Tag: news

Another Year of Inaction on the Climate Disaster

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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. 

Climate Conference Wake-up Call

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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!

We are All Engaged in the Class War

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

This is a time of polycrisis. The New Age of Catastrophe. With 130,000 killed by the war in Ukraine to date, at least 10,000 in Gaza, and 20,000 children permanently displaced by the impact of climate change each day, we can all see and feel the crisis. The tension, the need, is to keep hold of the Big Picture whilst also acting upon the local and immediate. This is my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald printed 13th November 2023, my local chemist (a lifeline for some 3,000 people each week), is being shut down in the name of short-term profit by an offshore hedge fund consortium. This drip-drip-drip fof cuts to essential social infrastructure has to be challenged, alongside the global issues of imperialism and climate collapse.

They’re closing our local Boots the Chemist. The shop manages thousands of prescriptions each week. The pharmacist spends time with individuals, he knows us, advises when there’s no chance of a timely GP appointment, his staff offer a smile. This doorstep service ensures those with mobility challenges have local access to help. The chemists has been a central core of our personal security and sense of safety.

It’s just the latest service lost to our community. Most of us are experiencing enforced rationing as if it’s wartime.

Not only has the cost-of-living crisis cut our real-spending power – lowering wages and raising the prices of the necessities of life: shelter, food and utilities – but the human services for health and welfare have all but disappeared. The working class pay a great deal through taxation for a social infrastructure that is rapidly diminishing. In fact, 40% of gross domestic product each year goes into our State coffers as tax, and goes out again to maintain a semblance of society. Yet we feel ourselves to be getting less-and-less back from the taxes deducted from our wages and purchases. 

Our health services are in crisis, the educational standards of our children are declining by all international comparisons, the general housing stock has become both unaffordable and in need of urgent repairs, local government is going bankrupt causing care of the vulnerable to become all but unavailable. The community hubs of libraries, parks and recreational facilities, paid for from our Community Taxes, are crumbling from lack of maintenance.  

We are not in a State of War. So what is going on? 

Firstly, we live in an unequal society riven by social class. The descriptions above are not experienced by those in the top ten percent of the population with individual income above £50,000 a year or a bank stash hoarded from inherited wealth. The richest one percent of the population live lives wholly separated from the challenges most of us face daily.

Secondly, the incredible level of polarisation between rich and poor has, by and large, been funded by our taxes. This is best summed-up by even the most superficial consideration of the political creed of “Privatisation”. Tax-payers funds have been squandered on transferring all our essential services into the hands of private companies and their shareholders, started by the Labour Government of the mid-1970’s and accelerated by all from Thatcher to Sunak ever since. 

Our water was sold-off in the early 1980’s, since when £75 billion pounds has gone into shareholders private accounts whilst our rivers and coastal shores became polluted and the charges for fresh water and sewage disposal have risen to a point where many – yes many – can’t afford flush their toilet through the day. 

The privatisation of electricity and gas supplies has seen record profits, record dividends for the bosses and large stockholders, and record prices to a point where we are now expected to not heat our homes but huddle under blankets. 

Fuel prices rise and fall at the whim of producers, but at base are three times the price of five years ago and the profits are three times as high – all this with UK-based oil producers receiving at least £10.5 billion a year in subsidies from us, the tax-payers, whilst they pay next to nothing into the Exchequer. 

And that’s the third thing – profit. Britain has become an internationally low-waged, long working-hours economy. Small and even Medium Sized businesses, known as SMEs, are undoubtedly struggling, keeping wages low in order that the tax-payer donates to the wages of their workforce by paying Universal Benefit top-ups, whilst our taxes pay-out Housing Benefits, not to the tenant but to the landlord who has increased the rent to unaffordable prices, able to increase homelessness through the licence to evict without cause with two months notice. Private profit divides and rules us all. 

It’s all rotten. It is the big businesses, the transnational corporations who do not respect our national borders but demand tax-incentives – bail-outs and subsidies from our pay-ins – who are bleeding us dry. The hundreds of billions in tax relief for corporations dwarf the tax money spent on supporting the homeless or refugees who we are told to blame for our poverty.

And all the while, the corporations are looking to increase their profits and dividends at the expense of most of us. Smaller companies go to the wall, the larger ones seek to restrict services and sack staff solely in order to make ever-larger pay-outs to their owners. 

That’s why Boots the Chemist is closing our local pharmacy – private profit over human need. Our medical prescriptions deliver them millions in profits paid by us, the tax-payers. Boots, its private equity owners, Walgreens, based in Switzerland (for the tax-avoidance no doubt) made a profit of £137million last year, its boss taking home a £3,800,000 million pay cheque. Apparently that’s not enough.

It’s never enough, is it? The impact of the closure upon our community’s health will be severe, but the greed of the system of Capitalism doesn’t give a damn.

We are engaged in a war, currently one-sided – the Class War. We have to fight for a better system based upon need not profit! This week that fight demands a campaign to save our local pharmacy.

Protests are a call for Peace and basic Humanity

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 7th November. The censorship of the media still in accelerating swing, with employers banning discussion of Gaza or any signs of support for Palestinians in or around the workplace (a social work colleague of mine hauled before her manager last week fo stating her support for Gaza’s on Facebook!). The protests continue to build.

What would you most associate with Remembrance Day: the commemoration of a ceasefire at the end of the most horrific of all wars to date, or endorsing and celebrating war?

The answer is remembering the joy of Peace, of course. The remembrance element of 11th November each year is the emotional engagement with the moment the war ended, the two-minutes silence at 11am offering a moment of reflection of the sheer horror of warfare and empathising with all the individual war dead and their grieving relatives.  Initially the remembrance of those killed in the First World War, Remembrance Sunday has developed over recent decades to recall and ponder all wars, the dead, the injured and the scarred emotional memory of those who survive. 

In Britain, Remembrance Sunday has the King, Prime Ministers past and present, and all sections of the military establishment march through Whitehall, London, to the Cenotaph to lay wreaths and stand silently still in commemoration of those who died for the Country. It is a yearly moment of overt nationalism and military pride.

On the 11th November there is a two minute silence, usually falling on a busy week day. This year the 11th is a Saturday. Apart from the two-minutes of silence, often drowned-out by the beeping horns and cash-til pings of commerce, nothing else happens. The remembrance is for Sunday.

So it is with the utmost hypocrisy that a section of our Government and national media choose to vilify the huge numbers of people across Britain organising for one of the largest ever demonstrations in London taking place on Saturday. The march, sprawling across the centre of London but nowhere near to the Cenotaph, will be calling, resolutely, for Peace. 

An immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and Occupied West Bank, as demanded by the United Nations but denied by the military Israeli State, is all that will be called for.

The USA and UK deny that even a pause in the War in Gaza should take place. It is, by any standard, hardly a war. The Palestinian fighters have no tanks or fighter aircraft but have been constantly bombarded for 4 weeks by the most heavily armed State across the entire Middle East, resulting in more than 10,000 Palestinians killed including 4,000 children. 

Why shouldn’t we protest to put a halt to that? Millions in Britain and across the world are currently engaged in mass vigils, meetings and protest marches calling for a ceasefire in the war on Gaza, Palestine.

Nevertheless, our Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, calls us all supporters of terrorism and calls the protests, “hate marches”. The double standard is jaw-dropping in its sheer hypocrisy. The Prime Minister has warned of disruption at the Cenotaph on Sunday, when the Ceasefire march is taking place the previous day! This is baseless scaremongering of the highest order, and should be exposed as propaganda – the government’s ideological weaponisation of Remembrance Sunday is outrageous. 

Peace protesters care for humanity. We cannot stand by and watch war crimes without shouting-out for the carnage to stop. The Government, intent upon supporting western supremacy and imperialist interests across the Middle East, what is actually the “Arab World”, will obviously stop at nothing to shut down all opposition. 

Yet the protests are building, upwards of a million people expected on the streets of London this Saturday, with coachloads travelling from across the country including from Plymouth, despite a promised Police crackdown on all of us who protest. This Government-sponsored political offensive comes from the very far-right of the political spectrum, seeking urgent legislation to outlaw protests that oppose the ideology of a single political party, soon to be ousted from office. Whilst Prime Minister Sunak calls for arrests of those defending Palestinians, he will stand at the front of a march which will, in its ranks, host a contingent of the British fascist party, the National Front. 

It would seem it is no longer fascism that is the enemy, but, ironically, freedom of association. There are growing numbers of statements from individuals at work and students in colleges threatened with discipline and even dismissal over wearing badges or carrying flags in support of the Palestinian people. School students and teachers are being instructed not to discuss the War. The danger to democracy is quite obvious.

Trade unions will defend its members against such repression.