifestyle and life-chances of the agricultural worker (the majority who work on the land) and the landowners (a tiny minority) could not be more different and polarised.

Unite the Union organises inside the farming community, with tens of thousands of members who work the land. They are some of the most poorly paid and badly treated of our entire working class, subject to the most hazardous working conditions and the very highest level of industrial accidents and workplace deaths.

So when 20,000 so-called “farmers” march on parliament against paying inheritance tax, the protest raises more questions than demands.

Small farmers are living on a knife-edge. The endless rains of last winter and spring collapsed much of the early crops, reducing income to a bare minimum or even increasing crippling debt, leading many to leave and some to commit suicide.

None of this has anything to do with inheritance tax. Small farmers are pressured by falling livestock prices, or are tenant farmers who own no land and are affected by increasing land prices. Since Brexit, farmers have faced reduced subsidies, increased tariffs and falling prices for products and livestock. The savagery of the huge supermarket chains squeezing wholesale prices to maximise their record profits to the impoverishment of the small farms is immoral and detestable.

But last week the millionaire land owners and big business drew upon the plight of poorer farmers to organise against the plans for the big agro-businesses to pay the same inheritance tax as the rest of the wealthy do.

One third of land in the UK is owned by the aristocracy, with separate tax rules and regimes that charge high rents for farming and homesteads, and little or no support in return. Church and State own less than 2% between them.

Second-up are the large corporations investing in land for its tax-saving opportunities. Then come the individual multi-millionaires and billionaires. 12% of land is in the hands of 50 owners.

James Dyson is a big landowner, as is billionaire John Whittaker, chairman of the Peel Group property corporation, owning ports, huge swathes of commercial and industrial land and companies such as the Holiday Inns.

Half of the top ten are oversees holders of UK land including the ruler of Dubai, Denmark’s richest man and Italian billionaire aristocrat Count Luca Padulli, freehold owner of hundreds of thousand so properties here including apartment buildings beset with cladding risks.

The root cause of the pain of small farmers is an agricultural system dominated by big business interests, the market and profit. Small farmers are being squeezed out by a process of gentrification on an industrial scale, orchestrated not only by local avaricious landlords but by global financial giants.

Yet poorer farmers are being pushed to the front of the protests by farming organisations run in the interests of the big estates, precisely because city people can relate to the real hardship of squeezed locals in a way that we wouldn’t care about the super-rich. In fact, we would like the corporations and multi-millionaires to pay more tax.

The protest against Labour’s inheritance tax rise doesn’t hit most farmers. It’s a tax on the very rich and millionaire land owners and big businesses. They would have to pay 20 percent inheritance tax on any estate worth more than £1 million—and even then, only what exceeds one million.

Inheritance tax is not levied on the value of property up to £325,000, bringing the untaxed total to £1.325 million. And, if a farmer is married and owns the farm jointly, their spouse can pass on an additional £1.325 million tax free. Furthermore, there is a £175,000 tax-free allowance on a main residence when it’s being passed to children or grandchildren.

This amounts to just half the main rate of inheritance tax everyone else is charged. As a result, some 500 farmers – the owners not the agricultural workers and tenants – will e tax demands each year.

The demonstration was headlines and praised across our media in a way that most protests at Parliament are ridiculed or unreported. Why? Perhaps because 80% of our news media is owned by just 5 billionaire families. Bur journalists should be expected to offer a more factual account.

One fifth of the working class are self-employed, hard-pressed, working all hours subject to the dictats of their corporate suppliers and free-market forces to scrape a living. The small farmers are in the same situation. The class divide in agriculture is all-but feudal in its despotism.

It was the big landowners and agro-businesses who financed this, the first major protest against the new Labour Government, cheered-on by the anti-working class far-right organisations of Reform UK and GB News.

But it is the trade union movement who should be organising opposition to Labour over the two-child benefit cap, winter fuel cuts and worsening austerity, to tax the super-rich to pay for the help and services desperately needed by ordinary workers, including those in agriculture. The problem in all employment sectors is the system of capitalism.

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Demand Action on Fossil Fuels

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (19.11.24) seeking to highlight the criminal hypocrisy of the COP29 Climate Conference. Climate is the overarching issue of this human era, bringing together all other issues and campaigns into a Big Picture far too overwhelming for the emotional intelligence of many. The resulting “it’s too late”, “grow your own” or hair-shirts responses are understandable but hopeless. And maybe that’s what is wanted. Just do nothing.

The projections of climate collapse in the very near future are illustrated by this year’s weather events as well climate movements. At least they published the mention of the of Saturday’s events, but the Press Release was never published.

Full text below:

Let’s have a look.

In the United States, super-hurricane Milton battered Florida followed by Helen, the strongest tropical storm ever recorded, which poured more than a year’s average rainfall onto North Carolina in less than eight-hours, destroying whole towns, houses and cars swept away. Seven weeks later local people have no fresh water to drink and the regional food production has been devastated. More than 200 people died.

In Spain, more than a month’s rain fell in less than one hour last week, flooding the the cities of Malaga and Valencia for second time in a month. Thousands were evacuated, more than 200 killed, many still missing, homes, shopping malls and bridges wrecked and 100,000 cars destroyed.

The farmlands that supply not only Spain but supermarkets here in the uk were decimated. Greenhouses, machinery and packaging plants were smashed, with crops destroyed and significant damage to fruit and vegetable production into the future. The floods destroyed more than 60% of Spain’s production of oranges, alongside thousands of hectares of tomatoes, peppers, salad and vines.

Emergency and relief authorities took days to appear and could offer little, the people left to fend for themselves and protest at the lack of care. Timely warnings were not broadcast and cash-relief only offered long after the immediate devastation. And in the USA, the most wealthy nation in the history of humanity, only the wealthy who could pay received help.

Such calamity is nothing compared with the Global South. Record rainfall is happening across the world, in regions with far less economic resilience and social infrastructure than Europe and the USA. And at the same time, fires and droughts across Africa.

Extreme weather is leaving tens of millions millions displaced, millions starving and thousands dead in Nepal and Vietnam, Tibet, Peru, India, China, and Indonesia. It snowed in the Sahara desert, an event never before recorded. Glaciers are melting in the Himalayas causing uncontrollable floods in Pakistan.

Parts of the Arctic are enduring exceptionally high temperatures — up 30 to 40 degrees above normal — because of multiple intense heat domes. 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the past decade recording the hottest global temperatures too.

Everywhere there is profound changes in the weather, swinging between extremes of wet and dry, hot and cold. In Britain one-in-six people live at risk of flooding.

But the United Nations Climate Conference held last week in the oil-dependent-economy of Azerbaijan has ensured no funding for concerted action on the climate emergency, and protected the fossil industries.

The emissions of global heating gases from the burning of fossil fuels is the cause. Emissions have to be reduced, as an emergency action by all nations across the world. And many countries will need help with that, or face complete disaster. That’s why we call for climate justice.

The poor and working classes of every country should not be left to pay the severe price of climate change, caused undoubtedly from the impact burning of fossil fuels since before 1850. Yet we are targeted by climate deniers telling us to keep quiet and carry on – a strategy that hasn’t worked anywhere else.

For every climate sceptic, there are hundreds of climate scientists who studied to get to university, then specialised in aspects of natural science and finally produced report after report of the extraordinary and unprecedented changes that are destabilising our land, oceans, atmosphere and wildlife. Tens of thousands of peer-reviewed and triple-tested scientific reports on all aspects of the climate collapse and sixth Great Extinction of life on Earth – happening now.

Yet those with power are denying these facts and encouraging baseless opinions formed from mythology, superstition and dogmatism. To say these are “conspiracy theories” is not sufficient. This is far-Right wing ideological claptrap, linking climate denial alongside anti-vaccines, anti-woke ultra-nationalism, supporting climate colonialism and racist denigration of the people of colour across the global south – lives that are less valuable than white humans of the industrialised North.

Whilst the super-rich buy-up land in New Zealand, projected to be the least and last to be affected by climate collapse, they tell us there is nothing to worry about. The climate deniers are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

It is as if the far-Right ideologues want to see mass environmental destruction and human carnage in order to feed off the hopelessness, despair and conditions of dog-eat-dog survival, best suited for their political ambitions. President Trump demands “drill, drill’ drill” for oil during his second term, appointing climate denier Chris Wright as energy secretary.

Prime Minster Starmer is more covert, booting tax handouts for carbon capture and storage, biofuels and nuclear power, none of which represent carbon-zero energy suppliers and altogether taking tens of billions of pounds away from investment in renewables of solar, wind and wave power.

The COP29 United Nations Climate Conference proved that the fossil-fuel companies are in control, selling more oil and gas rights in the face of disaster, chasing short-term profits at the expense of human carnage and societal collapse.

The science of climate change is not based upon opinion. It is fact. The climate deniers, funded by the oil corporations, are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

We protest! Plymouth’s trades unions are supporting the Climate Summit in Plymouth this Saturday, and marching to demand action now: cut emissions by 50% by 2030, and plan for the fastest possible transition away from fossil fuels! Join us!

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SSSSSHHHHHH!!!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald, reflecting on the Hurricane season in the USA. Since writing it, that is yesterday a new report says that in 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon. That’s a crisis alright.

The full version of my article here:

Ssshhh! We should talk about anything else but Climate Chaos. The two record hurricanes that killed hundreds, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, destroying entire towns across the Carolinas and Florida in the USA last week. This was passing news, fleetingly displayed and speedily dismissed.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton broke all records, Helene being one third more powerful than any previously recorded, including Hurricane Katrina.

The weather, once the few subjects that Brits have been allowed to talk about endlessly without any controversy, has now been weaponised. In our tense and polarised society, debate about the future is fraught with anxiety. It is as if we don’t want to face the facts, even when they flood our senses.

Climate Change is a case in point. For the far-Right, anyone calling for climate action is a “woke” enemy of freedom, seeking to end all personal liberties and regulate all personal choice. For those on the other side, concerned for the future of humanity and the planet, any public demonstration is to be ridiculed and any direct action quashed by unjust prison terms.

Before and after Helene there was a news blackout of the phrase, “climate change” across US media. Meteorologists and weather reporters received abuse and threats to their lives for mentioning the causes. Online, swathes of propaganda infected the internet with conspiracy theories that “the elite powers” had seeded clouds to produce the hurricanes. Scientists, it was claimed, had intentionally created the chaos to prove their unfounded theory of climate change, empowering despotic politicians to pass new laws banning cars and coal.

Conspiracy theorists had a field day. The thermometers that showed the increasing heat of the seas – the heat that generates the hurricanes – was not to be believed. Evangelists across the States proclaimed the floods as God’s wrath, warning us against alcohol and promiscuity, abortion and homosexuality. Prepare for the End of Times. As if they desire it!

The science that has charted the rapid concentration of global heating gases in the atmosphere over the past 150 years, all caused by the burning of fossil fuels as documented by the oil and gas corporations themselves, was instantly rebuked, rebuffed or downright denied.

And the list of extreme weather events, beating all records just as 2024 matches the hottest global average temperatures in millenia, was not to be advertised. In the last two weeks there have been devastating floods in Nepal, Oman, Spain, Tunisia, Thailand, Mumbai, India; Mexico; Ecuador, Oklahoma, Florida, Tennessee and the Carolina’s. And it’s not nearly winter.

We even experienced mild flooding in Plymouth caused by Hurricane Kirk as a record three hurricanes whooshed across the Atlantic at once. Those preaching individual freedom had better beware – they are not immune. As global warming gas emissions continue to rise, the world is set for worse extremes and greater destruction. And, because the corporations and governments refuse to take the actions required by lowering emissions and ending reliance on fossil fuels, it will be the working class and poor who will pay the price.

Those of us on low incomes and in poor housing have the least protection from extreme weather. One-in-five homes in the UK are built on flood plains, the insurance companies protecting their profits by refusing support or quadrupling their premiums. Floods and droughts abroad are creating food shortages that will soon hit our supermarkets.

And, if the USA is to go by, the employers who have done little or nothing to plan for climate change will force workers to stay at work amidst the havoc, or lose pay if they don’t clock-in on time and remain producing whilst the waters rise.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster”, according to the latest science report from Oxford University. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

We need a revolution in the way energy is produced and organised. Decentralised renewable energy, insulated homes to reduce use, and widespread free public transport. This transformation would create millions more jobs than those in the fossil fuel industry, and offer a beacon to the rest of the world for the action required to stop climate collapse.

The Trades Union Congress has proposed support for a National Climate Service to coordinate and fund emissions reduction. Instead, Starmer’s government has copied the Tory funding for a £23bn carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) project, unproven as a technology and a simple foil to allow fossil fuel companies to continue operating.

This denial of the Climate crisis must be challenged by all means necessary, if we are not to reap the whirlwind.

Restore Nature – and the Climate – Now!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.6.24) remonstrating against the silence and denial of all parties standing at an election devoid of debate on the acute seriousness of climate change. I am beside myself with angst and anger at the sheer stupidity and ignorance of candidates so self-obsessed and party-disciplined as to refuse to see what’s happening all around. Don’t give me any lip about caring for the future if you’re not acting, right now, against climate collapse.

Leaders are Protecting the Status Quo

It is in the nature of parliamentary democracy for politicians to argue over day-to-day promises. A couple of pence tax-deduction, more doctors, or so many new homes to be built are references to the continuing crisis of enforced austerity being experienced by the “working poor” (as at least seven million of us are so labelled).

The manifestos and “contracts with the people” all speak of reforming Capitalism when in reality, the entire economic and social system is in a depth of crisis that threatens all stability and, indeed, existence. The ruling class cannot and will not allow reform of their system that is so destructive. The demand to a speedy end to fossil-fuelled production actually represents the demand for the end of Capitalism.

So beneath the empty pledges of careerist individualists tied to the machinery of the Capitalist State lies a deeper ideological intent. The “masses” may be demanding real change, but the politicians are there to protect the status quo.

They insist there can be no real alternative to the current system of capitalism. Whilst the richest 1% become richer still, we, the working class, are expected to believe “there is no money”, “the exchequer is bare”, “it will take two parliamentary terms to turn things around”.

We are already required to vote on the basis that what we have is the best that can be hoped for, and anything better is so far away as to be pie in the sky. More of the same is all we should expect.

Except things are not going to stay the same. Their “stability and growth” is the real pie-in-the-sky. In truth, the next ten years will see such changes as to make today a halcyon dream. Real change is coming, courtesy of the natural environment.

Last week the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, warned of the deepening climate and ecological catastrophe affecting all nations across the world. He spoke of “planetary destruction” and stated that Governments across all wealthy nations have not kept their previous pledges. Global warming emissions from fossil fuel gases have risen to a new record level last year at a time when they must be halved by 2030 to avoid the worst climate effects.

“It’s we the Peoples versus the polluters and the profiteers,” he said. “Together, we can win. But it’s time for leaders to decide whose side they’re on.”

The speech was a rallying call by a UN leadership concerned that the climate crisis has slipped down the list of priorities. This “slippage”, bordering upon denial, was then proven at the June meeting of the powerful G7 group of countries, where world leaders including the UK Prime Minister repeated the same broken pledges, as if we should believe them this time.

In the real world, record breaking heatwaves were causing death and crop destruction from southern China, through India and North Africa to the southern states of America. 52C was recorded in Delhi, human beings were collapsing amidst water rationing of thirty million people, and monkeys and birds were seen falling from trees, dead from heat exhaustion.

Climatologists in the USA and Europe confirmed evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing, producing extreme and unpredictable weather patterns. In the UK, despite harvest failures this Spring, the mainstream parties in the election continue to cut their previous pledges on addressing the climate emergency.

Parties of the Right have published manifestos that deny the threat of climate change and call it all a conspiracy.

Working people are worried about the observable changing weather patterns and seasons. We want protections from the threats of flooded homes, transport disruption and high food prices. And our children are most concerned at the very obvious “6th Great Extinction” of insect and animal life taking place as a result of the pollution and heating of our oceans and lands.

Next weekend, against all the political denial and obfuscation, tens of thousands will be marching in London, calling-out to all political candidates to take this overarching issue seriously. ‘Restore Nature Now!” is our serious demand uniting conservationists, environmentalists, climate activists and trade unionists for immediate action to stop environmental destruction. Cut fossil fuel emissions and invest in the living environment!After all, why would anyone vote for extinction?

Election will Not Alter Class-based Society

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My Comment this week in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.6.24). The rigged “balance” required of the media during an election period means I can’t get published what I’d really like to say: Farage’s Reform Party offers an embryonic fascist rally which threatens the entire working class, the Greens are a pro-Capitalist Party with a terrible anti-working class record in Europe and indeed, against trade unions when running local councils; Galloway is socially conservative with adherence to religious family values that opposes a women’s right to choose, gay marriage and trans-rights, his Workers’ Party inviting cross-class alliances with Farage and ex-UKIP  candidates. Starmer is more than ready to lead us into World War Three within the duration of the next Government term (for which the imperialist ruling classes already undertaking the preparations). And anyway, putting one’s faith in bourgoisie democracy and the election of a socialist pro-working class government has been thoroughly destroyed by the ruling class offensive against Corbyn (not to mention the various corporate-funded right-wing coups against socialist reformers across the globe). The Left, historically infiltrated by chancers, turn-coat careerists, renegades, police spies and agent-provocateurs, continues to fragment just when political unease and renewed strike action in our class offers a chance to build a coherent mass organisation. The rise and falls of mass movements: Black Lives Matter; Me Too!; Climate Strikes and now Freedom for Gaza each represent missed opportunities for decisive leadership for whole-system change, linking all the issues together into an anti-Capitalist offensive. It’s no longer any good to say you’re a “socialist” without saying you’re anti-Capitalist. It is Capitalism and its current development of Imperialism that links all these movements and issues. The Capitalists will not allow you to reform their System out of existence! The only way out of this is revolution, which may well be brewing elsewhere in the world for us to jump-on and build here. One mass strike is worth ten general elections!

But none of this can be printed.

So instead, here’s the long version of the printable edition:

The candidates are about to be declared, the stage about to be set. General elections are theatres for Party activists.

People join together into political parties with reason. There are ideas that conjoin and ideas that splinter into opposition. It’s very difficult, for example, to believe in universal human rights whilst promoting racial superiority – is it okay that some people are born with more privileges and entitlements than others?

Some beliefs come together towards a whole and encompassing world view.  To act upon the our formed “way of seeing” we need to join together in sufficient numbers to have impact and change the direction of social organisation towards our preferred conditions. Hence parties.

On a very superficial level, that’s what putting a cross on a piece of paper at election day represents – a personal alliance with a world view.

The current drive towards politicians “independent” of any world view is probably a short-term proposition. A non-Party “independent” may be elected because they catch the majority view on a single issue but soon get into trouble when people disagree with other views they now espouse but were not in their manifesto. 

They may be elected as forthright and unbending on their stated goal, but find that, to achieve anything they will have to compromise into a coalition with others, watering down their mandate and starting to link together into a new political Party. 

The rise of the “Independents” is a necessary reaction to the general sense of “they’re all the same” which has swept into the consciousness of the electorate. The lack of faith in democracy as currently organised is prevalent across the Western world whilst still being fought for in the Global South. 

The point is, there are real differences in preferences for social organisation. There are Right and a Left wings of the political spectrum. Social organisation to share resources to ensure everyone’s needs and human rights are met is a world view and ambition that is the complete opposite of a belief in individual competition and personal enrichment at the expense of others. 

The best example is our National Health Service, loathed by Right-wingers as a construct of “socialism” because people pay into the common purse in order to get free health care at the point of need. The privatisation of the NHS is a right-wing strategy to turn our health service into a fee-paying, for-profit capitalist enterprise run by transnational pharmaceutical companies, not the State.

Any NHS charging essentially separates those who can afford to pay from those who can’t, into a society where your right to health care is based upon your personal income and inherited wealth. To accept charging in order to lower taxes is to accept individual competition as the social norm – a world view with wider implications.

It is difficult to ride on the back of two horses running in opposite directions. There are new parties seeking to go beyond, or bring together, Right and Left, despite the inherent conflict at the core of those ideologies. This may be an honest attempt to rebuild democracy away from the current two-party system which offers no real difference in policies or outcomes. But it’s a project doomed to failure.

A white-supremacist cannot be, at the same time, anti-racist and for a multi-cultural State. Someone who believes men should have power over women is unlikely to defend the rights of LGBTQ+. Warmongers don’t vote for Peace. Anyone who believes that the majority of Muslims are extremist “Islamists” is unlikely to believe in the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Beliefs coalesce into world views.

The inescapable fact is that we live in a polarised society based upon class, the conditions we are born into determining much of how we see the world and what we believe. We are born into a System, not of our choosing or making, where social policy either benefits the wealthy elite or it benefits the working class and the poor. Either we raise taxes to pay for social need, which requires the rich to pay-up in full, or we collapse the State and engage with a dog-eat-dog system where those without are left to perish. 

History provides many examples of where this class conflict which produces trade union strikes, mass movements, protests and community campaigns, produce real social changes far more profound and more often than general elections. 

So the core question to candidates should be, are you for the People (the majority of whom are working class reliant upon day-to-day income) or the Rich ruling class few who extract and exploit in order to maintain their privileges? Everything else stems from this divide. Whatever the result, we’ll still have to fight for our rights.

Heading into Strife

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment int he daily Plymouth Herald (14.5.24) seeking to expose the “disaster capitalism” manifesto of Rishi Sunak, ex-hedge fund manager who made millions out of the global financial crash of 2008. It is difficult to say “corrupt”, “gangster”, “liar” and “spiv” of a Prime Minister and get it published. Nevertheless, my hatred of Sunak and his billionaire class has to be broadcast by whatever means necessary.

The Prime Minister began this week by warning that the next five years will see fundamental changes to the way of life in Britain. What could he be speaking of?

The beleaguered Sunak predicts more will change in the next five years than in the last 30.

“I’m convinced that the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet most transformational our country has ever known.”

It sounds more like a threat than a promise. The signs are there. Tensions inside this country and across the world are ramping-up exponentially. Governments are responsible for the highest levels of corruption and self-interest, using propaganda mechanisms of nationalism and racism to maintain social control by setting us each against the other. 

All the time the politicians are managing the plundering of the tax-payers’ coffers and extracting record profits from all the necessities of life, our where-with-all being hoarded into the private off-shore bank accounts of the super-rich.

Internationally we are seeing deepening and entrenched warfare, Britain being drawn on the coat tails of the United States of America into direct engagement in Ukraine and Palestine, Africa and the South China Seas. Little wonder more tax money will be diverted to the military and away from spending on social welfare at home.

And no wonder that more millions of human beings are being forced to seek asylum, to migrate from their homelands, forced by everything from ethnic cleansing and genocides to climate collapse. 

The climate emergency has turned already into catastrophe for hundreds of millions across what is politically termed the “Global South” – those regions that have seen labour and natural resources plundered for the benefit of the nations of the North. Their crisis is coming our way, fast.

The climate changes that are killing millions each year are now hitting us. In Britain, eight months of record breaking rain represents new and less predictable patterns of extremes, in temperature, precipitation, meteorological seasons and the power of extreme weather events.

The unique speed of the rise in global temperatures is causing not only food shortages but the spread of disease. The classic killers and disabling infections of hot climates, such as malaria and Lyme disease are here now, brought north by warmer conditions by mosquitos and ticks, and fungal spores. 

The economic inequalities caused by harvest collapse, food shortages and transport disruption caused by both war and climate change will only produce more poverty, war and global warming.

So, sad as it is to admit, Sunak is correct. We are heading into social strife. 

What is left unsaid is that this is all the doing of Sunak and his Capitalist ilk, as part of the global political class and their Corporate masters who have created all these conditions: funding wars to reap massive profits for the arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies; denying and investing billions in propaganda campaigns against the science of climate change and effective remedies; demanding tax-billions for pharmaceutical companies to cherry-pick the most lucrative vaccine markets and disregard the rest; and the super-rich driven by avarice, ready to make a short-term profit at the expense of the future of humanity.

The single most noticeable change we will experience over the next 5 years is the intensification of authoritarianism, whatever the party of government. More punishments for strikers and protesters daring to challenge all the above and demand investment in the future of humanity. More intense political repression is inevitable, that is, unless we increase protests now to protect democracy and force the political change we need. 

Right now, the students are leading the way!  Show them every support! Turn up with food and water, send them money, protect them from assault. Build the Resistance!

Heat Strikes not Heat Strokes

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment published in the Plymouth Herald newspaper on 7th May 2024, urging the trade unions to take-up the call for maximum temperatures in workplaces, and for union reps to negotiate protections with employers. The trade unions, matching the leadership of the Labour Party, have detracted from organising on the issue of Climate Change and the impacts from the consequent extreme weather, and this has to change. Unions will have to challenge the Labour leadership ahead-of and immediately after the Party’s victory at the upcoming General Election. We must organise for that, now! PS, the weather is scorching hot today!

The ground is drying out at last. Local farmers are sowing and planting, seeking to supply us as well as compensate themselves for the over-winter losses.

We’ve had extreme levels of wet weather, already most of the average annual rainfall by the beginning of May. The soil has been too wet to work without destroying its composition, the winter crops rotting. 

This is just another example of The Change. No-one is honestly denying that Climate Change is with us, even if those wedded to fossil fuels and their private SUV’s want to argue against the cause. 

The speed and scale of change is not natural. Global warming is caused by the massive emission of gases, CO2, nitrous oxide and methane overwhelmingly produced by human methods of production, that trap heat inside the atmosphere causing land and sea to warm and expand, emitting more heat-trapping gases. 

The result is more extreme weather and the extreme shifts between weather patterns. One minute drenching down pours, the next, skin-burning heat. At a global level, deserts may be suddenly flooded, as in Dubai last week, or flood plains quickly turn to dust as in some southern states of the USA. 

The British Isles has seen the wettest winter and spring alongside it being the one of the warmest in record. The global heating creates more evaporation across the Atlantic and that produces more precipitation, rain to fall down on us. It’s going to get warmer but wetter, and most importantly, less predictable.

Nevertheless, every time the sun peers through the increasingly heavy and dark clouds, newspapers will carry front page news proclaiming “What a Scorcher!” with photographs of families lounging on beaches. Rubbish!

The majority of us will be at work, whatever the weather or time of year. And those outside will be at increasing risk of sun burn.

The extremes of weather will produce extremes of temperature, with unprecedented heights of heat waves becoming more frequent in the UK. 

High temperatures can be fatal for many elderly people, infants, disabled people and also workers exposed to heat for long periods.

The lack of health and safety regulations in the UK means that there are laws on working in the cold – minimum workplace temperatures below which you’d can stop work – but no laws on the maximum temperature. 

In recent years, because of global warming, heatwaves across the USA and Europe have led to the deaths of workers either in the outdoors or in extremely hot workplaces – building sites and kitchens are two examples, but glass sided office blocks are just as risky. 

It should be clear that the warming climate and heatwaves are trade union issues. Workers now require protection from extreme weather. 

Here’s some examples. If we are prevented from getting to work by transport disruption, or the workplace is unusable by flooding, our contracts should ensure we still get paid. If the workplace is too hot (much above 22 degrees Celsius) we should be sent home, and if we work from home, the employer should supply the air-conditioning to prevent over-heating. 

Union representatives have to be sitting with employers now to agree “conditions of service” – workplace conditions, that recognise the impacts of extreme or severe weather and protect the workforce. 

And for all the naysayers and climate deniers who consider such health and safety as woke, just look around you. A few years ago every time we had a heatwave people used to go out and sunbathe. Now, we sit in the shade under the trees, where they’re still standing, because the heat is becoming uncomfortable. 

If our employers refuse to invest in safe work conditions we should protect ourselves by joining together and refusing to suffer the discomfort. Instead of risking heat strokes, we should organise heat strikes!

The Climate Crisis Demands a Unified Response

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My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald, published on 2nd January 2024, making very basic and obvious points about the refreshed politic of climate denial being ramped-up by the mainstream parties. As the General Election looms closer, the backtracking and pooh-poohing of demands for action to save people and planet are going to overwhelm the mainstream media, despite all evidence to the contrary. We have to speak out and Act Now!

Last weekend’s welcomed rest and relaxation was certainly disrupted. Fierce downpours onto already sodden land ensured more local flooding. The transport disruption and electricity outages had one common cause – our increasingly extreme weather conditions.

There’s more to come. According to the World Metereological Association, 2023 saw a “deafening cacophony of broken records” across all climate measurements, the record heat set to escalate due to the “super El Niño” this year. Entire regions are already experiencing environmental and social catastrophe.

Last  year was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will be hotter still. Extreme heat, driven not only by the unprecedented levels of greenhouse gas emissions but also the development of the peak in the eleven year cycle of ocean warming, will ensure more intense heatwaves, wildfires and heavy rains which will threaten food production and transport dislocation.

The response to this, locally and globally, is abysmal. Here, and across much of the world, governments and politicians are pulling back from previous commitments and any future promises towards climate action.

In general they consider that any State spending on emissions reduction is a vote loser, the majority of the electorate (not the same grouping as the majority of the population) do not want to see tax money spent on social infrastructure such as home insulation, subsidies for renewable energy production and carbon-zero heating. 

This is untrue, of course. Most of us are worried about climate change, made anxious not so much the big threats of species extinction and global climate collapse which we feel powerless to affect, but the local day-to-day and observable impacts that cause us higher costs and growing discomfort. 

We also share a common nagging tension at the back of our heads about the potential major challenges facing our children. 

But the reaction against climate action is gaining hold. 2024 is election year, not just here in the UK but in the huge economies of the United States and India as well as countries across Europe. 

In every country where political tension is increasing due to the continuing cost-of-living crisis, investment in social infrastructure is being disparaged and condemned in favour of tax cuts – mainly for the wealthy. 

A narrative is being stoked – squeeze the power and costs of the State and free us all to live by our own wits and resources. It is an extreme individualist argument, borne of the far-Right of the political spectrum which always espouses survival of the fittest – despising and damning the poor and those in need of levels of help they cannot manage alone. 

The organised far-Right in every land is growing in capacity and influence. And the traditionally mainstream parties are kowtowing to this contrived “populist” vote, scapegoating minorities and ridiculing warnings of potential catastrophe. 

The “culture wars” are being ramped-up to publicly condemn any show of concern for others, for social welfare, or for the climate, as “woke”, spineless and unrealistic. 

There appears to be no mainstream party now demanding the scale of action required to reorder society to ensure resilience to the deepening climate crisis. The challenge to the Climate Movement, failing to be heard let alone to win timely government acton at the scale required, is immense. 

Nevertheless, our strategy has to be broadcast. Nothing less than a National Climate Service, overseeing all government agencies and ensuring the focus of all policy and spending towards climate action, will ensure protection of the tens of millions of working class people here. We require help to mitigate environmentally destructive routines and adapt to life inside unpredictable environmental conditions. 

This cannot be achieved by a local and piecemeal approach alone. We have to campaign for societal reorganisation and investment. And this year, that campaign is distinctly ideological, openly challenging the forces of corporate power and far-Right class privilege. 

Another Year of Inaction on the Climate Disaster

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 14th December 2023. The protests in Plymouth this year were small, the core of climate activists here depleted dramatically from the thousands pre-COVID lockdown. It’s hard to know why the issue has so little resonance at present, other than the cost-of-living crisis and general emotional sense of vulnerability seeing into the consciousness of the entire working class here. It’s a time for shutting the front door, keeping the outside outside and seeking some solace in the warm hearth of the holiday period (if you can afford the heating). Our climate march, joined with the local Palestine protest, managed over 120 people, whilst the Climate Summit, heavily publicised and built towards over the previous 6 months, drew 50 people – all already in the know. These are increasingly hard times, but a Movement of millions must be built quickly if we are to survive.

Why shouldn’t we be angry about the COP28 idiocy? A hugely expensive jamboree in the oil-rich Police State of UAE where 90% of the population are disallowed citizenship or human rights, protests are dangerously illegal, the government ministers and fossil fuel corporate executives packing-in 5-times the numbers of any citizen or NGO representatives, the rich flown-in on private jets to proclaim that it is the rest of us who have to tighten our belts because of the climate crisis whilst the poor remain voiceless.

Indeed, apparently, the climate catastrophe already killing millions each year and displacing millions more as climate refugees, is not the fault of greenhouse gas emissions. The President of COP28 this year, Sultan Al Jaber, head of the UAE State oil and gas company, says there is “no science” showing that we need to phase-out fossil fuels to restrict global heating to 1.5C.

After 30 years of this farce they’ve done nothing other than to protect the oil companies and their own voracious demand to get as rich as rich can be at the expense of people and planet. Yet thousands of scientific papers, peer-and-government reviewed before publication and published through the same United Nations entity, proves the precise opposite. These oil-rich billionaires should be considered as scum (a term recently judged by a UK court to be a perfectly legal derogatory term). 

The global average temperature in 2023 – the hottest year on record – actually reached 1.5C for a period. In fact, for three days it reached 2C. Whatever we do now, the changes to the earth’s climate have past tipping points that will ensure undeniable change everywhere – floods, fires, crop-failures, transport disruption and sudden extreme weather conditions displacing and killing people even here in wet-and-to-be-even-wetter England.

Unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground we have absolutely no hope of preventing climate breakdown. We are still putting more emissions into the atmosphere than we are stopping by moving to wind and solar. It doesn’t matter how many wind turbines you put up, or how many solar panels, unless you are scrapping the fossil fuel infrastructure and ensuring, through legislation, to leave coal, gas and oil in the ground, the Planet is going to boil. 

The highly effective and lethal fossil fuel lobbying, both inside the COP Conferences since 1992 and all day and night, every day and night, year-in and year-out, since the Second World War and before, has prevented most if not all effective action.

This has thwarted the simple things that need to be done. And while we sit and the years tick by, and we have so few years left now. We’re going to have to take drastic action if we’re going to avoid what could well be Earth systems collapse. This is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, and by design – as a result of the enormous oppressive and exploitative power of the fossil fuel industries.

And now they want the working classes of the world to pay for the clean-up, with our lives. Whilst the well-off and already entitled middle classes join the call for working class people to buy electric cars, eat pulses and wear hair-shirts, we live hand-to-mouth. One-third of Plymouth’s children are living in the poverty of damp housing, poor nutrition, rationed and paltry public transport, and charity-shop clothing, topped-up with food banks unable to meet the accelerating demands. 

Don’t you dare preach to us about buying an electric car or heat pump! Individually we haven’t the wherewithal. We challenge all moralising against the masses – individual actions are of little consequence given the scale of the challenge – it is the emissions at the point of production that have to be shut down, the rest will follow. The System has to change. 

The fossil fuel companies receive tax incentives to the tune of £11.5billion each year from the taxes we pay despite making record profits from energy bills three times the cost of 5 years ago. It is they, collectively, who should pay for this climate crisis, their billions in profits to be paid back-in to our society to immediately insulate and damp-proof our 14 million homes and decaying hospitals and schools, to renationalise and invest in decent free-to-use public transport, and train and recruit the millions of people required to change all production away from fossil fuels. 

We are in crisis right now – it’s visible. And that means we’ll have to change how we live, either by choice or necessity. But the lack of action by governments and corporation has shown we can’t rely upon them. Politicians will not legislate to stop all extraction of coal, gas and oil, and the corporations can’t transition in time, even if they wanted to. It’s the System of Capitalist exploitation – private profit -that has to be replaced or we face a torrid and barbaric future. 

COP28 used for Corporate Deals!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 27th November 2023. It was then of little surprise that, days later it emerged the President of COP28, Sultan Al Jabar, was quoted as saying that fossil fuels were not responsible for climate change (I paraphrase, but you get the gist). the corruption is beyond question, their culpability amounts to the greatest genocide in human history.

It should be of no surprise that the person in charge of this week’s Climate Conference is using the event to sign deals to extract more oil. The United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) has been held almost every year for more than three decades now and has achieved little or nothing. Some years ago it set targets for the global reductions in the emissions that warm the planet and destabilise the climate. In 2023 the emissions continue to rise, the target now requiring a 45% reduction in all our gases by 2030. 

It’s probably the case that no one believes the targets can possibly be reached. We are fast descending into a prolonged period of catastrophe for humanity and Nature’s Ecology. We are deep into the 6th Great Extinction of plant and animal life on the Planet, with Britain being the region most divested of wildlife on the Planet. 

The Climate Catastrophe, repeatedly predicted for over a century, is now with us, with 20,000 children forced to move forever from their inhospitable birthplaces every day. We face one billion, one thousand million humans, leaving their homelands in the Tropics, the southern states of the USA and southern countries of Europe, the centre of India and Southern China by the 2040’s.

Food shortages due to extreme weather conditions as well as long term regional climate changes will most certainly produce repeated global food shortages and transport disruption by the mid 2030’s if not much sooner. The resultant wars between states for the resources to maintain their societies have been predicted but are now actually with us – more than one hundred conflicts across Africa alone, and armies lining-up inside Europe itself. 

Civil wars sparked by food-shortages and unmanageable inflation levels are ensuring brutal repression of entire populations. The fear of mass migration is being ramped-up to ensure we are all desensitised to the plight of tens-of-millions of human beings, most but not all people of colour. Racism as a tool to dehumanise is being used to watch and ignore the development of refugee camps, millions of families living in crowded tents reliant on charitable food and water aid, and guarded by militia ready to shoot those who chance their lives on fleeing Northward for life and income.

So the revelations about the Conferences being used as bargaining bases to ensure higher emissions is just the latest damning indictment of the entire system. The United Nations is supposed to be the place where nations are brought together for international solidarity and support. It is not publicised as the broker of Corporate deals. The highest principal of the COP President is to rise above personal and national net rests to seek solutions for the common good. If the President of the COP process is seeking self-interest, then why shouldn’t everyone else? Trust in the COP process has collapsed. 

The COP28 Conference is supposed to be focussed upon the cutting the fossil-fuelled global warming emissions of C02, Methane, Nitrous Oxide and Fluorinated gases – all potent greenhouse gases. The drive towards renewable energy, greater energy efficiency leading to the reduction in the demand, and support and justice for those who are suffering the terrible consequences of climate change should be the focus for all decisions.

But the President of the COP28, the man presiding over the entire affair, is using the stage to ensure far more emissions. Dr Sultan al-Jaber is the head of the United Arab Emirates’ Oil company Adnoc. His company is talking with delegates to the COP28 about liquid natural gas projects in Mozambique, Canada and Australia, in collaboration with Germany and Egypt. The oil and gas deals carry-on being sealed, ensuring the predicted rise in global temperatures by at least 3Celcius by 2100, creating chaos to all human societies across the world.

This is corporate genocide on a global scale, funded and supported by corrupt government politicians focussed solely on short-term personal gain. From below, millions of conscious and empathetic human beings will be protesting throughout COP28, for human suffrage, climate justice and system change. The oil magnates and Sultans must be deposed. We have to force the end of fossil-fuel industries and global warming emissions now, or witness the end of human civilisation. 

Climate Conference Wake-up Call

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My weekly column published in the daily Plymouth Herald on 24th November. This is the local lead-up to our 10-days of actions and events coinciding with the COP28 United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai, UAE from next weekend. There is too much to say in less than 600 words, at a time when Climate is off the agenda and all protest actions are correctly focussed upon the genocide in Gaza. My attempt is to link the protests locally, identifying the common cause of climate collapse and genocide as Capitalism, and its most powerful presentation in the form of imperialism. the call for a joint protest march through the City centre is quite a gamble.

The TV news scenes flashed-up cars under water in Dubai following flash floods this week. The terms, “unprecedented” and “record-breaking” were spoken gravely for all the salaciousness and excitement that pulp-journalism could offer. They omitted to mention that Dubai will host the annual United Nations Climate Conference, a gathering of all interested parties next week. Corporations and their police allies will dominate the agenda.

This will be the COP28, in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, chaired by the oil magnate Sultan Al Jaber, managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Over the past thirty years (they missed-off a couple of meetings) the COP process have intended to agree on policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to impacts associated with climate change. 

They’ve failed miserably, the targets constantly revised upward, and with 2023 now witnessing the first period where global temperatures reached 2degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, the COP target being 1.5C. So much for greenwash talk. No wonder we’re protesting. 

Earlier this month, 9 women faced court charged with causing half-a-million pounds worth of criminal damage to the Canary Wharf headquarters of HSBC. None of the defendants, aged between 23 and 71, denied that, in April 2021, they used hammers and chisels to crack the windows of the Corporate headquarters and glued-on stickers reading “£80billion invested fossil fuels in the last five years” – “Just Stop Oil!”. 

The prosecution argued that, whatever their motives, there was no lawful excuse for what they did. last Thursday, the Jury disagreed, and unanimously found the women “Not Guilty”. Groups like this may be dismissed as troublemakers, but that was how people once responded to the suffragettes and those who marched in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Our attitudes may depend on how we think about Climate Change, and that will depend upon where in the World we live. After the case, one of the women, Susan, a retired community worker, said she’d spent her life caring for others. She quoted a UNICEF report detailing that weather disasters, exacerbated by climate change, permanently displaces 20,000 children from their homes every day. 

Most of us agree with Susan that our lives are inextricably linked with everyone else’s, not just inside our national boundaries but across the world. After all, the changing climate knows no national borders or separations caused by language of culture. What happens in the Antarctic has a direct bearing on weather conditions here. When people are permanently displaced by the destruction of their birthplace, happening now across the continents of Africa or Asia of South America, the countries of the North, so far less ravaged by fires and floods, and the desertification caused by high temperatures impossible to live through, feel the pressure of mass migration – Climate Refugees. We are all connected.

Scientists now observe that 2023 is the hottest year since records began. Indeed, global temperatures reached peaks not recorded in the evidence from trapped ancient gases in some half-a-million years – that is, before the dawn of our human species. That’s worth thinking about.

The UK government, alongside most across the world, is actively denying there’s a problem. Those who support them, and those who actively seek an early catastrophe, Armageddon in their lifetime, bullishly advertise and promote Climate Denial. There is a new movement, not those of us deeply concerned about the immediate threat of extreme weather to lives and livelihoods here as well as abroad. This far-Right movement has been named “Clexit”, and they, too are on the streets. Shouting out “Climate Exit”, they want complete withdrawal from all actions to limit Climate Change: the end of push towards electrification of transport; no investment in home insulation or heat pumps; more support and more money for new oil and gas fields. Let’s burn, burn, burn!

The Sunak Government has acceded. Most of even Johnson’s meagre measures to curb the emissions that cause global heating and climate collapse are being withdrawn. That’s the sub-text of this week’s Autumn Statement by the Chancellor. Where action to create new Climate Jobs and a low carbon economy can reflate and protect our economy, the domination of the oil corporations heralds ever-deeper disaster. Capitalist Business as usual in an era of fundamental change to our Planet. Absurd!