Rupert's Read

Stop our beloved NHS from being privatised

2012-02-02T20:00:00.001Z

For the first time ever, an NHS hospital is being run by a private company, starting today. The hospital in question is Hinchingbrooke, in Cambridgeshire, here in the Eastern Region of England.

It's just plain wrong to allow a private company to make profits out of people's ill-health. This is a new stage in the privatisation of the NHS; we are losing Britain's most-loved institution, right now.

I have been to Hinchingbrooke and have stood with the workers and local people who have been campaigning for years to stop this NHS hospital from falling into private hands. Successive governments - first the so-called 'Labour' Party, and now the Conservative-LibDem Coalition - have done nothing to secure the future of Hinchingbrooke. Only the Green Party has stood up firmly for keeping our beloved NHS public. We now see the consequences of the Government's failure to help Hinchingbrooke: privatisation. Many more hospitals will now be privatised across this Region and across the country, unless together we stand up, say 'No more!', and stop the rot.

Invitation to #Norwich 'Plan B' Event

2012-02-02T19:13:00.001Z

Compass's 'Plan B: A good economy for a good society' event will take place on March 7th at 6.00pm, at the Unite the Union Building, 39 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1ES.

The debate will focus on setting out a vision for an alternative economic direction, building upon the Compass report 'Plan B: A good economy for a good society'. The event will include guest speakers Anna Coote, new economics foundation, Clive Lewis, Labour PPC for Norwich South, Prof Alan Finlayson, UEA, Dr Rupert Read, East of England Green Party Co-ordinator and Howard Reed, Co-editor of Plan B. The meeting will be chaired by Joe Cox (Compass).

This event is open to the public.

What is Plan B? Read the one page summary here> http://www.scribd.com/doc/71928938/Plan-B-What-is-it

Download the full publication here > http://compassonline.org.uk/publications

The A14 Challenge: Eastern Region Green Party response

2012-02-02T12:15:00.001Z

The government's consultation [ http://www.dft.gov.uk/consultations/dft-20111212/ ] on the future of the A14 has just closed. The Green Party has submitted its innovative response and today is making this public [See below for the full response, with details of the Green Party's alternative transport strategy].

Nobody can doubt that there are problems on the A14. The normal drive to work, slowed to a crawl on most days, the sitting in traffic jams waiting to get into Cambridge, the noise, and pollution, not to mention with all that traffic the amount of CO2 being released into the air. This is indeed a challenge that needs addressing. Which is why the Green Party has sent its proposals to Government on the A14 and what to do about it.

At present the Governments' answer is to build more roads, with an extra lane proposed around Kettering. Will this make a difference to the congestion around the area? Or will it just make things worse? It will certainly attract more traffic onto the road, and will therefore in our view only make for more congestion, more traffic jams, and more waiting to get into Cambridge. There are alternatives, and these would remove traffic, reduce congestion and remove some of the CO2 that would be created by the building of new roads. The Green Party is calling for:

· The use of the rail system to carry more goods, thus freeing up the roads.

· Reducing speeds of traffic to 60MPH thus saving on fuel and money, and making our roads safer with a lower speed limit.

· Better public transport at an affordable price.

· Better use of the guided bus way at Cambridge.

· Rather than driving, make shops local and in walking or cycling distance.

We cannot simply keep building more roads and using a finite resource for fuel, we have to look at ways to reduce. We could have the necessary infrastructure in place at less cost than the building of more roads. Lets make our Eastern Region a truly green and pleasant place to live, and lets start by reducing the vehicles on the road, and, as the advert once said 'Let the train take the strain.' If the government is truly intent on becoming the greenest Government, then it needs to look at the options that are for the benefit of everyone's health and welfare: Sustainable transport links, local shops and joined-up thinking on the rail network.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Eastern Region Green Party Response to 'the A14 Challenge':

An alternative transport strategy.

Prepared and issued on behalf of: Eastern Region Green Party

Modal Shift

There are major congestion problems on A14, especially around Kettering and between Huntingdon and Cambridge and with planned housing growth and freight traffic growth this will just get worse. An extra lane is proposed around Kettering and this is in latest govt spending plans announced late 2011. A new road between Ellington and Fen Drayton and upgrades as far as Fen Ditton was previously proposed at a cost of £1.2bn but this was scrapped in the CSR in 2010. Some minor junction works and improved signing have recently been approved for that section.

Instead of creating more capacity on the road - which would simply attract even more traffic - more journeys, for both freight and passengers, should be shifted to rail in order to reduce the amount of road traffic. Adding more lanes or building new roads, whether tolled or free, is not the solution.

Mobility has traditionally been seen as the aim of transport. However we believe that accessibility, rather than mobility, should be the aim. We need transport in order to gain access to shops, work, leisure, friends, etc. By ensuring that people have access to facilities for shopping, work and leisure nearer to their homes we can improve accessibility but reduce mobility, the overall amount of transport that is required. Communities should also become more self-sufficient in order to reduce the amount and distance that goods need to be transported - local production for local needs.

A sustainable transport policy must also aim to reduce the impact on the environment of our transport systems. This includes reducing energy consumption from non-renewable sources, reducing air pollution and protecting the environment. We should also aim to make transport safer and healthier both for those using it and for the whole community.

When assessing the merits of any particular mode of transport we need to consider its social, environmental and economic impact. National transport policy over the last few decades has tended to focus primarily on the last of these criteria to the exclusion of the first two. All three need to be considered.

We need to reduce the overall amount of travel required and shift to less environmentally damaging modes of transport. In the long distance transport context this entails reducing car, lorry and airplane use and increasing travel by a more environment-friendly mode of transport, such as trains.

Land use planning and transport have significant effects on each other. They need to be considered together.

There should be more integration of residential, commercial and recreation facilities. The development of out-of-town hypermarkets should be halted immediately. Measures need to be taken to encourage small local shops on estates and to revitalise town centres. By making shopping facilities available closer to where people live and in places accessible by public transport car use can be reduced as people shift to walking, cycling and public transport. Future large scale developments should be on public transport corridors.

Issues – road

Traffic is already above the normal carrying capacity of such a road and is forecast to increase. There are major congestion problems on A14, especially around Huntingdon and Cambridge. There are frequent delays due to accidents and increased CO2 emissions due to volume of traffic and stop/start behaviour.

About 20% of the traffic is HGVs and 70% cars. However HGVs take up 2.5 times as much road space as cars. When this is factored in HGVs take up 38.5% of the road space and cars 53.8%.

Freight through Haven Ports (Felixstowe Docks and Harwich Bathside) is expected to double or treble over next decade. If the same proportion as now, about 75%, goes by road this would significantly increase the number of HGVs on A14.

Two major freight flows share the section of A14 between Spittals jn (J23) and Girton jn (J29). These are an east-west flow between HavenPorts and Midlands and a north-south flow between North and London/Channel Tunnel via A1 and M11. There should be a rail alternative for each of these flows.

Some journeys on A14 are quite short, for example commuting into Cambridge from nearby villages. Better bus services could reduce the use of A14 for many of these short trips, which tend to be on the busiest sections. CGB might help with this.

Although the road is mostly 2 lane dual carriageway it tends to operate as 2 single lanes, one with slower HGVs and one with faster cars.

Many accidents near junctions due to traffic weaving between lanes.

Interventions – road

Reduce speed limit on section between Huntingdon and Cambridge J21-J31 to 60mph. This will mean that HGVs, limited to 56mph, and cars are travelling at similar speeds. This will make it safer and smooth the flow. There would be CO2 reductions too. Journey time at a constant 60mph is only 2 min 9 sec longer than journey time at a constant 70mph. Since traffic is often stop/start now with a smoother flow resulting from reduced speed the journey time should be about the same as now or possibly improved.

Reduce amount of road traffic by shifting both people and freight traffic onto rail. Reduces CO2 emissions too.

Workplace Parking Levy could be introduced in Cambridge. This would provide an incentive for both employees and employers to make more use of public transport.

Improve bus services between Cambridge and surrounding towns and villages. Now that the controversial Cambridge Guided Busway has been built there should be more bus services on it and more incentives to use them.

There should be more Cycleways linking surrounding towns and villages with Cambridge and the new cycleway alongside the CGB should be enhanced.

Issues – rail

Missing sections of rail network for east-west travel by freight and passengers.

East-west routes not electrified.

Bottlenecks at single track sections and flat (at grade) junctions.

Long stretches where slower freight trains cannot be overtaken by faster passenger services. This limits capacity for both types of service.

Most freight trains between Haven Ports and Midlands go via London. This is a long way round and takes paths that are needed for more passenger services on GEML, NLL and WCML.

Interventions – rail

Re-open whole of East West Rail Link (EWRL) to provide rail route for both passenger and freight services between Cambridge, Bedford, Milton Keynes and Oxford. This enables passenger services such as Norwich-Ely-Cambridge-Bedford-MK-Oxford-Reading and Ipswich-Ely-Cambridge-Bedford-MK-Oxford-Bristol. Together with services on existing lines such as Ipswich-Ely-Peterborough-Leicester-Birmingham, Stansted-Cambridge-Ely-Peterborough-Leicester-Birmingham and Norwich-Ely-Peterborough- Liverpool there would be a half-hourly service on all of the east-west lines serving Cambridge and Ely.

Interchanges with WAML, ECML, MML, WCML, GWML would provide access to towns in the Home Counties to north and west of London and to most of Midlands, North, Wales and South West. This could significantly reduce the number of cars travelling long distance journeys on the A14. It enables freight services from Haven Ports to South West and S Wales avoiding London and increases capacity for freight services to West Midlands.

The Western section of EWRL, Oxford-Bedford, has recently been given approval and is expected to be in operation by 2017. It is estimated to cost about £250m. The eastern section, Cambridge-Norwich/Ipswich already exists.

The missing Central section of EWRL, Bedford-Cambridge, should now be developed and completed as soon as possible. A number of options for routes are under consideration but the most likely route is to use the existing rail line from Cambridge as far as Letchworth or Hitchin. From there it can either use the ECML to Sandy and then a new line to Bedford, partially on an old alignment, or a new line to Luton, then the MML and a short new chord from north of Ampthill tunnel to Milbrook on the Marston Vale line. Depending on the route chosen, about 10-15 miles of new/re-instated line is required. Cost should be of the same order as for the western section.

Raise line speeds on Ipswich-Ely-Peterborough and Norwich-Ely-Cambridge routes to benefit passenger services. Electrify all of Felixstowe-Nuneaton route.

The Ipswich-Ely-Peterborough-Nuneaton route has recently had the gauge increased to W10 to allow trains to carry 9’ 6” containers on normal flat wagons. However its capacity needs to be increased to allow more freight trains to use that route. Planned interventions will raise the capacity from 10 trains per day (tpd) to 24 tpd by 2014. However to accommodate growth in Haven Ports and more modal shift this needs to be doubled or trebled.

More and longer goods loops to enable freight trains to be overtaken by faster passenger trains on routes between Felixstowe and Midlands/North.

Redouble all remaining single track sections of line between Felixstowe and Nuneaton.

Improve capacity of junctions where freight trains have to cross the path of passenger services. Ideally this would be by creating grade-separated junctions (flyovers) but this is expensive and requires land outside the railway corridor. In short term enhance capacity by providing 3 or 4 track sections at and near the junctions, especially between staggered junctions. Ely North jn should be re-instated as a double junction.

New chords, which are needed at junctions at Ipswich and Nuneaton, are underway and capacity is being increased at Peterborough as part of station improvements there.

The line between Cambridge and Newmarket is mostly single track and has only an hourly service. This line was formerly double track and it should be re-instated as double track. A more frequent service, say half hourly, can then be operated. Intermediate stations at Cherry Hinton and Fulbourn should be re-opened. A Cambridge-Newmarket service could be extended to Soham and Ely. This would require a 0.5km chord to be re-instated just north of Newmarket and Soham station to be re-opened.

The section of MML through Leicester station area, between Wigston jn and Syston jn, is shared by EMT HST passenger services, freight trains between Felixstowe and W Midlands/North West and a variety of other services. It was previously 4 tracks but is now a mixture of 2, 3 and 4 tracks. The whole section should be re-instated to 4 tracks with a pair of freight tracks bypassing the station platforms.

The government has recently announced that the lines between Syston Jn and Stoke on Trent will be upgraded to W10 gauge. This will provide another route for freight trains between Felixstowe and the north west, avoiding the busy areas around Leicester and Nuneaton. There is a need to improve the capacity of junctions on this route where freight trains have to cross the path of passenger services. In short term enhance capacity by providing 3 or 4 track sections at and near the junctions. This would be around Trent South Jn/SheetStores Jn and Stenson Jn/North Stafford Jn.

Another route between Felixstowe and W Midlands via Corby and Market Harborough should be considered. This would require new chords at Manton Jn and Kettering North Jn. The lines from Manton Jn to Kettering and Kettering to Wigston Jn would need upgrading to W10 gauge. The former has 3 tunnels on it, which may be prohibitively expensive to upgrade.

The former rail line between Wellingborough and Northampton could be re-instated. This would enable a Peterborough-Corby-Kettering-Wellingborough-Northampton-Rugby-Coventry-Birmingham passenger service. This would take traffic off the western section of the A14. The only major infrastructure required would be a bridge under the A45 near Wellingborough, where the former trackbed has been obstructed by the construction of the A45.

The capacity for freight trains between the Channel Tunnel and the North of England should be increased. Currently these services have to go around the south and west sides of London on very busy lines and so the number of such trains is very limited. Channel Tunnel freight trains could run on HS1 as far as Barking, where there is a connection to the Network Rail lines, and continue on WAML, ECML, MML or WCML. HS1 already has freight loops to allow freight trains to be overtaken by faster passenger trains. Freight traffic that currently uses the A1-A14-M11 roads could then be transferred to rail.

Most of the HGVs using the A14 are domestic freight, not international. Some of this could be transferred to rail but there is no Rail Freight Terminal (RFT) in the Cambridge area that can handle containers. There should be one. Possible locations would be at Ely RFT or Chesterton sidings. Any RFT should be well away from residential areas and should have good links to the trunk road network. Some of the domestic freight traffic could then be transferred from road to rail.

There should be a charge on all imported containers that leave the port of entry by road vehicle. This would be to provide a financial incentive for onward shipment by rail or water, rather than road, and to raise money for more facilities for them. The ports of entry would include major ports, ferry terminals, airports and the Channel Tunnel terminal. The charge would apply to each TEU (twenty foot equivalent unit). There would be an exemption for any container delivered to a local destination, within 25 miles of the port of entry. The funds raised would be invested in the provision of facilities and enhanced capacity for rail freight and water borne freight.

Most of the former rail line between Cambridge and Huntingdon has recently been converted to a Guided Busway. This is regrettable because it could otherwise have been used as part of another east-west rail route, which would have more closely paralleled the A14. If the CGB fails then the route could be converted back to rail. Alternatively a new rail line could be constructed alongside the A14 road from Huntingdon to Histon, then running alongside the CGB from Histon to the mainline at Chesterton.

Other former rail lines between Huntingdon and Kettering and Kettering and Northampton, together with connecting lines, could then form a new rail route between Cambridge and Northampton, giving onward access to towns such as Coventry. However this would require several sections of line on new alignments and so would be more difficult and more expensive than re-instating tracks on old alignments.

Unique interdisciplinary Masters in Environmental-Sciences-and-Humanities launching at UEA

2012-01-28T18:23:00.010Z

I helped put together this exciting new programme; let me know if you are interested in being one of our first cohort of students!

#Norwich event: Plan B [vs. Plan C...]

2012-01-26T11:24:00.001Z

Compass are having a ‘Plan B’ event in Norwich on Wednesday 7^th March. Do come!

It will take place from 6PM to 7:30PM at the Unite building (39 Thorpe Road). Speakers already confirmed are:

Anna Coote (nef)

Alan Finlayson (academic, UEA)

Clive Lewis (Labour candidate for Norwich South)

And myself.

See http://www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=13985 for my general take…

Boris-Island: The real reason why we are even talking about this:

2012-01-26T08:47:00.001Z

I studied Philosophy at Oxford University with London's Mayor Boris Johnson. I have watched Boris's career since then with interest, including his stint as MP for Henley, near Heathrow. I find his proposal for a massive, madly-expensive new airport in the Thames Estuary to be nothing more than a piece of envioronmental vandalism. The real reason that this location is proposed is obvious: it is so that Boris's friends in Henley dont have so many planes flying over them...

It's great that there is to be no 3rd runway at Heathrow. But: Why should the people of Essex have to suffer more noise, pollution and traffic congestion than there is already? Just so that rich Tories living west of London can have a quieter life?!

It is crystal clear now that there was no environmental reason for the no-3rd-runway-at-Heathrow decision. . .

Lets put the vast sums of money that would be spent on this proposed eyesore in the Thames Estuary to better use, to making the quality of all our lives better, right here and now. Lets take the pressure off our roads and invest in a better rail network here in the East, rather than loading more pressure onto those roads by going ahead with this insane and retrograde proposal for a mega-expensive new airport in the estuary.

Among all the Political Parties it is only the Green Party that is prepared to tell the truth on this one. The last shred of environmental credibility has been thrown away by this Government, and the quality of life of people in the Eastern Region of this country is now hanging by a thread: all so that the government's rich friends living in and to the west of London dont have to suffer more overflights...

GREEN HOUSE REPORT ON GUARDIANS FOR THE FUTURE: MESSAGE OF SUPPORT from Hungary

2012-01-21T15:56:00.001Z

A message from Sandor Fulop, the Hungarian ombudsman for future generations, in support of my guardians proposal [This message was read out at the event launching my report in Westminster, last week]:

MESSAGE OF SUPPORT

TO THE LAUNCH OF THE GREEN HOUSE REPORT ON GUARDIANS FOR THE FUTURE

It is my great regret that I cannot take part in this event because of organisational and financial reasons. My heart is with you and I fully support the idea developed by Mr. Read about the guardians for future generations.

To my view, first of all we should not refer to the future generations as "they", since actually we ourselves are future generations, too, as we would like to enjoy liveable urban and rural environment, drinkable water, edible food etc. in 5 or 10 years from now. However, our decision-makers, when ruling over huge sums of money on nation-wide bureaucracies, seldom think ahead even for that long. The next closing of the fiscal year, the next report to the Parliament or, the longest possible, the next election represent their horizon. Naturally, when our societies follow this rather short-sighted practice, they pay absolutely no attention to further future generations, that is to the fate of our children and grandchildren, whom we do love otherwise. Isn't this a really unnatural, schizophrenic situation?

But let's put aside our nearer or further future for a few moments, and let's deal with here and now. Climate change delivers already with orders of magnitude more frequent extreme whether phenomena than a century ago. Every 20 minutes we lose one living species from the world and we never lose just one of our mates: every creature exists in complex systems, every loss strikes an irrecoverable wound on the network, whereas more and more elements will fade away soon. We use tens of thousands of chemicals, while we do not fully know their effects on the environment and on the human health. Some of these chemicals are abandoned at poorly insulated landfills, or are illegally treated, others get incinerated potentially with even worse effects. Our arable lands and forests are disappearing, even in Europe in a single country, Hungary we lose 100 hectares green surface per day as an average.

Whose task is it to estimate these tremendous threats on us and to plan our fight for survival? Our governments? They are overwhelmed with our days' short-term problems, which are important, but not the only problems a reasonable society should tackle with. Nevertheless they close these problems into the quarantine of environmental ministries or inspectorates, where a couple of committed bureaucrats try to cope with tiny parts of the enormous system of environmental and connected social, economic problems. Should environmental NGOs, think-tanks estimate the threats and plan how to survive them? They usually have the proper attitudes and approaches, but are too small and lack resources to act effectively. They have seldom broken through the perception threshold of our societies so far. Our only hope is if all the interested and concerned organisations and persons form national and international networks. These networks in turn shall develop new institutional solutions and this way further strengthen themselves. The new institutions should be based on a logic that is different from the existing ones: their primary task should be to confront our societies with the facts of environmental disasters and their consequences, and also to organise and empower networks that might be able to help our societies and cultures to survive.

The Hungarian Ombudsman for Future Generations, the New Zealand environmental parliamentary commissioner, the Israeli and the Finnish parliamentary commissions for future generations, the New Jersey chief environmental prosecutor, the Austrian and Canadian regional/national environmental ombudspersons, similar organisations planned in Wales and Malta were, are and will be good examples for such institutional solutions that seem to spread out in the world. Even more important, if they could get a global counterpart, a guardian or high representative for future generations somewhere in the organisational structure of the United Nations, and also in some of the regional administrations, such as the EU.

I am convinced that we shall keep fighting for more such institutional innovations in the name of intergenerational justice and also in the name of our present constitutional values and the basic human sense and interests. Our ancestors were able to live in peace with nature and with their past and future generations. We have to learn it again and to recreate these functions and institutions that serve our survival. This is our only chance we should not miss it.

Budapest, 9 January 2012

Mr. Sándor Fülöp

@CarolineLucas on BBC Question Time, tonight!

2012-01-19T20:28:00.001Z

Caroline will appear on BBC Question Time at 10.35pm this evening, alongside
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party, Stephen Twigg
MP, Labour's shadow education secretary Green MP, Germaine Greer, feminist
writer and academic, and Charles Moore, columnist and former editor at the
Telegraph and the Spectator.

The programme will be available to watch again here once it has been
broadcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01b3cdw

Watch me on Beeb on 'Boris-Island'

2012-01-19T08:40:00.001Z

BBC TV last night: Go 8 minutes in to see my take on the government's airport expansion plans: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b019lr20/Look_East_East_18_01_2012/

What is liberty?: A podcast

2012-01-18T21:36:00.001Z

Have a listen to this: http://rupertread.fastmail.co.uk/What%20is%20liberty%3F

A talk given by me to UEA's undergrad philsoc today.

Warning: large file, will take some time to download...

Cafe Conversations, Spring 2012

2012-01-13T07:55:00.007Z

Philosophy Series 2 January 25th to 28th February - Marzano's, The Forum

A second series of evening cafes organised and hosted by UEA's School of Philosophy (Rupert Read and Chad Ryan) has been announced for January and February. Discuss, debate and discover in an informal setting with a variety of expert hosts. Topics include why we feel emotion for fictional characters and why we seem to have lost our sense of magic in the modern world. For the full programme click here.

Podcast of my Parliament talk yesterday on breaking the culture of political short-termism

2012-01-11T17:26:00.001Z

Have a listen!: http://rupertread.fastmail.co.uk/%27Podcast%27%20of%20full%20%27guardians%27%20report%20launch%20event%20at%20HofC%20

Warning: This is a VERY big file you need to download, to listen to my talk and to the discussion... But it's worth it! It was quite an event...

Podcast of 'guardians of the future' talk at COMPASS!

2012-01-11T16:15:00.001Z

Have a listen to my talk at yesterday's Compass 'Progressive Alliance' meeting, on the 'guardians for future generations' idea.

[Download, and then play. [Warning: this is a very large file!]]

http://rupertread.fastmail.co.uk/My%20guardians%20talk%20(and%20discussion)%20at%20Progressive%20Alliance

'Guardians' on Liberal Conspiracy - have a read!

2012-01-11T14:55:00.001Z

My latest on @LibCon: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2012/01/11/a-radical-idea-to-elect-guardians-to-protect-future-generations/

ONEWORLD NEWS: Welcome to 2012!

2012-01-07T16:10:00.000Z

[For more, goto oneworldcolumn.org ]

As the struggle for global resources - energy, minerals, agricultural land, water - increases we'll look at the the widespread pressure for social justice and protection of the earth. As the corporate control of the world tightens (1%), we'll reflect on the collective people's movement for democratic change, that began in 2011, with the (99%) protesters of the Arab Spring, continued with the indignados of Spain and Greece, and the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park in New York and hundred of cities around the world.

As the government continues its austerity drive and support of the City of London and the banks, we'll keep supporting those involved with land rights, community ownership, and defence of our public services. As well as facing the hard and difficult issues, we will include the positive moves that are changing the restrictive patterns within our social fabric. We'll be looking at the grassroots movements that create an alternative infrastructure as the global economic systems falter, a "downshift" culture of sharing resources and skills: neighbourhood energy schemes, community kitchens and CSAs.

We will looking at the bigger picture set within a local framework and highlighting subjects that are often ignored or minimised in mainstream culture, from climate change to nuclear energy. We will be making links between all these subjects in order to further strengthen our common intent to bring about a fair, sustainable and connected OneWorld. Hope you will join us!

Writing on the Edge, 2011

In 2011 we relaunched ourselves as a blog with a party at the EPIC Media Centre in Norwich and decided we would keep posting our columns each Saturday and also invite guest writers to contribute and include occasional news and events posts.

We started the year reporting from the front line of the cuts, as February demonstration in Norwich rallied on the steps of of County Hall. Guest writer, Andrew Boswell wrote about the closure of essential child protection services, Jan Ainsley about the threatened NHS and Mark Watson about the Lowestoft Against the Cuts Public Workers Strike Rally later in November.

2011 was an activist year, in which progressive groups came together as never before. and though we continued to write on traditional OWC issues, such as military and nuclear power, there were unexpected events started to appearing in the world and in our columns - most strikingly the people's movements in the Arab nations and the Occupy movement in the West. Trevor Philips wrote from the squares in Athens, Charlotte Du Cann from Hay Hill about Occupy Norwich. It was a year where the word capitalism no longer belonged to the rhetoric of the left. Everyone started to look at the economic system by which we have lived our lives, about systemic collapse. about ethical responsibility and solidarity. Mark Crutchley reflected on financial tipping points and peak oil, Rupert Read asked: Are we a consumerist or a producerist society?

None of us had any anwers.

But one thing we knew: like all civilisations. who have risen and fallen, our future will be determined in terms of our relationship with food and energy. As land grabs increase in Indonesia, Africa and China and climate change destabilises the growing patterns of many of of world's staple crops, we looked at the depletion of f ish in the oceans, the diminishing water tables. protests against the proposed introduction of GM farming into Britain and the agricultural lobbying that goes on behind the scenes. We looked at the way food is considered as a commodity and speculated on in the global markets and the warning signs of collapse in the decline of bees and the negative effects of factory farming on our collective health and well being.

Some of our 2011 posts concerned peak oil and looked at the accountability of the companies still making huge profits from fossil fuels the cost of the environment, the climate and local people. At the same time we celebrated the resistance to this, such as the KEYSTONE XL Pipeline campaign. This protest against the unconventional tar sands oil had its first success last year as 10,000 people surrounded the White House and the proposal for a pipeline from Canada-Texas was delayed, awaiting further research. This was the biggest environmental protest in the United States since the 1970s and over a thousand people were arrested including 350.0rg organiser Bill McKibben and James Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist.

There was also widespread protest mounted against "unconventional" shale gas extraction using a process called hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", which halted excavations in many places in the US and also in Britain where the process is being trialled in Lancashire. There were several national campaigns launched, as the countryside came under further threat for housing and road development (not least in the local NDR proposals) and bio-mass and biofuel power stations planned to be built around the British coastline. Increasingly it became clear that these moves were sparking a popular re-engagement with politics and ethics, that had almost disappeared from contemporary culture. Reflecting on these shifts, we considered putting ourselves on the line and creating an alternative to the mainstream media that insists that the world will thrive when economic growth returns in a business-as-usual paradigm. We know it won't.

But it might just thrive for other reasons.

If you would like to contribute news or features to the OneWorld Column please get in touch at oneworldcolumn AT gmail.com

Occupy Earth poster at Keystone Pipeline protest outside the White House; the ST Valentine's Unneccesary Massacre; Chevron lawsuit in Ecuadar, Amazon Watch; at Lowestoft Fair Pensiions rally; the AIRPLOT at Heathrow, reclaiming the field by Grow Heathrow.

Saudi's Hidden Energy Crisis

2012-01-07T16:07:00.001Z

Now it gets interesting/terrifying...:

	Middle East and North Africa Programme Analysis


The Energy, Environment and Development Programme at Chatham House has published a new report on energy security in Saudi Arabia:

Burning Oil to Keep Cool: The Hidden Energy Crisis in Saudi Arabia

Programme Report by Glada Lahn and Paul Stevens, December 2011.

Key points:

Domestic energy demand growth in Saudi Arabia is cause for international concern. If it continues at the current rate, it could jeopardize the country's ability to stabilize world oil markets.

Given Saudi Arabia's level of dependence on oil revenues, excessive consumption will cause economic and social pressures long before oil exports end – within a decade if nothing changes.

Current policies are not enough. Planned additions of renewable power supply would help maintain the fiscal balance for an additional two to three years; given the lead times nuclear power would have little or no impact.

Huge economic, social and environmental gains from energy conservation are possible in Saudi Arabia but the long period of low prices and the bureaucratic structure of the state present several challenges to implementing effective pricing policy and regulatory measures.

Fear of confronting these challenges has deterred meaningful government action in the past. However, some immediate, targeted investments could produce effective results even in the absence of price reforms.

Raising prices is politically difficult but international experience can help in preparing society through a range of efficiency, educational and infrastructure adaptation measures to smooth the transition. This must be done within a package of measures that increase private-sector employment for Saudi nationals.

Read the full report >>


	Further Resources


	Future Trends in the GCC Countries \| MENA Programme Project We are starting a new stream of work focusing on future scenarios for the political and economic development of the GCC states, and this webpage brings together our most recent analysis and reports on the region.

Keeping it in the family | Article for Foreign Policy by Jane Kinninmont | November 2011
Senior Research Fellow Jane Kinninmont explores the dynamics of the Saudi royal succession.

Investing in Renewable Energy in the MENA Region: Financier Perspectives | Energy, Environment and Development Programme Working Paper by Kirsty Hamilton | June 2011
This paper finds that there is significant interest in investing in renewable energy in the MENA region, but financiers would like more clarity on policy from regional governments.


	The Political Outlook for Saudi Arabia \| MENA Programme Workshop Report \| May 2011 This report summarises discussions which covered both Saudi domestic politics and Saudi Arabia's position in a changing Middle East.


	About the Middle East and North Africa Programme

The Middle East and North Africa Programme carries out in-depth research and convenes discussions on the politics, societies, economics and security of the region.

View more information on:

For further information about the MENA Programme, please feel free to contact Kate Nevens on knevens@chathamhouse.org or +44 (0)20 7314 3624.


	The MENA Programme on Twitter Follow our official MENAP account at @CH_MENAP, as well as our Yemen and Egypt projects @Yemen_Forum and @EgyptDialogue





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Film of the last major sea surge

2012-01-07T13:30:00.001Z

The East Anglian Film Archive has just released on the web a thirteen minute film of the 1953 East Anglian Sea Flood. It can be viewed by going to http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/205529 Check out the first couple of minutes of it!

This will bring back memories of fifty-nine years ago to many mature people, and hopefully act as a stark warning to those who are now aiding and abetting the loss of our sea defences...

[H.T. Pat Gowen.]

My 'Guardians' proposal in the GUARDIAN

2012-01-04T15:35:00.001Z

My new 'guardians for future people' proposal [that Caroline Lucas will be hosting a meeting on next week with me in the House of Commons] is in The _Guardian_!: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2012/jan/04/climate-politics-future-generation-justice?intcmp=122

['Guardians' in The Guardian ; makes sense, I guess...!]

Do comment below the story there, if you have a comment. (Especially a nice one! ;-)

My report launching at 'Green House' Parliamentary event next week

2012-01-03T12:02:00.001Z

Radical thinktank report calls for institution of 'guardians' for future generations

In a new report to be launched at the House of Commons on 10^th January 2012, Green House think tank Chair Dr. Rupert Read (that's me! ;-) will propose radical constitutional reform to Parliament in order to create strong 'guardians' to protect future generations' basic needs. In order to actualise this, the 'Guardians for future generations' report suggests creating a 'super-jury', picked by chance (as juries are) from the population at large, charged with preserving the basic needs of future generations, to be placed above the upper house.

The Guardians' central powers would be a veto over new legislation that would damage / compromise the basic needs of future people, and a right to force a review of existing legislation that is already damaging their basic needs.

· The 'Guardians for future generations' report will be launched at 5pm [for 5.30]on January 10^th 2012, in Committee Room 5, House of Commons. The meeting will be hosted by Dr. Caroline Lucas MP, Leader of the Green Party, and will also be addressed by Jon Cruddas MP of Labour and by Government Minister Norman Baker MP. Representatives of the 'Alliance for future generations' and the 'Intergenerational Foundation' will also be on hand to offer backing to the issuing of the report.

· The guardians report can be purchased here: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/guardians-of-the-future/18743272 . By Jan. 10, it will be available for free download online at the Green House website.

· Further information about Green House think tank can be found at http://www.greenhousethinktank.org

Summary of report findings:

'Democracy' means 'government by the people'; but who are 'the people'?

Society exists over time and decisions taken today can have significant consequences for people yet to be born. This report argues that the interests of future generations should be formally represented within our existing parliamentary democracy. In other words: Future people should be included among 'the people'.

Building on the precedent of Hungary's innovative office of Ombudsman for Future Generations, the report proposes the creation of a new legislative structure Guardians of Future Generations. The members of this body would be selected by sortition, as is current practice for jury service, in order to ensure independence from present-day party political interests.

The Guardians would have a power of veto over legislation that was likely to have substantial negative effects for society in the future, and perhaps also the right to review major administrative decisions which substantially affected future people and the power to initiate legislation to preserve the basic needs and interests of future people.

[The report argues that two facts make the proposal especially timely; first, the government's intention to become 'the greenest government ever', contrasted with its closure of institutions designed to maintain our ecosystems for the future; second, the current process of radical constitutional reform (most notably, potential democratisation of the House of Lords).]

A New Year e-message:

2011-12-31T10:58:00.001Z

What a stunning year 2011 has been. Full of hope and horror. 2012 will see the continuation of the year of revolutions in the Arab world, including probably the fall (most probably, I would guess, the death) of Assad and I hope that real change will come to our continent, too. For, while we complacently think that we at least live in democracies, the truth is otherwise.

With the intensification of the financial crisis in Europe, which will I believe probably get much worse in the coming year, and with the coming to power of some 'technocratic' (read NOT democratic, tacitly very right-wing, pro-finance) governments, we cannot avoid now facing a defining question: _Are_ the nations of Europe really serious about becoming _democracies_ at all? I say 'becoming', because 'Democracy', etymologically, involves the people governing: Does anyone seriously believe that the people (rather than 'the markets') govern, today, in countries like ours? The financial crisis, and now the Euro-crisis, only make this elephant-in-the-room question all the starker, and a negative answer to it all the more obvious.
The Occupy movement has arisen as a powerful response to this appalling undemocratic inegalitarianism: Europe's child, in a way, of the Arab Spring.

So: I think it very important that we reject the widespread conservative/elitist failure to consider even for a moment the only way in which this crisis is actually likely to be solved: by a _deepening_ of democracy (rather than by its suspension, as has already pretty much explicitly happened in Greece and Italy). Here, the Occupy movement offers more than just inspiration: it offers an actual model. If our societies were actually allowed to become democratic, they would, I suggest, opt for a viable way out of the crisis, implementing the ideas offered by the likes of Steve Keen, Ann Pettifor, Caroline Lucas, Richard Murphy, and Nicholas Shaxson: a general debt jubilee, capital controls, real nationalisation or remutualisation of the banks, governments regaining control of the creation of money, a sustained assault on tax havens, a real Green New Deal, and so on. Whereas all that the technocrats will have to offer is yet more bailing out of the 1% and endlessly ruthlessly inegalitarian regimes.
If we had more democracy, rather than less, then we might even finally have a Europe which would do right by us, the 99%. Imagine that

So: I think that 2012 will be a crucial year for determining whether we start to live in democracies, or whether we lose even what power and financial resource we currently have.

Meanwhile, the huge financial and political threat hanging over us can make it hard to think long-term. But that is what we must do, with regard to the even greater long term challenges facing us.

That is why I wrote this piece, for Green House, on the attitude we need to have toward how to take care of the future: http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/page.php?pageid=gases . I hope you will find it a suitable seasonal offering

Solidarity for 2012!

Rupert.

Downing Street e-petition to eject Assad's diplomats from Britain

2011-12-26T12:53:00.001Z

The liberated regimes in Tunisia and Libya have closed Syria's embassy there. It is time for Britain to follow suit...:

SIGN (as I have), and then spread the word! http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/25418 ...To boot the war-criminal Syrian regime's embassy out of Britain.

These Downing Street petitions can make a real impact - if they get thousands of signatories. Help make sure that this one does!

The Syrian army is killing its own people with impunity right now, in Homs: https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23homs . This is the least that we can do, to try to make sure that, before too long, the killers can ge stopped.

That's what comes of becoming a Tory...

2011-12-23T19:12:00.002Z

Reality bites...

How to relate to the future: Justice or Love?

2011-12-23T15:17:00.001Z

My Christmas 'Love-Gas', has just gone live over at the GreenHousethinktank site: http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/page.php?pageid=gases

Have a read; and greetings of the season!

Defend Our Services

2011-12-19T17:43:00.002Z

Me protesting outside City Hall on the National Day of Strike Action against the cuts on Wednesday 30th November 2011.

#Durban : The most positive part of the outcome

2011-12-13T12:21:00.001Z

The beginning of the end for the Kyoto 'Annex 1' vs 'non_Annex 1' distinction is crucial. This opens the way for the starting-in-2020 climate agreement (or maybe 2017?) promised in Durban to be something modelled on Contraction and Convergence (or on GDRs, etc). This gives a crucial opening to achieve for the first time an agreement which encompasses everyone, is just, and is effective. So, although the long delay may well prove fatal, especially to AOSIS countries and LDC countries, we do now at least have a _chance_, for the first time, of achieving what we as a species need through the COP process.
So: one cheer for Durban.
----------------------------------------

For all things Rupert, goto
www.rupertread.net

Think/Act longterm to stop #climate catastrophe: here's how:

2011-12-11T17:41:00.001Z

The dodgy deal at #Durban (essentially, nothing except promissory notes til 2020 - by which time it will be too late) sheds new light on the direness of the need for new political institutions that will robustly think and act long-term-ist. Check out my piece at http://www.greenworld.org.uk/page305/page305.html , for a concrete suggestion for what such institutions would/should/could look like...

Would guardians for future generations allow the present moment to slip by without starting to act to stop deadly climate change? I think not...

Embodied emissions: My evidence to Parliament

2011-12-09T13:56:00.002Z

My evidence to the House of Commons select committee is on p.38f. of: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmenergy/writev/consumpt/consumption.pdf

Evidence to the Energy and Climate Change Committee, for their recent inquiry on consumption-based emissions reporting:

2011-12-09T10:10:00.001Z

This submission:

· Draws on the author's political and journalistic experience to note and explore the failure of the previous Government to come clean about Britain's rising carbon emissions, once one takes into account factors such as 'embodied' emissions, and calls on the present Government to embrace honest full disclosure of the record, using a consumption-based emissions reporting system (and including in this air travel beginning in the UK, and some portion of sea travel);

· Draws on the author's philosophical research to note and explore the danger of taking 'developing' countries to be more economically 'efficient' as a reason for justifying under the banner of 'globalization' the 'offshoring' of industrial production there because such offshoring is often carbon-inefficient, as consumption-based emissions reporting would make clear.

For a period of years, I pursued first David Miliband and then his brother Ed, in the relevant government Departments, seeking to get them to answer the questions that I outlined at the links just below, concerning the crucial issue of embodied emissions and related reasons why Britain's seeming emissions reductions since 1990 have been delusive:See for instance http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/2007/10/who-will-lead-on-combatting-dangerous.html & http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/05/22/the-miliband-commitment-to-climate-change-is-mostly-just-rhetoric/
As I suggested in my more recent article on this at LeftFootForward (http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/07/a-green-perspective-on-ed-miliband/ ), one possible way forward with this is for "emissionsto be counted where they originate, in the countries that can potentially control them." However, I also noted that "Of courseit wouldbe perfectly possible to exercise significant control over them, if our country were willing, as I believe it should be, to control products' entry into our borders partly on the basis of their emissions footprint." (I would urge the Committee to consider this point: that it is not enough to assess emissions on a consumption basis We should also control what products we import on the basis of those assessments.)
I received no answer from the Milibands to my queries as to the misrepresentation of Britain's record of emissions-reduction under Labour, until finally I managed to button-hole Ed Miliband in person: as briefly outlined in the LeftFootForward piece referenced above. The Coalition government has a heavy responsibility upon it (1) To be honest in reporting Britain's record on emissions, which is in reality one of growth, not of reductions, and (2) To change to a system of consumption-based emissions measurement.
My current philosophical work, done in part in co-operation with UEA's environmental scientists, and in co-operation with colleagues in the Green House thinktank (see Jonathan Essex's submission from Green House, for detail), focuses on the needful effect of our reaching and breaching the social and ecological limits to growth (notably, the limits on the carbon-absorptive capacity of the atmosphere, without dangerous temperature-rise and chaotic climate effects) on our politics and our economy (See e.g. my recent published academic papers referenced at http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=3100 .) One crucial moral of this work of mine (and of the current work of my student, Ruth Makoff) is this: That it is disastrous for our chances of maintaining climatic ecological viability that we continue as a society to measure efficiency with reference to minimising labour costs rather than with reference to minimising material throughput (i.e. minimising ecological impact). This can be swiftly illustrated in a way that is directly relevant to the current inquiry of the Committee:
Very roughly, over the past 20 years Britain has exported a very large amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to China. These emissions, produced in China and consumed in Britain, are not counted at present in Britain's GHG emissions figures. They are counted in China's. When one studies China's GHG emissions figures relative to China's GDP and other economic indicators, one finds that the energy- and emissions- intensity of production in China is far greater than that in Britain. In simple terms: Production has moved to China, because of the cheapness of Chinese labour. But, viewed in terms of the global ecological economic efficiency, this is a crazy change to have made, because, though Chinese production is 'efficient' relative to labour (because China is, as Tony Judt aptly phrases it, a 'low rights' country, where labour is treated more brutally than here), it is inefficient relative to energy and emissions. It is only because the latter are not priced in any remotely-adequate way (to reflect the damage of climate-dangerous emissions, not to mention the using up of scarce hydrocarbon resources), and not rationed or capped at all, that production has moved to China in the first place. It would have been more rational, considered from the point of view of the global ecosystem and the political economy of the world in the context of that limited ecosystem, for much of this production to have remained in Britain (and in the U.S., etc.), and only for industries which are labour-intensive but NOT energy- or emissions- intensive to have migrated to China.
This massive global irrationality has been concealed from British voters and consumers because of the way in which emissions are counted (in the place of their production rather than of their consumption), because of the fact that they are barely if at all registered on products, because of the fact that they are not controlled at all at point of entry, and because it is convenient for British political elites to downplay this irrational inefficient exporting of emissions (See above for my account of the Milibands' downplaying of this.).
This must change.

Submitted by Dr. Rupert Read, Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and Co-ordinator of Eastern England Green Party. (Note: This submission is not made on behalf of UEA, though it does draw at one point on my own academic research.)

An Inconvenient Truth 2 on TV tonight - 8.30pm

2011-12-07T15:45:00.001Z

This film made by a former student of mine is WELL worth watching:

Tonight 'An Inconvenient Truth 2 - A film about the world getting better' premieres on the Community Channel at 8.30pm, Sky 539 and Virgin 223.

The series continues next Wednesday at the same time and on Wednesday 21st.

If you don't have Sky/Virgin you can watch the series on Freeview 87 on January 15th/16th/17th at 6am. Or watch online at www.jackguest.com from December 10th.

To watch the trailer and an interview the director did with BBC radio Gloucestershire go to www.youtube.com/agreatfilm

The follow the series and movie on Facebook go to www.facebook.com/aninconvenienttruth2

And if you want to buy the director's cut on DVD with special features (including a 2nd film) email dvd@jackguest.com with your order - the cost is £9.99 including postage.

If you can't watch tonight or the following Wednesdays the series repeats on Sky and Virgin on The Community Channel, Sky 539, Virgin Media 233:

28th December 8.30pm - An Inconvenient Truth 2 - Episode 1
4th January 2012 8.30pm - An Inconvenient Truth 2 - Episode 2
11th January 2012 8.30pm - An Inconvenient Truth 2 - Episode 3

Alternatives to Economic Growth

2011-12-04T17:05:00.005Z

A One day Conference with Tony Juniper, Molly ScottCato, Miriam Kennett and Rupert Read
Saturday, 18th February 2012,
Centre at St Paul's, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 1JP

An underlying question to much of today’s political agenda is “How can we get back to Economic Growth as soon as possible?”. Yet economic growth does not take into consideration finite natural resources, social justice and individual wellbeing.

How can we escape the dependency of a system based on continuous economic growth? What alternatives are there? How can alternatives be implemented and given the priority they need in our crowded social and political agendas?

This “Ideas Day” will bring together prominent speakers and activists who have addressed these issues constructively from a sustainable point of view; as well as a range of individuals and groups who are developing and implementing practical alternatives
.
Our intention is that this day will stimulate thought and action amongst sustainability and green activists in and around Cambridge and the Eastern Region, leading to an intensification of appropriate economic, social and political change, locally, regionally and nationally.

Full program can be found here.
Booking form can be found here.

Richard Murphy Book Launch

2011-12-02T10:05:00.004Z

Richard Murphy (anti-poverty campaigner, tax expert and author of the UK's No.1 Economics blog www.taxresearch.org.uk) will be launching his new book - The Courageous State - in Norwich on Wednesday, December 7th at the Workshop Coffee bar.

Click the image to enlarge.

A KEY BUT OVERLOOKED MAIN CAUSE OF DANGEROUS CLIMATE CHANGE: Factory-farmed animals [A guest post by Roddy Newman]

2011-11-30T11:10:00.002Z

[Note: this is a guest post by Roddy Newman]

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has been criticised for supporting Paul McCartney's 'meat free Monday' climate change campaign, but her critics are simply ignorant, because the world's leading authority on climate change, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told "The Observer" in 2008 that people ought to give up meat one day a week for climate change reasons, and then ought to reduce their meat consumption further:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/07/food.foodanddrink

As the above "Observer" article points out, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has stated that global meat consumption will double by the middle of the century, because the world's growing middle class in for example China, are using their extra income to buy more meat, and FAO said in its now famous book length 2006 report, "Livestock's Long Shadow", which you can read here, that meat production, and dairy production, which it predicted would nearly double by 2050, were the biggest single creators of greenhouse gases, so Caroline Lucas's ignorant critics ought to explain how they intend to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, by for example encouraging people to switch to renewable energy, when what may be the biggest single cause of such emissions is forecast to double, or nearly double over the next 4 decades:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM

Prince Philip, who, as this "Daily Telegraph" shows, decided that vegan food would be the most ecological type of food to serve at a 2009 Windsor Castle summit of the UN Secretary General and the world's religious leaders which was designed to spread green ideas to the planet's religious believers, was the President of the World Wildlife Fund from 1981-1996, so it is not surprising that the WWF argued in a 2009 study that, for climate change reasons, people ought to eat meat no more than 3 times a week, and that they ought to drink soya or rice milk substitutes for cow's milk:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/6488123/Meat-off-the-menu-as-Windsor-Castle-goes-vegan.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196139/Eat-red-meat-just-times-week-says-World-Wildlife-Fund.html

Two years later, the WWF commissioned a report from the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health at Aberdeen University which was designed to create a sustainable diet that the WWF could use to lobby the British Government and the British food industry to use as a blueprint for an ideal diet. As you would expect, the proposed diet involves cutting back on meat and dairy consumption:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/30/livewell-plate-diet-nutrition

Another environmental group, Friends of the Earth, issued a report in 2010 which argued that the Government should change its healthy eating and green advice to encourage people to eat less meat:

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/healthy_planet_eating.pdf

Prince Philip's son Charles, who used to be vegetarian, also believes that meat consumption is an environmental problem, as in 2011 he urged Americans, who are particularly big meat consumers, to eat less beef, because the Earth could not cope with the amount of water which is needed to produce it:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/8494171/Prince-Charles-tells-America-to-cut-down-on-steaks-...-for-the-sake-of-the-world.html

Lord Stern, who was a British Government adviser on climate change, also believes that meat consumption is an environmental problem for water, and also climate change reasons. He argued in 2009 that meat eating could eventually become as socially unacceptable as drink driving as a result:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/26/palm-oil-initiative-carbon-emissions

Later that year, the Government's Sustainable Development Commission released a report which argued that the public ought to cut down on meat and dairy consumption for ecological reasons:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/11/eat-less-meat-dairy-diet

However, what may be the most important wake up call of all of these warnings from prominent organisations and individuals, was this 2009 report for the American environmental group the Worldwatch Institute by a World Bank scientist, and by a scientist who was the World Bank's lead environmental adviser, as it argued that "Livestock's Long Shadow" was wrong for various reasons to estimate that meat and dairy livestock created only 18% of greenhouse gases. The Worldwatch report claimed that 51% was a better estimate:

http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf

As the authors admitted, that 51% figure was "a strong claim that required strong evidence", so they went on to explain that evidence in great detail. They also argued that people switching to meat and dairy free diets would be the quickest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The UN Environment Program was thus right to call in 2010 for the world to adopt a vegan diet to save the planet from climate change, and hunger and fuel poverty:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-meat-free-diet

All of these warnings over the last 5 years from prominent organisations and individuals about the ecological damage which dairy production does, may partly explain why soya milk sales have massively increased since 2006 in Britain, as this 2011 "Daily Telegraph" article reveals:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/8500956/Soya-milk-goes-mainstream-as-Starbucks-sells-soya-frappuccino.html

It might be "An Inconvenient Truth", to cite the title of Al Gore's famous documentary abut climate change, which says nothing about meat and dairy livestock being a cause of that environmental problem, that people's favourite meat and dairy products are the number one cause of climate change, but there are an ever growing number of meat substitutes which vegan companies like Redwoods and Frys have created for meat eaters who cannot do without the taste of chicken and other meats, and the list of vegan cow's milk substitutes grows ever longer: soya, rice, oat, coconut, hemp, almond, millet, and spelt (a type of wheat) are all now available, though in the latter 4 cases, rarely outside health food shops, and I know from experience that adopting a vegan diet also leads you to try many types of tasty food that you would never have considered as an omnivore, or even as a vegetarian.

While the various prominent organisations and individuals who I have cited have highlighted various ecological reasons for adopting a vegan diet, they have not listed them all. The British vegan campaigning group Viva! have pointed out that farmed animals are not only the number one cause of climate change, but also the number one cause of: species extinction (because of farmers destroying their forest and other habitats), deforestation, desertification (which is primarily caused by grazing animals at the edge of deserts), and water pollution (because most of the world's crops are chemically grown farm animal fodder, because of slurry from factory farms, etc.), and a leading cause of acid rain (because animal manure creates most nitrous oxide and ammonia), and antibiotic resistant superbugs (factory farming packs animals closely together, which rapidly spreads diseases, and leads to factory farmers heavily dosing their animals with antibiotics that people then consume the residue of when they eat those animals).

Viva! also point out that overfishing is emptying the world's oceans, so it is handy that Redwoods have put so much effort into creating fish substitutes for people who wouldn't like to do without the taste of fish. There is now even a vegan caviar made from seaweed, though unlike Redwoods and Frys products, which are widely available in health food shops, it is not easy to find:

http://www.cavi-art.com/

The title of an important 2007 Viva! report about the ecological impact of non-vegan food, "Diet of Disaster", was thus appropriate.

On what's wrong with thinktanks: Letter by me in the current issue of PROSPECT

2011-11-30T11:02:00.001Z

Green thinking

We at Green House cannot entirely agree with Bronwen Maddox when she says that the recent Prospect think tank awards demonstrated that "plunging markets and revolution have prompted radical new thinking." In one sphere at least that verdict seems questionable: it was noticeable that no green-leaning think tank featured on any of the shortlists mentioned for any of the awardsa disappointing state of affairs given the central importance of environmental policy to the current UK government (rhetorically at least) and to any serious approach to our current problems which looks beyond the short term.

The award winners, admirable though their work is, work very much within the established terms of the debate, at a time when the fundamental premises of capitalism are being called into question very widely and when talk of economic collapse is not confined to the tents outside St Paul's. It was this failure of the political commentariat, which prompted a group of influential environmental thinkers and writers to launch Green House in mid 2011. Green House differs from existing think tanks in that it sees its work as not just presenting policy options for tinkering but offering deeper challenges to the mainstream so as to "reframe" the debate. It has already published three substantial reports; this month, it will be presenting evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee on the green economy; and in January we will launch a new report on giving a political voice to the largest disenfranchised group currently affected by our political decision-making unborn future generations.

Rupert Read, Chair, Green House and Ray Cunningham, Associate, Green House

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/11/letters-26/

Greens support industrial action tomorrow in defence of pensions

2011-11-29T11:32:00.001Z

Statement from Eastern England Green Party:

On behalf of Eastern Region Green Party, the Regional Co-ordinator Dr. Rupert Read [that's me!] said:

"The Government is ratcheting up the rhetoric ahead of tomorrow's strikes. But it is the Government's own poor handling of public sector pensions that remains a serious concern for workers across the public sector - it looks like we are still some way from the government offering a genuinely fair deal.

"I know that the unions will now want to work even more closely with Government to reach a settlement, as well as to improve community relations and ensure maximum support from the wider public. But time has almost run out.

"I regret the disruption caused by industrial action and feel confident that, nowadays, union leaders only resort to the strike option in special circumstances. But if public sector employees continue to feel that the Government is not listening and the need for action remains, then the Greens will lend support and solidarity to those taking industrial action tomorrow. In the circusmtances, the public back these strikes [See Note to editors below], and so do we: it is a shame that none of the other Parties, not even Labour, are supporting strikes to save decent public pensions.

"It is completely unfair for the government to try to slash workers' pensions at the same time as the richest 1% in society are still receiving huge salary rises and bonuses. The Green Party believes that instead of paying huge bonuses to a handful of CEOs and bankers, government investment should be made in pensions but also of course in renewables, insulation, public transport, sustainable agriculture and social housing: green jobs, in a true 'Green New Deal' for all.

"Investment in a truly green future would see more jobs, and a better future for all.

"It is high time that the 99% of us in Britain who are not bankers nor fat-cats got a fair deal."

ENDS.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Note to Editors:

Opinion poll indicating majority support for tomorrow strikes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/poll/2011/nov/28/support-strikes-november-30

My latest letter in the INDY:

2011-11-28T14:03:00.001Z

Any job is unsafe in the line of fire

So, the Coalition want it to be easier to hire and fire people ("Cameron's war on employment rights", 23 November). This is a deceptive piece of spin.

What they mean is simply making it easy to fire people. We are given a long list of measures that not only make it easier to fire workers, but to do so with impunity, however arbitrary the decision. That is why big business wants these legal changes; and that is why this government will give them what they want.

This has nothing to do with improving the economy, let alone to do with reducing unemployment. It has everything to do with businesses being empowered and workers being disempowered.

Dr Tom Greaves

Dr Rupert Read

[Scroll down on this page to see the letter on the INDY's website: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-newspapers-feed-the-greed-for-fame-6267628.html ]

Film As Philosophy: the festival

2011-11-23T13:55:00.003Z

I'll be presenting Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010) at the Manchester Metropolitan University this Saturday. All are welcome!

My letter in today's FT - on party funding

2011-11-23T11:22:00.001Z

Sir, As you report (“Party funding reforms appear doomed”, November 22), reaction from the three main parties to the committee on standards in public life’s proposals to tightly restrict individual donors’ donations and to introduce a “pay per vote” scheme to make up the shortfall has been rapid – and negative. It appears they would rather keep their access to soft money from super-rich individuals, corporations and trades unions than gain access to a large permanent stream of public money.

This telling turn of events points to the broader issue, largely missing from the CSPL approach: the corrosive effect of the dominance of our politics by the interests of a small wealthy elite (for example, half of Conservative funding now comes from financial interests). This elite is holding our politics to ransom, at the very time when economic and climate crises point to the need for radical change. The case for radical party-funding reform, in this broader context, is pressing: the massive inequalities motivating the “Occupy” movement, for instance, will never be tackled by a political system relying on the largesse of the beneficiaries of this system of inequalities.

We are working on a report (for GreenHouse think-tank) responding to the CSPL recommendations. Our report will insist that the case for major public funding of political parties cannot be divorced from the case for broader democratising reforms and must include ways of ensuring that public funding of political parties is not used merely to prop up the large central administrations of the main parties that have presided over the crises now convulsing us. For instance: matched funding for party membership subs, with that funding going to local parties rather than to national HQs, would be one measure deserving serious consideration.

Rupert Read and John Hare, Norwich, Norfolk, UK

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2bb48c08-0fb7-11e1-a36b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1eWdiegn9

An Inconvenient Truth 2 World Premiere

2011-11-23T10:15:00.001Z

Jack Guest is a former student of mine.

This film is WELL worth watching! (I enjoyed it a lot)

An Inconvenient Truth 2

World Premiere

Three-part series starts 7 December 8.30pm on Community Channel

Jack Guest, an extraordinary young filmmaker from Cheltenham. After graduating in philosophy and politics, Jack single-handedly funded, directed and produced a film to address the impact of climate change and uncover workable solutions.

Inspired by former United States Vice President Al Gore's 2006 documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth', Jack travels by boat to Sweden, a country aiming to break its dependency on oil by 2020, to speak with leading politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs. Jack also meets with families committed to reducing their impact on the environment and visits an eco-village completely dependent on renewable resources.

Jack says: "In no uncertain terms we face a huge problem on planet earth and An Inconvenient Truth 2 looks at turning that problem into an opportunity, showing that we can make things work, for everybody. It gives a positive message that things can get better and that change does not have to mean sacrifice."

He asserts: "we already have the answers to climate change and we just need to implement them. The solutions for a stable climate do exist and they can enrich rather than restrict our daily lives."

An Inconvenient Truth 2 can be seen on Community Channel (Sky 539, Virgin TV 233) on 7 December at 8.30pm.

Jack Guest is available immediately for interviews and happy to answer a range of related questions, call +44 (0)7728 871 028 or p@jackguest.com

To watch the trailer visit: www.youtube.com/agreatfilm

To visit the film's Facebook page: www.facebook.com/aninconvenienttruth2

International viewers can watch or buy the film online from December 10th at www.jackguest.com

For further information about Community Channel please contact Jessica Culshaw at jessicac@mediatrust.org or 020 7871 5636.

A high resolution version of this photo is available upon request p@jackguest.com

The next stage of the crisis?

2011-11-18T14:14:00.005Z

By Rupert Read, with a response by Brian Heatley

Summary: Last month's developments, including the massive crash in silver and copper prices (which have, I believe, come about because people, including crucially industrialists, are realising that there just isn't going to be the economic activity to use them), presage, in my view, the next stage of the economic crisis. The world is waking up to what may be the end of growth, certainly in the ‘developed’ (sic.) world. If there is growth now in some sectors of the world’s economy, it is likely to be matched or outweighed by decline elsewhere.

Meanwhile, a huge potential disaster is looming and growing in the world, as money itself comes under strain... I predict massive corporate debt crises soon, to rival the growing sovereign debt crises. But the fiat money system itself will likely be in the firing line within a year or two…

This piece explores speculatively some of the scenarios for the next few years which are not making the headlines in the mainstream media. ‘Surprises’ which need to be considered… Now that a permanent and forced end of growth is likely, now that we are actually hitting real global environmental limits that will systemically limit the capacity of the economy to produce now, not just damage it for the future.

In this post, I think all of this through at this current historical moment, so far as these matters can be judged. Then, Brian Heatley, a colleague of mine at the Green House thinktank, essays a reply. That is followed by a very brief further reply by me. The matter is then thrown open to you, dear readers, for debate…

Last month’s actions and predictions by the Fed, ‘Operation Twist’, mark an important change in the world financial and economic crisis. Basically, the Fed is finally accepting that we are quite likely to be entering a prolonged recession, more likely perhaps a Depression. Even perhaps, I would add, a permanent Depression. And ‘the markets’ have realised this. That is the huge significance of the massive drop in silver and copper prices that followed the Fed’s intervention:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-26/commodities-drop-as-silver-slumps-on-europe-debt.html

“Morgan Stanley attributed silver’s drop to growing concerns about industrial usage and the “high retail component of the investor base”…

Three-month delivery copper fell 4 percent to $7,067 a ton, taking this year’s loss to 26 percent, after earlier today touching $6,800, the lowest level in more than a year. The contract lost 15 percent last week.

“Copper is clearly in a downward trend as investors see no improvement in the macro environment, only deterioration,” Zhang Zhenghua, an analyst at Minmetals Futures Co., said today by phone from Shanghai.”

In other words: silver and copper, which (unlike gold) are still bought primarily as genuine commodities for their actual use (speculative and 'savings' use of silver is still well under 50% of its use), have plummeted in price because manufacturers think that they are not going to need much silver or copper in the next several years. Because they finally have woken up to realise that we probably are not going to have net economic growth.

The mania for economic growth, combined with elite determination not to take proper control over banking and not to make the banksters pay for this crisis, and combined of course with financialisation itself, have unleashed a disaster. A disaster that could have been prevented by a genuine Green New Deal. Now, we are in the midst of a growing sovereign debt crisis, because the banks’ losses have been socialised. That crisis shows no sign of ending. And on the verge of a massive corporate debt crisis: balance sheets are going to unravel, as plans that were made on the basis of predictions of expansion are reined in. The de-leveraging will continue to unwind and probably escalate, as expectations fall. (See http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/nicole-m-foss )

The actions taken to try to deal with these escalating crises without taking power from the bunch of bankers who have ruined the world economy are putting fiat currencies themselves at risk. ‘Quantitative easing’ has further enriched elites without putting more money into the hands of the populace at large: A Citizen’s Income should have been used instead, with the newly printed money. Money itself is finally starting to come into question. As yet more QE happens in Britain, we now don’t know whether we are destined for runaway deflation (in my view, the likely outcome) or runaway inflation (which is what is currently being worried about in public).

Why is QE being tried? One reason is that QE is being used to stop the nominal banktruptcy of financial institutions (and now also governments) become an actual bankruptcy. But also: In a desperate bid for growth, through a zero-sum-game of export-led ‘strategies’, in the context of an unwillingness to take banking into social/public control. Most roads lead back to growth-mania as increasingly the cause of our troubles.

For now, the U.S. dollar is safe. But for how long can the game of the U.S. printing money without anything to back it up continue? The U.S. economy is in a dire state. Will other countries allow it to leech off them, through the dollar being a reserve currency, forever? (Further: is the US prepared in effect to lose its sovereignty to China? And what if the Chinese don’t want it as a vassal?)

The printing of more and more money, the real inflation underlying dubious government stats purporting to show that inflation is not getting out of control (see e.g. http://www.shadowstats.com/ for some provocative analyses; also http://www.shadowstats.com/article/hyperinflation-special-report-2011 )...; will money as we know it survive the current crisis? This inflation is lowering the real value of people’s houses and much more besides without them really noticing. Relative to the value of gold, house prices have gone through the floor in the last few years. So we are undergoing the deflation that we need to make the money match the real economy -- but the price is being paid by those with small assets rather than large assets. This is why the ‘We are the 99%’ message is now more pertinent than ever…

As mentioned above, this pro-elite inflation is hovering in uneasy balance with the massive deflationary tendencies inherent in the vast destruction of debt-based money that has occurred and that may accelerate in the deleveraging process. All that is needed now is some countries to default and a load of banks to fall like nine-pins, and we could fall into a more or less unstable deflationary Depressionary spiral, which will impoverish billions. (Watch this video, which caused a sensation:

BBC speechless as trader says collapse is coming; Goldman Sachs rules the world and the euro eurozone collapse is a certainty:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqN3amj6AcE&feature=colike )

Moreover, the short term effect would already be dreadful: If government defaults begin the main problem is the freezing up of the credit/trade systems that we rely on for our basic necessities.

This huge ongoing disaster may well have been caused in part by the limits to growth and the unwillingness of governments and peoples to face up to them: See http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/2011/09/economic-crash-resulted-from-limits-to.html .

The level of denial about this is astonishing; governments seem prepared to trash everything on the unrealisable altar of their desperate bid to restart economic growth. Thus we are getting the environmentally-trashing economics of 3^rd world ‘development’

– and of the destruction of the countryside envisaged under the new planning laws that this Coalition government are bringing in in Britain.

Let’s take stock. The disaster was allowed to happen by governments unwilling to strongly regulate haute finance. And it has been and is being hugely exacerbated by the refusal to contemplate anything but growthism as the way out of the crisis. Because it is this refusal which has motivated the horribly-risky ‘strategy’ of printing vast sums of money, thus putting money itself at risk.

What is needed is a strategy to deal with all of this that does not fantasise a way out via a return to growth. We need to put finance back on the leash, swiftly: Vickers, for instance, represents too little, too late, and too slow: http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/files/greenhouse/publications/Banking_summary1.pdf (See also http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdom-theme/rupert-read/2009/07/14/the-bank-of-britain-a-proposal : this proposal has since become Green Party policy. It stands diametrically opposed to the obscenity of allowing the banks to return to the private sector, at this delicately-balanced moment in human history).

We need a Green New Deal not as a ‘stimulus’ but as a transition to a dynamic equilibrium economy: See my piece on this in http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/COM_Good_Society_Green_Society_04.pdf .

We need to go beyond Tim Jackson's (excellent) challenge to growth, and redefine prosperity through the idea of a REconomy: cradle-to-cradle processes incentivised, rationing not just of carbon but also of other virgin resource use (so an overall supply side resilience is secured), and, alongside this, rethinking how we incentivise appropriate technologies that match positive human-scale behaviour-change. The greatest challenge, that is, is replacing the growth-based identity with a provisioning one.

We need simultaneously to put in place a broader series of measures that will build resilience in the event, now probably likely, of the kind of vast crash and Depression indicated above. For instance, local currencies.

We need to warn people in plain terms that growthism, banksterism, and enormous gambles with our collective future have put the world on the edge of an unknown precipice. We need to talk about the risk of a Depression such as the world has never seen before; of an end to money as we know it. There is far more than the Euro now at stake. The news is full of the travails of Greece, Italy, and (soon) Spain and France. The banking system teeters on the edge of complete meltdown. For if the Euro tears apart and some of these countries default, there are far too many banks that will not be able to stand the strain.

Meanwhile, the refocusing on real assets – the sacrificing of anything and everything (including the celebrated British Planning system) to the chimera of growth -- is accelerating ecological impacts and, ironically, pushing us towards a more ultimate economic collapse (See e.g. http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2008/climate-geo-engineering-with-carbon-negative-bioenergy/ ). The ‘investment’ and exploitation in real resources around the world is truly devastating. It is not just a market Depression, but underlying collapse that is looming. And a huge land- and resource- grab is in process -- which may be accelerated by processes of collapse (There will be super-rich waiting eagerly to pick up the assets of the en masse bankrupted and immiserated).

We need to be warning people now about the disaster that is unfolding. In the event of dire cataclysm, we need to be able to say entirely truthfully, ‘Unlike the others, we told you so’. We need, for instance, to tell people plainly, now: your savings, the savings of the 99%, are at risk. The (commercial) banks are not safe, and perhaps now they never will be.

Meanwhile, think tanks are piling over each other to have the best growth strategy – see http://www.lexcomm.co.uk/latest-news/think-tank-quarterly-the-growth-edition/ . Even Compass’s ‘Plan B’, for all its virtues, is still resolutely growthist.

But the environmental crisis will now almost certainly be permanent (non-renewables are not going to get more plentiful by themselves; we will hit more limits to growth, not less, as time goes by); the system will keep wandering into new crises making growth impossible.

The only people who see the really massive disasters coming are a small minority who are prepared to think the unthinkable and challenge hegemonic normalising assumptions. Like the tiny minority (including Dean Baker, Ann Pettifor, Larry Elliott, Nouriel Roubini) who saw the 2007-present crash coming, and were willing to guess how big it might be.

I think we may be about to see that crash get way bigger. I think we should warn people. Herewith then, my warning.

The time has come for a zero-growth solution to the world’s problems. The alternative don’t bear thinking about.

__________________________________________________________________

I wish it were the end of growth but it is not – a reply to Rupert Read from Brian Heatley

I agree with most of Rupert’s piece. Regulating the banks, providing a nationalised utility bank, local currencies, the dangers of inflation arising from quantitative easing and above all challenging the assumption that growth is the only way out of the crisis is all common ground. But one thread throughout the piece worries me.

This is Rupert’s most important claim that the world economy is now actually hitting environmental limits that are preventing further growth:

Now that a permanent and forced end of growth is likely, now that we are actually hitting real global environmental limits that will systemically limit the capacity of the economy to produce now, not just damage it for the future.

I think this claim is wrong, and essentially wishful thinking. I’m not saying that the world economy should not stop growing to prevent catastrophic environmental damage in the future, and I’m not saying that the world economy will not at some point in the future be stopped from growing by environmental constraints. But it hasn’t happened yet.

The first and very simple point to make is that the world economy has not stopped growing. The current recession is an OECD phenomenon, affecting primarily Europe, the US and Japan. China, India and many other countries are still racing ahead at high growth rates, if a little slower than before. Here’s a graph of real growth rates over the last five years for the principal economies (figures from the World Bank website at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG):

The world as a whole is the thick black line, and for the world as a whole there was one year of negative growth of 2% in 2009. World growth in 2010 was 4.2%. The four principal OECD economies, the US, Germany, Japan and the UK largely tracked the world economy but at a lower overall level; the UK has shown an especially weak recovery. China and India both slowed, but from much higher growth rates.

So it’s simply not the end of growth globally, and so perhaps it’s a bit premature to start asking why growth has come to an end. The UK, because of its special characteristics (an over-large finance industry and a doctrinaire right wing government seeking an excuse the shrink the state seem to me to be the main special factors), may well be entering a depression (by which I mean a prolonged recession), but there is little evidence that the world is.

Rupert supports his contention that we may actually be hitting environmental limits with reference to Sarel Sarkar’s new book, The Crisis of Capitalism, at http://www.oekosozialismus.net/The+Crises+of+Capitalism.+Saral+Sarkar.+2011.pdf

Now I’m a great admirer of Sarkar, especially his earlier Eco-capitalism or eco-socialism which I put on the Green House book list. But I think the case he makes here is thin.

Sarkar’s main point is that commodity prices for non-renewables (mainly fossil fuels and minerals) have risen, reflecting the exhaustion of finite deposits. This has fed through into the main economy; the main mechanism he cites in the book (pg 197 onwards) is that increased commodity prices reduced the incomes of poorer Americans, and led to mortgage foreclosures, precipitating the whole banking collapse.

The claim about rising commodity prices themselves is very complex, involving many different commodities over a time period. Rupert cites very low copper and silver prices as evidence of lack of demand in the economy as a whole. But equally that is evidence against exhaustion of those minerals and the limits to growth case. Perhaps a lot more important is the case of oil; its use is so ubiquitous with few close substitutes that it has the potential to depress the whole world economy, as it did in the early 1970s. But the evidence is mixed. Peak Oilers claimed their moment had come when the price reached $150 a barrel in 2008, but the price has now dropped back to an unexceptional $80 (see http://www.nyse.tv/crude-oil-price-history.htm). Yes, the price will rise as it gets harder to extract, but enough to choke off growth? The West will, immorally, use war and support for client dictatorships to secure cheap supplies. We've only used half of it, there's (regrettably) an awful long way to go yet. My guess is that it might be possible to mount a better case around another ubiquitous item, food, and I’m looking forward to seeing Tom Lines’s forthcoming piece. But my point is we need far more careful treatment of the whole range of commodity prices, and of their behaviour in other economic cycles, before we can be sure that ‘limits’ are dominating the picture.

Moreover, to go back to the main thread of the Sarkar argument, there are problems at the other end of the chain of causation involving the incomes of poorer Americans. There were quite a lot of things in the last decades affecting the real incomes of poorer people in the OECD countries apart from commodity prices for non-renewables, some positive some negative:

- increasing incomes through rising productivity and technical change

- the bonus that has come from the import of far cheaper manufactures from China etc

- a general tendency for tax rates and the share of government expenditure to fall

- changes in other commodity prices, especially agricultural prices

- the increase in the share of profits and rents from 30% in 1980 to about 50% now and the corresponding fall in the share of wages and salaries, squeezing in particular those on lower incomes

- the increasing debt of poorer people (through credit cards etc) which meant more of their income went to interest

and without a detailed and above all quantitative analysis it's wrong to assert that one of these is the dominant factor and so in some sense the 'cause' of the crisis. I say quantitative because it does matter how big the different effects are. My gut feeling (or perhaps it's political prejudice) is that by far the biggest factor is the rising share of profits and rents in the period, the declining incomes and power of working people, brought on by Thatcherism, Reaganism, free movement of capital and the neo-liberal triumph. And that that has produced in the end a good old crisis of lack of effective demand; workers actually spend wages and salaries, while profits and rents are not necessarily spent, so if the share of the latter increases the economy is in trouble (I didn't make this up by myself, it's essentially David Harvey's analysis in The Enigma of Capital, and more accessibly at http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/06/28/rsa-animate-crisis-capitalism/ .) It seems to me that it would need a rather more dispassionate and quantitative survey than that presented by Sarkar to get his argument properly off the ground.

Rupert says that Sarkar argues that there is a second mechanism; this is a crisis of the limits to growth because environmental limits have reduced profitability. Profitability in real-world investments have fallen, because of increasing costs of extraction, increasing pollution-effects, etc., and this has systematically biased the economy to become a bubble economy based around parasitism (financialism). I’d like to see some data to support the profitability point before believing it. And as I point out below, disentangling this effect, if it exists, from for example political determinants of the share of profits, requires detailed quantitative analysis.

None of this proves the assertion that growth is already ended by the environmental crisis is wrong. I'm merely arguing that the case that it is right hasn't been shown. And quite apart from the environmental case that growth has ended, other arguments that growth has ended seem to me to ignore experience. Depressions have happened before (1820s, 1870s, 1930s), have been hugely destructive and unpleasant, but after a vast loss of capital, a generation lost to unemployment and sometimes war, growth has always ultimately returned. If we haven’t hit environmental limits, why is it different this time?

It is tempting when you believe that the right course for the world is to end its addiction to economic growth, to think that the limits to growth have finally come, that reality is anyway on your side. In the slightly longer run it is. But the sequel to one of the founding texts on limits, Limits to growth, the 30-year update, written but five years ago, has industrial production peaking around 2020 (page 169), which I agree is desperately close, but is not 2010. I don’t think we are quite there yet; the next recession maybe. None of this is an argument that we should not be pushing for the alternative of no growth now, and at least in the context of UK politics seeing the current depression as an opportunity to advance a new paradigm. But this is while we can still choose to do so, not because we are being forced to quite yet.

______________________________________________________________

Growth hasn’t ended yet: mine was a conditional prediction – a reply to Brian Heatley from Rupert Read

Thanks to Brian for his cordial and well-informed reply. I won’t do a substantive further reply; people can make their own minds up. Just a couple of quick clarifications:

I concede, of course, that growth hasn’t yet ended (though some of the stats coming out from countries such as China are liable to be unreliable, artificially boosted by scared local managers and officials, etc.). My point in my piece was that the ecological limits to growth combined with social and financial buffers that we appear to have hit are hatching a massive disaster. I think that many in ‘the markets’ now believe that we are in the end-game for growth and for the Stock Market etc. . They may succeed in dragging it out for a few more years, via QE, more trashing of the environment, etc. – but desperate measures such as these will only hatch a bigger crash, when it comes. So: mine was a prediction, my best guess: overall growth will soon crash to a halt and reverse. If it doesn’t, then the crash will be all the bigger and more systemic, a few years later. The only way out of this is a controlled move now towards the kind of policies etc. recommended by us in the Green Party and like-minded others, which would require a planned end to growthism.

Guest post: Value vs. Money, BY JONATHAN KENT

2011-11-16T10:31:00.001Z

[I'm pleased to have the opportunity to post this piece by BBC freelance journalist Jonathan Kent; I realy like it.]

Growing up, did you ever play Monopoly or Risk? Did you ever get to a point where you simply picked up the board, chucked the pieces in the air and told everyone 'this is a stupid game'?

I did and I feel I've reached the same point now with the much bigger game that we've been suckered into; mindless materialism. Suckered because it's a game that creates 99 losers for every winner and for 150 years the traditional left has been playing along, simply trying to ensure that more people win.

The time has come to stop playing an unwinnable game and play a different one entirely.

Looking back 150 years to an age when working people had been driven off the land and into the cities, when live expectancy was short, when malnutrition and slum housing were rife, when education was accessible only the a minority, when social security was almost non existent and universal healthcare yet undreamed of; that early socialists saw the problem in almost purely material terms is understandable. Confronted with such deprivation the only decent response was to feed, clothe, house, educate and cure. There are many parts of the world where that still holds true.

But the left has moved beyond trying to meet people's needs in order to ensure that everyone can live with dignity. The traditional left has bought into materialism the mindless pursuit of consumer crap and in doing so, it has condemned millions to misery. Misery because the material hierarchy for which they've signed up condemns most of them to be losers, and it's the conscious or unconscious knowledge of this that leaves so many people in modern Western societies feeling dissatisfied, adrift and depressed.

Leftist materialism found its purest voice in New Labour. New Labour worshipped the rich. Blair and Mandelson embodied that final capitulation. They didn't just feel intensely relaxed about others getting filthy rich, they felt really very chilled out at the prospect of getting filthy rich themselves.

I've often wondered what the attraction is. Of course most of us can understand why people lust after the first million or so; a nice house, a decent car, big TV, all that stuff not having to worry about paying the bills. But the second million? Or the tenth? Even the one thousandth million?

Looked at in purely quality of life terms the relationship between wealth and wellbeing rises steeply from zero but reaches a point pretty fast where it more or less flat-lines. A BMW gets you from A to B in relative comfort (I prefer the train, so long as I can sit down and not get charged a fortune), but 5 luxury cars don't get you there any faster or more comfortably. The difference in wellbeing between having four homes rather than three is miniscule next to having one home rather than none. A wardrobe full of the latest Versace dresses and no friends is a poor substitute for a chest of drawers full of hand-me-downs and a dozen people you can turn to when you're feeling low.

A recent survey concluded that the Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim is the richest man in history because his income equals that combined of more of his fellow countrymen than even legendary rich figures such as Crassus- in Slim's case his wealth equals that of 440,000 average Mexicans.

Yet Slim doesn't have 440,000 homes. He doesn't have 440,000 cars or even 440,000 fried eggs for breakfast. The same is true of Warren Buffett, a shrewd investor but an unassuming man whose modest lifestyle belies his vast wealth. Redistribute their capital and you don't free up additional resources to be redistributed. You only pump more money into the system and change the price of goods. Take away Slim or Buffett's fortunes and spread around their cash and you redistribute power, not least buying power, but you don't create more stuff.

Because here's the thing. Past a certain point money has nothing to do with standard of living and material comfort; past a certain point it's about status and then it's about power.

We are, on a very important level, still the children of our animal selves with our need to survive, reproduce and to have a place within the group. It's just that these days all that evolutionary programming is at work in the city rather than on the savannah.

Status and power are intimately tied up with survival and finding the best possible mate. Our need to be valued and to be with others that are valued is as hardwired into our brains as is the need to eat, sleep and go to the toilet.

But here's another thing value doesn't have to be measured in financial terms. There are plenty of circumstances where people have won status, respect and even a more desirable mate not through being rich but through giving more through being indispensible to the group. When your people are starving being the person who knows how to grow food gives you a value that being able to hand out gold coins does not.

The trouble is that the left has capitulated and plays a game where value is measured in purely material terms. As the Archbishop of York John Sentamu said the other day; "it is hard to imagine a more powerful way of telling someone that they are of little value than to pay them one-third of 1% of your salary." Yet even if we manage to reduce income disparities which we most certainly should in a world where value is ascribed in purely monetary terms, nurses, carers, teachers and so many others are never going to be paid enough to reflect their real value to us. We have to change the game.

Just think; if we refuse to run on the materialist hamster wheel, if we refuse to coo and ooh and aah over someone's new car, bigger house, shiny handmade kitchen and designer clothes, those things start to lose their value.

If the natural reaction to someone with five cars was 'what a wombat' (apologies to wombats everywhere btw) rather than 'wow, like your cars' the incentive to own five rapidly diminishes. Of course if you're reading this you're probably the kind of person that would tell the owner of five cars that they're a wombat (you're so polite I'd expected more anglo-saxon). If we can persuade all the other people who have been conned into playing this sucker game to do the same then we're onto something.

It's tough. It's tough to tell people, especially ones you like, that you think the rubbish they buy is just that. After all when someone has bought loads of stuff to bolster their self esteem it's pretty crushing to be told it's just so much tat. Perhaps better to tell them you like them for themselves but that their tat gets in the way.

So just imagine what it would be like if we were valued for what we gave rather than what we took, not so much for financial giving as the giving of time, concern, support and love. Imagine the sort of race that would produce to be top dog and there would be a race because we're programmed to want to be valued, however that value is handed out.

I'm talking about a system which creates lots of winners because that sort of value generates more value we become valued because we give of ourselves and those we give to feel valued because they receive our love, time, concern and attention. It's a virtuous circle and the resources involved are infinite not scarce. It's a recipe for a happy, sustainable society.

It won't be easy. Not only have millions invested a lot of their hopes and dreams in stuff but some very big and powerful companies have invested millions (upon millions upon millions) in creating an addiction to things, anything that can be sold to them.

But we can make a start. Let's stop complimenting people on the stuff they've bought and start complimenting people on the good things they do or just for being a good person. A pebble rolled down a hill

So much for financial status addiction, but as for what money buys you when you already have status power the answer there is hardly new. We want democracy. We want power to rest with the people and we want those we elect to govern on our behalf to do just that to govern for the 100%, not just the 99% and certainly not just for the 1%. Where corporations and the super-rich have accrued power for themselves, we want it back. They can have their share, like the rest of us; a ballot paper, a pencil and if they want to use it a voice. But they don't get to use their money to buy a megaphone to drown out the voices of the 99%.

But whatever we do we should remember this; human nature is what it is it may not be quite a constant but it evolves at the speed at which continents drift very slowly. We mustn't aspire to perfect people. As Christopher Hitchens noted; "It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment." Mao and Hitler and Pol Pot all hoped to transform people and ended up slaughtering them.

Rather we should aim to improve society so that it brings out the best in people rather than the worst. We've found that while greed may be a powerful force for growth, it's also a poisonous, polluting force that corrupts those it touches and crushes those that stand in its way. If we want a society driven by more wholesome urges; the desire to help, to care, to nurture, to discover, to create, to beautify, to understand then we must reserve our respect and reverence for those who embody such values.

So let's focus on needs and let's focus on deeds and let's stop measuring our worth by the stuff we own as someone I once loved said to me; you don't own your possessions, they own you.

Richard Douthwaite is dead

2011-11-15T18:04:00.001Z

I can't believe it! This is not a man, somehow, who I had thought would die.

:-(

An important thinker, a big big influence on me as on so many others, and someone who (each time I had the privilege to interact with him directly) was unfailingly thoughtful and decent.

http://www.feasta.org/2011/11/15/in-memorium-richard-douthwaite

READ his brilliant book, ‘THE GROWTH ILLUSION’.

#KeepOurNhsPublic : Save Hinchinbrooke Hospital

2011-11-10T09:38:00.001Z

For the first time ever, an NHS hospital is going to be taken over by a private company, it has been announced this morning: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/72899cf2-0b2c-11e1-ae56-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1dHwr4IS2 . The hospital in question is Hinchingbrooke, in Cambridgeshire here in the Eastern Region of England.

In my capacity as Co-ordinator of the Eastern Region Green Party, I want to say plainly this morning that it's just plain wrong to allow a private company to make profits out of people's ill-health. This is a new stage in the privatisation of the NHS; we are losing Britain's most-loved institution, before our very eyes.

RoadPeace day service

2011-11-09T11:24:00.001Z

I am proud to be giving the 'Address' at this event. Do join us!:

THE CATHEDRAL OF

ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST, NORWICH

SERVICE TO COMMEMORATE

WORLD DAY OF REMEMBRANCE

FOR ROAD TRAFFIC VICTIMS

Sunday 20^th November 2011 at 3.30pm

The United Nations' Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020

From Global Remembrance to

Global Action across the Decade

#Occupy Norwich to discuss financial reform - with me!

2011-11-06T20:55:00.002Z

Occupy Norwich are to have a discussion on reform of our monetary
system on Wednesday 9th November at 6.15pm at their camp on The
Haymarket. (All are welcome, and everyone, whether they regard
themselves as Left, Right or neither, will get a chance to have their
voice heard.)

The discussion will be led by me. I'll talk about how the
creation of 97 % of our money by the banks leads to overments,
individuals and businesses becoming more and more indebted. When the
debts can no longer be repaid the banks demand a bailout from the
taxpayers, and cuts have to be made in pensions, benefits and public
services, as happened when the world economy nearly collapsed three
years ago.
Occupy Norwich are inviting everyone to come along and debate the solutions.
The bailout of the banks three years ago did not result in reform of
the banking system, which is due to collapse again, as the recent
problems in the Euro-zone have clearly demonstrated. We need reform
urgently, before the system crashes again. This reform should start with the genuine nationalisation of the banks which the British taxpayer currently owns, which, quite wrongly, are still paying out massive bonuses, at present.

Plan B? We need Plan C: A constant, no-growth economy, to stabilise the world from potentially-endless financial and economic crisis.

2011-11-01T11:23:00.001Z

Growth is finished. Greece is going to default within 4 months; the Euro will tumble and disintegrate. Financial interests will give up trying to seek profits in the real economy, and move still further into trying to profit from a bear market, leading to yet more financial and economic disaster.

It is pointless - counterproductive - in this context, to keep seeking the hopeless capitalist outofdate 'remedy' of growth. For my critique of Compass's Plan B then, on Bright Green, goto: http://brightgreenscotland.org/index.php/2011/10/plan-b-vs-plan-c/

Time for diplomatic sanctions on #Syria

2011-10-31T08:34:00.001Z

In a brave and important move that has been as yet barely
acknowledged in the press in this country, the Libyan
Transitional National Council last week shut the Syrian
embassy in Tripoli down, and recognised the Syrian National
Council (which has recently unified virtually all the non-violent
anti-Assad Syrian Opposition behind its banner) as the
government-in-waiting of Syria.*

This is an exciting development, an intelligent move. It ought to
be copied by Britain.

For one of the things that the Syrian protesters now most want
(they mostly DON'T want foreign military intervention) is
precisely this: serious diplomatic sanctions against Syria, to
delegitimise the Assad regime in the eyes of the world. We

should support the Syrian democracy-protesters; we can easily give them what they want.

Let's close the Syrian embassy in Britain (unless it is prepared
to declare independence from its capital, as some Libyan embassies did
during the uprising there), and recognise the SNC as the only
legitimate government of Syria. Assad doesn't govern Syria any
more. He merely tries (and mostly, due to the extraordinary
bravery of the bulk of the people, fails) to terrorise it.

The great advantage of diplomatic sanctions moreover, besides being free, is that they won't hurt the "person in
the street" in Syria. This is a win-win.

To sum up: Imposing such diplomatic sanctions on Syria is the least that
this country can do, to back up the heroic Syrian democracy-
protesters.

New scientific report by Green scientist proves that enriched uranium weapons were used in Fallujah and that they are having serious effects now

2011-10-28T18:57:00.001+01:00

This scientific report by Professor Chris Busby which has just come out shows by hair sample analysis that enriched uranium weapons were used in the attack on Fallujah, where birth defect and cancer rates are rocketing:

http://www.conflictandhealth.com/content/5/1/15/abstract

In this article, Busby talks about the attempts to stop his report being finished, and to stop it being published:

http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/news/news.php?article=21049

DU weapons are wrong, as I've argued previously here and on Liberal Conspiracy. They should not be used on humanitarian missions such as in Libya, because they are anti-human and inhumane.

Plan B vs. Plan C

2011-10-28T16:26:00.001+01:00

Why I won't be attending the launch-conference for Compass's 'Plan B' event, this weekend.

I got an invite from Gavin Hayes and Neal Lawson to attend the launch-Conference this Saturday (tomorrow) for Compass's 'Plan B'. Now, I'm a big fan of Compass. It has been for some time the only real sign of life in Labour. Its full opening up to members of other Parties earlier this year was a genuinely exciting moment in British politics, a key moment in the possible realignment of the Left: http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/2011/03/compass-greens-join-up.html . I am one of the co-ordinators of the effort to get together Greens who are in Compass, to ensure that there are lots of us and that we think together within the Green Party: http://www.facebook.com/notes/rupert-read/announcing-compass-greens/10150290565828687 . I have been since its beginning a member of Compass's 'Sustainability Panel', which seeks to green-validate Compass's publications. In this capacity, I have seen successive drafts of Plan B.

These drafts have greatly improved as time has gone on. Plan B is a document which makes an effort to take account of the sustainability revolution.

But nevertheless, I cannot sign up to Plan B and I wouldn't feel at home at a conference launching and celebrating it.

This is because, despite the improvements to it, Plan B is still seeking a "model for growth". That is yesterday's language, yesterday's aim. 'Plan B' won't be worth having unless it seeks prosperity without growth.

This isn't just about playing with words. Plan B is, to put it plainly, a strategy to restart economic growth. That just isn't compatible with ecologism.
'Green [economic] growth' is an oxymoron. Growthism a commitment to growth without end -- is the ideology of the cancer cell. (And we know how that ends)
If there is to be a Green New Deal, and a rebalancing of the economy, then there is a need for a commensurate REDUCTION in other economic activities. And attention needs to be paid to determining a long-term sustainable level of economic activity, which will probably require (considerable) further reductions. These things are not in Plan B.

Some may respond by saying that in theory there could be green economic growth. What is laid out very nicely in Jonathon Porritt's book, CAPITALISM AS IF THE WORLD MATTERS, is how there is no historical precedent for absolute decoupling between growth in economic activity and environmental impacts. Porritt is hardly a radical g/Green. If even Porritt, who wants to be business-friendly, shows that there is no 'evidence-based' reason to believe that green growth is feasible, then we should all take note.

This point is so important that it is worth restating and elaborating on a little. Porritt would prefer to break the correlation between emissions and growth; he wants, as Plan B does, a kinder gentler greener capitalism. But what he states clearly and supports extensively with stats is this: that, while the relative carbon and ecological-footprint intensity of economic activity can be reduced, there is simply no evidence that the absolute intensity thereof can be reduced, without a reduction (or at the very least a stabilisation) of overall economic activity.

A further question: what is 'green growth' growth of? Presumably not GDP, which none of us really believes in. So: what? Maybe growth in ISEW (The 'Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare', a leading proposed replacement for GDP) etc.?; but that, of course, doesn't require growth in economic activity. So it is entirely misleading to call growth in ISEW 'green [economic] growth'.
No-one has ever satisfactorily explained what 'green growth' is growth in, or of.

Yes indeed, we need to insulate buildings; we need renewables; we need targeted public transport investment; we need new homes; we need more teachers and care workers. We need targeted increases in economic activity, in certain areas. But we need serious decreases in economic activity, in other areas. The message of 'green growth' provides governments and polluters with a tacit excuse to carry on economic/extractive/destructive business-as-usual, with a green veneer overlaid on top of it.

Yes indeed, we need to move beyond GDP as a measure. But it is playing into the hands of those who are completely unserious about transforming our economy and society in the direction of sustainability, to simply turn the latter point into an excuse for saying that there are no limits to growth, provided such growth is 'green'. There are very real limits to growth, and we have breached them already in many cases. Unless you believe that growth can be 'angelized', then you must accept the logic of zero-growth or of decroissance.
Incidentally, R'sR readers may be interested to see that Saral Sarkar has made a particularly topical case in this direction, recently: http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/2011/09/economic-crash-resulted-from-limits-to.html . His new book is highly recommended.

To briefly summarise it: Saral Sarkar's case is basically that the limits to growth have caused the world's economy to grind to a slow halt, and thus indirectly caused the financial mayhem we are living through.

Sarkar argues that this is a crisis of the limits to growth because environmental limits have reduced profitability. Profitability in real-world investments has fallen, because of increasing costs of extraction, increasing pollution-effects, etc., and this has systematically biased or turned the economy to become a bubble economy based around parasitism (financialism).

Why may this lead to collapse? For various reasons, including because of the unprecedented nature and scale of the deleveraging now in progress.

If we are going to have more of what we need, then we don't need the chimera of growth. We need to REDISTRIBUTE. 'Growth', of green or whatever hue, is basically an excuse for not making more serious efforts to have a more egalitarian and sane society.

So: Plan B is clearly better than Plan A; but I don't see how it is good enough to pass a sustainability test, a test of green economics.

And actually, even the remark that 'Plan B is clearly better than Plan A' needs qualification. If Plan A results in stalled economic growth, that might end up being better, sustainability-wise, than if Plan B succeeded in resuming economic growth (which it almost certainly won't, btw - see below). The counter-intuitive logic here is that same as that which applies clearly to the historical case of the U.S. over the last 20 plus years: the Clinton administration's environmental regulations etc. were slightly better than either Bush's, but the totality of the evidence suggests that the Clinton administration was on balance even worse for 'the environment' than the Bush administration. Why? Because Clinton managed the economy 'better'. I.e. There was more economic growth under Clinton. And there is a direct correlation between economic growth and environmental destruction. [That explains why most environmental indicators, 'surprisingly', deteriorated MORE under Clinton than under Bush.]

As I've already allowed, above, there is clearly a need for more rather than less economic activity in some areas of the economy. But: An increase in (e.g.) renewable energy systems requires a compensatory reduction in (e.g.) oil or nuclear. You can't just add 'green growth' to our existing economy -- without making it if anything even less sustainable (Because, and this is crucial to Sarkar's case, we need to acknowledge clearly that even free energy ('renewable' energy) has very significant resource and pollution inputs/implications. There are no free lunches in a genuinely green economy.)

As Herman Daly (and Aubrey Meyer) have shown, the only alternative to such zero-growthism is to believe that economic growth can be 'angelized': that it can carry on indefinitely while throughput of materials (which, clearly, in fact, needs to fall) does not rise. This is about as plausible as a perpetual motion machine.

The Green New Deal is mentioned positively in Plan B. But there are two readings of the Green New Deal, as laid out in my piece on this in the Compass 'red-green' dialogue ebook:http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/COM_Good_Society_Green_Society_04.pdf
Plan B's reading seems close to the 'green stimulus' reading of the Green New Deal. Such Green Keynesianism by itself is not something that genuine g/Greens can or should endorse.

I am all in favour of a Green New Deal as part of a transition to a genuinely sustainable economy, and as a Depression-prevention device. What I disagree with is only the chimera of 'green growth'. Obama, Cameron, Clegg -- and Compass -- all love the idea of 'green growth'; it makes for great political rhetoric. It's like apple pie and motherhood, given the current hegemonic forces and discourses in our society. But, following Herman Daly and the other leading ecological economists, I would simply point out that there is zero reason for believing that in the real world it is possible - and zero extant examples of it (and here once more I am in Porritt's debt). (N.b. Once again, to be clear: I am talking about growth across the whole of society, not just about individual cherry-picked sectors.)

Now let's tie these thoughts to the latest stage of the unprecedented economic crisis that we are living through. Last month's actions and predictions by the Federal Reserve, 'Operation Twist', mark an important change in the world financial and economic crisis. Basically, the Fed is finally accepting that we are quite likely to be entering a prolonged recession, more likely perhaps a Depression. Even perhaps, I would add, a permanent Depression. And 'the markets' have realised this. That is, I believe, the huge significance of the massive drop in silver and copper prices that followed the Fed's intervention:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-26/commodities-drop-as-silver-slumps-on-europe-debt.html

"Morgan Stanley attributed silver's drop to growing concerns about industrial usage and the "high retail component of the investor base"

Three-month delivery copper fell 4 percent to $7,067 a ton, taking this year's loss to 26 percent, after earlier today touching $6,800, the lowest level in more than a year. The contract lost 15 percent last week.

"Copper is clearly in a downward trend as investors see no improvement in the macro environment, only deterioration," Zhang Zhenghua, an analyst at Minmetals Futures Co., said today by phone from Shanghai."

The mania for economic growth, combined with the elite's determination not to take proper control over banking and not to make the banksters pay for this crisis, and combined of course with financialisation itself, has unleashed a disaster. A disaster that could probably have been prevented by a genuine Green New Deal. Now, we are in the midst of a growing sovereign debt crisis, because the banks' losses have been socialised. That crisis shows no sign of ending. And on the verge of a massive corporate debt crisis: balance sheets are going to unravel, as plans that were made on the basis of predictions of expansion are reined in. The de-leveraging will continue to unwind and probably escalate, as expectations fall. (See http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/nicole-m-foss )

The actions taken to try to deal with these escalating crises without taking power from the bunch of bankers who have ruined the world economy are putting fiat currencies themselves at risk. 'Quantitative easing' has further enriched elites without putting more money into the hands of the populace at large: A Citizen's Income should have been used instead, with the newly printed money. Money itself is finally starting to come into question. As yet more QE happens in Britain, we stand finely balanced between runaway deflation and runaway inflation.

Why is QE being tried? In a desperate bid for growth, through a zero-sum-game of export-led 'strategies', in the context of an unwillingness to take banking into social/public control. Most roads now lead back to growth-mania as increasingly the cause of our troubles.

This huge ongoing disaster was caused in part by the limits to growth (see Sarkar's work) and the unwillingness of governments and peoples to face up to them. The level of denial about this is astonishing; governments seem prepared to trash everything on the unrealisable altar of their desperate bid to restart economic growth. Thus we are getting the environmentally-trashing economics of 3^rd world 'development' and of the destruction of the countryside envisaged under the new planning laws that the Coalition government are bringing in in Britain.

If growth seems like the only game in town, then it isn't surprising that good folk such as Compass look for a greener version of it. We need to acknowledge why Compass et al plump for a green stimulus / green growth etc. package. They do so because, in our current system, they feel that that is the only way to deliver employment.

In the ecologically-limited post-growth world that we are entering/in, we have no option but to look at different models for employment, and for sustaining ourselves. There are models showing that zero growth needn't mean unemployment (Peter Victor, Managing without Growth (http://www.pvictor.com/MWG/About_the_Book.html ), and to some extent Tim Jackson's Prosperity without growth.) More work remains to be done in this area. (www.GreenHousethinktank.org is seeking / will seek to do some of it.)

So: What is to be done?

What is needed is a strategy to deal with all of this that does not fantasise a way out via a return to growth.

We need to put finance back on the leash, swiftly: Vickers, for instance, represents too little, too late, and too slow: http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/files/greenhouse/publications/Banking_summary1.pdf (See also http://brightgreenscotland.org/index.php/2011/01/the-peoples-bank/ & http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdom-theme/rupert-read/2009/07/14/the-bank-of-britain-a-proposal : this proposal, that I initiated, has since become Green Party policy. It stands diametrically opposed to the obscenity of allowing the banks to return to the private sector, at this delicately-balanced moment in human history).

We need a Green New Deal not as a 'stimulus' but as a transition to a dynamic equilibrium economy: See again my piece on this in http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/COM_Good_Society_Green_Society_04.pdf .

We need to go beyond Jackson's (excellent) challenge to growth, and redefine prosperity through the idea of a REconomy: cradle-to-cradle processes incentivised, rationing not just of carbon but also of other virgin resource use (so an overall supply side resilience is secured), and, alongside this, rethinking how we incentivise appropriate technologies that match positive human-scale behaviour-change.

We don't need Plan B. We need Plan C. The creation of a constant (no-growth, dynamic-equilibrium) economy.

[Thanks to Alexis Rowell, Jules Peck, Peter Lipman, and my colleagues at Green House (www.GreenHousethinktank.org ) for input into this article.]

Diplomatic sanctions now against Assad

2011-10-27T09:05:00.001+01:00

My newest on OPEN DEMOCRACY: http://www.opendemocracy.net/rupert-read/libya-has-opened-to-way-to-diplomatic-sanctions-against-syria

Keep The NHS Public

2011-10-26T20:14:00.003+01:00

Debating the future of the NHS with Simon Wright outside his office, Friday 21st Oct.

The Green Party has been actively campaigning across the country in order to keep the NHS public. The party is concerned about plans to remove from the Secretary of State for Health the obligation to ensure that health services are provided across the country and to place the responsibility on GPs to buy health care services for the NHS, often from private companies.

The purpose of this protest, organised by the Norwich branch of the Keep Our NHS Public campaign, is to highlight the support that local Conservative and LibDem MPs, including Simon Wright, have given to the plans and to call on them to reconsider. Mr Wright recently voted for the reforms in a crucial Commons vote. The proposals are currently being considered by the House of Lords.

Medialens under the lens, over Syria and Libya: Becoming the new Dave Sparts?

2011-10-22T16:12:00.002+01:00

I have long been an active supporter of Medialens (http://www.medialens.org/ ). Like many others, I have supported them with money, time, tips, and I have been proud to have done so. For they have done very important groundbreaking work over the years challenging the inanities and distortions of the 'mainstream' media. They have for example written important critiques of mainstream media coverage of dangerous climate change, of Iraq Body Count, of the corporate nature of most of our media, and much more besides. They have held the corporate media to account time and again. They ought to be saluted for all of that.

It is therefore with a sense of deep regret (as well as of some foreboding) that I have finally to write to address the ways in which, lately, some of the wheels seem to be coming off their wagon.

An early warning sign perhaps was their long-running spat with George Monbiot, over the Rwandan genocide and the terrible atrocities in Bosnia: http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/04/media-cleanse/. But things have taken a further and more serious turn with their dogmatic opposition to the last resort of intervention now, as with Libya, and to any serious criticism of and serious attitude to brutal regimes, such as Syria's.

I found Medialens's opposition to UN involvement in the Libya situation (http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=644:to-avert-a-bloodbath-libya-and-the-press-part-1&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68 ) very troubling. Like various others on the Left, such as John Pilger and 'Moronwatch', their attitude seems to have been one of 'My enemy's enemy is my friend'. Medialens and Pilger have found themselves forced to ignore the overwhelming evidence that the Libyan revolutionaries, when their backs were against the wall and they were being threatened with massacre by Gaddafi (http://www.indianexpress.com/news/gaddafi-vows-no-mercy-in-attack-on-benghaz/764322/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/17/gaddafi-benghazi-libya-news_n_837245.html ), backed intervention under the responsibility to protect (though not by ground troops): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/12/libya-benghazi-gaddafi-revolution. It is very likely that the UN-backed, internationally-legal action in Libya saved Benghazi from a bloodbath.

Certainly, this is view is held by the Libyans who I know personally. One Benghazian who had been on the streets there in February said to me (on his return from there to England) that he didn't care why the West was thinking of intervening to stop Gaddafi from attacking Benghazi, but simply that they had to intervene, to stop a revolution-crushing bloodbath. This was a man who had stood shoulder to shoulder with me in the campaign to stop the West attacking Iraq in 2003. Because the two situations are profoundly different.

It is perfectly respectable to be against Western wars or Western proxy wars, or to take up an absolutist position of non-violence. What is hard to respect are the following two attitudes: (1) The pretence that there can never be a justification for last resort military interventions (as we should plainly have done to stop the Rwanda genocide, for instance), and that there are no relevant distinguishing features between, say, the internationally-illegal lies-based war on Iraq and the UN-backed NATO operation in Libya, which occurred in response to indigenous calls for help; and (2) The use of cherry-picked sources to support such pretences. The latter crucially undermines the organisation which does the cherry-picking.

What finally prompted me to write this article was the latest, deeply-dismaying 'media alert' from Medialens, focussing on Syria: http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=648:targeting-syria-the-bad-news-for-the-guardian&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68. In this alert, Medialens blatantly cherry-pick their sources. They begin by quoting Michel Chossudovsky, who argues, shamefully, that "The ultimate objective of the Syria protest movement, through media lies and fabrications, is to create divisions within Syrian society".

This is classic blaming-the-victim propaganda. Why are Medialens, in citing positively such pro-Assad statements in effect shifting -- from supporting the oppressed to supporting the oppressors?.

Chossudovsky, while well-respected as an academic within his area, is evidently an unreliable individual in this context, someone who (when it suits his argument, and Medialens's) cites Israeli news sources with known biases on the subject of Syria uncritically, someone who wildly alleges Mossad plots to foment rebellion in Daraa (the place where the Syrian uprising began, in response to horrendous government torture of children in Daraa), and so forth. He is the kind of source who Medialens would delight – quite rightly – in rubbishing, if he were uncritically citing (say) Israeli and media propaganda in relation to the Israel-Palestine 'peace process'.

Contrary to Medialens' rather bizarre stand on Syria there exists carefully collected data that conveys how the Syrian revolt started in Daraa (see International Crisis Group reports on Syria which also draw on sources within the government, security and party apparatus: http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/publication-type/crisiswatch/crisiswatch-database.aspx?CountryIDs={1341CC4D-F195-4B82-A9B9-0411818FDB03} ).

Given that Syrian protestors are still being killed every day it is in fact astounding that the take up of arms is not actually on a much wider scale. The International Crisis Group reports do not shy away from acknowledging that there are gradually-growing elements of an armed insurgency in Syria and for the growth in agent provocateurs of all colours. However, it is clear from the daily footage coming out of Syria via social media sites and Facebook groups over the past months that, remarkably, most protests are still peaceful. Whilst it is hard to verify content on social networking sites it is clear that the overriding narrative is one of peaceful protest and that some prominent and experienced activists have a known record by now for providing pretty reliable information on this. So whilst elements of the Left debate how they can continue to align with or apologise for the Syrian regime, based on its support of Hamas and Hizbollah and its opposition to Israeli expansionism, etc., they are blind to the great intellectual and political shifts taking place in the region. The crisis engulfing the region's historically Left-friendly dictatorships is a crisis that I hope will allow those on the Left unequivocally to condemn a regime for murdering its civilians whether or not that regime is against Israeli foreign policy (rather than to condemn peaceful democracy protesters for "creating divisions within Syrian society".) Ideals of Arab unity should not and do not include embracing the murder of innocent protestors!

This should all be obvious.

Medialens meanwhile quote Jeremy Salt approvingly, as follows: 'There is no doubt…that armed groups operating from behind the screen of the demonstrations have no interest in reform. They want to destroy the government.' What is most suspect about this remark is the implication that there is some prospect in Syria under Assad of 'reform'. While the Syrian demonstrators first called for 'reform', they have now overwhelmingly come to back the overthrow of the government: because it is clear that the real reforms needed are not taking place and the regime has committed grave crimes against humanity. It is clear, in other words, that the Assad government is unreformable. So there is no longer anything contentious about wanting to destroy the Assad government. The only question is how long it will be possible to go on seeking to do so non-violently (http://americansyrians.com/syria/post/Syrian-Revolution-The-most-unflinchingly-non-violent-revolution-in-history.aspx), when the government meets every demonstration that it can with live fire and the most hideous torture known to humankind. It is extraordinary how the discipline of this movement of non-violent resistance has stood up under the most extraordinary provocation (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/21/syria-women-unrest-repression ); the Assad regime makes Mubarak look like a softie, by comparison. It is deeply-dismaying therefore that Medialens are willing to paint the Syrian protesters as American or Israeli stooges.

There is some arms smuggling into Syria, although the evidence suggests that this is mostly small-scale, and is taking place mainly along long-established smuggling routes over the Lebanese border. Most of those seeking smuggled arms may well be simply heads of families anxious to defend themselves, in a situation of growing uncertainty. Medialens say that they are trying to draw attention to the armed element of the Syrian opposition which they say is having a veil drawn over it by the Western media. But the truth of the matter appears to be that the armed element of the Syrian opposition is even now only a relatively small element of it. Most of it is defecting soldiers, as reported here by the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/14/syria-protesters-defections-security-forces . Do Medialens think it is somehow not right to encourage soldiers to defect to the opposition? Do they think that soldiers who do so will not or should not take their arms with them? When they will certainly be killed or tortured if they are captured by the government.

By distorting what is happening in Syria – by giving credence to the ravings of the likes of Chossudovsky, and ignoring the voices of the Syrian activists who are still the mainspring of the movement – Medialens is performing a gross disservice to us all, and above all to the Syrians getting killed everyday.

I showed a colleague of mine, Odai Al-Zoubi (http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/odai-alzoubi ) -- a Syrian democracy protester who was on the streets of his country this summer engaged in peaceful demonstrations, taking the risk every day of being beaten, tortured, killed (Friends of his who did the same have been tortured) – the Medialens material on Syria (http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=648:targeting-syria-the-bad-news-for-the-guardian&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68 ). This was his response:

"The easy way is to see the world is in a black-white dichotomy. 'Everything America supports is wrong.' I believe that that attitude is lazy.

The left can't deal with the Arab Spring. Being green or Marxist or leftist means for them being anti-american. That's it. Nothing more.
Behind this is a racist attitude, suggesting that there is no successful authentic revolution anywhere in the world. If America supports the revolution, then the revolution is condemned. If America opposes the revolution, then it is praised. I am almost desperate with the left. For them, no one can do anything in the world without the help of America. Those who claim to be anti-american are the people who destroy everything in our understanding of the world, in order to be anti-american. Tacitly, they worship America. They believe that it controls the world...And they don't understand that the farmers in Daraa don't give a shit whether America supports them or opposes them. The people in Daraa understand the world more than the leftists. They do things...
Moreover, the dogmatic leftists are immoral. They don't stress that so many people were and are being tortured in Syria. Since Syria is anti-american, everything is fine.
The future of the left is doomed if they don't try to open their eyes. The Arab Spring should make them think outside the American / anti-american binary."

Such a voice surely deserves to be taken seriously. I wonder what Medialens would make of it? And why such voices never appear in their alerts on Syria, Libya, etc.

My colleague Dr. Phil Hutchinson, like me a long-time admirer and supporter of Medialens, has commented as follows:

"Let me try out an analogy: Notice how shopping, the act of, is in origins an act that is undertaken to serve a goal: buying things one needs. Later, under certain socio-economic conditions, it becomes an end in itself for many people. To shop is to enjoy oneself. People run up debts not because they need more stuff necessarily or because they think they need more stuff, or even because they will get pleasure from more stuff but because they have become addicted to the activity of shopping. I think there is an analogue in left politics: MediaLens have an insight, they have had many, but then they lose sight of that insight, and become addicted to a set of freefloating procedures. They are supposed to be about media-bias which they expose using the Chomskian 'propaganda model', but they are increasingly just parroting substantive moral or political claims of folks they like. They've stopped being a lens on the media and started being a propaganda-machine themselves, more like an unfunny Michael Moore than like the MediaLens of 5 years ago.

"One of the problems of the 'propaganda model' is it can be used to uncover anything you want to uncover. It needs to be used by people who keep themselves honest and in check."

It is not too late for Medialens to reconsider their dogmatic blanket opposition to Western action in relation to the Arab Spring. Caroline Lucas MP, Leader of my Party (the Greens), voted against supporting Britain's role in the UN-backed action in Libya. But she at least had the good grace afterward to say this: http://brightonhovegreencampaigns.blogspot.com/2011/08/green-leader-calls-on-uk-to-stop.html . It would be good to hear similar statements from Medialens.

Or would it? As Hutchinson remarks, things have reached a strange pass when the prime way that an organisation allegedly dedicated to hunting down bias in the mainstream media becomes known is not for its work in this capacity but rather for its own substantive political/moral position on conflicts in Bosnia, Libya, Syria, etc. . This point does rather suggest that Medialens needs to refocus its work: back onto the very necessary task of critiquing the corporate media for their biases, and away from (getting out of its depth in) attempts to analyse the precise nature of the historical and contemporary details of events that are the subjects of news stories. Medialens would be well-advised, in particular, to stop cherry-picking their sources in relation to Syria. They should bin Chossudovsky et al, and pay closer attention instead to groups like the International Crisis Group, which (unlike the sources Medialens rely on) has excellent on-the-ground sources in Syria.

If Medialens persist in low-quality work (i.e. in using unreliable / cherry-picked sources) which tacitly rubbishes the Syrian revolution, then they will join the company of John Pilger, 'Stop the War' and others who have failed to understand the new dynamic of the Arab Spring and the way that external powers, whatever their motivations, have done something on balance good by intervening in Libya and ending Gaddafi's mass-murderous regime, and need now (as Turkey is) to be actively considering their options in relation to the horrifying situation in Syria. The Syrian protesters were dismayed that the UN failed recently to act. (By contrast, it is encouraging that the UN have at least now made an unequicoval statement on Yemen, calling for Saleh to go: http://www.euronews.net/2011/10/22/un-security-council-calls-on-yemen-s-saleh-to-go/ .) There is a dire need for some form of action – perhaps an international solidarity movement, of people prepared to travel to Syria to put themselves on the line beside the revolutionaries? – to seek now to help the Syrian people.

I earnestly hope that Medialens will step back from the brink, and stop smearing the (heroic) Syrian revolutionaries by quoting nonsense from hopeless sources. Otherwise, they will join Pilger, John Rees et al in becoming nothing more nor less than the new Dave Sparts, mere dogmatic opponents of anything and everything that the 'imperialist' powers say and do, and tacit apologists in the process for Gaddafi, Assad, and other thugs who were/are every bit as much war-criminals as Bush and Blair.

[[N.B. This is a corrected version of a piece just published under my name on Left Foot Forward. Unfortunately, the version that they published was a mostly uncorrected early draft. And the title they imposed on the piece was not mine, and I have objected to it strenuously. So: I disown the version they published. Here is the actual piece.]]