Tag: plymouth-uk

Demand Action on Fossil Fuels

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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!

May be an illustration of map and text

We Have to Keep protesting for Gaza!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column published in the Plymouth Herald on 5th December 2023. I am in tears and choked by the horror of the genocide in Gaza, the Second Nakba (Catastrophe) in which twice the numbers of Palestinians have now been displaced compared with the first Nakba in 1948, and 5 times the number of civilians killed, including at least 6,000 children. This will never be forgotten, but, as the bombing and destruction starts again, with 1.9 million people suffering without food, water or shelter, I can only voice my outrage and call everyone onto the streets.

It’s no good. We have to talk about Gaza.

There can be no greater expression of absolute power than in having fighter planes, drones, ships, tanks and super-armed militia pummel civilian neighbourhoods and then stop, let in tiny amounts of water and food, and then begin the killing all over again.

You may say “It’s War”. You may point to an enemy hidden amongst the civilians. You may choose sides. 

But, by any reckoning, 14,000 casualties in 7 weeks, set against 1500 (max) Israelis, is asymmetrical, in military terms, 10:1.

And for every person killed in Gaza there are at least 3 others injured with life-changing, debilitating wounds and without any decent hospital treatment as the fuel and medical supplies have run out. Now amounting to 38,000 injured – more than the entire population of Barnstaple.

The Israeli government this week declared that the entire region of Gaza is now subject to their military occupation and assault. This will not stop, they say, until all their goals are achieved. Their published goals include the extermination of the Hamas governance and infrastructure, but they do not disclose their entire plan. What happens afterwards?

There remains more than 2 million Gazan Palestinians – human beings by the way, now corralled into Southern Gaza, an area measuring 12 miles by 7 miles – smaller than our PL postcode area which crams-in fewer than 320,000. These people, to repeat, these 2 million people, include more than 1 million offered no more than crowded tents in winter weather conditions. They are now being continuously strafed by fighter planes, bombed, with reports of incendiary weapons that continue to burn on contact with skin, and targeted if they dare to move.

There are over 1,000 bomb craters visible from space in Gaza, the result of over 8,000 bombs drops on 12,000 targets in an area of just over six square miles – the size of Plymouth’s Devonport.  

We should remind ourselves that more than 5,000 of the dead are children below the age of 13, and 45% of those killed are women according to the United Nations medical officials there on the ground. The world has watched, the West supporting the death and destruction, the Global South (the majority of the world’s governments) condemning the deaths yet all nations united in doing nothing to end it. 

This so-called “war” is to continue at least over our Christmas period. In fact, it is intensifying. The United States have suggested that Israel should lower the proportion of civilian deaths during their “exercises”, but last Saturday, in one single day, 700 were killed. 

Most crucially for us, the UK has ramped-up its military support to Israel and activity in the occupation of Gaza. The Royal Air Force is conducting the drone surveillance flights using Shadow R1 reconnaissance aircraft over Gaza to track and target movements on the ground, whilst Commandos are deployed and Vanguard-class nuclear submarine supports two US aircraft carrier convoys in the southern Mediterranean Sea.

Such a huge use of military might against the impoverished and besieged people of Palestine is not only questionable, it is unconscionable. 

The British trade union movement called early-on for a ceasefire, mindful of the inequality in the level of military power and consequential one-sided civilian casualties. We cautiously welcomed the “lull” of last week, giving hope that it could be made permanent. The sheer horror of the continuation of the mass killing is made all more unjust by the sheer proven fact that it can be stopped at will. 

Specifically, the UK must stop arming Israel. Now! We have nothing to do but shout-out our opposition. The trade unions’ Day of Action on Thursday 7th December will see many workplaces and students stage walkouts for an immediate cessation to the killing.

The demand for a ceasefire is the only humane approach. The fact that our MPs and local politicians refuse to call for an end to the mass killing of children and civilians is the most seering indictment of their complicity, their support for UK military involvement tantamount to support for genocide, a war crime. 

For our part, we shall continue to protest and expose the hypocrisy and warmongering of our elected leaders. We can only ask that everyone of conscience and with any moral compass join us.

COP28 used for Corporate Deals!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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. 

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.