My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.7.26), only to find someone else had already thought of my strapline! Original ideas are only original to the thinker. It’s all been said before. And I must admit, now living through the second Labour Chancellor called Denis Healey, another Big Cuts cavalier, the deja vu of life is finally overwhelming me. Plus ca Change? Revolution, please. Please.

The unedited version below, or expand the pic for the printed version:

Burnham by name, Burn’em by intent:

This is not scaremongering! It is Science. Fact. “What we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly consider as normal.” That is the summarising comment from Mike Kendon, the UK Met Office lead author of the latest edition of the State of the UK Climate report. It has political undertones far wider than the weather..
The climate is not the same as the weather. Weather refers to the short-term conditions of the atmosphere, while climate describes the average weather conditions over a long period of time. The rapid and accelerating rise in average global temperatures is happening because heat is being trapped in the atmosphere and cannot escape. The sea sucks in 90% of the heat, expanding and evaporating ever faster, the increased moisture amplifying extreme heat and storms, winds and floods.
It is the agglomeration of gases we have been emitting by burning fossil fuels that has caused the climate change. Scientifically speaking – that is, as a matter of fact – to stop an accelerating and intensifying process towards ever greater extremes we have to stop emitting the gases that are the sole cause.
So, when the latest Prime Minister opens his term of office by announcing the extraction of more fossil fuels, oil and gas, from the Rosebank and Jackdaw North Sea stores, it can only be deduced that he, like all the others, defies science and flails in the face of Fact.
Burnham becomes a double entendre, both literal and ironic. Burnham by name, burn’em by intent. Let the country, nay, the World, fry. Yet another politician caving-in to the immense power of the fossil fuel lobbyists and oil corporations from Day One. The current status quo of Capitalism is safe in his hands. Nothing to worry about, fossil-fuel shareholders!
This is the extreme of idiocy. For survival, the entire energy infrastructure of the United Kingdom has to be transformed, right now, away from fossil fuel dependence. At a political level of imperative equal to the national engagement in a world war, all possible resource has to be diverted into cutting emissions and investing in localised energy production based upon renewable electricity generation. Our transmission grid and storage capacity has to be replaced, our energy use reduced.
Reindustrialisation should not continue Starmer’s rearmament, new tax-billions for the military-industrial complex should be diverted immediately to the millions of new engineering and technology jobs required for energy transformation. War is the greatest emitter of climate changing pollution, sucking life and livelihoods away from any sustainable future.
Nationalisation should end the £13bn a year tax support for the oil and gas companies here. They don’t need it and shouldn’t have it! The corporations making tens of thousands of millions of pounds in annual profits should repay, the money used instead to refurbish our homes ready to protect us from the extremes of heat and rain and damp. More than one million new jobs are urgently required to insulate at least 14 million of our existing homes and install solar panels on every roof, domestic thermal water heating and communal heat pumps.
The end of neoliberal economics should mean wealth and land taxes to redistribute resources to protect the working class from the climate extremes. The endless cuts to our emergency services have to be reversed. The thousands of lost jobs cut in the Fire Service reinstated and more, to manage the wildfires threatening rural and urban populations, and the flash floods causing homelessness and impoverishment.
Homeland security should prioiritise making us safe. Hospitals need restaffing now to organise for the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from the extreme weather. Security forces refocussed to provide rescue and refuge for the huge numbers of us now affected.
Employment rights and employer liabilities must be strengthened and enforced by powerful inspection regimes to ensure climate-proof workplaces and working conditions. We should not be forced to suffer for the climate-destroying greed and short-termism of the Capitalist class.
Climate Chaos is here. The first UK climate refugees are those in North Wales losing property and livelihoods to wind-whipped wildfires. This Autumn the flash floods will produce new homeless from the swamped basement flats in Plymouth. Somerset will be awash again. More than 1 in 5 UK homes are built on flood plains, all now threatened by extreme storms and sea level rise.
This is the climate emergency, declared a decade and 7 prime-ministers ago. For all the rhetoric, the true scale of the threat to the working class from climate change has not been addressed. With Burnham’s support for the new Cambo oil-and-gas field it would appear we have a leader even worse than Starmer. What a Con!
We will be protesting tomorrow at Downing Street to demand no new extraction and massive cuts to global heating emissions. Stop Rosebank! Invest in Climate Action Now!