Choices and accountability in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

The Guardian's Environment Correspondent Fiona Harvey asks the question (Wed 24 jun 2020):

UK's net zero pledge: what has been achieved one year on?

The urgency of the climate emergency has grown but there has been little progress so far

Last summer, Theresa May signed into law the UK’s ground-breaking target of hitting net zero carbon emissions by 2050 against a backdrop of increasingly vocal Extinction Rebellion protests, school climate strikes and Brexit-related political turmoil within the Conservative party.

It was one of the last acts of a beleaguered prime minister, under fire after a series of missteps and haemorrhaging support in party and country. Protesters lined the streets, businesses despaired at the lack of leadership and the government seemed to have little strategy for extricating the country from its immediate travails, let alone a viable long-term vision.

Since then, Britain has been transformed by the coronavirus crisis, with the economy mired in the deepest recession for centuries and braced for a possible second wave of infections. But while the skies have cleared and carbon emissions plunged during the lockdown, the urgency of the climate emergency has only grown.

As the first anniversary looms this Saturday of the signing of the net zero pledge into law, there has been little concrete action, and no clear roadmap on how to meet the goal.

Asked by the Guardian what measures had been taken on net zero in the past year, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) cited only: 

• The consultation on bringing forward the phaseout of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 to 2035. 
• £800m for carbon capture and storage. 
• Plans to double the UK’s international climate finance funding from £5.8bn to £11.6bn.

John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: “If the government wants businesses, local authorities and households to make the appropriate investments over the next decade, they will need confidence that Britain really is committed to decarbonising the economy. But the practical measures taken by the government over the past 12 months add up to a tiny fraction of what is needed to keep us on course to meet that commitment.”

The UK was one of the first countries to enshrine in law a net zero target for carbon dioxide. 

That leadership helped the UK gain host status for the crucial next round of UN climate talks, called Cop26, and the target – endorsed by all the major parties in last year’s general election – was intended to galvanise action across government and spur business investment.

The law was passed amid political turmoil over Brexit, followed by Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in last December’s general election. The subsequent redrawing of the political map was still in progress, and the reshuffled cabinet still bedding in, when the coronavirus pandemic struck early this year. These upheavals forced the postponement of Cop26 to next year, and have also, according to insiders, stalled new climate policy.

The climate economist Lord Stern said the government was making progress in difficult circumstances, and pointed to repeated assurances by ministers that the net zero target was still a priority. “They have stuck with it,” he said. “Government language has been very consistent for the last year, and the sustainable agenda remains the story for this recovery [from Covid-19].”

Progress has been slow on key fronts, however. Billions of pounds spent to bail out airlines, carmakers and oil companies have come without green strings attached. Home heating is the biggest source of emissions from households, but there is still no strategy for insulating Britain’s draughty homes, despite clear evidence that doing so would provide thousands of “shovel-ready” green jobs. Switching from gas boilers to low-carbon alternatives is essential, but at the replacement rate the government proposes, it would take 1,500 years, according to Friends of the Earth.

“To see this kind of foot-dragging so early on is hugely concerning,” said Jamie Peters, the campaigns director at FoE.

Investors want to see more direction from the top, to spur private capital into low-carbon projects, while businesses want more regulation that provides clear signals that private investors will follow, as well as support for large-scale trials of new technologies, such as hydrogen fuel and carbon capture and storage.

But while many are prepared to cut ministers some slack for having to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the government’s political opponents say the delay shows an unwillingness to take the drastic steps needed.

Matthew Pennycook, the shadow climate change minister, said: “Setting a target is one thing, hitting it is quite another. As things stand, not only are the government failing to do anything like enough to meet our legally binding net zero target, they are not even on track to meet the less ambitious one that preceded it.”

Wera Hobhouse, the Lib Dem climate emergency spokesperson, said: “Without a plan to cut emissions, the Conservatives’ pledges fall far short of the action we need.”

There must be clear focus on a green recovery from the coronavirus crisis, added Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP. “This really is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put us on the path to a greener, fairer future. Going back to business as usual would be a one-way street to climate disaster.”

A spokesperson for BEIS said: “Tackling climate change is a national priority, which is why the UK was the first major economy to commit to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. We have proven that green growth is possible, and our track record of driving down emissions while growing our economy and supporting our world-leading renewable and low-carbon sectors will see us go further and faster in the years ahead.”

The government will be under the spotlight later this week when its statutory adviser, the Committee on Climate Change, produces a progress report on Thursday on the UK’s emissions-cutting efforts. The CCC will recommend a green recovery, for which there are indications of public support, and the government must make a formal response.

Ahead of the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s pre-budget statement, thought to be slated for 6 July, ministers must show that warm words will be backed up by action, experts said. “There are encouraging signs that the government is beginning to realise that all policy and public spending must be put through a net zero filter,” said Shaun Spiers, the executive director of the thinktank Green Alliance. “The whole government now needs to shift gear and ensure that ‘build back better’ and ‘green recovery’ are not just slogans, but drive the economic recovery from Covid-19.”

Are governments accountable?

We will have to change almost everything, from our homes to our meals - Fiona Harvey - Guardian Environment correspondent

Wed 12 Jun 2019

The net zero carbon target will require sweeping changes to almost every aspect of British life, affecting our homes, food and the way we get around, as well as jobs and businesses across the board. Ministers hope there will be health benefits and improvements to the natural environment along the way, as well as helping to stave off the global climate emergency. 

On some of the key areas where rapid change is needed, however, the signals so far have been mixed. 

Energy 

Phasing out coal use and bringing more renewable energy on stream are the key planks of the government’s strategy. Gas has become an increasingly important source of fuel in the last three decades, particularly for domestic heating, but to reach net zero it will have to be phased out too. 

Support for renewable energy has been reduced and in some cases scrapped by the government. Onshore wind is now one of the cheapest forms of energy, but the withdrawal of subsidies and stricter planning rules have resulted in a dearth of new projects, though offshore wind is continuing to make progress. 

The number of new solar installations plunged by 94% in April, according to Labour, after the government’s withdrawal of support. Chris Hewett, the chief executive of the Solar Trade Association, says: “Solar and wind are now the lowest cost forms of power generation in the UK, yet there is no route to market and government is continuing to subsidise the fossil fuels it is aiming to phase out.” 

The number of jobs in renewable energy in the UK fell by about a third, from 36,000 in 2014 to 25,000 in 2017, according to the union Prospect. 

Carbon capture and storage will be needed if we are to continue to use any fossil fuels. A long-running £1bn competition to build the first large-scale demonstration project for the technology was scrapped by George Osborne, but the government says that smaller projects not requiring taxpayer assistance could start to develop. 

Controversially for some, the Committee on Climate Change says fracking is compatible with a net-zero target – but only if the gas produced displaces gas which would otherwise have been imported.

Transport 

There are only about 210,000 electric vehicles in the UK. About 1% of households use an all-electric car and about 2% hybrids, so tens of millions of cars will have to be replaced. Public transport, walking, cycling and ways of working that avoid travel will also be part of the solution. 

Darren Shirley, the chief executive of the Campaign for Better Transport, says: “In the coming weeks the government should commit to restarting the programme of rail electrification, outlining further incentives to rapidly grow the market in electric vehicles in the UK, and start work on publishing a national strategy for buses with investment to grow the network and green the bus fleet to be published by 2020.” 

The government has pledged to phase out diesel and petrol cars by 2040, but that target should be brought forward to 2030, according to the CCC. 

The government has slashed support for electric vehicles, resulting in slower take-up. A lack of charging points is also hitting demand. There are about 8,500, but they are not spread evenly across the country, and some towns have few or none. 

The CCC notes that the number of flights we take can continue to grow at least in the short term provided emissions come down in other areas, but campaigners say the decision to allow Heathrow’s expansion will blow away any chance of reducing the UK’s overall transport emissions.

Buildings 

All newly built homes – of which the UK needs a record number to solve the housing crisis – were meant to be zero emissions from 2016 under plans from the Labour government in 2006. Those plans were scrapped in 2015 on cost grounds, and now there are few requirements for new-build houses to incorporate energy-saving features or renewable generation. 

Government policy is key to making the built environment, which accounts for roughly 40% of the UK’s carbon footprint, more climate friendly, says Juliet Barfield, an architect at Marks Barfield. “The government must regulate if we want to bring down emissions.” 

Repurposing and refurbishing existing buildings is nearly always preferable to demolishing and rebuilding, unless the existing construction is dangerous or of such poor quality it cannot be remedied. Concrete is one of the most commonly used construction materials, but associated emissions are sky-high. If the global concrete industry were a country, it would be the world’s third biggest emitter. Alternative materials from timber to wool are not widely used, and while innovators are working on ways to bring down emissions from concrete – using additives from coffee grounds to beetroot, for instance – it remains a significant source of carbon.When new buildings are needed, a long-term vision – at least 50 years, for the lifetime of a building – and resisting cost-cutting temptations are also important. Barfield notes that high ceilings make buildings more liveable and easier to adapt in future, as well as having benefits in ventilation and light that help in designing ways to reduce energy use. Many architects, however, come under pressure to reduce ceiling height to squeeze in more rooms, which limits the building’s future potential. 

Less than 1% of Britain’s housing stock each year is newly built, and old homes tend to be leaky, draughty, costly to heat and inefficient. The government scrapped measures, such as the “green deal” policy, to insulate existing housing stock. Cash-strapped local authorities lack the resources to offer the insulation needed, even though it would save residents money and improve their health. The CCC recommends turning down heating to 19C in winter, but that may be of little comfort to people in unsuitable and uninsulated homes.

Industry 

Heavy industries such as steel and chemicals currently come under the EU’s emissions trading scheme. Companies are awarded a certain number of allowances to emit carbon dioxide, some free and some paid for, and the most efficient can sell any spares to laggards, who are supposed to be spurred by the additional cost to mend their ways. The system has suffered many setbacks in its nearly 15 years of operation, but it is still one of the main ways in which industry is held to account for its contribution to global heating. 

It is not yet known what, if anything, will replace emissions trading after Brexit, when manufacturers and other heavy industries are likely to come under increasing economic pressure if trade is disrupted. 

Manufacturing output has already come under pressure from the prospect of a no-deal exit, but losing manufacturing in the UK will not reduce carbon emissions overall, but will increase reliance on imports. 

Farming, land use and food 

More than a tenth of greenhouse gas emissions comes from agriculture and this proportion is rising as other sectors have been able to reduce emissions faster. 

Growing more trees is the key plank of the government’s strategy on land use, along with better soil management. Michael Gove, the environment secretary, has set out plans for the UK’s first soil strategy since the “dig for victory” campaigns of the second world war. Soil is one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks, but can also be a major source of carbon depending on the farming techniques used.

Details of the strategy are still to come, and when it comes to tree planting farmers face some uncertainty. There are benefits under the common agricultural policy for planting new and maintaining existing trees, but these can be complex and hard to access. The government has promised £50m for rural tree planting in England to meet its target of 10m new trees across the countryside. The UK is one of the least wooded countries in Europe, with 10% of land forested in England, 15% in Wales, 19% in Scotland and only 8% in Northern Ireland. 

Urban trees can also be a vital way of reducing carbon, cleaning air and reducing the impact of climate change by providing shade and health benefits. The government has put up £10m for 130,000 new trees in towns and cities in the next two years. There is no national policy, however, and some local authorities and landowners such as Network Rail have embarked on tree-cutting programmes without clear oversight of the environmental costs and benefits. 

Our heavy consumption of meat is taking a toll on our health as well as the planet, and farmers can help reduce emissions from livestock, for instance by improving their diet so they produce less methane. Ultimately, however, meat consumption must be reduced. Moving from a high-meat to a low-meat diet would cut emissions by 35%, the CCC found. 

Biodegradable food waste must not be sent to landfill, where it rots to produce methane, after 2025, according to the CCC. Food waste should be avoided as far as possible to bring down agricultural emissions. Unavoidable food waste, treated properly with anaerobic digestion, can be a source of natural gas to be used for heating or electricity generation, displacing fossil fuels. 

Tim Benton, the dean of strategic research at the University of Leeds, says food will only increase in importance as a source of greenhouse gases. He says: “When you have reduced everything else – energy, transport, and so on – the thing you’re left with is food.” 

A ‘just transition’  

When the UK first made its “dash for gas”, it was in the context of closing coal mines and the aftermath of the miners’ strike of the 1980s. Hundreds of thousands of workers in traditional coal-mining areas lost their jobs and the devastation is still keenly felt across swathes of the UK. The recent and enduring memory of that loss and upheaval should act as a warning of how not to engineer a transition to a new form of economy, trade unions believe. 

Sue Ferns, Prospect’s senior deputy director general, says: “We need a just transition for all the workers affected and this means we need to work proactively to ensure that the damage inflicted on coal communities in the 1980s is not repeated.” 

Myths debunked . . .

Damian Carrington Environment editor for the Guardian published this article on the internet (Fri 19 Jun 2020), and in the print edition on Saturday 20 June 2020, under the headline: 

What is the truth about eating meat versus going vegetarian or vegan? 

Unpalatable as it may be for those wedded to producing and eating meat, the environmental and health evidence for a plant-based diet is clear

Whether you are concerned about your health, the environment or animal welfare, scientific evidence is piling up that meat-free diets are best. Millions of people in wealthy nations are already cutting back on animal products.

Of course livestock farmers and meat lovers are unsurprisingly fighting back and it can get confusing. Are avocados really worse than beef? What about bee-massacring almond production?

The coronavirus pandemic has added another ingredient to that mix. The rampant destruction of the natural world is seen as the root cause of diseases leaping into humans and is largely driven by farming expansion. The world’s top biodiversity scientists say even more deadly pandemics will follow unless the ecological devastation is rapidly halted.

Food is also a vital part of our culture, while the affordability of food is an issue of social justice. So there isn’t a single perfect diet. But the evidence is clear: whichever healthy and sustainable diet you choose, it is going to have much less red meat and dairy than today’s standard western diets, and quite possibly none. That’s for two basic reasons.

First, the over-consumption of meat is causing an epidemic of disease, with about $285bn spent every year around the world treating illness caused by eating red meat alone. Second, eating plants is simply a far more efficient use of the planet’s stretched resources than feeding the plants to animals and then eating them. The global livestock herd and the grain it consumes takes up 83% of global farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories.

So what about all those arguments in favour of meat-eating and against vegan diets? Let’s start with the big beef about red meat.

Meaty matters

Claim 1: Grass-fed beef is low carbon
This is true only when compared to intensively-reared beef linked to forest destruction. The UK’s National Farmers Union says UK beef has only half the emissions compared to the world average. But a lot of research shows grass-fed beef uses more land and produces more – or at best similar – emissions because grain is easier for cows to digest and intensively reared cows live shorter lives. Both factors mean less methane. Either way, the emissions from even the best beef are still many times that from beans and pulses.

There’s more. If all the world’s pasture lands were returned to natural vegetation, it would remove greenhouse gases equivalent to about 8 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, according to Joseph Poore at Oxford University. That’s about 15% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Only a small fraction of that pasture land would be needed to grow food crops to replace the lost beef. So overall, if tackling the climate crisis is your thing, then beef is not.

Claim 2: Cattle are actually neutral for climate, because methane is relatively short-lived greenhouse gas
Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and ruminants produce a lot of it. But it only remains in the atmosphere for a relatively short time: half is broken down in nine years. This leads some to argue that maintaining the global cattle herd at current levels – about 1 billion animals – is not heating the planet. The burping cows are just replacing the methane that breaks down as time goes by.

But this is simply “creative accounting”, according to Pete Smith at the University of Aberdeen and Andrew Balmford at the University of Cambridge. We shouldn’t argue that cattle farmers can continue to pollute just because they have done so in the past, they say: “We need to do more than just stand still.” In fact, the short-lived nature of methane actually makes reducing livestock numbers a “particularly attractive target”, given that we desperately need to cut greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

In any case, just focusing on methane doesn’t make the rampant deforestation by cattle ranchers in South America go away. Even if you ignore methane completely, says Poore, animal products still produce more CO2 than plants. Even one proponent of the methane claim says: “I agree that intensive livestock farming is unsustainable.”

Claim 3: In many places the only thing you can grow is grass for cattle and sheep
NFU president, Minette Batters, says: “Sixty-five percent of British land is only suitable for grazing livestock and we have the right climate to produce high-quality red meat and dairy.”

“But if everybody were to make the argument that ‘our pastures are the best and should be used for grazing’, then there would be no way to limit global warming,” says Marco Springmann at the University of Oxford. His work shows that a transition to a predominantly plant-based flexitarian diet would free up both pasture and cropland.

The pasture could instead be used to grow trees and lock up carbon, provide land for rewilding and the restoration of nature, and growing bio-energy crops to displace fossil fuels. The crops no longer being fed to animals could instead become food for people, increasing a nation’s self-sufficiency in grains.

Claim 4: Grazing cattle help store carbon from the atmosphere in the soil
This is true. The problem is that even in the very best cases, this carbon storage offsets only 20%-60% of the total emissions from grazing cattle. “In other words, grazing livestock – even in a best-case scenario – are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock,” says Tara Garnett, also at the University of Oxford.

Furthermore, research shows this carbon storage reaches its limit in a few decades, while the problem of methane emissions continue. The stored carbon is also vulnerable - a change in land use or even a drought can see it released again. Proponents of “holistic grazing” to trap carbon are also criticised for unrealistic extrapolation of local results to global levels.

Claim 5: There is much more wildlife in pasture than in monoculture cropland
That is probably true but misses the real point. A huge driver of the global wildlife crisis is the past and continuing destruction of natural habitat to create pasture for livestock. Herbivores do have an important role in ecosystems, but the high density of farmed herds means pasture is worse for wildlife than natural land. Eating less meat means less destruction of wild places and cutting meat significantly would also free up pasture and cropland that could be returned to nature. Furthermore, a third of all cropland is used to grow animal feed.

Claim 6: We need animals to convert feed into protein humans can eat
There is no lack of protein, despite the claims. In rich nations, people commonly eat 30-50% more protein than they need. All protein needs can easily be met from plant-based sources, such as beans, lentils, nuts and whole grains.

But animals can play a role in some parts of Africa and Asia where, in India for example, waste from grain production can feed cattle that produce milk. In the rest of the world, where much of cropland that could be used to feed people is actually used to feed animals, a cut in meat eating is still needed for agriculture to be sustainable.

What about …?’

Claim 7: What about soya milk and tofu that is destroying the Amazon?
It’s not. Well over 96% of soy from the Amazon region is fed to cows, pigs and chickens eaten around the world, according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says Poore. Furthermore, 97% of Brazilian soy is genetically modified, which is banned for human consumption in many countries and is rarely used to make tofu and soya milk in any case.

Soya milk also has much smaller emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. If you are worried about the Amazon, not eating meat remains your best bet.

Claim 8: Almond milk production is massacring bees and turning land into desert
Some almond production may well cause environmental problems. But that is because rising demand has driven rapid intensification in specific places, like California, which could be addressed with proper regulation. It is nothing to do with what almonds need to grow. Traditional almond production in Southern Europe uses no irrigation at all. It is also perhaps worth noting that the bees that die in California are not wild, but raised by farmers like six-legged livestock.

Like soya milk, almond milk still has lower carbon emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. But if you are still worried, there are plenty of alternatives, with oat milk usually coming out with the lowest environmental footprint.

Claim 9: Avocados are causing droughts in places
Again, the problem here is the rapid growth of production in specific regions that lack prudent controls on water use, like Peru and Chile. Avocados generate a third of the emissions of chicken, a quarter of those of pork, and a 20th of beef.

If you are still worried about avocados, you can of course choose not to eat them. But it’s not a reason to eat meat instead, which has a much bigger water and deforestation footprint.

The market is likely to solve the problem, as the high demand from consumers for avocados and almonds incentivises farmers elsewhere to grow the crops, thereby alleviating the pressure on current production hotspots.

Claim 10: Quinoa boom is harming poor farmers in Peru and Bolivia
Quinoa is an amazing food and has seen a boom. But the idea that this took food from the mouths of poor farmers is wrong. “The claim that rising quinoa prices were hurting those who had traditionally produced and consumed it is patently false,” said researchers who studied the issue.

Quinoa was never a staple food, representing just a few percent of the food budget for these people. The quinoa boom has had no effect on their nutrition. The boom also significantly boosted the farmers’ income.

There is an issue with falling soil quality, as the land is worked harder. But quinoa is now planted in China, India and Nepal, as well as in the US and Canada, easing the burden. The researchers are more worried now about the loss of income for South American farmers as the quinoa supply rises and the price falls.

Claim 11: What about palm oil destroying rainforests and orangutans?
Palm oil plantations have indeed led to terrible deforestation. But that is an issue for everybody, not only vegans: it’s in about half of all products on supermarket shelves, both food and toiletries. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature argues that choosing sustainably produced palm oil is actually positive, because other oil crops take up more land.

But Poore says: “We are abandoning millions of acres a year of oilseed land around the world, including rapeseed and sunflower fields in the former Soviet regions, and traditional olive plantations.” Making better use of this land would be preferable to using palm oil, he says.

Healthy questions

Claim 12: Vegans don’t get enough B12, making them stupid
A vegan diet is generally very healthy, but doctors have warned about the potential lack of B12, an important vitamin for brain function that is found in meat, eggs and cows’ milk. This is easily remedied by taking a supplement.

However, a closer look reveals some surprises. B12 is made by bacteria in soil and the guts of animals, and free-range livestock ingest the B12 as they graze and peck the ground. But most livestock are not free-range, and pesticides and antibiotics widely used on farms kill the B12-producing bugs. The result is that most B12 supplements - 90% according to one source – are fed to livestock, not people.

So there’s a choice here between taking a B12 supplement yourself, or eating an animal that has been given the supplement. Algae are a plant-based source of B12, although the degree of bio-availability is not settled yet. It is also worth noting that a significant number of non-vegans are B12 deficient, especially older people. Among vegans the figure is only about 10%.

Claim 13: Plant-based alternatives to meat are really unhealthy
The rapid rise of the plant-based burger has prompted some to criticise them as ultra-processed junk food. A plant-based burger could be unhealthier if the salt levels are very high, says Springmann, but it is most likely to still be healthier than a meat burger when all nutritional factors are considered, particularly fibre. Furthermore, replacing a beef burger with a plant-based alternative is certain to be less damaging to the environment.

There is certainly a strong argument to be made that overall we eat far too much processed food, but that applies just as much to meat eaters as to vegetarians and vegans. And given that most people are unlikely to give up their burgers and sausages any time, the plant-based options are a useful alternative.

‘Catching out’ vegans

Claim 14: Fruit and vegetables aren’t vegan because they rely on animal manure as fertiliser
Most vegans would say it’s just silly to say fruit and veg are animal products and plenty are produced without animal dung. In any case there is no reason for horticulture to rely on manure at all. Synthetic fertiliser is easily made from the nitrogen in the air and there is plenty of organic fertiliser available if we chose to use it more widely in the form of human faeces. Over application of fertiliser does cause water pollution problems in many parts of the world. But that applies to both synthetic fertiliser and manure and results from bad management.

Claim 15: Vegan diets kill millions of insects
Piers Morgan is among those railing against “hypocrite” vegans because commercially kept bees die while pollinating almonds and avocados and combine harvesters “create mass murder of bugs” and small mammals while bringing in the grain harvest. But almost everyone eats these foods, not just vegans.

It is true that insects are in a terrible decline across the planet. But the biggest drivers of this are the destruction of wild habitat, largely for meat production, and widespread pesticide use. If it is insects that you are really worried about, then eating a plant-based organic diet is the option to choose.

Claim 16: Telling people to eat less meat and dairy is denying vital nutrition to the world’s poorest
A “planetary health diet” published by scientists to meet both global health and environmental needs was criticised by journalist Joanna Blythman: “When ideologues living in affluent countries pressurise poor countries to eschew animal foods and go plant-based, they are displaying crass insensitivity, and a colonial White Saviour mindset.”

In fact, says Springmann, who was part of the team behind the planetary health diet, it would improve nutritional intake in all regions, including poorer regions where starchy foods currently dominate diets. The big cuts in meat and dairy are needed in rich nations. In other parts of the world, many healthy, traditional diets are already low in animal products.

On the road

Claim 17: Transport emissions mean that eating plants from all over the world is much worse than local meat and dairy
“‘Eating local’ is a recommendation you hear often [but] is one of the most misguided pieces of advice,” says Hannah Ritchie, at the University of Oxford. “Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from.”

Beef and lamb have many times the carbon footprint of most other foods, she says. So whether the meat is produced locally or shipped from the other side of the world, plants will still have much lower carbon footprints. Transport emissions for beef are about 0.5% of the total and for lamb it’s 2%.

The reason for this is that almost all food transported long distances is carried by ships, which can accommodate huge loads and are therefore fairly efficient. For example, the shipping emissions for avocados crossing the Atlantic are about 8% of their total footprint. Air freight does of course result in high emissions, but very little food is transported this way; it accounts for just 0.16% of food miles.

Claim 18: All the farmers who raise livestock would be unemployed if the world
went meat-free
Livestock farming is massively subsidised with taxpayers money around the world – unlike vegetables and fruit. That money could be used to support more sustainable foods such as beans and nuts instead, and to pay for other valuable services, such as capturing carbon in woodlands and wetlands, restoring wildlife, cleaning water and reducing flood risks. Shouldn’t your taxes be used to provide public goods rather than harms?

So, food is complicated. But however much we might wish to continue farming and eating as we do today, the evidence is crystal clear that consuming less meat and more plants is very good for both our health and the planet. The fact that some plant crops have problems is not a reason to eat meat instead.

In the end, you will choose what you eat. If you want to eat healthily and sustainably, you don’t have to stop eating meat and dairy altogether. The planetary health diet allows for a beef burger, some fish and an egg each week, and a glass of milk or some cheese each day.

Food writer Michael Pollan foreshadowed the planetary health diet in 2008 with a simple seven-word rule: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But if you want to have the maximum impact on fighting the climate and wildlife crisis, then it is going to be all plants.

Make your choice! Carrots or Oil?

Carrots NOT Oil! 

"What's up Doc?"

The Business leader in Sunday's Observer (Sun 21 Jun 2020) observes that: 

The admission by oil companies – the corporations with most to lose from a battle against the climate crisis – that their industry is on the cusp of decline renews hope that change is possible.

Coronavirus has dealt the fossil-fuel industry the biggest single blow in its history, and it is clear that 2020’s plummeting demand for oil and gas is no mere flesh wound. The global Covid-19 crisis may have already triggered a terminal decline for big oil.

BP’s decision last week to reset its oil price forecasts for the next three decades was the latest tremor in a seismic shift for the industry. Its forecasts of a $75-a-barrel oil price over the next 30 years were scrapped in favour of an average price of $55. The watershed decision wiped more than $17bn from the value of its business at a stroke and could mean many of its untapped oil reserves will remain in the ground.

The transition to a renewable future featured prominently in BP’s statement. Chief executive Bernard Looney said: “These difficult decisions – rooted in our net-zero ambition and reaffirmed by the pandemic – will better enable us to compete through the energy transition.” The company added that the pandemic would probably “accelerate the pace of transition to a lower-carbon economy and energy system”.

It is a clear acknowledgement that the progress of the green transformation is unstoppable, only weeks after Royal Dutch Shell too bowed to the inevitable decline of oil industry returns. Shell revealed a dramatic rebasing of its shareholder dividends, wiping three-quarters from the annual payouts expected this year, in its first dividend cut since the second world war.

Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, said at the time that the pandemic could bring the high-water mark of the oil market closer and may mean that the company shows preference to clean energy projects “which serve us better in the future”.

Van Beurden has been more cautious than Looney, but they are heading to the same conclusion. The most ancient of human terrors – a pandemic – has shown two of the world’s most powerful polluters to be out of time.

Both companies acknowledge that the peak in global oil demand is likely to come sooner than expected as a result of the collapse in fossil-fuel use during the pandemic, with further momentum provided by governments that focus on a green economic recovery. One research firm, Rystad Energy, believes that more than 280 billion barrels of oil may be left in the ground as the world’s appetite for the fuel peaks in seven years’ time. Others believe the peak may have passed last year.

Nonetheless, a climate victory is not guaranteed. It will require governments to accelerate plans for a green economy, and that will be a test of voters’ political will. Politicians will be wary of testing public resolve for further change when economies around the world have received their worst battering since the second world war.

Some industries, such as aviation, appear to be decades away from the technological breakthroughs that would enable them to make a meaningful contribution to emissions cuts.

This will put further pressure on oil companies to acknowledge their fate and put more management focus, and money, into embracing renewables. BP set a carbon footprint target of net zero by 2050. But by putting just $500m of its annual $12bn investment budget into green energy, it showed that words were not being matched with deeds – a familiar accusation can be levelled at major polluters. This time, though, the existential threats to the planet (both Covid and climate) pose a terminal threat to the fossil fuel majors. BP and Shell are savvy enough to know this.

The admission by oil companies – the corporations with most to lose from a battle against the climate crisis – that their industry is on the cusp of decline renews hope that change is possible.

Change is possible . . .

Like finding North Sea oil again?

Governments can opt to repeat the failure of austerity or take the opportunity to invest in the future

This is the viewpoint that Larry Elliott takes in the Guardian (Sun 21 Jun 2020). He writes: 

It all takes some explaining. The government has borrowed more than £100bn in two months and the national debt ratio is bigger than the economy’s annual output, but investors don’t care a bit.

Orthodox economic theory says rising budget deficits lead to rising interest rates because the financial markets get nervous and demand a higher price for lending to the state. Not these days. There have even been examples of investors paying for the privilege of lending to the British government.

That’s despite the fact that it shows no desire to rein in the deficit any time soon. Lessons have been learned from the coalition government of 2010, which responded to what was then record peacetime borrowing by whacking a still-weak economy with higher taxes and spending cuts. Austerity choked off the recovery and made Britain’s inequality worse.

Low interest rates and the bond-buying scheme known as quantitative easing disproportionately helped those who own assets by driving up the value of their houses and their shares, while spending cuts hit those on the lowest incomes hardest.

A repeat of the austerity experiment is highly unlikely for a number of reasons. For a start, the experience of the period since the global financial crisis has dented the idea that higher deficits mean higher borrowing costs.

An ageing population is part of the story, because older people tend to save more and spend less than younger cohorts. The uncertainties caused by the pandemic has sent this global pile of cash in search of safe havens, and you don’t get much more secure than government bonds in countries that can print their own currency.

As a result, both official interest rates – those set by central banks – and rates set by the actions of the financial markets are going to stay low. The Bank of England has pegged official interest rates at 0.1% and is thinking through the pros and cons of taking them below zero. Real interest rates, those adjusted to take account of the level of inflation, are negative and likely to remain so.

Governments, therefore, have a choice. They can either opt for another bout of self-defeating austerity which they know will antagonise already disgruntled voters, or they can take full advantage of the most benign borrowing environment imaginable to invest in the future. The second option looks more attractive.

As Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth say in their new book Angrynomics there is already an enormous amount of unhappiness out there. There are many people who feel a rigged system broke in 2008 and has never been satisfactorily mended.

“We think of capitalism as a computer that has just had a massive crash”, the pair write. “However, only a small software patch was installed to get it up and running again when what it really needs is a whole new operating system. Populism – of the left and right – is a recognition of that.”

What’s interesting about Angrynomics is that it comes up with some solutions to the problem it identifies. One is that it makes perfect sense for governments to invest in greening the economy if, as is now the case, the cost of capital is lower than the return on investment.

Another is that rather than seeking to redistribute wealth through the tax system, the government should create a national wealth fund, the proceeds of which would be distributed to those with the fewest assets.

The low level of interest rates gives the UK the opportunity to remedy one of the biggest economic tragedies of the last half century – the failure to put the proceeds of North Sea oil to better use.

When crude was found in the North Sea, the fields were divided up between Norway and the UK. Norway decided it would be a good idea to set up a sovereign wealth fund that could be used to pay for long-term spending, such as the extra health and social costs required for an ageing population. Britain squandered the windfall on current spending: the peak of North Sea oil revenues came in the 1980s as the bills started to roll in for mass unemployment.

Countries with sovereign wealth funds have tended to be those rich in commodities or with economies particularly geared towards exports. Britain’s oil reserves have been dwindling for more than two decades, leaving a sense of what might have been. The current market conditions provide a second opportunity.

Imagine the government decides to set up a national wealth fund, Lonergan and Blyth say. It can borrow at a real interest rate of zero for a 15-year period, so it issues bonds worth 20% of national output – around £400bn - and invests in a diversified basket of global equities.

Assuming a real, inflation-adjusted, rate of return of 4-6% the fund would more than double in size over a 15-year period and leave a healthy surplus once the original borrowing had been paid back.

As far as the authors of Angrynomics are concerned, the existence of negative real interest rates is like discovering North Sea oil all over again. They propose that the surplus be distributed in the form of trust funds to the 80% of households who own the fewest assets.

There are risks, of course. A wealth fund would be seriously impaired were the global economy to be permanently debilitated by Covid-19. With that caveat, though, a national wealth fund would help tackle some of the UK’s social, economic and political ills by giving everyone a sense that they have a stake in growing prosperity. It is one those rare ideas that has its supporters on both the left and right, and it is easy to see why.

Levelling up . . .

Jonathan Watts (Tue 23 Jun 2020) writes: 

Micky Day is an electrical cable installer from Hartlepool, one of the poorest, most avidly pro-Brexit regions in the UK. He is not interested in Westminster politics and has little time for talk of the green recovery, but he knows how to unite a community and care for people who are hurting. And it is this that inspires his thoughts about Britain beyond lockdown.

“We can’t have more cuts. There are a lot of people on their knees already,” he says. “There is a lot of industry in this area. If the government puts the money on the table, it could be massive in the north-east. Let’s get people back working and lift the economy off its knees.”

Day is known locally as “the most popular man in Hartlepool” because of the amount of time he devotes to community work. He has raised more than £400,000 for cancer, established the mental health charities Miles for Men and Minds for Men, and works with local supermarkets to arrange food donations. During lockdown, he and his friends have been doing karaoke car park tours to lift the spirits of people in isolation, regaling the inhabitants of elderly care homes with Elvis and Oasis numbers.

He says this already close community of 90,000 has become stronger during the pandemic because people have rallied to help each other out. But Day foresees financial and mental health problems ahead unless there is more support. “A lot of people have been going through tough times. After lockdown, it’s going to get worse.”

How to lift and heal the country is the biggest political challenge facing the government. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is putting together a recovery budget that could be the defining economic policy of a generation. It must head off the UK’s worst recession in 300 years, address an existential climate crisis, and “level up” incomes in an unequal and divided nation. Politicians in the north-east see an opportunity for a historic transition. There are hopes that decarbonisation can give a future to a region that has often struggled to emerge from the past.

Since Margaret Thatcher closed the collieries in the 1980s, the town of Hartlepool has slipped further and further behind other parts of Britain for job prospects, life expectancy, health and economic growth.

One in three households are jobless. A third of children are obese when they finish primary school. Although there are only 40,000 families in the town, such is the level of need that there are nine food kitchens. Life expectancy was declining even before coronavirus. The local council is in dire financial straits. Locals joke darkly that even three pound shops have gone bust.

‘Covid is just another crisis’

Because the town was already so poor, the economic impact of Covid-19 has been muted. The third of the population on benefits may even be slightly better off because the government is giving an extra £20 a week in universal credit and £15 for school meal vouchers. In a ranking of which English towns have suffered the worst financial hit from the crisis, Hartlepool came 154th out of 175. Others have suffered a sharper downturn because they have lost tourist and student income.

“For us, Covid is just another crisis. We already knew who to support. We’ve been doing it for ages,” says charity coordinator Sacha Bedding. He fears that what happened to Hartlepool after deindustrialisation in the 1980s could be a foretaste of what is to come.

When the Conservative government closed the coal mines and ancilliary operations that had provided most of the jobs in the town, call centres were supposed to be the future – but they all moved to India in the 2000s. The public sector was then the biggest employer, but it was slashed under austerity programmes following the financial crisis. There has been public-private investment in redeveloping the marina, but several of the upmarket new restaurants have gone bust because there are not enough wealthy local customers to fill the tables.

“We try to reinvent ourselves, but we always seem to be one step behind because we don’t address deep structural changes,” Bedding says. “If we are not careful, I worry the country will level down rather than level up,” he says over a cup of tea at the end of another day delivering food parcels and medicine to those in need.

For most of the last few decades, Bedding – like several others the Guardian spoke to – feels people in the north-east have been ignored, scorned as “scroungers” or derided as racist throwbacks who failed to adjust to a globalised post-industrial world.

But he feels the voice of the region has grown stronger in the wake of Brexit and the election of a new post-red wall wave of MPs, mayors and councillors who can no longer take their support for granted.

Green growth

One such politician is Ben Houchen, a Conservative elected in 2017 as Tees Valley mayor. The investments he is trying to attract include some of the biggest decarbonisation projects in Europe.

In a phone interview, Houchen comes across as very different from southern Tories like David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. He seems more concerned about jobs, levelling up and the need to decarbonise the economy.

“For Teesside, clean growth could be as transformative to our region as steel and iron were 200 year ago … This would be huge in levelling up.”

He is under no illusions about the scale of the economic challenge. “It’s absolutely unprecedented – as big as it could be,” he says. “But the rebound will be strong. There is a lot of pent-up energy in the economy … that wasn’t there in 2007.”

Many major spending projects have been pre-approved, and Houchen is hopeful for more because interest rates are low, which means the government has less of an incentive to take the path of austerity. Politically, it will also want to capitalise on its recent gains in former Labour territory.

“Everyone I have spoken to, including the PM, says we will invest in our economy, not tighten belts and cut spending. I am hoping that if Rishi [Sunak] has some money in the next few weeks, there will be projects in the north,” he said. “Depending on the direction government choses to take, we could accelerate decarbonisation.”

The old steelworks on Teesside was recently chosen as the site for one of the world’s biggest industrial-scale carbon capture and storage projects. Houchen said Net Zero Teesside will bring in more than £3bn in investment, create 5,700 jobs and capture CO2 equivalent to the emissions of 6m homes every year. It is due to start by 2025 with the backing of BP, Shell and Equinox. “They see it as the future of their business. They realise they can’t just release the emissions into the air any more,” the mayor said.

Other potential job-creating investments by the chancellor include the decarbonisation of heating in the country’s 20m homes by switching boilers from fossil fuel gas to hydrogen. “That will require refitting 2,000 boilers every day until 2050. That’s a huge number of jobs,” the mayor says.

The government could also support the domestic manufacturing of turbines for the large offshore wind farm at Dogger Bank, which is 80 miles off the Teesside coastline. Houchen estimates that would create another 5,000-8,000 jobs.

But all this is not enough to hold back the unemployment tsunami that is gathering force. There will also be pressure to generate more carbon-intensive jobs through roadbuilding and expanding airports.

Locals say they don’t care whether jobs are green or black, as long as they are not minimum wage, or zero-hours contracts, which barely pay more than benefits. That means employees in the care, health and retail sectors should be valued as the “essential workers” they were designated as during lockdown.

A caring economy

The town centre is coming back to life. When non-essential shops reopened, locals say there were so many people wanting to return to old consumer habits that streets were blocked with cars, and marshals had to be called in to manage the long lines of eager customers.

Some want a more caring economy. Independent retailers Angela Arnold and Trevor Sherwood, co-owners of the cosy LilyAnne’s coffee bar, have used their £10,000 Covid-19 support grant to expand the cafe so they can provide a “gentle space” that will help socially isolated residents to reintegrate. “Covid has heightened anxieties among many people,” said Arnold. “There will be a big mental health impact.”

But with the prime minister urging people to shop for Britain, Arnold and her business partner fear the government will suspend the Sunday trading law to ramp up productivity again. “That would be a disaster for independent retailers like us,” she said.

Like many, she would like more focus on togetherness, which helped during Covid-19 and previous crises and is likely to be needed in the tough times that everyone expects to come.

“Before Covid, when did you last see your neighbour? Everyone is normally too tired when they come home. But in lockdown, we are getting to know each other again,” she says. “People are cooking for one another and leaving food on the steps, and reconnecting with friends. There is a realisation that there is more to life than money.”

At the nearby seaside town of Seaton Carew, the beachfront is as close to bustling as it is possible to get in an era of physical distancing. There are long queues for fish and chips and ice-cream. Families picnic on the sand, play football and fly kites. With pubs and amusement arcades still closed, people pay more attention to each other. The scene could come from a more innocent, bygone age. It seems that the lockdown, which started with fears of dystopia and social breakdown, appears to be ending here with people more closely bonded and appreciative of nature than before. 

The question now is how long that mood can last once capitalism revs up again.

Going GREEN! Is it a choice or a necessity?

Damian Carrington Environment editor reports (Mon 22 Jun 2020) on the call from a Green Coalition for the UK chancellor, Rishi Sunak to:

"seize the day"

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, must “seize the day” and create a national nature service to restore wildlife and habitats in England, say a coalition of the country’s biggest green groups. It said the move would create thousands of jobs, a more resilient country and tackle the wildlife and climate crises.

The coalition has drawn up a list of 330 projects that are ready to go, including flower meadows, “tiny forests” in cities and hillside schemes to cut flooding. It said a service to fund the projects and train workers would create 10,000 jobs and be part of a green recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

“A new national nature service could restore our land, coastlines, oceans and economy for a greener, more prosperous future,” the coalition said in the letter to Sunak. “In doing so, we will create a more prosperous and resilient society and train up a new workforce to power a green, modern economy.”

“From you, we need a well-funded training and employment programme, investment in a co-designed portfolio of conservation projects to kickstart green recovery, and the bravery to seize the day,” said the coalition of 50 groups.

It includes National Parks England, RSPB, The Wildlife Trusts, Woodland Trust, WWF, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, representing millions of members. Others include the Black Environment Network, councils in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, the National Youth Agency and the Nature-Friendly Farming Network.

Sunak is reported to be planning a “green industrial revolution”, with a possible announcement in July. Environment groups, however, fear plans to spend billions on energy and transport infrastructure are overshadowing the role that restoring nature can also play in the post-pandemic recovery. In March, Sunak pledged £640m for a “nature for climate fund” to support tree planting and peatland restoration, which was a Conservative manifesto commitment in the December general election.

A national nature service was supported by a high-level food and farming commission in 2019. Nature has also been shown to improve people’s health and wellbeing. However, the UK is “among the most nature-depleted countries in the world”, according to experts. The government’s official advisers said in 2019 that the UK was due to miss almost all of its nature targets.

Richard Benwell, head of Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), which is part of the coalition, said: “Investing in nature can provide a short-term boost with thousands of jobs, and it can provide long-term, cost-effective protection against costly risks like flooding, soil degradation, and climate change.”

“Helping the poorest, most nature-deprived communities first can help improve people’s way of life at the same time as helping wildlife,” he said. “This is the chancellor’s chance to grow back better by including funding for these projects in July’s budget announcement.”

Funding the 330 projects would create or enhance at least 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of key habitat, such as woodland, heaths, peatland, marshes and rivers, WCL said, an area 25% bigger than greater London.

At least 4.5m trees would be planted as part of the projects. This would capturie about 3m tonnes of carbon dioxide, and give a lifeline to threatened wildlife, from seahorses to hedgehogs and bats to birds. Populations of the UK’s most important wildlife have plummeted by an average of 60% since 1970.

Among the projects is the restoration of wildflower meadows being undertaken by Plantlife, which provides habitat for bees and other pollinators, benefiting both crops and wildlife. Another group, Earthwatch, is creating “tiny forests”:dense, tennis-court-sized groves in urban areas which grow five times faster than conventional woodland, absorbing CO2 and creating habitats for biodiversity.

In the Lake District national park, the RSPB is working with landowner United Utilities to increase wildlife and carbon storage, as well as reduce the downstream flood risk to homes. Assessment of a subset of the projects indicated every £1 spent would produce £5 of benefits to the environment and people’s health.  

Q&A from the Guardian  

Q. What is biodiversity and why does it matter?

A. Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms and all its interactions.  

“Without biodiversity, there is no future for humanity,” says Prof David Macdonald, at Oxford University. It is comprised of several levels, starting with genes, then individual species, then communities of creatures and finally entire ecosystems, such as forests or coral reefs, where life interplays with the physical environment.  

Without plants there would be no oxygen and without bees to pollinate there would be no fruit or nuts. The services provided by ecosystems are estimated to be worth trillions of dollars – double the world’s GDP. Biodiversity loss in Europe alone is estimated to cost the continent about 3% of its GDP, or €450m (£400m), a year. 

The extinction rate of species is now thought to be about 1,000 times higher than before humans dominated the planet, which may be even faster than the losses after a giant meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago. 

The sixth mass extinction in geological history has already begun, according to some scientists. Billions of individual populations have been lost, with the number of animals living on Earth having plunged by half since 1970. 

Researchers call the massive loss of wildlife a “biological annihilation”.  

Changes to the climate are reversible, even if that takes centuries or millennia – but once species become extinct, there’s no going back. 

Re:LODE Radio suggests that this UK government, while strong on promises and electioneering rhetoric is weak on delivery, capability and competence and, once capitalism has revved up again, things will carry on as "normal"; 

with business as usual!

Chaos at No 10 sparks disquiet on Tory backbenches in; 

a car crash week!

"brightly coloured lollipop"

Marina Hyde draws our attention in her Guardian opinion piece (Fri 19 Jun 2020) to the prospect of: A strong sense of empires crumbling this week;

as Led Zeppelin are no longer the biggest dickheads to demand a plane respray. 

Sliding into the top spot are Boris Johnson and his government, with the prime minister taking time out of accidentally bumping off British citizens to order a £900,000 paint job on his VIP Voyager aircraft.

And the UK taxpayer is paying for it . . .

This is Boris Johnson's midlife crisis.

The rest of us just have to live in it.

Marina Hyde writes:  

The only disappointment is that he didn’t reveal the plans at one of the daily No 10 press conferences. Here’s a slide showing how tens of thousands more people than necessary have Sadly Died because of decisions I took or put off taking. But looking at the positives, here’s a slide of the new designs for my plane! As for the respray, I’m picturing something that befits our status in the world. Perhaps giant letters reading “Air Farce One”. The budget option would be to keep it grey and just scrawl a classic across the side, like “CLEAN ME” or “My plane is dirtier than your mum”. If not, maybe Johnson would be drawn to something like “If this plane’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’”, or “Don’t laugh, lady – your daughter could be in here”.

None of these would be any less absurd than the justification for it all by cabinet minister Oliver Dowden. I note that Oliver is a Conservative culture secretary, which has historically been like being the Ku Klux Klan’s equalities wizard. Here he is on Johnson’s paint job: “We really are a creative industries superpower, and we should be promoting that. I think the work on Voyager is part of that.” To which the most reasonable reply is: wut? Still, let’s try to clamber inside the logic simulator and work out what – in the name of his favourite album being a free CD that came on the front of the Sunday Times in 2007 – Oliver is trying to say here. Is it that theatres are in such acute crisis that 75% of them may never reopen, so we need to get this piece of military hardware into the bodyshop? Is it that we made Fleabag, and that’s why my boss needs a penis extension? I’m finding the philosophy somewhat impenetrable.

Then again, Johnson has always seen some mystical correlation between his sense of sexual potency and the success of the nation. He has previously fretted that Trident going to sea without missiles would mean “the whole country is literally firing blanks”. He has described himself as the man “to put some lead in the collective pencil”. And he’d now like us “to have a chlorinated chicken in every port”. Actually, I think I invented that last one – but you’re welcome for the image. We’re all men of the world, and no one said dockside life was for the faint-hearted.

Speaking of grotesque maritime adventures, it feels the moment to turn to one minister’s widely publicised letter to Johnson this week in the wake of his shameful decision to merge the Department for International Development with the Foreign Office. 

This requested that the government spend money intended for overseas aid on two new yachts to replace the Royal Yacht Britannia.

The letter was written by Penny Mordaunt, hitherto one of the less lavishly useless ones. When Dominic Cummings broke lockdown to drive to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight and so on, Tory MPs were swamped by furious constituents. Mordaunt went on record to offer them her “deepest regrets” and say that there were “some inconsistencies in his account of events and the reasons behind it”. In the immediate wake of this, a “well-placed observer” told the Times: “Dom is very vindictive. I think someone like Penny – she’s fucked. I know how they operate and she is in big trouble. They will go after her.”

Alternatively, she might have to pass some mad loyalty test, like having to execute a snitch in an abandoned warehouse in front of her crime boss – or write a letter saying that aid money has to be spent on a yacht. Sorry, two yachts. That, I imagine, is when you lower the gun you were handed, shaking with a mixture of horror, fear, relief (maybe even a tiny trace of exhilaration), and Cummings claps you on the back and goes: “That it’s, Pen. Always knew you were one of us.”

In terms of cultural exports, of course, we are now a country where the foreign secretary informs the world that Black Lives Matter protesters’ taking a knee “seems to be taken from the Game of Thrones” [sic]. 

Domestically, the DfId/FCO merger is a culture war gambit that reminds us this government will be coming for the BBC soon enough. In that act of cultural vandalism, they will be assisted by various quarterwits on the left who want to privatise a utility currently owned by the public, and who believe that a strong, independent leftwing media will spring up in its place. Just like it has in all the other countries.

Still, no doubt the politicians can visit these on their royal yacht replacement. I’m afraid I don’t yet know the purpose of the second yacht Mordaunt has requested. Maybe some kind of human ark? There may come a point where Johnson’s administration has wiped out so many British citizens that the only way for us to survive as a world-beating master race is to take to the high seas – and they will get higher, if he has his way – where a retinue of women will be impregnated by one hugely self-regarding enthusiast. I can’t imagine who.

In the meantime, surely it’s time to point out that if a telly chef was behaving like Johnson, you know what people would be saying. Let’s look at the evidence: the chap in question has left his wife for someone very much younger. He has recently acquired a dirt bike on which to bomb round the grounds of Chequers. He now wants not one but three ludicrously showy high-performance vehicles. Come on – does the prime minister have to get a Celtic knot tattoo before we can call what’s happening by its name? Does Johnson have to casually push up his sleeve at the dispatch box to reveal a newly inked piece of Route 66 body art, then say to Keir Starmer “I’m headed for the open road of life, mate”? Does he have to be spotted in a terrible leather jacket? Do a triathlon? Learn to surf? If it were anyone else in public life, then the Daily Mail’s Sarah Vine would have written 15 columns about it, so allow me to “go there” on her behalf: the prime minister is having an incredibly cliched midlife crisis, and we’re all having to live in it.

If this was Bake Off’s Paul Hollywood, then fine. I myself would get a couple of columns out of it; and in any case he’s only in charge of a baking tent, a Kawasaki Ninja and a semi-custom Big Dog Ridgeback (I’m told it doesn’t ride as good as it looks). But when they’re in charge of an entire country, shambolic pandemic response and some nuclear codes, it does feel like something we should all keep an eye on. A powerless one, yes: but still an eye.

Adding to the wreckage . . .

Scrapping the DfID?

The Guardian view on scrapping DfID: a new front in a culture war

Editorial 

The destruction of the Department for International Development is being fuelled by the corrosive idea, seeded by Boris Johnson, that a generous Britain is being taken for a ride by foreigners

(Fri 19 Jun 2020)

Boris Johnson’s surprise announcement this week to parliament that he will fold the Department for International Development (DfID) into the Foreign Office is the wrong decision taken at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. Such a move will hurt the world’s poorest just when the Covid-19 pandemic is predicted to cause soaring levels of poverty, malnutrition and child mortality.

Mr Johnson’s ill-conceived merger plan is less about responding to global challenges and more about diverting attention from this week’s humiliating U-turns with a damaging culture war. On Tuesday Mr Johnson unexpectedly declared his intention to end Britain’s policy of divorcing the pursuit of the national interest from the promotion of development abroad.

At stake is DfID’s aid budget of £15bn a year, the third largest in the world. Mr Johnson prizes realpolitik rather than a zeal for reducing poverty abroad. The ruling Vote Leave clique thinks the money could be better spent in a series of gestures that only serve to highlight the narrowness of its nationalistic agenda. This is a two-front battle, with Mr Johnson advancing against opponents within his party – those one-nation Conservatives for whom DfID’s independence is a litmus test of liberal Toryism – and his enemies without who oppose his reckless chauvinism.

It was under David Cameron, building on Labour’s inheritance, that the UK became the only G7 state to meet the target of spending 0.7% of GDP on overseas assistance. This ought to be a source of pride and strength. But the aid budget’s biggest critics were, like Mr Johnson, also leavers. That’s no coincidence: a form of nationalism, particularly the corrosive idea of a munificent Britain being taken for a ride by foreigners, fuelled both campaigns.

Brexit’s enemies were cast as an out-of-touch elite who cared more about people outside the country than those inside it. Mr Johnson’s leave campaign also juxtaposed austerity at home with generosity abroad, playing on the absurd suggestion that we were seeing cuts in the UK but not in the developing world. In parliament Mr Johnson shamelessly played to leave sentiment with evidence-free claims that DfID was a profligate “cashpoint in the sky” that spends money abroad without reference to Britain’s “diplomatic, political and commercial” priorities.

This is palpably false. Aid works by reducing poverty and bolstering growth in poor nations. Money does go to some of the world’s poorest, most corrupt and most violent places. But since these are often in the most need of basic amenities, cash will inevitably flow to the worst places. The prime minister says the UK gives more aid to Tanzania and Zambia than it does to Ukraine and the western Balkans where Russia poses security threats. That’s because countries like Zambia and Tanzania have high levels of poverty, which is what DfID was created to tackle, and because on a per-capita basis the western Balkans get far more aid than Africa. Without a focus on development, aid will end up being used as a sweetener for arms deals.

Mr Johnson dog-whistled to his base that we can return to the ways of the white Commonwealth by bringing the UK into line with Australia and Canada. These are minnows in the world of development. Some Conservatives try to leaven the argument by saying that foreign ministries in Norway and Denmark are in charge of aid. The Scandinavian comparisons only work if Mr Johnson’s government adopts Nordic levels of competency.

The prime minister knows it is the law to spend 0.7% of GDP on development each year. But the modus operandi of Vote Leave is to break the rules and to make political capital out of being taken to court. Foreign Office mandarins would be naive if they believe that DfID’s pain will be their gain. There are votes for Mr Johnson if he diverts aid cash to build warships and NHS hospitals, and none in revamping embassies. If the prime minister gets his way then “Global Britain” will become a textbook case of how to lose friends – and influence. By pandering to the belief that aid sells the country short, Mr Johnson is doing enduring harm to British leadership and the idea that the country can help those in need.

Johnson accused of 'colonial mindset'

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor for the Guardian reports (Mon 22 Jun 2020): 

Dozens of Commonwealth countries are understood to have raised concerns over Boris Johnson using his role as chair of the organisation to hinder the reappointment of its secretary general, Patricia Scotland.

One high commissioner said Downing Street’s behaviour was “redolent of a colonial mindset”, while the president of one Pacific island nation, Kiribati, has written to all heads of Commonwealth to say he was perplexed and disturbed at the way his objections to Lady Scotland’s treatment have been ignored.

Scotland, a Labour peer and former attorney general, has been secretary general of the Commonwealth of Nations since 2016. Its 54 heads of government had been expected to decide her future at their biennial summit, Chogm, this month but it was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A proposal for an automatic four-year reappointment was made amid uncertainty over when the next Chogm might take place.

In a letter to heads of government on 8 June, Johnson said there was “a significant and diverse” number of objections from Commonwealth states to Scotland automatically staying on for a second four-year term.

The process of countries letting their views be known about Scotland’s future is not fully transparent, but her supporters claim she has the backing of up to 40 out of the 54 nations.

Behind the row is a wider debate about whether Downing Street regards the Commonwealth primarily as a trading opportunity, or an independent political voice. Small states, often ignored in the Commonwealth, also feel they need a stronger voice and that Scotland provides this.

International development aid! The Commonwealth! Trading opportunities?  

. . . excuse me? 

A reminder concerning the history of British colonialism . . .

Shrewsbury's Clive statue belongs in museum, says Telford councillor born in India

More than 10,000 people have now signed petitions calling for Shrewsbury's Clive of India statue to be removed 

Rob Smith of Shrewsbury News (Jun 9, 2020) reports:  

The town centre statue of controversial East India Company man Robert Clive should be placed in a museum, a councillor said.

Debate has raged this week over the statue of 'Clive of India' in Shrewsbury's Square after a statue of slave trader Edward Colston, which stood in Bristol, was toppled and dumped in a bay by protesters on Sunday.

More than 10,000 signatures have been added to two online petitions asking for the Robert Clive statue to be removed.

He played a key role in conquering swathes of India for the East India Company in the mid-18th century.

Corruption and looting saw Clive amass a huge amount of wealth and after returning to Britain he was made Baron Clive of Passey, knighted and became Shrewsbury's MP, a position he held until his death.

Many of the treasures Clive and his son Edward acquired from India can be seen on display at Powys Castle. 

Re:LODE Radio notes that one of the first words from India to go native in English was;

"loot", Bengali slang for plunder. 

To see why, you have only to visit Powis Castle. In 1801 Powis Castle passed by inheritance to Edward Clive, the son of Robert Clive, the front man in the British East India Company's conquest of India and the great looter of Bengal. Edward himself was later governor of Madras and took part in his own share of conquest and plunder. The result is one of the world's greatest collections of art and artifacts from Mughal India.

Professor Utsa Patnaik (Jawaharlal Nehru University) has estimated that: 

Britain robbed India of $45 trillion between 1765 and 1938.

However it is estimated that if India had remained free with 24% of world GDP as in 1700 then its cumulative GDP would have been: 

$232 trillion greater (1700-2003) and $44 trillion greater (1700-1950).

“Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to 9.2 trillion pounds ($45 trillion), taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure, and compounding it at a 5 per cent rate of interest” 

Deprivation kills and it is estimated that 1.8 billion Indians died avoidably from egregious deprivation under the British (1757-1947). The deadly impact of British occupation of India lingers today 71 years after Independence, with 4 million people dying avoidably from deprivation each year in capitalist India. 

Who is accountable?

Polemics, past and present . . .

These facts lend themselves to polemical argument. And, as is well known, the facts of history are always complicated by contexts and timelines. Facts have always been used in polemics of one kind or another. The example of Clive of India's looting of south Asia was used by Thomas Paine in his The American Crisis pamphlet series to inspire the Americans in their battles against the British army. While complaining about the British using negroes and natives in this military conflict, he castigates the British for their despoiling of India. However, he does not refer to the long history, by this date, of the slavery of Africans transported to the thirteen British North American colonies, and the fact that the British were offering North American African slaves their freedom in exchange for their military service.

The American Crisis Pamphlet addressed to Lord Howe - Philadelphia, Jan. 13, 1777

"What's in the name of lord, that I should fear
To bring my grievance to the public ear?"

If ever a nation was made and foolish, blind to its own interest and bent on its own destruction, it is Britain. There are such things as national sins, and though the punishment of individuals may be reserved to another world, national punishment can only be inflicted in this world. Britain, as a nation, is, in my inmost belief, the greatest and most ungrateful offender against God on the face of the whole earth. Blessed with all the commerce she could wish for, and furnished, by a vast extension of dominion, with the means of civilizing both the eastern and western world, she has made no other use of both than proudly to idolize her own "thunder," and rip up the bowels of whole countries for what she could get. Like Alexander, she has made war her sport, and inflicted misery for prodigality's sake. The blood of India is not yet repaid, nor the wretchedness of Africa yet requited. Of late she has enlarged her list of national cruelties by her butcherly destruction of the Caribbs of St. Vincent's, and returning an answer by the sword to the meek prayer for "Peace, liberty and safety." These are serious things, and whatever a foolish tyrant, a debauched court, a trafficking legislature, or a blinded people may think, the national account with heaven must some day or other be settled: all countries have sooner or later been called to their reckoning; the proudest empires have sunk when the balance was struck; and Britain, like an individual penitent, must undergo her day of sorrow, and the sooner it happens to her the better. As I wish it over, I wish it to come, but withal wish that it may be as light as possible.

The American Crisis pamphlet addressed to General Sir William Howe

For the domestic happiness of Britain and the peace of the world, I wish she had not a foot of land but what is circumscribed within her own island. Extent of dominion has been her ruin, and instead of civilizing others has brutalized herself. Her late reduction of India, under Clive and his successors, was not so properly a conquest as an extermination of mankind. She is the only power who could practise the prodigal barbarity of tying men to mouths of loaded cannon and blowing them away. It happens that General Burgoyne, who made the report of that horrid transaction, in the House of Commons, is now a prisoner with us, and though an enemy, I can appeal to him for the truth of it, being confident that he neither can nor will deny it. Yet Clive received the approbation of the last Parliament. 

Thomas Paine (February 9, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution and inspired the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights. Historian Saul K. Padover described him as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination".

Born in Thetford in the English county of Norfolk, Paine migrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every rebel read (or listened to a reading of) his powerful pamphlet Common Sense (1776), proportionally the all-time best-selling American title, which catalysed the rebellious demand for independence from Great Britain. His The American Crisis (1776–1783) was a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. 

Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said: "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain". Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote Rights of Man (1791), in part a defence of the French Revolution against its critics. His attacks on Anglo-Irish conservative writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia in England in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel.

In 2020 an American Crisis becomes a global crisis  

A rainbow in the dark skies over Berlin . . .
. . . Graffiti in Mauerpark, Berlin, depicts the unlikely scenario where Chinese president, Xi Jinping, is going in for a kiss with his US counterpart, Donald Trump. 

What would Thomas Paine make of the current global confrontation of his America with modern China? Could Thomas Paine's Enlightenment era ideas on transnational human rights take on the modern challenge of the mitigation of the impact of climate change upon all the peoples of the planet.

Global carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion

The three countries with the largest share of carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion are China, the United States and India. Together these three states contribute nearly half of the world's current carbon emissions, and now they are locked into a global confrontation that's about competition for a new kind of economic global hegemony and seems about to escalate into a new kind of cold war.

Patrick Wintour, Diplomatic editor for the Guardian considers this current state of affairs (Mon 22 Jun 2020), and affaires of these states, under the headline and subheading: 

US v China: is this the start of a new cold war? 

Coronavirus has brought the rivalry to a head sooner than expected – and the scope for non-alignment is narrowing

George Kennan, the US charge d’affaires in Moscow at the end of the second world war and the author of the famous Long Telegram in 1946, captured in his memoir how quickly perceptions in international relations can change.

The man widely seen as the intellectual author of the cold war recalled that if he had sent his telegram on the nature of the Soviet threat six months earlier, his message “would probably have been received in the state department with pursed lips and raised eyebrows. Six months later, it probably would have sounded redundant, a preaching to the converted.”

Now, as the US squares up to China over the coronavirus pandemic, it appears as if many of the world’s democracies are, as rapidly as in 1946, reaching a new perception of the world order. Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, has declared the Chinese Communist party to be the number one threat to security, greater than international terrorism, and a growing number of countries seem to agree.

Those who argued that a more economically liberal China would produce a more politically liberal China fear they have found themselves on the wrong side of history. From the airspace over Taiwan to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, the frozen Himalayas on the border with India and the reefs surrounding the Xisha/Paracel islands in the South China Sea, Chinese assertiveness is prompting a reassessment. The Australian government’s decision on Friday to call out a state-led cyber-attack – without naming China – was only the latest evidence of a new mindset.

The US is demanding that its allies not only admit to previous naivety but join it in an anti-China alliance. China, perhaps less overtly, is lobbying countries to to join its rival power bloc.

Many countries are trying to hedge, but the scope for neutrality or non-alignment is narrowing. India, for instance, long proud of what its former national security adviser Shivshankar Menon calls its strategic autonomy, is reeling at the implications of the brutal Chinese clubbing of its soldiers in the Galwan valley, an act Menon regards as unprecedented in its scope and implications for relations between the two neighbours.

Menon has long argued that India should eschew permanent alliances: “The ideal position for India, of course, is to be closer to both China and the US than they are to each other,” he says. But as the rhetoric and the threats escalate, it is becoming ever harder to navigate between China and the US in this way. It feels instead as if a new cold war is brewing, fought as much through technology and tariffs as with conventional weaponry.

Indeed, the great question for the next six months is the extent to which those countries opposed to the world being divided again into two blocs can prevail, and whether the economic connections across the world are now so dense that the price of the decoupling that America is demanding is too high.

A few years ago, many thought these might be questions for later in the decade. A superpower rivalry had been brewing slowly, after all, under Barack Obama. But it took on a new urgency with the advent of the Trump administration. In the words of one of Donald Trump’s discarded advisers, Steve Bannon, “these are two systems that are incompatible. One side is going to win. The other side is going to lose.” Coronavirus, the Great Accelerator, has brought the issue to a head earlier than expected.

According to Kishore Mahbubani, a fellow at the Asia Research Institute, Trump has prepared for this battle chaotically. “The fundamental problem is that the US has decided to launch a geopolitical contest against China, the world’s oldest civilisation, without first working out a comprehensive strategy on how it is going to manage this contest. It is quite shocking. These are not abstract issues for Korea and Japan. America wants them both to decouple from China, but for them that is economic suicide.”

Mahbubani was Singapore’s lead diplomat at the United Nations, and the county’s current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is equally vehement that Asia does not relish Bannon’s choice. “Asian countries see the US as a resident power that has vital interests in the region,” he said. “At the same time, China is a reality on the doorstep. Asian countries do not want to be forced to choose between the two. And if either attempts to force such a choice – if Washington tries to contain China’s rise or Beijing seeks to build an exclusive sphere of influence in Asia – they will begin a course of confrontation that will last decades and put the long heralded Asian century in jeopardy.”

Loong also urges the US not to see this as a rerun of 1946. “China is far from a Potemkin village or the tottering command economy that defined the Soviet Union in its final years . Any confrontation between the great powers is unlikely to end, as the cold war did, in one country’s peaceful collapse.”

A similar scramble for neutral ground is under way in Europe. Yes, Europe declared China “a systemic rival” a year ago, and most EU countries are looking to diversify their supply chains, limit foreign subsidies, or review how they regulate sensitive Chinese inward investments. But Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, is reluctant to be dragged into Trump’s all-out war. After video talks with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi earlier this month he unveiled the Sinatra doctrine – Europe would do it in its own way.

Borrell insisted China was not a military threat and confided Wang had told him China did not like being called a “systemic rival”. Borrell ruminated “Words matter,” before tying himself up in linguistic knots asking “What does ‘rival’ mean? ‘Rival’ on what? Is ‘systemic’ a matter of rivalry between systems? Or is it a systematic rivalry? There are two interpretations”.

For countries such as Germany this is not about a play on words. China bought €96bn (£87bn) of German exports in 2019 – nearly half as much as the EU’s. Volkswagen sold 4.2m cars there in 2017 financial year. If Deutsche Telekom was forced to remove Chinese equipment suppliers from its network – a scenario called Armageddon – it would take 5 years and cost billions. A systematic rivalry is not in Berlin’s interests, or indeed what its people want. In survey after survey they affirm Trump is a greater threat to world peace than Xi.

Similarly, in Latin America some surprising countries are proving to be China-centric. Chile, probably the most free-market economy on the continent, counts China as its main trading partner both in terms of imports and exports.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has extended his signature foreign policy, the Belt and Road initiative, right across Latin America, signing up 14 of the region’s 20 countries. China has surpassed Brazil as Argentina’s biggest trade partner. Argentina’s president, Alberto Fernández, preaches that “trade relations must be de-ideologised”.

In Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro’s entourage have sent racist tweets about Beijing’s plans for “world domination”, exports to China rose by 13.1% in the first five months of the year compared with the same period in 2019. A third of Ecuador’s debt – $18.4bn (£15bn) – is owed to Chinese policy banks. Mexico, Venezuela and Bolivia also have strong trading links with China.

Once America’s backyard, Latin America is rapidly becoming China’s frontyard. With the closer economic links come political quiescence. On the issue of Taiwan, Panama, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador have shifted from Taiwan to China since 2017. In return they have secured infrastructure financing and investment.

China has long had Africa sewn up as its biggest creditor. “For Africa there is no other game in town when it comes to financing,” says the historian Niall Ferguson. “We [the west] are not competing in an effective way,” he recently told the Henry Jackson Society.

African countries have borrowed as much as $150bn – almost 20% of their external debt – from China, data collected by Johns Hopkins University shows.

In recent years, China’s lending has grown to exceed the combined loans of the IMF, the World Bank and the Paris Club, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Yet around 50% of China’s international lending to developing and emerging countries is not included in official statistics. China says that as part of the G20, it will do its bit to ease Africa’s debt burden, suspending payments for at least eight months. But it has not announced details, and the conditions of many of its loans are murky.

“The terms of these loans are very opaque and will take a lot of time to restructure,” says William Jackson, the chief emerging markets economist at the research firm Capital Economics. “There is little negotiating power among African countries. China is in the stronger position.”

China has used this worldwide network to make its long march through the UN’s institutions, enabled by the US’s own shorter march out of the same forums. An early warning for the west came in 2017 when Britain’s candidate to run the World Health Organization was crushed by the Chinese-backed Ethiopian candidate, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. China itself now heads four of the UN’s 15 specialist agencies. Prior to the election for director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2019, China wrote off $78m in debt owed by the Cameroonian government, whose nominated candidate coincidentally withdrew his bid afterwards. China beat the French candidate, taking 108 of the 191 votes.

After years as a shrinking wallflower, China has also become active in the UN Human Rights Council, sponsoring motions and in July 2019 crushing western criticism of China’s treatment of 1 million Uighur Muslims. That July vote was seen as an acid test of Chinese influence. Twenty-two western nations backed a resolution criticising China, but more than 50 nations signed an opposing letter accusing the west of “politicising human rights” and commending what it called China’s “remarkable achievements” in human rights. Not a single Muslim country backed the west. The so called “Like-minded Group of Developing Countries” all backed China or sat it out. Similarly, a tranche of eastern European countries refused to condemn Beijing.

The episode demonstrated that any assumption that there is an inbuilt majority willing to take on Chinese authoritarianism in the way that the US wants is a fantasy. Mahbubani argues that countries containing 20% of the world population are willing to join an anti-China alliance, but the rest would not. Dr Keyu Jin, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, says there is a global divide: “The attitude of many emerging markets to China is very, very different to rich industrialised nations. They want to learn from and aspire to the China model. They associate China with innovation in technology. Ten years ago during the financial crisis, China was the one to fill in the financial gaps when the US Fed[eral Reserve] had only swap lines with six major advanced economies.”

China has been lucky in its enemy. Just as China has courted its allies, Trump has insulted his. Mira Rapp-Hooper, in her new book Shields of the Republic, documents both how Trump has gloried in the destruction of alliances, and the price the US is paying. She concludes: “Trump does not need legally to sever treaty alliances – by treating them as protection rackets for which the protected parties can never pay enough, he obviates them. By embracing adversaries, he challenges the very notion that his allies share threats.” Not surprisingly some Chinese diplomats would welcome Trump’s re-election, and another swing of the wrecking ball he brings to the western alliance.

Yet at the 11th hour there may be a reversal of fortunes, largely caused by China behaving as foolishly as Trump. For Aaron Friedberg, a counsellor at the National Bureau of Asian Research, China’s behaviour in response to coronavirus could represent a kind of clarifying moment. “It is as if at every stage the unfolding of the crisis has pulled back another curtain, revealing yet more ugly facets of the regime’s character and highlighting the diverse dangers that it can pose to others.”

The threat posed to Hong Kong, and the conflicts on the border with India, are only symptomatic of a series of Chinese steps that have made the life of the non-aligned harder, and have left more traditional Chinese political scientists such as Lanxin Xiang fuming. He argues that China, by indulging in “fantasies of self-glory”, is doing untold damage to itself and relations with the west.

If China is at risk of blowing its chance to lead, then others have calculated that a fleeting chance exists for the middle-power democracies, some with nuclear weapons, to hold greater sway. There is talk of a D10 of democracies – in essence, the G7 plus Australia, India and Korea. It is an idea that might fly if Joe Biden is elected US president. But it would require greater restraint from Washington about how far to push the confrontation with China.

He never got to run an international thinktank, but the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, reflecting on a previous interregnum, was right: “The old world dying, and a new one struggling to be born. Now is the time for monsters.” 

Q. So what is the prospect for global cooperation between the three biggest polluters on reducing carbon dioxide emissions? 

A. Not good!

In December 2019 Vox ran a story on:  

Why the US bears the most responsibility for climate change, in one chart 

The article published Dec 4, 2019, by Umair Irfan, features a stunning animation of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, produced by Carbon Brief.

Which countries have emitted the most CO2?

The animated chart shows comparisons over a period of time beginning in 1750, the year following Thomas Paine's schooling at Thetford Grammar School in Norfolk, England (1744–1749), at a time when there was no compulsory education.

As this time-line begins, the young Paine, at the age of 13, was apprenticed to his father, a staymaker. 

Carbon Brief

Q. How would Thomas Paine have regarded the emergence of the kind of "American exceptionalism" at the heart of the climate change denial machine, and captured in slogans like Trump's "Make America Great Again"? 

A. He would have been sorry! 

"shouting at this lovely girl and commanding her to yield . . ." 

Discontented and politically challenging citizens 

This is what the Chinese government and the Communist Party are most afraid of!

Over 30 years on . . . 

. . . and earlier this month!

Discontented and politically challenging citizens 

This is what the US government and the capitalist classes it serves are most afraid of! 

Protesters Versus Police 

The New York Times reports that: 

Trump Falsely Targets Buffalo Protester, 75, as ‘Antifa Provocateur’ 

The president attacked Martin Gugino even as the activist was in the hospital recovering from a head wound sustained when the police shoved him to the ground.

So, writes Alan Feuer, in his story published June 9, 2020

It is true, his friends admitted: Martin Gugino is an activist, a seasoned peacenik who in a lifetime of protest has taken part in demonstrations against military drones, climate change, nuclear weapons and police brutality.

But Mr. Gugino is also a football fan, they said, a mild-mannered bachelor and a Buffalo native who returned to his hometown some years ago to care for his ailing mother.

The one thing he is not, however, those who knew him said, is what President Trump suggested he was on Twitter Tuesday morning: a wily Antifa provocateur.

Mr. Trump’s tweet — none of it backed by fact — raced across the internet all day even as Mr. Gugino, 75, still lay in the hospital, recovering from the serious head wound he sustained on Thursday night when two Buffalo police officers shoved him to the ground at a demonstration marking the police killing of George Floyd.

In the video, a tall and lanky Mr. Gugino can be seen in front of the police with what seems to be a cellphone in his hand. Two of the officers shove him and he falls backward, cracking his head against the ground. As blood seeps out of his right ear, several officers walk by him.

The president’s tweet on Tuesday, which appeared to accuse Mr. Gugino of having instigated or even faked the encounter, was not the first time Mr. Trump has sought to blame Antifa — a word that describes a loose collective of anti-fascist activists — for encouraging what has now become nearly two weeks of nationwide demonstrations.

The president and his allies have often tried to place anti-fascists and other “outside agitators” at the center of the protests as a way to delegitimize them and to deflect from the fact that the vast majority of the demonstrations have been peaceful.  

Mr. Buckley, a co-owner of the Burning Books bookstore on Connecticut Street in Buffalo, said he was disturbed that Mr. Gugino — “a 75-year-old elder,” as he put it — had effectively been tarred as a thug by Mr. Trump and his supporters.

“He’s one of the most gentle people I know,” Mr. Buckley said. “He’s not aggressive at all. But people make up the most insane stories so they don’t have to deal with reality.” 

Mr. Trump’s tweet seems to have been based on a report by One America News Network, a right-wing cable television channel, which claimed that Mr. Gugino had been trying to knock out the police officers’ radios with his cellphone — an idea that several of Mr. Gugino’s friends dismissed as ludicrous.

This story has links to other New York Times stories:

• How False Antifa Rumors Spread Locally 

• Trump, Lacking Clear Authority, Says U.S. Will Declare Antifa a Terrorist Group

At the end of May, Mr. Trump announced — again on Twitter — that he intended to designate Antifa as “a terrorist organization.” There were, however, two problems with the declaration: The federal government can only designate foreign-based groups as terrorist entities, and anti-fascism is a political idea, like pacifism or communism, not an organization.

With tens of thousands of people marching across the country, it is all but impossible to accurately determine how many Antifa activists have taken part in the protests. But it is definitely clear that they are not playing a leading role in the protests. 

As has been mentioned in previous Re:LODE Radio and Re:LODE posts and articles, the United States is a low intensity democracy. Under the US Constitution the Slave States of the Union had numbers in the electoral colleges that were based on the populations of each state, and that included slaves in that population count. They had no vote, but the slave masters did. 

There is no workers party in the United States. Anarchists are vilified as quasi-terrorists, along with Antifa. The new Democratic Party politicians, proud to self-identify as socialists, have the extremely well funded reactionary, capitalist, and alt right to contend with, in a culture war of words and images. 

Freedom only goes so far . . .  

. . . especially when it is a concept employed in ideologically based propaganda efforts, as in the old cold war, and in the present ramping up of a new battle of images and ideas.

Young Joan Dale, reporter, becomes Miss America!

"Out of the very heart of the spirit that is America comes a new champion of democracy"

The Goddess of Liberty inspired the gathering of people in Tiananmen Square in 1989 in their creation of an image of a possible future China, and symbolized by the Goddess of Democracy.

Many of the students, and others, who gathered in Tiananmen Square just over 31 years ago, did so in the presence of the Goddess of Democracy. Many believed that the Communist Party of China was the people's party.

The Goddess of Democracy

The Goddess of Democracy, also known as the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom, the Spirit of Democracy, and the Goddess of Liberty (自由女神; zìyóu nǚshén), was a 10-metre-tall (33 ft) statue created during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The statue was constructed over four days out of foam and papier-mâché over a metal armature. The constructors decided to make the statue as large as possible to try to dissuade the government from dismantling it: the government would either have to destroy the statue—an action which would potentially fuel further criticism of its policies—or leave it standing. Nevertheless, the statue was destroyed on June 4, 1989, by soldiers clearing the protesters from Tiananmen Square. Since its destruction, numerous replicas and memorials have been erected around the world, including in Hong Kong, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver.

Since the destruction of this symbol, and unlike the US, Britain and France, there has been no attempt to create a female symbolic personification of China, but there is evidence of a matrix of ideas, policies and practices that, over the seventy plus years of the modern Chinese state, reflect the long held cultural Chinese concept of a Chinese exceptionalism, now associated with an expansionist agenda.

China: The expansion of power, influence, and the myth of Chinese exceptionalism 

Contemporary developments must surely be seen as being related to, and reminiscent of, the cold war politics that shaped the non-alignment of nations across the world, nations that had been made newly independent from European colonial empires. The 1955 gathering of representatives of these nations in Bandung, Java, in an Indonesia that had won its independence from the Netherlands, is addressed in an article to be found in the Information Wrap for the LODE Cargo created in Maribaya. 

The Bandung Conference in 1955

The Chinese are coming!

The significance of China's role in this moment has been made clear in other articles related to the Information Wraps for LODE Cargo created in Java, in both Glodok and Pangandaran. China's influence is best illustrated in the plan to dominate global trade and known as the "Belt and Road Initiative".  

China's trillion dollar plan to dominate global trade

A peaceful rise . . .

The myth of Chinese exceptionalism

Excerpts of this blog/article from 2012, by Yuan-kang Wang of Western Michigan University, offer an interesting analysis of what China’s past behavior might tell us about its future course:

Most Chinese people — be they the common man or the political, economic, and academic elite — think of historical China as a shining civilization in the center of All-under-Heaven, radiating a splendid and peace-loving culture. Because Confucianism cherishes harmony and abhors war, this version portrays a China that has not behaved aggressively nor been an expansionist power throughout its 5,000 years of glorious history. Instead, a benevolent, humane Chinese world order is juxtaposed against the malevolent, ruthless power politics in the West.

The current government in Beijing has recruited Chinese exceptionalism into its notion of a "peaceful rise." One can find numerous examples of this line of thought in official white papers and statements by President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao, and other officials. The message is clear: China’s unique history, peaceful culture, and defensive mindset ensure a power that will rise peacefully.

All nations tend to see their history as exceptional, and these beliefs usually continue a heavy dose of fiction. Here are the top three myths of contemporary Chinese exceptionalism.  

Many Chinese firmly believe that China does not have a tradition of foreign expansion. The empirical record, however, shows otherwise. The history of the Song dynasty (960-1279) and the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) shows that Confucian China was far from being a pacifist state. On the contrary, Song and Ming leaders preferred to settle disputes by force when they felt the country was strong, and in general China was expansionist whenever it enjoyed a preponderance of power. As a regional hegemony, the early Ming China launched eight large-scale attacks on the Mongols, annexed Vietnam as a Chinese province, and established naval dominance in the region.

But Confucian China could also be accommodating and conciliatory when it lacked the power to defeat adversaries. The Song dynasty, for example, accepted its inferior status as a vassal of the stronger Jin empire in the twelfth century. Chinese leaders justified their decision by invoking the Confucian aversion to war, arguing that China should use the period of peace to build up strength and bide its time until it had developed the capabilities for attack. In short, leaders in Confucian China were acutely sensitive to balance-of-power considerations, just as realism depicts.

The Great Wall of China has not always been there. The wall we see today was built by Ming China, and it was built only after a series of repeated Chinese attacks against the Mongols had failed. There was no wall-building in early Ming China, because at that time the country enjoyed a preponderance of power and had no need for additional defenses. At that point, the Chinese preferred to be on the offensive. Ming China built the Great Wall only after its relative power had declined.

In essence, Confucian China did not behave much differently from other great powers in history, despite having different culture and domestic institutions. As realism suggests, the anarchic structure of the system compelled it to compete for power, overriding domestic and individual factors.

Thus, Chinese history suggests that its foreign policy behavior is highly sensitive to its relative power. If its power continues to increase, China will try to expand its sphere of influence in East Asia. This policy will inevitably bring it into a security competition with the United States in the region and beyond. Washington is getting out of the distractions of Iraq and Afghanistan and "pivoting" toward Asia. As the Chinese saying goes, "One mountain cannot accommodate two tigers." Brace yourself. The game is on.

The westward and southward spatial expansion of Chinese influence . . .

Along with the globalized spatial expansion of Chinese influence central to the Belt and Road Initiative, is the need to secure "stability" within the borders of China. Social stability, and an increasing policy of "integrating" minorities, be they defined by ethnic or religious terms, into Han Chinese cultural norms. This is reminiscent of the drawing of imperial and colonial boundaries in the nineteenth century map-rooms of Europe and the Americas, and an increased "policing" of this spatial control and organisation.

This splicing of these two video works by Johnny Harris. The first Vox video is looking at the way state power is encroaching on traditional spatially oriented cultural and agricultural activity in the border zones of the mountain ranges of Himalayas, and taking place in what has been previously recognized and respected, as "non-state spaces". 

The second video looks at the 49th parallel north, a straight line running east and west, with significant politically and geographically defined wiggles in the east and west, that form the border between the US and Canada. 

What was the deadly India-China border clash really about?

The New York Times reported on this bizarre skirmish that took place on June 15. According to this report:

An Indian military official said the clash started during a meeting attended by hundreds of soldiers on both sides who had come together along the border to discuss efforts to de-escalate tensions. For the past week, Indian military officials had been reassuring the Indian public that the border was calming down and that they were having productive talks with the Chinese, through diplomatic and military channels.
 
But, according to the Indians, Chinese officers insulted them at the meeting on Monday night, which triggered a fight between soldiers that quickly spiraled into a major melee.

“A violent face-off happened as a result of an attempt by the Chinese side to unilaterally change the status quo,” said a statement from Anurag Srivastava, an Indian government spokesman. “Both sides suffered casualties that could have been avoided had the agreement at the higher level been scrupulously followed by the Chinese side.”

Jeffrey Gettleman, Hari Kumar and Sameer Yasir for the New York Times (June 16, 2020) reported under the headline and subheading:

Worst Clash in Decades on Disputed India-China Border Kills 20 Indian Troops

Under nationalist leaders, the nuclear-armed rivals have been increasingly assertive toward neighbors, risking open conflict. They have contested their Himalayan border for generations.

NEW DELHI — The worst border clash between India and China in more than 40 years left 20 Indian soldiers dead and dozens believed captured, Indian officials said on Tuesday, raising tensions between nuclear-armed rivals who have increasingly been flexing their diplomatic and military muscle.

For the past several weeks, after a series of brawls along their disputed border, China and India have been building up their forces in the remote Galwan Valley, high up in the Himalayas.

As they dug into opposing positions, adding tinder to a long-smoldering conflict, China took an especially muscular posture, sending in artillery, armored personnel carriers, dump trucks and excavators. On Monday night, a huge fight broke out between Chinese and Indian troops in roughly the same barren area where these two nations, the world’s most populous, had fought a war in 1962.

Military and political analysts say the two countries do not want a further escalation — particularly India, where military forces are nowhere near as powerful as China’s — but they may struggle to find a way out of the conflict that does not hint at backing down.

Both countries and their nationalist leaders, President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, have taken increasingly assertive postures that pose real risks of the conflict spinning out of control.

“Neither PM Modi or President Xi want a war, but neither can relinquish their territorial claims either,” said Ashley J. Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

What’s happening along the Himalayan border is an unusual kind of warfare. As in the brawls last month, Chinese and Indian soldiers fought fiercely without firing a shot — at least that’s what officials on both sides contend. They say the soldiers followed their de facto border code not to use firearms and went at each other with fists, rocks and wooden clubs, some possibly studded with nails or wrapped in barbed wire.

It’s not clear what India can do now. Mr. Modi and his Hindu nationalist party have pursued a forceful foreign policy that emphasizes India’s growing role in the world and last year, after a devastating suicide attack that India blamed on a Pakistani terror group, Mr. Modi ordered airstrikes on Pakistan, bringing the two countries to the brink of war.

But India is in no shape to risk a war against China — especially now, as it slips deeper into the economic and health crisis caused by the coronavirus, which has cost the country more than 100 million jobs. 

“Whatever India might want to do it’s not in a position to do,” said Bharat Karnad, a professor of security studies at the Center for Policy Research at New Delhi.

“The Modi government is in a difficult position,” he said. “This is bound to escalate.”

And, he added, “we are not prepared for this kind of escalation.”

Mr. Xi has been doubling down on China’s territorial claims across Asia, backing up arguments with the threat of force or sometimes even the use of force. In recent weeks, the Chinese have tightened their grip on the semiautonomous region of Hong Kong; menaced Taiwan; and sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat in the South China Sea.

The upshot, scholars say, is a dangerous break from the past. China and India, with their growing ambitions and growing militaries are increasingly bumping up against each other along their 2,100-mile border.
“Over the past several decades there’s been incessant confrontation between China and India, but proudly there have been no shots fired or deaths,” said Long Xingchun, a professor at China West Normal University in southwest China who studies relations with India.

But now, he added, neither side is as willing to compromise, raising the risks of more fighting, even if the countries don’t actually want to go to war.

“There was no reason for this to happen,” he said. “Unless it was a military standoff that got out of control.”

It’s difficult to know the exact trigger or severity of the fighting. The Galwan Valley is a rocky, icy, inhospitable slice of the Himalayas, off-limits to all but a few lonely herdsmen and Indian and Chinese troops. Each side was quick to blame the other for violence along the Line of Actual Control, the boundary that emerged from the 1962 war.

“The Indian military broke their promises and once again crossed the Line of Actual Control to engage in illegal activities,” Col. Zhang Shuili, a Chinese military spokesman, said in a statement. “They deliberately launched a provocative assault, leading to an intense physical clash that caused death and injury.”

The surge in violence is a product of the protracted dispute between India and China over the precise location of their jagged Himalayan border, which cuts through a desolate landscape home to few people or resources that would be easy to extract. Both sides maintain high-elevation military installations facing each other, and armed skirmishes continued through the late 1960s and mid-70s.

And the wider backdrop is that India and China have been competing for influence on many fronts across South Asia.

Several countries, such as Nepal and Sri Lanka, that were once reliable Indian allies have recently tilted toward China, wooed by Chinese investment. And Pakistan, India’s archenemy, is now fully aligned with China, working hand in hand with the Chinese military.

And last year China helped Mr. Modi during his re-election campaign by agreeing to a United Nations resolution that designated Masood Azhar, a Pakistani militant, as a global terrorist. China had refused to do this for a long time but after determined lobbying by India and others, China  relented, handing Mr. Modi a diplomatic victory at a crucial time.

But then India did something that aggravated China. A few months after Mr. Modi won a landslide election, his home minister, Amit Shah, vowed to take back Aksai Chin. During a speech in Parliament about the disputed region of Kashmir, Mr. Shah said that Aksai Chin and all of Kashmir belonged to India and India would “sacrifice life for this.”

Analysts say the Aksai Chin issue, along with India’s warming relations with the United States, have become irritants to China, which may now be using its military to harass India as payback.

An empire of surveillance, spatial control, social control and thought control . . . 

Why is China building islands and internment camps

Accountability and denial . . .

Who is made accountable?

Supporters holding yellow umbrellas, a symbol of the demonstrations, crowded outside the courthouse. Tai told supporters: “No matter what happens today, I have the confidence that many people here will strive for Hong Kong’s democracy.” 

Hong Kong Protests One Year On

The torchbearer in 1989 . . .

. . . and in 2012

Li Bingbing: Gucci's Chinese torchbearer

Chinese film star, Li Bingbing talks about Gucci.
Up until recently Re:LODE Radio might have gotten away with presenting this image as a personification of China, given the integration of western style consumerism into contemporary Chinese culture, and the fact of Chinese modernity as an historical reality. Shanghai, just as much as New York, was a cultural capital of the twentieth century. 

The cultural revolution in the decade 1966 -76, was a more than a blip on this timeline, and the catastrophic damage caused to the artefacts and sites of a once traditional Chinese heritage, has seemingly allowed for a  nostalgia driven version of Chinese culture and exceptionalism, that's a false echo of a true historical reality, and framed to become part of a new and aggressive ideological front. 

Assimilation or racism? Or both?

The general movement of Chinese government toward assimilating minorities into the Han dominated "norm" within the borders of China, rather than accommodating differences in cultural identity and history, is well under way. This would partly explain what is happening to the Uighur populations in their own lands, and the opening up of the borderlands of China to a significant influx of a Han migration, to homogenize and normalize a nation's look and its identity. Is this ethnocentrism or something akin to the United States expansion westward across North America that more, or less, wiped out the Indigenous People of this continent?

There is nothing like a "plague" for revealing deep seated prejudice, a denial of difference and the inequalities of a society.

Hsiao-Hung Pai says in this Opinion piece published in the Guardian this last April (Sat 25 April 2020), that:

The coronavirus crisis has exposed China's long history of racism

Under the subheading: Today Africans in Guangzhou are being demonised over Covid-19, but the roots of this prejudice go back centuries, Hsiao-Hung Pai says

“Clean up the foreign trash!”. “Don’t turn our hometown into an international rubbish dump.” “This is China, not Nigeria!” Resembling the anti-migrant racist hatred you frequently see on UK social media, these are just a few examples of countless anti-African rants from Weibo users in China in a surge of popular racism over the past month.

Despite the huge amount of censorship on China’s social media, none of these posts have been removed. 

Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa have become the primary target of suspicion, racial discrimination and abuse amid public fear of a second wave of Covid-19. And this intolerance has peaked in Guangzhou, a city of 12 million people in the highly industrialised Guangdong province.

It started with the local government in Guangzhou implementing surveillance, conducting compulsory testing and enforcing a 14-day quarantine for all African nationals – even if they had earlier been tested negative and hadn’t recently travelled outside China. In Yuexiu district, the largest African migrant community in China, many Africans were evicted by landlords – despite having paid their rents – and left to sleep rough on the streets.

In an echo of apartheid South Africa or segregation-era United States, a colour bar was imposed across the city: Africans were refused entry by hospitals, hotels, supermarkets, shops and food outlets. At one hospital, even a pregnant woman was denied access. In a department store, an African woman was stopped at the entrance while her white friend was allowed in. In a McDonald’s restaurant, a notice was put up saying “black people cannot come in”.

The widespread racism has caused a huge public outcry across Africa, shared on social media under the hashtag #ChinaMustExplain. YouTuber Wode Maya, who has lived in China and is a fluent Mandarin speaker, urges fellow Africans to “wake up to what’s happening”. The global African diaspora has put pressure on African embassies and institutions to act. Last weekend the Kenyan government announced plans to allow its citizens stranded in China to be evacuated.

The official Chinese responses were at first silence or denial. State media such as Global Times and Xinhua failed to report the story in the first few days after the news broke in African news outlets. Later, the Chinese authorities began to recognise the reports of racism as “reasonable concerns”, though migrants continue to feel unsafe.

To outsiders, this horrendous racism may appear “unprecedented”. But ethnic minorities in China would find it all too familiar. In Shaoguan, not far from Guangzhou, the racist murder of two Uighur workers in 2009 triggered a series of events, such as the Ürümqi Incident, which led to further repression in the north-western region of Xinjiang.

The ideology of “race” in China goes back a long way. In the late 19th century, Qing imperial reformers searched for an “answer” that could revive China in face of European and Japanese colonialist expansion. “Race”, “nation” and nationalism have since been embedded into Chinese republicanism in the early 20th century, and then into the establishment of the Chinese Communist party.

Nationalism has taken deeper root in the four decades since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. National revival has been a key ideological driver behind modernisation.

Today, assimilationism is at the centre of the concept of nation. Minzu, a key term used interchangeably for both ethnic group and nationality, refers to a group of common descent, with a distinct culture and territory.

In 2012, Xi Jinping began his rule by saying: “The China dream gathers Chinese aspirations and wishes for generations and manifests the interests of the whole Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu) …” The “China dream” became the political-economic programme for “the realisation of the great revival of the Chinese nation”.

This century is the “Chinese century”, Xi said. His multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative was launched in 2013 as a massive global investment programme. From 2013 to 2018, the Chinese state invested nearly $614bnin developing countries. China’s foreign investment campaign is seen by some in Africa as colonialism, as the nations involved risk losing control of their essential infrastructure and natural resources, with their debt burden increased. China now holds 14% of the total debt stock in sub-Saharan Africa and has become the largest owner of public debt in Africa.

China’s growing presence brought with it labour migration from African countries from the late 1990s. People from Nigeria, Mali, Kenya, Senegal, Ghana and other west African countries came for work opportunities, mostly in the metropolis of Guangzhou. Many work in the city’s wholesale markets as other types of employment, including factory work, are closed to them. It’s commonly said by them that Africans are often “accepted as traders but discriminated against as people”. There are currently more than 15,000 African migrants with formal immigration status living in Guangzhou.

Although China has the lowest immigration in the world (migrants account for just 0.07% of the population), the authorities impose harsh “migrant management”. African migrants can often be criminalised in a similar way to the internal migrants from the countryside. Apart from immigration checks and crackdowns, the authorities consistently discourage migrants from living in certain neighbourhoods. There is no legal protection against racial discrimination.

The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted this longstanding anti-African racism. With all the damage this pandemic has done to the economy and people’s livelihoods, scapegoating and hostility towards an imagined outside threat clearly helps to divert domestic frustration away from the ruling elite – a trend we are all seeing worldwide. As Asian communities in Europe and the United States become victims of racism during this pandemic, Africans in China are crying out, “We are not the virus!” To resist racism, we need to see it for what it is, wherever it occurs.

Becoming the enemy?

When it comes down to it, the present leadership of both the US and China have an interest in a new cold war. For the capitalist power brokers in the US, with its low intensity democracy, and the authoritarian dictatorship of the Chinese communist party, with its economy so heavily committed to, and invested in the capitalist system, present and future problems can be blamed on the "other", as a "useful enemy".  

Civilization and barbarism meet as the headlight of Uncle Sam’s gun-mounted “Auto-Truck of Civilization and Trade” shines the light of “Progress” on “China.” Published during the Boxer uprisings against Westerners and Christians, the cartoon portrays China as a frenzied dragon under the control of a “Boxer” gripping a bloody sword and banner reading “400 Million Barbarians.” In the balance of power between technological “progress” and primitive “barbarians,” the cartoon makes clear who “must back up.”

“Some One Must Back Up.” December 8, 1900 Artist: Victor Gillam

Some choice?

When it comes to a possible personification of China, and the US take on its policy toward China, this example from the American press at the beginning of the twentieth century looks as if it just the kind of cartoon style racism, and right up Trump's street during this "China" virus crisis. 

While the US has a low intensity democracy, and has never allowed the formation of a workers political party to unite the interests of citizens across communitarian divides, China's communist party allows for certain freedoms, especially in the economy, but cannot allow the prospect of democratic reform, as it would mean the end of business and politics as usual. Although these two global superpowers are in a contentious struggle for contested hegemony, this appears to be the result of weakness in the face of the responsibility to address a planetary crisis as well as a national crisis.   

Weak and defensive? The pretence of strong leadership?

For the contemporary political leaders of China and the US they will prioritise social stability over all other considerations. This means a quick fix in the delivery of jobs and income for a majority constituency over any potential long term structural change to the economy, change that would hurt capitalism, but simultaneously address the challenge of global heating and its catastrophic consequences.  This is leadership sleepwalking to disaster

There is a choice! Cold war and global heating . . . or a Green New Deal!

In the post-Hiroshima cold war years, the apocalyptic approach of nuclear war was a driver for change. French author Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel La Planète des singes, translated into English as Planet of the Apes or Monkey Planet, was taken up by American film producer Arthur P. Jacobs, who had come to Paris looking for properties to adapt with his new company, APJAC Productions. To explain his interests, Jacobs would tell agents, "I wish King Kong hadn't been made so I could make it." Remembering Jacobs' earlier comment about King Kong, the agent Bernheim mentioned La Planète des singes, not expecting he would be interested. However, the story intrigued Jacobs, who bought the film rights immediately. After optioning the novel's film rights, Jacobs spent over three years trying to convince filmmakers to take on the project. He hired a succession of artists to create test sketches and hired veteran television writer Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, to pen the screenplay. Serling's script changed elements of Boulle's novel, introducing Cold War themes; notably, he devised a new twist ending that revealed the planet to be a future Earth where humans had destroyed themselves through nuclear warfare.

Who is accountable?

This last scene of the film, and the use of the Statue of Liberty to carry the final twist in the plot, is highly dramatic and effective. 

"They finally, really did it. You maniacs."

For our times the line would run: 

"They did nothing. You maniacs."

The Statue of Liberty was "unveiled" during a ceremony of dedication that was held on the afternoon of October 28, 1886. President Grover Cleveland, the former New York governor, presided over the event. 

A nautical parade began at 12:45 p.m., and President Cleveland embarked on a yacht that took him across the harbour to Bedloe's Island for the dedication. De Lesseps made the first speech, on behalf of the French committee, followed by the chairman of the New York committee, Senator William M. Evarts. 

A French flag draped across the statue's face was to be lowered to unveil the statue at the close of Evarts's speech, but the sculptor of the monument Bartholdi mistook a pause as the conclusion and let the flag fall prematurely. The ensuing cheers put an end to Evarts's address. President Cleveland spoke next, stating that the statue's "stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man's oppression until Liberty enlightens the world".

No members of the general public were permitted on the island during the ceremonies, which were reserved entirely for dignitaries. The only females granted access were Bartholdi's wife and de Lesseps's granddaughter; officials stated that they feared women might be injured in the crush of people.

She made her choice . . .

The restriction offended area suffragists, who chartered a boat and got as close as they could to the island. The group's leaders made speeches applauding the embodiment of Liberty as a woman and advocating women's right to vote. A scheduled fireworks display was postponed until November 1 because of poor weather.

Shortly after the dedication, The Cleveland Gazette, an African American newspaper, suggested that the statue's torch not be lit until the United States became a free nation "in reality":

"Liberty enlightening the world," indeed! The expression makes us sick. This government is a howling farce. It can not or rather does not protect its citizens within its own borders. Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the "liberty" of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the "liberty" of this country "enlightening the world," or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme.

Q. What has changed?

A. Nothing has changed?

Of course ALL LIVES MATTER, but given a choice, Mike Pence declines to say 'Black Lives Matter' . . .

PHILADELPHIA -- Ever since the death of George Floyd, and the nationwide protests that caught-on-camera moment spurred, America has once again been grappling with the words 'Black Lives Matter.' 

For some, the phrase is a call-to-action. For others, it's merely a verbal acknowledgment if deep-seated disparities that result in a host of injustices. For still more, though, the words are viewed through a political lens, as an affront to the notion that "all lives matter." 

In recent days, Democratic lawmakers in Washington have been challenging their Republic colleagues to utter the phrase -- at times, giving way to some fiery exchanges. So far, just a handful of Republican members of Congress have done so. 

On a historic Juneteenth, as protests continue to rage across America, Vice President Mike Pence was asked if he would say those words, 'Black Lives Matter,' and three times declined during an interview with our sister station WPVI-TV in Philadelphia. 

Instead, Pence said "all lives matter in a very real sense."

The vice president, when pressed as to why he would not say the phrase, said, "Well, I don't accept the fact, Brian, that there's a segment of American society that disagrees in the preciousness and importance of every human life."

Trump's latest tweet uses manipulated video of toddlers

Brian Taff: And yet, one final time, you won't say the words, and we understand your explanation.

I wanted to ask you about this. The president's tweets, I know a lot of people are reluctant to comment on them. Last night, he sent one that's been particularly - let's call it - reviled by some on the other side. They said this video that he showed really undermines the argument that people are making on the streets across America right now, basically dismisses the concept of racial injustice as fake news. Do you think that was an appropriate message from the president to America right now?

Vice President Pence: Well, are you speaking of the humorous video of the two little children?

Brian Taff: Humorous is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.

Vice President Pence: Well, look, I think when you watch much of the national news media these days, Brian, it seems like they focus more every day on what divides us in this country. I think that the president saw an opportunity with a good sense of humor to once again challenge the media narrative.

So it's come to this.

In a presidency debased by extraordinary and ongoing assaults on truth and the First Amendment, Donald Trump is now exploiting and defaming toddlers, to further his political goals and war on the media.

Accountability?

Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. Originating in Galveston, Texas, it is now celebrated annually on the 19th of June throughout the United States, with varying official recognition. It is commemorated on the anniversary date of the June 19, 1865 announcement by Union army general Gordon Granger, proclaiming freedom from slavery in Texas.

President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had officially outlawed slavery in Texas and the other states in rebellion against the Union almost two and a half years earlier. Enforcement of the Proclamation generally relied on the advance of Union troops. Texas being the most remote of the slave states had a low presence of Union troops as the American Civil War ended; thus enforcement there had been slow and inconsistent before Granger's announcement. 

Although Juneteenth generally celebrates the end of slavery in the United States, it was still legal and practiced in two Union border states (Delaware and Kentucky) until later that year when ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished chattel slavery nationwide in December.

Celebrations date to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. It spread across the South and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival. 

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, it was eclipsed by the struggle for postwar civil rights, but grew in popularity again in the 1970s with a focus on African American freedom and arts. 

More recently, Juneteenth is celebrated in most major cities across the United States. Activists are campaigning for the United States Congress to recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday.

Amanda Holpuch reporting for the Guardian (Wed 17 jun 2020), looks forward to an energised Juneteenth, given new focus by 'Black Lives Matter' and the raising of tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Trump had controversially planned to hold a rally on the Juneteenth day itself. Amanda Holpuch writes under the subheading:

The celebration of the emancipation from slavery in the US comes amid protests inspired by the police killing of George Floyd 

The annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the US, Juneteenth, will be marked with a new energy and mass demonstrations this year amid the global uprisings against systemic racism sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. 

Celebrations planned for the Friday holiday have morphed into protests and marches in cities large and small across the US.
In New York City, more than a dozen protests are planned. Detroit is hosting a week of events, culminating in a rally on Friday morning. On the west coast, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) announced it will shut down 29 ports in solidarity. 

Tensions are expected to be especially high in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where on Saturday Donald Trump will have his first campaign rally since the Covid-19 lockdowns began. The rally was initially planned for Friday, but the Trump campaign moved the date after facing widespread criticism that scheduling the rally on Juneteenth was a nod to white supremacists. 

Tulsa is where white armed mobs led a massacre of up to 300 people in 1921. The Tulsa race massacre not only killed hundreds and injured hundreds more, it also destroyed a thriving district known as “Black Wall Street”. 

Several actions are planned in Tulsa to celebrate Juneteenth, to protest against the president’s visit or to do both things at once.
A member of the city’s Black Lives Matter chapter, pastor Mareo Johnson, said though he was pleased the rally was moved to Saturday, it was still disturbing to have the event so close to Juneteenth. 

“What follows [Trump] is a spirit of hate,” Johnson said. “Even if he doesn’t have those intentions, that’s what people get from him. With him coming, it will fuel hate in people.” 

Johnson is helping lead a Trump protest on Saturday. He told the Tulsa World newspaper that the event is intended to encourage community camaraderie and to celebrate Juneteenth, while also reflecting on current events.

Pressure for Juneteenth to be recognized as a federal holiday has been building in recent years in part because of movements like Black Lives Matter. The organization is one of several efforts to refocus the national dialogue on systemic racism and to lay the groundwork for the uprising happening today.

These conversations also reawakened engagement in the topic of reparations, which was discussed in Congress for the first time in a decade on Juneteenth last year.

There, lawmakers debated what can be done to atone for the enslavement of 4 million Africans and their descendants through reparations.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates said at the hearing: “It was 150 years ago and it is right now.”

Thousands celebrate Juneteenth with anti-racism marches across US

In their report for the Guardian, Nina Lakhani in New York and Maanvi Singh in Oakland (Fri 19 Jun 2020) cover Angela Davis speaking at a Juneteenth shutdown at the Port of Oakland.  

They write:

Elsewhere in the country, civil rights leaders joined events and spoke out against injustices. The activist and scholar Angela Davis appeared at a march that drew thousands in Oakland, California, shutting down the city’s industrial port.

“If I had not chosen to become a university professor my next choice would have been to be a dock worker,” Davis said. “In order to be part of the most radical union in the country. Thank you for shutting down the ports today, on Juneteenth. You represent the potential and power of the labor movement,” she added. 

"Make America Great" says Rev Al Sharpton at Tulsa on Juneteenth

More choices? 

If the MAGA hat fits . . . wear it, but does is it make the wearer accountable?

Q. Reparation for slave owners? A. Yes! 

Q. NOT the slaves? 
A. Yes!

Q. And paid for by the British state?

Jasper Jolly writes for the Guardian (The 18 Jun 2020) on a shameful period in English history when certain banks remained tied to human trafficking. he writes under the headline and subheading:

Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds among UK banks that had links to slavery

Many bank directors received compensation after slavery was made illegal in 1833

The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807 but it was not until 1833 that the Slavery Abolition Act finally banned the ownership of other human beings. However, 46,000 slave owners continued to benefit financially as the subsequent Slave Compensation Act provided £20m in payments – a sum worth billions in 2020 terms. 

Despite the name of the act, the former slaves were not compensated.

University College London’s Legacies of British Slave Ownership project shows that 10% to 20% of Britain’s wealthy can be identified as having had significant links to slavery. The amount of money borrowed to pay off slave owners was so large that the government only repaid it fully in 2015. Companies with links to slavery in their past include:

Royal Bank of Scotland

RBS was founded in Edinburgh in 1727, but among the hundreds of banks it later acquired some could trace their history as far back as the 1640s (in the case of Child & Co). A 2009 report funded by the bank found that directors of RBS predecessors had owned slaves, as well as giving loans and other support to plantation owners. Eighteen linked directors are referenced in the UCL database. The bank was bailed out by the UK taxpayer in 2009, and the government retains a 62% stake.

A spokeswoman said: “We have a strong multicultural network across the bank and have recently set up a taskforce led by our BAME [black, Asian and minority ethnic] colleagues which will look at what more we can do as a bank. This includes looking at making contributions to BAME groups.”

Barclays Bank

Barclays traces its history back to two goldsmith bankers in London in 1690. The name of one of its 250 predecessors gives a clear indication of its role in the British empire: the Colonial Bank finally merged with Barclays in 1925. Two managers, a subscriber and three directors are named on the UCL database as having been involved in the slave trade or received slave compensation.

A Barclays spokesman said: “The history of Barclays, like other institutions, is being examined following recent events. We can’t change what’s gone before us, only how we go forward. We are committed as a bank to do more to further foster our culture of inclusiveness, equality and diversity, for our colleagues, and the customers and clients we serve.”

HSBC

HSBC was founded in 1865 to finance trade between Europe and Asia, but its 1992 merger with the UK’s Midland Bank gives it earlier roots. Those include the London Joint Stock Bank, whose first manager, George Pollard, shared £2,416 (more than £230,000 today) in compensation for giving up 134 enslaved people in Nevis.

A spokeswoman said: “HSBC has operated across the globe for over 150 years and is fully committed to driving a diverse and inclusive culture. We are committed to learning from the past and, in particular, anything that would be inconsistent with our values today. HSBC has zero tolerance towards racial discrimination, or any other type of discrimination.”

Lloyds Banking Group

For its first 100 years Lloyds Bank operated from just one office in Birmingham. However, in the 1860s it embarked on a period of rapid expansion. John White Cater, a director of one of the rivals it acquired, received compensation for five estates that enslaved 80 people at the time of abolition. Eight former companies associated with Lloyds have links to claimants or beneficiaries in the UCL database,.

A Lloyds spokeswoman said: “A lot has changed during the 300-year history of our brands and while we have much within our heritage to be proud of, we can’t be proud of it all. We stand against racism, slavery and discrimination in all its forms and truly believe that by reflecting, understanding, promoting and valuing the diversity of our colleagues, we will deliver better results. We can do more, we can do better and we will do it together.”

Lloyd’s of London

The insurance market started in a coffee house more than 330 years ago. By the 1730s it was dominating shipping insurance around the world, and playing a key role in the UK’s empire building. That meant it was also intimately involved in the slave trade. Simon Fraser, a founder subscriber member of Lloyd’s, held at least 162 people in slavery and was paid the equivalent of nearly £400,000 for ceding a plantation in Dominica. Descendants of slaves brought action for reparations against Lloyd’s in 2004.

Lloyd’s of London said the slave trade was “an appalling and shameful period of English history, as well as our own, and we condemn the indefensible wrongdoing that occurred during this period”. It now plans to provide cash help to organisations that support BAME groups and “invest in positive programmes to attract, retain and develop black and minority ethnic talent”.

Arbuthnot Latham

Both of the private bank’s founders, Alfred Latham and James Alves Arbuthnot, were linked to the slave trade. Latham received compensation after the 1833 abolition of slavery, co-founding the bank in the same year. The bank grew into a major funder of Britain’s colonial exploits, including Cecil Rhodes’s gold fields in South Africa.

A spokesman said: “Arbuthnot Latham stands against racism and discrimination in all forms, and is committed to diversity across the bank.”

Greene King

Pub chain Greene King, which runs 3,100 pubs, restaurants and hotels, has been brewing beer since 1799 when it was founded by 19-year-old Benjamin Greene. Greene went on to own cane sugar plantations in the West Indies where slaves worked, and he criticised abolition campaigners. He received nearly £500,000 in today’s money for three plantations in the West Indies.

“It is inexcusable that one of our founders profited from slavery and argued against its abolition in the 1800s,” said Nick Mackenzie, Greene King’s chief executive. The company plans to offer financial reparations.

Over two years ago David Olusoga's Opinion piece was referenced in the Re:LODE project taking place at the Bluecoat in Liverpool, as part of an exhibition looking at all the histories associated with the Bluecoat Chambers building in its anniversary 300th year. The subheading to this piece points to the fact that:

The modern equivalent of £17bn was paid out to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human property.

David Olusoga writes:

It is hard to imagine why somebody at the Treasury thought that the subject of slavery was fertile territory from which they might harvest their weekly “surprising #FridayFact”. Just after lunchtime on 9 February the department’s Twitter page presented its third of a million followers with its latest offering.

“Millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes,” it trumpeted.

Below, under an image of Africans being marched, in yokes and ropes, into slavery, the tweet continued: “Did you know? In 1833, Britain used £20 million, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.”

The “fact” had the unctuous feel of a pat on the back. A little over a week after millions had been given their self-assessment tax bills, the good people at the Treasury threw us something to cheer us up. You might be skint, you might want to weep when you see your bank balance but look, you helped to end slavery, at least it’s all for a good cause, eh?

What the Treasury didn’t mention, though, was that the £20m was paid out to the 46,000 slave owners, to compensate them for the loss of their human property. By one calculation that is the modern equivalent of about £17bn. Is this really something we should regard with collective pride?

Few people in the 1830s would have seen it that way. Compensation was a mechanism by which Britain was finally able to end a system that millions of people had come to regard as abhorrent, and a national disgrace. It was a way out. The abolitionists agonised over it. To accept the principle of compensation was at odds with their fundamental moral position: that it was impossible for one human being to own another, to hold “property in men”, as they put it. The only people who saw the payment of compensation as a positive were the people who had spent three decades campaigning for it and would be the beneficiaries of it – the slave owners.

And the slave owners not only received compensation from the British taxpayer, they won another concession, the euphemistically titled “apprenticeship” system. What this meant was that the slaves themselves were forced to work the fields for a further six years after the supposed abolition of slavery – 45 hours a week for no pay.

Within hours of the Treasury’s tweet being posted it was evident that surprise was not the dominant emotion it was eliciting. Anger and incredulity were more in evidence. Lexington Wright tweeted: “So basically, my father and his children and grandchildren have been paying taxes to compensate those who enslaved our ancestors, and you want me to be proud of that fact. Are you f**king insane???”

To pay the £20m to the slave owners, the government set up the Slave Compensation Commission, which like all bureaucracies left behind detailed records of its financial outgoings. By accident, the process of compensation created a nearly complete census of British slavery: the names of all the slave owners on 1 August 1834, the day on which slavery ended – and of course “apprenticeship” began. This is how we know the scale of slave ownership of the so-called plantocracy, the super-rich of their age: men such as John Gladstone, the father of prime minister William Ewart Gladstone.

The Gladstones were paid £100,000 – the modern equivalent of about £80m – in compensation for 2,500 men, women and children they regarded as property. Also in the records of the Slave Compensation Commission are the ancestors of George Orwell, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Gilbert Scott and David Cameron – all owned slaves and received compensation. All of this information is publicly and freely available on the website of the University College London’s Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project.

Although called a #FridayFact, what we are dealing with here is a factoid: a fact-like entity that crumbles on proper examination. It was not only wrongly judged, in numerous respects it was just wrong. Compensation was not paid at the end of “the slave trade”. That ended in 1807. The slave trade and slavery – confusing as that may be to us – were regarded almost as separate issues at the time. Compensation was paid 30 years later, at the end of slavery.

To make matters worse, the picture chosen to illustrate the #FridayFact was (again) of the slave trade rather than slavery; and, judging by the dress of the slave traders depicted, it was a Victorian image of the eastern slave trade, through which Arab and African-Arab slave traders trafficked millions of Africans to lives of enslavement in the Middle East – a too often neglected aspect of the global story of slavery.

Even the most essential details were wrong. The 1833 act did not free “all slaves in the Empire”, as the most rudimentary research would have shown.

Someone at the Treasury wisely deleted the tweet within hours. Yet its inaccuracy shows what happens if we as a nation focus on abolition but stay largely silent on the centuries of slave-trading and slave-owning that predated it. It is what happens when those communities for whom this history can never be reduced to a Friday factoid remain poorly represented within our national institutions.

For a few weeks, black lives mattered. Now what?

This is an excerpt from Nesrine Malik's Opinion piece for the Guardian (Sat 21 Jun 2020) asking and answering her question:

Was this time really different from all the other times before it? 

There did seem to be some spontaneous alchemy at work: perhaps the long period of lockdown meant that people of all races paid a new kind of attention. They watched George Floyd call out for his mother as his life ebbed away and they watched the US president trample over the pain that followed. They saw the cheapness of a black life – and they began to realise that all the excuses they had made in the past for not seeing it would no longer hold.

One way in which this time was not different was the haste to change the subject: couldn’t we talk about something other than statues and empire and history? Wasn’t all this just the distant past? And so, after a few days of protests, black people were once again put on the stand to answer for all this talk about toppling monuments to slave traders, removing old TV programmes out of rotation on streaming services, renaming venerable pancake syrup brands.

Some of this is simply the way our media is set up to host “debates” about whether it’s true that some lives matter more than others. But it is also the way that complaints of racial injustice have always been invalidated. They are turned into matters of opinion, removed from the realm of moral justice and placed in the realm of competing cultural values. This is how movements for racial equality are easily framed as unprovoked assaults on our cherished culture, which is perpetually under threat of being vandalised by race vigilantes. This is the dog-whistle frequency that was heard by those groups of white men who arrived, without being asked, to “defend” statues across England.

That frequency is amplified by the media’s treatment of race as a spectacle rather than a serious subject, which has contributed so much to the climate of trivialising racism that triggered the Black Lives Matter protests in the first place. The press is not the main story here, but we cannot make progress on racial equality without honestly interrogating and challenging the ways that the public conversation on race has been shaped. If we are going to probe and litigate the complex aftermath of these protests, it cannot be done in the same fashion and on the same platforms that contributed to their eruption.

In a similar vein Afua Hirsch in an Opinion piece for the Guardian, published in the print edition Thursday 18 June 2020, that warns: 

The Tories have plan to tackle racism: deflect our attention

Don’t let the government fool you into thinking it has no strategy on racism. I know it looks that way, what with the prime minister’s litany of racist statements, the health secretary’s belief that boasting about “diversity of thought” is an appropriate response to the total absence of black people from the cabinet, and the Covid-19 review into race disparity organised in such a way as to alienate the very groups it was meant to help protect. But oafish stupidity is part of Boris Johnson’s electoral brand, and – as usual – beneath it there very much lies a plan. 

The first stage, as has been attempted by successive Conservative governments, is to invent a new foe. Black people have often served that purpose. Winston Churchill’s idea of a good slogan for defeating the left in 1955, for instance, was “Keep England white”. 

Yet now, after the killing of George Floyd, British people have begun taking an interest in racism I’ve never seen before. Books on race and inequality are topping the bestseller lists; many are completely sold out. 

Black Lives Matter protests have been characterised by the huge numbers of white people taking part. Tory heartlands, from Wimbledon – where private school teachers are talking about blackness – to Wiltshire, where the council announced its support for Black Lives Matter, are embracing a new language of progress. 

It’s not rocket science to predict that if Britain could become less racist, the rewards of divisive and scapegoating electoral strategies would be greatly diminished. It’s no coincidence that now is the moment Nigel Farage, allegedly a teenage aficionado of the Hitler Youth, has lost his primetime broadcast platform after comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to the Taliban. 

So the Conservatives – reliably on the wrong side of such moments of social change, never mind global pandemic – need a new enemy to convince voters of their relevance. And that enemy is “wokeness”. 

Like the alleged demise of free speech, wokeness is one of those things that now only exists in the imagination of those determined to be victims of it. But this week, Downing Street officials were reported to have been actively pushing the prime minister towards reincarnating this imaginary cultural battle, by declaring a new “war on woke”. 

Battles need to take place in the real world, however. So these advisers looked down the road to Parliament Square, where Winston Churchill’s statue, despite facing no serious threat, was boarded up with great fanfare.  

The prime minister urged us to avoid “photoshopping our history”. He is less quick to say, however, that a first step in that direction would be acknowledging, alongside Churchill’s commendable victory in the second world war, the full litany of abuses and racist acts he carried out. 

And not only that. Labelling Churchill a victim of antiracist extremists ignores the fact that his statue has been targeted by almost every large protest movement in recent years, from May Day marches to demonstrations against student fees. As one commentator succinctly put it, where was the backlash then? “Nowhere, because white people did it.” 

The point is, Johnson needs to tell people that British cultural pride, for which Churchill’s statue is such a convenient symbol, is under attack. The war on woke is how he plans to defuse calls for racial justice. 

The final element of this strategy is to legitimise it by awarding prominent roles to people of colour, acting as his human shields. As long as a small number of black and brown faces speak up for Johnson, however bizarre and out of step their views on racism, his actions and inactions can escape scrutiny.
It’s sometimes said that true equality is when people from ethnic minority backgrounds have as much a right to undermine antiracism work as anyone else. There is a logic to that idea, albeit a profoundly depressing one. Yet the appointment of Downing Street policy chief Munira Mirza – one of a handful of former Revolutionary Communist party members who swung radically to the right – to conduct a review into inequality beggars belief. Mirza believes that “race is no longer the significant disadvantage it was portrayed to be”, that institutional racism is a “myth”, and that even talking about racial bias is akin to “stoking grievance”. 

The real irony here, though, is that while Mirza and those in her ideological circle despise what they term “identity politics” – an idea that seems to specifically condemn ethnic minority people who self-organise (when working-class people do it, it’s just “politics”) – this very notion underpins the Tories’ current strategy. Specifically, the party weaponises the identity of any black or Asian person who’s willing to denounce antiracism. 

Thus the former party chair James Cleverly was last year rolled out to defend a Tory MP who had blacked-up his face. And this month the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, accused a black journalist of fanning racial tensions for exposing the impact of Covid-19 on British minorities; and the home secretary, Priti Patel, used her own experiences to gaslight a black Labour MP who’d called for stronger action to tackle racism. 

Munira Mirza is the latest in line. That the review she is leading is dead on arrival is not such a bad thing – no one asked for it, and hardly anyone thinks it’s the answer to Britain’s continuing racial injustice. But the fact that she fronts it makes clear the government’s plan: incite a war where there isn’t one to obscure the very real problems for which it has no answers.

'White Lives Matter'

Ben Quinn and Jim Waterson report for the Guardian (Tue 23 Jun 2020):

Police have said no criminal offence took place when a banner reading “White Lives Matter Burnley” was towed past the stadium by an aircraft during Monday night’s Premier League game between Manchester City and Burnley.

The incident “caused offence to many people in Lancashire and beyond”, a senior officer said on Tuesday, as the stunt was blamed on individuals from a group of football hooligans connected with Burnley.

Iffy Onuora, the equalities officer for the Professional Footballers’ Association, said on Tuesday he hoped the widespread condemnation of the banner would act as a catalyst for further conversations about the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The words themselves aren’t offensive, it’s just the context. It’s the rejection of the conversation we’re having at the moment. That’s what it represents,” Onoura told the BBC. “I guess people have the right to do it. For me it’s just proof again that these things can lead to positive things because all that’s been said in the 12 hours since the game finished has been, again, a catalyst, another conversation to have.”

Nick Lowles, the chief executive officer of the campaign organisation Hope not Hate, said the stunt was carried out by prominent members of Burnley’s so-called “Suicide Squad”, a hooligan gang, or “firm”, whose members include supporters of the club.

Burnley’s captain, Ben Mee, said he felt “ashamed and embarrassed” by the incident, while the club has said it will issue lifetime bans to those responsible for the stunt.

Burnley swiftly issued a statement apologising “unreservedly to the Premier League, to Manchester City and to all those helping to promote Black Lives Matter”.

After the game, which ended in a 5-0 victory for Manchester City, Mee said in an interview with Sky: “I’m ashamed and embarrassed that a small number of our fans have decided to put that around the stadium … It doesn’t represent what we’re about, what the club is about, what the players are about and what the majority of the fans are about. It’s a small minority of people and I’m really upset that it happened. As we were coming out we heard some whispers that it was going to happen. The club tried to stop it.”

'Racism is not what Burnley is about'

Josh Halliday North of England correspondent for the Guardian reports (Tue 23 Jun 2020) under the subheading:

Lancashire town has worked hard to bring communities together since race riots of 2001

Wajid Khan was half-watching his beloved Burnley football club when he received a WhatsApp message from a friend. It showed a banner reading, “White Lives Matter Burnley” being flown over the Etihad stadium in Manchester. His heart sank.

“It hurts because I love my town,” Khan said on Tuesday, the emotion apparent in his voice. “I was born and brought up here, educated here. You want to be proud of the town you live in. It’s not a good day.”

Khan, the Burnley-born son of a taxi driver, is one of the region’s leading voices on race relations and community cohesion. At 40, he is also the Lancashire town’s youngest ever mayor.

As a Labour councillor, he has fought for over a decade to heal the wounds of the town’s 2001 race riots and stop the far right from regaining a foothold in Burnley. He knows first hand how potentially combustible the “White Lives Matter” slogan could be in the town.

“We have come quite a distance from our early 2000 difficulties as a town and we want to move forward and support initiatives like Black Lives Matter. When you’re a Premier League town, you need a Premier League, progressive approach,” said Khan. “These aren’t fans of the club – they’re an embarrassment and they drag the town back with their backward thinking.”

The banner has been met with universal condemnation by Burnley FC, its players and many of its fans, who called radio phone-ins in their hundreds to express their anger that such a banner had been flown in their name. In Burnley’s busy town centre, lunchtime shoppers bemoaned the negative headlines that would inevitably follow the stunt.

“It’s wrong it was attributed to Burnley,” said Yvonne Evans, 68, who was out shopping with her husband. “I don’t think the majority of people have a problem [with Black Lives Matter]. Racism is not what Burnley is about – we’re a very tolerant place.”

The former textile town has worked hard to bring communities together since the 2001 riots, when interracial tensions erupted on the streets of Burnley, Oldham and Bradford. The backwash from the riots helped Nick Griffin’s far-right BNP to win eight seats on Burnley council by 2003, leading to a slew of unwanted media attention until the party was ousted in 2012.

Last year, the anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson – one of whose supporters has claimed responsibility for the banner – visited Burnley for a rally during his campaign to become MEP for the north-west of England. He was roundly defeated, gaining just 2% of the vote and losing his deposit, but his presence in the town reopened difficult conversations.

Those who work with Burnley’s marginalised communities felt a similar sense of dismay on Tuesday. “It is a bit of a setback to the good work that’s been going on,” said Fatima Shah, 50, who works with black, Asian and minority ethnic women in the town. “It undermines a lot of the work [we] have been doing to get communities together.”

Shah, director of community group Access Alpha, said there had been “some movement” in integrating Burnley’s mostly white residents with the Asian community, who make up about 11% of the nearly 90,000 population, but that the town was “still fragmented”.

In Burnley town centre, Sam Jackson-Smith had one word for those behind the stunt: “Bints.” The 18-year-old student and his friends are too young to remember the BNP and the riots, but they were disappointed at the support they had seen on Facebook for the “White Lives Matter” banner.

“It sends the wrong message about what the town is about,” said 17-year-old Alfie Morland, who is preparing to study classics at Durham University next year. “The fact people spent so much money to do it – it’s just fragile people, small-dick energy.”

On BBC Radio Lancashire, lifelong Burnley fan Julian Jordan said he “felt sick to my stomach” that the town had been “humiliated in front of a global audience”. It didn’t just besmirch the name of Burnley and its people, he said – it could harm the town’s future prospects.

“If you were looking to invest in somewhere now, I’d imagine community relations would be part of your agenda. This morning, Burnley looks like a less attractive option than it did yesterday,” he said.

Unmasked: the man behind Britain's most toxic far-right YouTube channel

Mark Townsend reports (Sun 21 Jun 2020) on the unmasking of a shadowy figure known as The Iconoclast, who has been free to peddle far-right ideology on YouTube. Mark Townsend writes under the subheading:

Former media student Daniel Atkinson used video-sharing platform to influence new generation of rightwing activists

He is the anonymous architect behind one of the most successful and toxic British far-right YouTube channels, responsible for disseminating racist, Islamophobic and antisemitic material. For years the individual known as The Iconoclast has managed to protect his identity despite amassing nearly 21m views and more than 218,000 subscribers.

However the Observer can reveal that the figure behind one of the biggest far-right content producers in the UK – and the movement’s most prominent anonymous account – is a former media student called Daniel Atkinson.

Campaigners said the unmasking of Atkinson was important because he is emblematic of the latest manifestation of the far right.

They said it is highly likely his widely disseminated racist views influenced some far-right supporters who clashed with police in central London last weekend.

The far-right’s influence has traditionally been consolidated within formal groups and political parties such as the British National Party and English Defence League (EDL). Now, however, its most prominent figures more closely resemble social media influencers such as Atkinson and those who have opted to be identified, for example rightwing commentator Katie Hopkins and far-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson, also a senior editor at the conspiracy theory website Infowars. The former leader of the EDL, Tommy Robinson, is another far-right figure who now prefers to produce online content than belong to a particular organisation.

After the Observer asked YouTube why it continued to host The Iconoclast, the platform finally moved to close a channel which has operated since 2016 and repeatedly been accused of hate speech. A YouTube spokesperson said: “We share a deep concern and responsibility in protecting the community against hate speech and do not want our platform used for harm. Due to repeated violations of our policies, we have terminated The Iconoclast channel.”

Not only had Atkinson’s YouTube channel and magazine steadily attracted an international audience over the years but it also provided a platform for a number of high-profile and extreme figures on the global far right.

Among these are US writer Brittany Pettibone, who views immigration as “white genocide” and in 2018 was banned from entering Britain. Another is antisemitic white supremacist Colin Robertson – aka Millennial Woes – who has described himself as “pro-slavery” and demanded the torpedoing of refugee boats.

On Friday night anti-fascist groups celebrated the removal of one of the most divisive channels on YouTube. Gregory Davis, researcher at anti-extremism pressure group Hope Not Hate said: “The Iconoclast is the perfect example of the threat posed by the modern far-right. It operated online and anonymously and outside of any formal far-right organisation but managing to reach huge numbers of people around the world.”

Extreme even by the standards of most far-right YouTubers, Atkinson actively promoted the idea of “voluntary repatriation” for the UK’s minority ethnic population. In a video uploaded to YouTube in April, he showed clips of an interview with Enoch Powell talking about measures that could encourage voluntary repatriation. Atkinson agreed, saying they would “create an atmosphere that may make leaving Britain seem a more attractive option”.

Such views are similar to those expressed by Generation Identity, a far-right racial separatist group that Atkinson has promoted on his channel and whose ideology is said by some to have inspired the mass shooter in the Christchurch mosque attack, which killed 51 people in March 2019.

Another video on The Iconoclast, published on 5 April and attracting more than 50,000 views, reveals Atkinson’s dismay at suggestions that Rishi Sunak, the Southampton-born chancellor of the exchequer, may be the next prime minister.

“He [Sunak] isn’t British. He is Indian. He can never be British beyond a civic sense. He can never have a genetic connection to the history of this country. So how can he do what’s best for us?” said Atkinson.

Uncovering Atkinson’s identity involved forensic analysis of his social media output, including repeated usernames, profile pictures, throwaway comments that corroborated biographical details shared in his YouTube videos and undeleted accounts. One closed TikTok account linked to Atkinson has a profile blurb that simply states: “I’m racist.”

YouTube has intervened on a number of occasions, removing one video from Atkinson’s channel as recently as 4 June. The video made several racist statements about black people and the Black Lives Matter protests, including one claim that the demonstrations proved Enoch Powell was right to say that the “black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.

Last August his YouTube account was temporarily removed for violating the platform’s guidelines along with prominent anti-Islamic extremist Martin Sellner, who has also been banned from the UK. However, both were reinstated with no apparent explanation from YouTube other than apparently that it had been “the wrong call”, a decision that caused global controversy. Days earlier, YouTube’s chief executive said it had to be open to hosting “controversial” ideas.

Commenting after YouTube had terminated his channel, Atkinson said: “As it stands, your article will paint me in a certain light, and the video samples you have chosen will be the only representation of my wider work, which the public can no longer access.”

Hope NOT Hate

Despite rebranding attempts they are far-right activists with a history of racism   

Hope Not Hate have an article about US writer Brittany Pettibone, mentioned in the Guardian story, with a link, is another vlogger cynically forging a lucrative career out of conspiracy theories and fake news.

Brittany Pettibone is a California-based author, far-right activist and social media personality who rose to prominence in online far-right circles after helping to promote conspiracy theories and through co-hosting the alt-right ‘Virtues of the West’ interview vlog dedicated to “[…]traditional gender roles and [the] love of one’s own culture, race and country”. More recently, she has garnered attention through her continued support for the anti-Muslim, anti-migrant and racial separatist identitarian movement.

Pettibone has previously propagated the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory (a conspiracy which ultimately led to a shooting) and continues to spread the “White Genocide” conspiracy that there are plans made by a shadowy global elite to turn white populations in majority white countries into racial minorities through immigration, diversity initiatives, support for access to abortion and other means.

YouTube accused of being 'organ of radicalisation'

Algorithms push viewers to extremes, senior MP says at launch of report on far right

So Ben Quinn, Molly Blackall and Vikram Dodd report (Mon 2 Mar 2020) for the Guardian under the subheading above:

Social media companies have been heavily criticised at the launch of a major report on the far right, with YouTube being labelled an “organ of radicalisation”.

The State of Hate 2020 report, by Hope Not Hate, also found the Conservative party had suspended more than 20 officials and activists, including six sitting councillors, who had posted Islamophobic comments on social media.

Yvette Cooper, the Labour chair of the Commons home affairs select committee, said on Monday that when she and others had set up an account to search for one of the far-right groups named in the report, YouTube had automatically suggested that viewers might want to watch neo-Nazi videos.

“Look up one thing out of curiosity and YouTube is ever willing to offer far, far more, often getting far more extreme and pushing further out to the extremes, because that is how YouTube works,” she said. “They have become an organ of radicalisation instead of taking responsibility, for that is the way their algorithms work.”

It seems that YouTube is NOT accountable!

More than a year ago Dan Hett explained how all social media platforms have the capability to remove extremist content if they so choose. The trouble is the algorithms that allow the generation of maximum profits also enable extremist content to thrive.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google have the power to choose, and they choose the psychological manipulation of the "community" of their users, and the advertising revenue that generates profit.

Dan Hett explains how, in the wake of the tragic events in Christchurch, and as the brother of Martyn Hett, who was killed in the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, that as a software engineer, he knows that extremist content on the internet can be curbed (Wed 20 Mar 2019). He writes:

Like so many, I was shocked to the core by the recent killing of 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand. As I absorbed the news, my thoughts – for reasons I will shortly explain – turned to the technology that is so closely linked to the atrocity. And let me say this clearly: major platforms such as YouTube and Facebook are a primary and active component in the radicalisation of, mostly, young men.

These organisations counter that they aim to take down content that violates their rules swiftly, and are increasing resources for efforts to identify and remove dangerous material before it causes harm. But clearly this isn’t enough. And by not doing enough to police their platforms, they risk being complicit in innocent lives being violently cut short. It is within their power to remove extremist content and users from their platforms, and they’re failing to do so in any meaningful way. Crucially, this is not caused by insurmountable technical problems.

I write these words with a high degree of confidence, speaking as an experienced software engineer who has spent much of his career writing similar code for dozens of large companies. More importantly, though, I write them with a heartfelt and burning concern, as the brother of Martyn Hett, who was killed in the 2017 attack on the Manchester Arena at the hands of a young man who was radicalised in part by the content and people he connected to online.

Although the idea of people being fed abhorrent rhetoric and conspiracy theories is nothing new, what we have seen in the past decade is an absolute explosion in the ready availability of this content, and easy access to the networks behind them. Gone are the days of hostile mobilisation being organised in quiet meetings in the back rooms of pubs – intolerance has changed with the times. Platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are carefully engineered to ensure you reach content and people you will find interesting. Of course, this is great if you’re into cars or Star Trek. But, as we’ve seen so clearly, the same precision-engineered recommendations work just as well if you’re into the rightwing extremist content linked to the Christchurch atrocity, or the anti-vaccine propaganda that’s contributing to children succumbing to easily preventable diseases.

YouTube in particular is extraordinary in how it continually recommends what it decides is relevant content. As an example, I’m an established antiracism campaigner with nothing in my search history to indicate an interest in flat-Earth beliefs or Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. Despite this disconnect, and with many years of my browsing data on file, YouTube is happy to continually show me this content.

Now, imagine instead I’m a disaffected and potentially vulnerable young man with access to semi-automatic weapons, or contacts and influences that could feasibly help me construct an explosive device. For such a person, that constant barrage of hateful media and disinformation could begin to sound interesting, then relatable, and eventually trustworthy. Consider too that this user-generated content goes hand in hand with the intolerance and normalised hatred we’re seeing in the mainstream media. The Christchurch suspect was described on the front page of the Daily Mirror as an “angelic boy who grew into a killer”, in direct contrast to its “Isis maniac” description of the jihadist extremist who killed a similar number in Orlando. With this double standard so prominent in traditional publications, the most extreme user-generated rhetoric gains an implied legitimacy.

I’m often asked: what can the platforms do? There’s so much content, and moderating is so difficult, right? Wrong. I’m not having this for a second. I will say this with confidence: the platforms can do a whole lot, but aren’t doing it. These networks are built and staffed by some of the finest minds in modern software engineering. I know this because I’ve spent the past decade sitting in audiences at conferences listening to these people show off their impressive tech.

Here’s an example: YouTube is comfortably capable of sifting through its billions of videos and picking up a minuscule snippet of music amid the noise, correctly identifying it and tagging it for licensing. Of course, it was compelled to do this because of money; and what’s more, it has had this capability for a decade now. Now consider the wealth of information available to YouTube before you even look at the content of the video itself: titles, descriptions, tags, users, playlists, likes and dislikes. Hobbyist computer programmers regularly experiment with this to do interesting things in just a few days, or a few hours even – this is rudimentary data-wrangling, not rocket science. A step up from that is to begin looking at the contents of the video itself: we’re in a golden age of advancements in machine learning and AI, and yet apparently none of this is currently being used to put the house in order. More succinctly: if anyone at YouTube (or any other platform) goes on record to say that catching a lot of this stuff isn’t possible, I would be deeply sceptical.

Can we ever realistically catch everything at this scale? Of course not, but I’m wholly convinced that a lot can be caught, blocked, banned, eradicated. Every extremist post and video that a vulnerable young person doesn’t see is another small victory for us all. And of course, identifying content identifies users, and identifying users identifies networks. There’s no instant fix, but reducing it makes us safer. And for those who cry censorship, nobody’s free speech is being violated. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that all speech is welcome, nor does it protect you from someone showing you the door. There’s a suggestion that removing this content from major platforms will simply send users elsewhere, but that misses the point: yes there are plenty of disparate and growing “elsewheres” (the Christchurch suspect was a member of notorious internet cesspool 8chan), but these pale in comparison to the algorithmically driven recommendation engines that point to a monstrous library of content and networks of people. The average at-risk young person isn’t logging on to the dark web or frequenting relatively obscure, impenetrable forums, they’re trawling YouTube.

Enough is enough. Our communities are under siege. Despite the clear evidence that these enormous platforms are the key frameworks upon which a wealth of toxic online cultures are built, nothing tangible is changing. I am calling them out, and we as a society have an urgent imperative to do the same.

Dan Hett is a digital artist and activist, and co-founder of Survivors Against Terror

At the conclusion of this extended post, and following on from this declaration in "calling them out", Re:LODE Radio considers it essential to foreground two positions related to choices, accountability and responsibility, in a world riven by inequality.

Number One . . .

Like water, access to the web must be a universal right

Tim Berners-Lee on the right to access the internet in the Guardian Opinion column (The 4 Jun 2020). This excerpt from his piece explains what we can do: 

History shows us that after all great global upheavals there are major attempts to repair the damage and rebuild, with some more successfully delivered than others. In the midst of this turmoil we must surely strive to ensure some good emerges out of the darkness. 

The web can and must be for everyone — now is our moment to make this happen. We have the technical means to connect the entire world in meaningful and affordable ways: we now need the will and the investment.
Governments must lead the way.

They must invest in network infrastructure, not only in urban centres, but in rural settings where market forces alone fail to connect residents. And because data affordability remains one of the biggest barriers to access, these networks must be efficient. For example, policies that encourage service providers to share network infrastructure, and regulations designed to shape competitive markets for data, can go a long way towards bringing down costs for users.  

And, to connect everyone, governments will need to target typically excluded groups – including people on low incomes, women, and those in rural areas. This means funding public access and digital literacy initiatives to ensure everyone has the skills to use the internet in meaningful ways. 

Service providers must invest in network performance, reliability and coverage so that everyone is within reach of high-quality connectivity. We have seen experiments with drones, balloons and satellites to connect hard-to-reach areas. While these don’t replace good policy and investment in proven technologies, innovation such as this is a welcome addition to the mix. 

There is nothing to stop governments and companies making a choice now, to accelerate progress on connectivity where good changes are happening and to step up where they aren’t. 

Finally, we can all play a role as individuals. If you’ve relied on the web recently, don’t you owe it to the other half of the world to help them get that lifeline, too? 

Demand action from your government to make universal internet connectivity a priority. Support a technology NGO such as the World Wide Web Foundation. Back the Contract for the Web — a collaborative project to build a better web, with universal connectivity as a key priority. 

Just as people campaign for clean water and access to education, we need a global campaign for universal internet access.

We must, of course, be more alert than ever to the web’s shortfalls – the privacy violations, the misinformation and the online gender-based violence that has become far too familiar. But these very real problems must not deter us from achieving the foundational challenge of making the web available to all.

Just as the world decided that electricity and water were basic needs that should reach everyone, no matter the cost, we should recognise that now is our moment to fight for the web as a basic right. Let’s be the generation that delivers universal internet access.

World Wide Web Foundation

. . . and Number Two!

Surveillance capitalism

'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions (Sun 20 Jan 2019):

We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495 could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of our brains; and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet printing did all this and more.

Why choose 1495? Because we’re about the same distance into our revolution, the one kicked off by digital technology and networking. And although it’s now gradually dawning on us that this really is a big deal and that epochal social and economic changes are under way, we’re as clueless about where it’s heading and what’s driving it as the citizens of Mainz were in 1495.

That’s not for want of trying, mind. Library shelves groan under the weight of books about what digital technology is doing to us and our world. Lots of scholars are thinking, researching and writing about this stuff. But they’re like the blind men trying to describe the elephant in the old fable: everyone has only a partial view, and nobody has the whole picture. So our contemporary state of awareness is – as Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace once put it – one of “informed bewilderment”.

Which is why the arrival of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is such a big event. Many years ago – in 1988, to be precise – as one of the first female professors at Harvard Business School to hold an endowed chair she published a landmark book, The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, which changed the way we thought about the impact of computerisation on organisations and on work. It provided the most insightful account up to that time of how digital technology was changing the work of both managers and workers. And then Zuboff appeared to go quiet, though she was clearly incubating something bigger. The first hint of what was to come was a pair of startling essays – one in an academic journal in 2015, the other in a German newspaper in 2016. What these revealed was that she had come up with a new lens through which to view what Google, Facebook et al were doing – nothing less than spawning a new variant of capitalism. Those essays promised a more comprehensive expansion of this Big Idea.

And now it has arrived – the most ambitious attempt yet to paint the bigger picture and to explain how the effects of digitisation that we are now experiencing as individuals and citizens have come about.

The headline story is that it’s not so much about the nature of digital technology as about a new mutant form of capitalism that has found a way to use tech for its purposes. The name Zuboff has given to the new variant is “surveillance capitalism”. It works by providing free services that billions of people cheerfully use, enabling the providers of those services to monitor the behaviour of those users in astonishing detail – often without their explicit consent.

“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”

While the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users. In that sense, her vast (660-page) book is a continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and – dare I say it – Karl Marx.

Viewed from this perspective, the behaviour of the digital giants looks rather different from the roseate hallucinations of Wired magazine. What one sees instead is a colonising ruthlessness of which John D Rockefeller would have been proud. First of all there was the arrogant appropriation of users’ behavioural data – viewed as a free resource, there for the taking. Then the use of patented methods to extract or infer data even when users had explicitly denied permission, followed by the use of technologies that were opaque by design and fostered user ignorance.

And, of course, there is also the fact that the entire project was conducted in what was effectively lawless – or at any rate law-free – territory. Thus Google decided that it would digitise and store every book ever printed, regardless of copyright issues. Or that it would photograph every street and house on the planet without asking anyone’s permission. Facebook launched its infamous “beacons”, which reported a user’s online activities and published them to others’ news feeds without the knowledge of the user. And so on, in accordance with the disrupter’s mantra that “it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission”.

When the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “surveillance is the business model of the internet” he was really only hinting at the reality that Zuboff has now illuminated. The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.

And it won’t be easy to fix because it requires us to tackle the essence of the problem – the logic of accumulation implicit in surveillance capitalism. That means that self-regulation is a nonstarter. “Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists,” says Zuboff, “or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking old Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”

The Age of Surveillance Capital is a striking and illuminating book. A fellow reader remarked to me that it reminded him of Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in that it opens one’s eyes to things we ought to have noticed, but hadn’t. And if we fail to tame the new capitalist mutant rampaging through our societies then we will only have ourselves to blame, for we can no longer plead ignorance.

Ten questions for Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Larry Page saw that human experience could be Google’s virgin wood’

John Naughton: At the moment, the world is obsessed with Facebook. But as you tell it, Google was the prime mover.

Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism is a human creation. It lives in history, not in technological inevitability.

It was pioneered and elaborated through trial and error at Google in much the same way that the Ford Motor Company discovered the new economics of mass production or General Motors discovered the logic of managerial capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.

Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data surplus, and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this surplus.

The company developed new methods of secret surplus capture that could uncover data that users intentionally opted to keep private, as well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not provide. And this surplus would then be analysed for hidden meanings that could predict click-through behaviour. The surplus data became the basis for new predictions markets called targeted advertising.

Here was the origin of surveillance capitalism in an unprecedented and lucrative brew: behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms. As click-through rates skyrocketed, advertising quickly became as important as search. Eventually it became the cornerstone of a new kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale.

The success of these new mechanisms only became visible when Google went public in 2004. That’s when it finally revealed that between 2001 and its 2004 IPO, revenues increased by 3,590%.

JN: So surveillance capitalism started with advertising, but then became more general?

SZ: Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to advertising than mass production was limited to the fabrication of the Ford Model T.

It quickly became the default model for capital accumulation in Silicon Valley, embraced by nearly every startup and app. And it was a Google executive – Sheryl Sandberg – who played the role of Typhoid Mary, bringing surveillance capitalism from Google to Facebook, when she signed on as Mark Zuckerberg’s number two in 2008. By now it’s no longer restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.

JN: In this story of conquest and appropriation, the term “digital natives” takes on a new meaning…

SZ: Yes, “digital natives” is a tragically ironic phrase. I am fascinated by the structure of colonial conquest, especially the first Spaniards who stumbled into the Caribbean islands.

Historians call it the “conquest pattern”, which unfolds in three phases: legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to legitimate the declaration. Back then Columbus simply declared the islands as the territory of the Spanish monarchy and the pope.

The sailors could not have imagined that they were writing the first draft of a pattern that would echo across space and time to a digital 21st century. The first surveillance capitalists also conquered by declaration. They simply declared our private experience to be theirs for the taking, for translation into data for their private ownership and their proprietary knowledge. They relied on misdirection and rhetorical camouflage, with secret declarations that we could neither understand nor contest.

Google began by unilaterally declaring that the world wide web was its to take for its search engine. Surveillance capitalism originated in a second declaration that claimed our private experience for its revenues that flow from telling and selling our fortunes to other businesses. In both cases, it took without asking. Page [Larry, Google co-founder] foresaw that surplus operations would move beyond the online milieu to the real world, where data on human experience would be free for the taking. As it turns out his vision perfectly reflected the history of capitalism, marked by taking things that live outside the market sphere and declaring their new life as market commodities.

We were caught off guard by surveillance capitalism because there was no way that we could have imagined its action, any more than the early peoples of the Caribbean could have foreseen the rivers of blood that would flow from their hospitality toward the sailors who appeared out of thin air waving the banner of the Spanish monarchs. Like the Caribbean people, we faced something truly unprecedented.

Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Once we thought of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us as free.

JN: Then there’s the “inevitability” narrative – technological determinism on steroids.

SZ: In my early fieldwork in the computerising offices and factories of the late 1970s and 80s, I discovered the duality of information technology: its capacity to automate but also to “informate”, which I use to mean to translate things, processes, behaviours, and so forth into information.

This duality set information technology apart from earlier generations of technology: information technology produces new knowledge territories by virtue of its informating capability, always turning the world into information. The result is that these new knowledge territories become the subject of political conflict. The first conflict is over the distribution of knowledge: “Who knows?” The second is about authority: “Who decides who knows?” The third is about power: “Who decides who decides who knows?”

Now the same dilemmas of knowledge, authority and power have surged over the walls of our offices, shops and factories to flood each one of us… and our societies. Surveillance capitalists were the first movers in this new world. They declared their right to know, to decide who knows, and to decide who decides. In this way they have come to dominate what I call “the division of learning in society”, which is now the central organising principle of the 21st-century social order, just as the division of labour was the key organising principle of society in the industrial age.

JN: So the big story is not really the technology per se but the fact that it has spawned a new variant of capitalism that is enabled by the technology?

SZ: Larry Page grasped that human experience could be Google’s virgin wood, that it could be extracted at no extra cost online and at very low cost out in the real world.

For today’s owners of surveillance capital the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers, oceans and forests before they fell to the market dynamic. We have no formal control over these processes because we are not essential to the new market action. Instead we are exiles from our own behaviour, denied access to or control over knowledge derived from its dispossession by others for others. Knowledge, authority and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely “human natural resources”. We are the native peoples now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.

While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance capitalism is not technology. Digital technologies can take many forms and have many effects, depending upon the social and economic logics that bring them to life. Surveillance capitalism relies on algorithms and sensors, machine intelligence and platforms, but it is not the same as any of those.

JN: Where does surveillance capitalism go from here?

SZ: Surveillance capitalism moves from a focus on individual users to a focus on populations, like cities, and eventually on society as a whole.

Think of the capital that can be attracted to futures markets in which population predictions evolve to approximate certainty.

This has been a learning curve for surveillance capitalists, driven by competition over prediction products. First they learned that the more surplus the better the prediction, which led to economies of scale in supply efforts. Then they learned that the more varied the surplus the higher its predictive value. This new drive toward economies of scope sent them from the desktop to mobile, out into the world: your drive, run, shopping, search for a parking space, your blood and face, and always… location, location, location.

The evolution did not stop there. Ultimately they understood that the most predictive behavioural data comes from what I call “economies of action”, as systems are designed to intervene in the state of play and actually modify behaviour, shaping it toward desired commercial outcomes. We saw the experimental development of this new “means of behavioural modification” in Facebook’s contagion experiments and the Google-incubated augmented reality game Pokémon Go.

It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.”

This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society. The message here is simple: Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.

JN: What are the implications for democracy?

SZ: During the past two decades surveillance capitalists have had a pretty free run, with hardly any interference from laws and regulations.

Democracy has slept while surveillance capitalists amassed unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power. These dangerous asymmetries are institutionalised in their monopolies of data science, their dominance of machine intelligence, which is surveillance capitalism’s “means of production”, their ecosystems of suppliers and customers, their lucrative prediction markets, their ability to shape the behaviour of individuals and populations, their ownership and control of our channels for social participation, and their vast capital reserves. We enter the 21st century marked by this stark inequality in the division of learning: they know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them. These new forms of social inequality are inherently antidemocratic.

At the same time, surveillance capitalism diverges from the history of market capitalism in key ways, and this has inhibited democracy’s normal response mechanisms. One of these is that surveillance capitalism abandons the organic reciprocities with people that in the past have helped to embed capitalism in society and tether it, however imperfectly, to society’s interests. First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely on people as consumers. Instead, supply and demand orients the surveillance capitalist firm to businesses intent on anticipating the behaviour of populations, groups and individuals. Second, by historical standards the large surveillance capitalists employ relatively few people compared with their unprecedented computational resources. General Motors employed more people during the height of the Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights of market capitalisation. Finally, surveillance capitalism depends upon undermining individual self-determination, autonomy and decision rights for the sake of an unobstructed flow of behavioural data to feed markets that are about us but not for us.

This antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse of digital technology. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence over the division of learning in society. It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. Paradoxically, this coup is celebrated as “personalisation”, although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.

JN: Our societies seem transfixed by all this: we are like rabbits paralysed in the headlights of an oncoming car.

SZ: Despite surveillance capitalism’s domination of the digital milieu and its illegitimate power to take private experience and to shape human behaviour, most people find it difficult to withdraw, and many ponder if it is even possible.

This does not mean, however, that we are foolish, lazy, or hapless. On the contrary, in my book I explore numerous reasons that explain how surveillance capitalists got away with creating the strategies that keep us paralysed. These include the historical, political and economic conditions that allowed them to succeed. And we’ve already discussed some of the other key reasons, including the nature of the unprecedented, conquest by declaration. Other significant reasons are the need for inclusion, identification with tech leaders and their projects, social persuasion dynamics, and a sense of inevitability, helplessness and resignation.

We are trapped in an involuntary merger of personal necessity and economic extraction, as the same channels that we rely upon for daily logistics, social interaction, work, education, healthcare, access to products and services, and much more, now double as supply chain operations for surveillance capitalism’s surplus flows. The result is that the choice mechanisms we have traditionally associated with the private realm are eroded or vitiated. There can be no exit from processes that are intentionally designed to bypass individual awareness and produce ignorance, especially when these are the very same processes upon which we must depend for effective daily life. So our participation is best explained in terms of necessity, dependency, the foreclosure of alternatives, and enforced ignorance.

JN: Doesn’t all this mean that regulation that just focuses on the technology is misguided and doomed to fail? What should we be doing to get a grip on this before it’s too late?

SZ: The tech leaders desperately want us to believe that technology is the inevitable force here, and their hands are tied.

But there is a rich history of digital applications before surveillance capitalism that really were empowering and consistent with democratic values. Technology is the puppet, but surveillance capitalism is the puppet master.

Surveillance capitalism is a human-made phenomenon and it is in the realm of politics that it must be confronted. The resources of our democratic institutions must be mobilised, including our elected officials. GDPR [a recent EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the EU] is a good start, and time will tell if we can build on that sufficiently to help found and enforce a new paradigm of information capitalism. Our societies have tamed the dangerous excesses of raw capitalism before, and we must do it again.

While there is no simple five-year action plan, much as we yearn for that, there are some things we know. Despite existing economic, legal and collective-action models such as antitrust, privacy laws and trade unions, surveillance capitalism has had a relatively unimpeded two decades to root and flourish. We need new paradigms born of a close understanding of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives and foundational mechanisms.”

For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place? All that does is further institutionalise and legitimate data capture. It’s like negotiating how many hours a day a seven-year-old should be allowed to work, rather than contesting the fundamental legitimacy of child labour. Data ownership also fails to reckon with the realities of behavioural surplus. Surveillance capitalists extract predictive value from the exclamation points in your post, not merely the content of what you write, or from how you walk and not merely where you walk. Users might get “ownership” of the data that they give to surveillance capitalists in the first place, but they will not get ownership of the surplus or the predictions gleaned from it – not without new legal concepts built on an understanding of these operations.

Another example: there may be sound antitrust reasons to break up the largest tech firms, but this alone will not eliminate surveillance capitalism. Instead it will produce smaller surveillance capitalist firms and open the field for more surveillance capitalist competitors.

So what is to be done? In any confrontation with the unprecedented, the first work begins with naming. Speaking for myself, this is why I’ve devoted the past seven years to this work… to move forward the project of naming as the first necessary step toward taming. My hope is that careful naming will give us all a better understanding of the true nature of this rogue mutation of capitalism and contribute to a sea change in public opinion, most of all among the young.

This video of Edward Snowden and Naomi Klein was live-streamed yesterday on 23 June 2020 on the . . .

. . . creeping surveillance state 

This post ends with another mention of Columbus

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus . . .

Re:LODE has a page in the To every story there belongs another article on the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes section on the song They All Laughed . . . as an example of the social impact of technology as a theme embedded in the ideology of . . . 

. . . American exceptionalism!