Where the LODE Zone Line crosses a border or a boundary, be it political, linguistic, cultural, human or physical geography, this is a possible location, a place to consider making a LODECargo, a cargo of questions made from local materials, and framed by the situation as reported in newspapers and other forms of newsgathering.
Following the LODE Zone Line across northern Germany, it crosses the free border between Germany and Poland at Linken on the German frontier, and then passes over the Polish port city of Szczecin, the erstwhile German port of Stettin, serving the hinterland of Prussia's capital city, Berlin.
The LODE Zone Line then crosses the border of Poland with Belarus. This Sunday, on the Polish side of the border, the Polish electorate voted in the Polish presidential election. The election resulted in an election victory of the "populist" politician Andrzej Duda.
Shaun Walker and Jennifer Rankin report for the Guardian (Mon 13 Jul 2020) on an election result that . . .
. . . hands populists free rein.
Shaun Walker and Jennifer Rankin write:
Poland’s ruling populists have been given free rein in their mission to reshape the country after liberal hopes of taking the presidency were crushed in a narrow defeat following a divisive campaign. The incumbent president, Andrzej Duda, was elected for another five-year term as a familiar set of demographic divisions played out in the vote. Poles under 50 and those living in larger towns and cities backed the liberal challenger, Rafał Trzaskowski, while older and rural voters stood by Duda. With almost all the ballots counted on Monday, Duda, who was backed by the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and ran a campaign laced with homophobic rhetoric, was on 51.2% of the vote and Trzaskowski on 48.8%. The challenger conceded on Monday afternoon. “Thank you also for the amazing energy that we have managed to unleash together during these few weeks,”Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, wrote on Twitter. In a short speech later, he congratulated Duda and expressed hope that his second term might be different from the first. Duda’s supporters celebrated what they saw as a clear mandate for PiS to continue on a path that has reduced poverty but raised concerns that democracy is under threat. Critics and human rights groups expressed fears that Duda’s victory would boost illiberal tendencies not only at home but also within the EU. During its time in office, PiS has clashed with Brussels over rule of law and assaults on the judiciary, and on Tuesday the European parliament’s civil liberties committee will vote on whether the EU should broaden its continued disciplinary procedure against Poland. The EU executive launched an investigation into the rule of law in Poland more than four and a half years ago, but the process has languished as EU member states are divided over how to respond. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who has also clashed with Brussels, marked Duda’s re-election by posting on Facebook a picture of himself shaking hands with the Polish president, with graphics of a hand showing a “V” for victory and a Polish flag.
Trzaskowski ran an energetic campaign, narrowing the gap in a race that Duda had been expected to win easily before the original May vote was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. In recent days there had been a real sense that the election could go either way, and the result left Trzaskowski’s supporters deflated.
Rafał Trzaskowski at a press conference in Warsaw.
If he had won, Trzaskowski would have been able to use the presidential veto to stymie much of the PiS legislative agenda. Now, with the next parliamentary elections not until 2023 and PiS controlling most of the levers of power, the fear is that PiS will double down on its strategy for at least the next three years. A mission of election observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Monday that the voting had been well organised and security measures relating to the pandemic had been properly enforced, but they expressed concern about a lack of impartiality on public television and about the combative nature of the campaign, and in particular Duda’s rhetoric. “We were worried by instances of intolerant rhetoric of a homophobic, xenophobic and antisemitic nature, particularly among the president’s campaign and the public television,” said Thomas Boserup, the head of the monitoring mission. He criticised Duda personally for use of homophobic rhetoric. During the campaign, the stable of media loyal to the government attacked Trzaskowski as an “extremist” and on various occasions alleged he was backed by shadowy foreign forces, or that he would take money from Poles and disburse it to “Jewish interests”. The outlets also criticised him for his support of LGBT rights during his time as mayor. Trzaskowski said in the run-up to the vote that it was “now or never” to stop PiS, which has governed Poland since 2015.
While some commentators expressed optimism that so many young Poles had voted for change, others warned that PiS may step up its xenophobic rhetoric. “PiS sees the nationalist far right as a bigger threat to its majority than liberals, and will want to send signals to these young nationalist voters,” said Wojciech Przybylski, a political analyst.
Bart Staszewski, an LGBT activist who during the campaign confronted Duda with photographs of LGBT teenagers who had taken their own lives, wrote on Twitter that there was “no hope of improving the situation of minorities” in the country after the result.
The race was closely watched by politicians around the globe for clues about what may or may not work in the fight against populists. In an unusual intervention, Donald Trump received Duda at the White House days before the vote and praised him as doing a “terrific job”.
Trzaskowski carried the hopes of liberals worldwide, fielding a call from Barack Obama in the days before the vote. “Encouraging that so many, young people in particular, were mobilised for an open inclusive Poland at the heart of the European Union,”Sophie in ‘t Veld, a Dutch liberal MEP, wrote on Twitter on Monday. She said it was “shameful” for a politician to have won an election in Europe in 2020 with “a homophobic hate campaign”.
The LODE Zone Line continues to stretch eastward to the borders of Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. Across the Polish border in Belarus it's NOT about populist politicians and politics it's about a dictatorial and authoritarian regime rigging the recent presidential election.
Populist authoritarianism on one side of the frontier and an unpopular autocratic dictator stealing an un-winnable election on the other!
Today, for this post, it is the border between Belarus and Ukraine where the courage of a person, fighting for democracy and justice, demands all of our attention and moral support.
Ukrainian media says Maria Kolesnikova refused to enter country after being abducted from Minsk
Luke Harding and Shaun Walker reporting for the Guardian on the shocking events taking place in Belarus (Tue 8 Sep 2020). They write:
The Belarusian opposition figure Maria Kolesnikova ripped up her passport in order to avoid being deported from her own country, according to a Ukrainian minister and media reports.
On Monday, masked men kidnapped Kolesnikova from the centre of Minsk and drove her away. Two of her opposition colleagues also vanished. The three activists were later driven to the Alexandrovka border with Ukraine in a car that arrived at about 4am on Tuesday.
Kolesnikova refused to cross the border and deliberately ripped up her passport, according to local sources. “When attempting to deport her, she tore her passport and could not be allowed into the territory of Ukraine by border guards,” a source told Interfax-Ukraine agency.
The latest repression against opposition figures in Belarus came as a group of Russian journalists, including the editor-in-chief of Russia Today, Margarita Simonyan, flew into Minsk for Lukashenko’s first interview since he declared a controversial victory in a presidential election a month ago.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has promised to send a contingent of special forces to Belarus to prop up Lukashenko if necessary, and is due receive the embattled Belarusian leader in Moscow for talks in the coming days.
Roman Babayan, one of the Russian journalists at the interview, wrote on Telegram that Lukashenko said he will not step down, saying his supporters would be attacked, but he did acknowledge that he may have overstayed his welcome after 26 years in power. “I may have sat in the president’s chair a little too long,” he said, according to a quote tweeted by Russia Today.
Lukashenko also ruled out dialogue with a coordination council, set up by the opposition, of which Kolesnikova is one of a seven-person presidium. Authorities have been systematically tageting its leaders in recent weeks.
Ukraine’s deputy interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko, posted on Facebook that Kolesnikova had successfully prevented “a forcible expulsion from her native country”. “It wasn’t a voluntary trip,” he wrote, calling Kolesnikova“this brave woman”.
The activists with her – Anton Rodnenkov and Ivan Kravtsov – were in Ukraine, officials in Kyiv confirmed. The Belarus state Belta news agency said Kolesnikova was pushed out of the car, which continued without her across the Ukraine border. Belarusian guards then appear to have recaptured Kolsenikova. The exact sequence of events at the border and her whereabouts were unclear.
“Kolesnikova has now been detained. I can’t say concretely where she is, but she has been detained,”Anton Bychokovsky, a Belarus border guard spokesperson told Reuters. “She was detained in connection with the circumstances in which they [the group] left the territory of Belarus.”
Kolesnikova was a campaign partner of the opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who claimed victory against the longstanding president, Alexander Lukashenko, in disputed elections on 9 August.
She was seized on Monday along with at least three other members of the coordination council, which was set up to seek a peaceful transfer of power amid widespread rejection of the official election results, which gave 80% of the vote to Lukashenko.
Speaking to the Guardian before her kidnapping, Kolesnikova said her civic actions were not part of a political programme. “I just want to do it as a citizen,” she said. She mentioned harassment from the authorities including being followed and minibuses “lurking outside” her campaign headquarters.
Kolesnikova added: “I am not paying attention because if I was going to pay attention I would have left [Belarus] three months ago. I made a decision in May [to stay]. I have no illusions about the kind of country in which I’ve made that decision.”
Germany and Britain have demanded answers over Kolesnikova’s whereabouts. The British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, tweeted: “Seriously concerned for the welfare of Maria Kolesnikova in Belarus. Lukashenko’s regime must make her safe return their highest priority. The regime must cease brutalising protesters, release political prisoners and begin dialogue with the opposition.”
Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, demanded “clarity on the whereabouts and the release of all political prisoners in Belarus”.
The European Union also led calls for Belarus to immediately release more than 600 people arrested during protests against the regime.
The interior ministry said 633 people were detained on Sunday for illegal mass gatherings, one of the largest waves of arrests since the early days of the demonstrations.
“The EU expects the Belarusian authorities to ensure the immediate release of all detained on political grounds before and after the falsified 9 August presidential elections,” its diplomatic head, Josep Borrell, said. “The EU will impose sanctions on individuals responsible for violence, repression and falsification of election results.”
Canada’s foreign minister, François-Philippe Champagne, called for the release of people detained, including opposition members and journalists. “The most recent arbitrary arrests of leading opposition voices and acts of repression are unacceptable,” he said.
Tikhanovskaya, Lukashenko’s main rival who left the country under pressure from the authorities and was granted refuge in EU member Lithuania, said in a statement: “The more they try to scare us, the more people will take to the streets.”
The disputed election has sparked large demonstrations in the ex-Soviet country of more than 9 million people on Russia’s western borders, in an unprecedented challenge to Lukashenko.
On Sunday, more than 100,000 people marched on the president’s residence calling on him to quit. Gangs of pro-government thugs beat up protesters on their way home.
The masked men who snatched Kolesnikova on Monday drove her away in an unmarked minivan in what appeared to be part of a targeted attempt by the authorities to wipe out the protest movement. It was unclear who abducted Kolesnikova.
Her colleague Rodnenkov reportedly disappeared about 40 minutes after confirming Kolesnikova had gone missing. Police in Minsk were cited by Russia’s Interfax news agency as saying they had not detained her.
Before the election Kolesnikova had joined forces with Tikhanovskaya and with Veronika Tsepkalo, who has also since left the country. Another leading activist, Olga Kovalkova, arrived in Poland on Saturday, saying she had been told she would face arrest if she stayed in Belarus.
As concerns regarding the safety and welfare of Maria Kovalkova are evident across international media, the efforts of Extinction Rebellion to draw attention to the climate change crisis and to those who are complicit in the climate change denial machine, have been greeted by a degree of hostility and . . .
The language used in this report byThe Sun newspaper, and accessible on the internet, is highly charged, and clearly aiming to represent the efforts of Extinction Rebellion to protest against the climate denial machine as a form of extremism. For example:
The Sun report begins:
HOME Secretary Priti Patel has warned Extinction Rebellion protesters could face jail over their "guerrilla tactics."
She is looking at introducing tougher sentences for the extremists after they blockaded newspaper print works in warped bid to hamper free speech.
Nosheen Iqbal reports for the Guardian (Sat 5 Sep 2020) uber the subheading:
Extinction Rebellion protests at News Corp sites condemned by Society of Editors as ‘attempt to silence other voices’
Ministers and MPs from all parts of the political spectrum have condemned Extinction Rebellion for blocking the delivery of newspapers across the UK on Saturday.
Four national newspapers, including the Sun and the Daily Mail, were missing from some newsagents’ shelves on Saturday morning after more than 100 environmental protesters targeted printing presses owned by Rupert Murdoch’sNews Corp on Friday evening.
The prime minister, Boris Johnson, said: “A free press is vital in holding the government and other powerful institutions to account on issues critical for the future of our country, including the fight against climate change. It is completely unacceptable to seek to limit the public’s access to news in this way.”
On Saturday morning, the Labour MP Dawn Butler tweeted “Bravo Extinction Rebellion”, but subsequently deleted it. The Labour party’s official line, which followed, read: “A free press is vital for our democracy. People have the right to read the newspapers they want. Stopping them from being distributed and printers from doing their jobs is wrong.”
Protesters used trucks and bamboo scaffolds to block roads outside the Newsprinters works at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and Knowsley, near Liverpool, on Friday night. The presses print the Sun, Times, Sun on Sunday and Sunday Times, as well as the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, and the London Evening Standard. Banners reading “Free The Truth” and “5 Crooks Control Our News” were hung on the site.
By Saturday morning, police said about 72 activists had been arrested. A blockade in Glasgow was cleared at around midnight with no arrests.
In a statement, Extinction Rebellion said the action was designed to disrupt and expose what it called a failure to adequately report on the climate emergency: “Our free press, society and democracy is under attack – from a failing government that lies to us consistently … Our leaders have allowed the majority of our media to be amassed in the hands of five people with powerful vested interests and deep connections to fossil fuel industries. We need a free press but we do not have it. They have failed us.”
The UK press and media has a track record on the climate change emergency that is highly questionable!
In the month following the Paris agreement (negotiated by representatives of 196 state parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, and adopted by consensus on 12 December 2015), Bob Ward reflected his views in an Opinion piece for the Guardian theme Climate science denial(Mon 25 Jan 2016), and the headline:
Bob Ward writes his Opinion piece under the subheading:
Editors
of the Mail, Express, Times, Sun and Telegraph should put the interests
of their readers first by reporting the real facts about global warming
Why are so many British newspaper editors still serving up unscientific climate change denial to their readers, even though the governments of more than 190 countries - including the UK - agreed in Paris last month that urgent action is required to avoid dangerous impacts from rising greenhouse gas levels?
While the overall coverage in the Guardian, Independent and Mirror titles tends to reflect the mainstream scientific, economic and political consensus about climate change, the Mail, Express, Times, Sun and Telegraph titles all continue to use their opinion columns and leaders to try to cast doubt on the risks. This was plainly shown by the contrasting reports last month of the link between climate change and this winter’s flooding.
However, not all of the naysayers are the same, with some science and environment correspondents valiantly battling to serve the best interests of their readers with fact-based reporting about climate change.
Sadly, it appears that some of these newspapers are now carrying out a cull of writers who choose not to reflect the uninformed prejudices of their editors and proprietors. Last summer, the environment editor of the Sun, Ben Jackson, left the newspaper and was not replaced.
This was the culmination of a slow slide in the newspaper’s coverage of climate change and other environmental problems since James Murdoch left its parent company, News International (now News UK), in the wake of the phone hacking scandal.
Murdoch junior, unlike his father, is acquainted with the scientific evidence for climate change, and had persuaded his stable of newspapers to recognise the importance to their readers of being better informed about environmental issues.
Since his departure, however, the editors of the Times and the Sun have fully embraced unscientific denial of climate change.
Soon after losing its environment specialist, the Sun published an article from “climate expert”, James Delingpole, a notorious rightwing polemicist whose lack of scientific knowledge was cruelly exposed on national television by the president of the Royal Society. And the Times has been providing Viscount Ridley, the former chair of Northern Rock bank, with a regular column to downplay the risks of climate change.
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph also decided last summer to make redundant Geoffrey Lean, one of the UK media’s most experienced voices on the environment. Lean wrote on his blog: “In the British press... there [are], in my estimation, some 10 columnists who reject or underplay the dangers of global warming, with precious few columnar voices on the other side”.
Fortunately, the Daily Telegraph still retains an environment correspondent, and at least occasionally publishes well-informed contributions to “balance” the babbling nonsense on climate change that appears in its columns by famous non-scientists such as Boris Johnson and Charles Moore.
But it is readers of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Express who suffer the most, with drivel appearing on both their news and comment pages. The Mail on Sunday has published a series of articles by David Rose, under the campaign banner of “The Great Green Con”, which attempt to undermine confidence in climate science in a very clumsy and unconvincing way, including stories that have been based on a fake magazine cover he found on the internet and a typographic error on a website.
Nevertheless, it is the Daily Express which has the worst track record, mixing ideological propaganda and inaccurate journalism.
For instance, on 20 January, the United States National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, Nasa and the UK Met Office all announced that they had independently found 2015 to be the warmest year globally since records began in the 19th century.
The online report by the Daily Express, under the headline “What Global Warming? USA temperatures DOWN as climatologists claim 2015 was hottest year,” reflected the talking points handed out by climate change sceptics.
Written by Jon Austin, who describes himself on Twitter as “Science & Paranormal Correspondent”, it stated: “Todays [sic] announcement that a major developed nation like the US did not experience its hottest year ever is likely to fuel the argument put forward by many US-based climate sceptics that human activities simply do not have the level of impact being claimed by the climate change lobby.”
This is bunkum. The contiguous United States, not including Alaska and Hawaii, covers less than 2% of the Earth’s surface and recorded its second highest annual average temperature in 2015, just behind 2012. The United States is warming, just like the rest of the world.
It should be noted that the Daily Express struggles with its coverage of weather as well as climate. On 10 January, the newspaper’s website reported the impending arrival of a few days of seasonal weather under the headline: “Arctic SNOWBOMB to smash into Britain: Coldest winter in 58 YEARS now just days away.”
In fact, the meteorological winter (December, January and February) of 1957-58 was not particularly cold, and 22 of the UK’s winters since then have recorded lower average temperatures.
Given that last month was the warmest December on record in the UK by a considerable margin, and that the first half of January was also mild, this prediction by the Daily Express appears to be little more than uninformed speculation.
When will editors of the Daily Express and other British newspapers abandon their daft crusade to promote climate change denial, and instead . . .
. . . put the best interests of their readers first by reporting the real causes and potential consequences?
More recently this article in the INDEPENDENT reports on the research that concludes with the finding:
Louise Boyle, reporting from New York for the Independent (Monday 27 July 2020), on the 2020 Digital News Report:
Opponents of battling the climate crisis have had twice the media coverage of those advocating to take action, according to a study published on Monday.
The new report looked at more than 1,700 climate-related press releases over a 30-year period, and news articles including the information which were published in the US's largest-circulation newspapers.
Researcher Rachel Wetts, an assistant professor at Brown University's sociology department, found that approximately 14 per cent of press releases in opposition of climate action, or denying the science behind the climate crisis, were more likely to grab headlines compared to roughly 7 per cent of those in support of climate action.
Professor Wetts’ findings suggest why Americans show less concern about the climate crisis than people in other countries, and why climate policy has often stalled.
The 2020 Digital News Report found that globally, seven in 10 people view the climate emergency as a serious problem. However in the US a significant portion (12%) dispute its severity, in part because they may be “sceptical of the science”, the report said.
The study involved categorising hundreds of press releases issued by businesses, advocacy organisations, scientific researchers, trade organisations and the public sector into those which supported or opposed climate action.
And the article concludes with this summation:
Professor Wetts said her findings appear to support the argument that mainstream news organisations often mislead readers by giving equal weight to two sides of an argument. Separate studies have found that print and TV news outlets have historically overrepresented the extent of disagreement on the scientific basis of climate change, and given a prominent platform to a small number of contrarian scientists.
“Journalists seem to feel that they always have to include opposing voices when they report on climate change,”Wetts said. “But sometimes they give those opposing voices so much weight, they lead readers to believe that climate denial is more than a fringe stance.”
The impact of news coverage that lends equal weight to those who oppose climate action goes beyond altering public perception. It could also lead political leaders to modify the actions they take in the fight against the climate crisis, the study found.
“The media is providing a distorted picture of how different groups feel on this issue,” she said. “That can dampen political will to act on climate change, with potentially serious consequences for how we as a society address — or fail to address — this issue.”
Looks like "the other voices" get twice the media coverage, just to make sure "it's business as usual"!
The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
When it comes to News Corp and the climate change denial machine functioning in the news media along the LODE Zone Line in Australia, we will encounter some of the usual suspects in the ongoing "culture wars".
Graham Readfearn reporting for the Guardian on Rupert Murdoch responding to a question at the News Corps AGM in New York about time given to ‘climate deniers’ by News Corp outlets in Australia. Graham Readfearn writes (Thu 21 Nov 2019):
News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch has said “there are no climate change deniers around I can assure you” after he was asked at the corporation’s AGM why his company gives them “so much airtime” in Australia.
Murdoch was speaking in New York on Wednesday when he received a question from a proxy for Australian activist shareholder Stephen Mayne.
Murdoch was asked about the company’s “stance on climate change”.
The questioner asked: “What do you believe is the global role of News Corp in the geopolitical climate? If you do believe in climate change, Mr Mayne is interested to hear why News Corp gives climate deniers like Andrew Bolt and Terry McCrann so much airtime in Australia?”
Murdoch responded with a promotion of his company’s corporate carbon reduction goals, saying “we have reduced our global carbon footprint by 25% six years ahead of schedule”.
Murdoch, 88, who was born in Australia, said News Corp was the first North American media company to commit to “science-based targets to limit climate change” and the company had cut its energy costs by US$18m ($26.5m) since 2014.
He also said his company was sourcing its print paper from certified sustainable sources.
Murdoch then added: “There are no climate change deniers around I can assure you.”
Bolt, a political commentator and blogger for News Corp Australia, is known for promoting the views of climate science deniers, and for his own attacks on “alarmists” and his derision of climate change science.
Bolt also has a nightly show on Sky News where he often interviews guests who reject that humans cause climate change.
Business writer McCrann is known for attacking the viability of renewable energy in his columns. In an interview on Sky News in early November, McCrann was responding to a question about a statement from 11,000 scientists warning of a climate emergency.
McCrann said: “I am sceptical of that word ‘scientist’. I think if you substitute ‘loon and hysteric’ then that is getting more accurately to the description of who these people are.”
A 2013 study of climate coverage in Australian newspapers found that one-third of coverage was sceptical and pointed to News Corp titles as the dominant factor.
At the time, News Corp said: “News Corp and its newspapers do accept the scientific consensus. There is no company edict on the line to take – editorial control rests with the editors.”
Murdoch himself has given conflicting messages over time on his view of the science and impacts of climate change.
In 2006, Murdoch appeared to shift his views away from scepticism, saying the planet “deserves the benefit of the doubt”.
Since then, his views appear to have reverted back. He told Sky News in 2014 that climate change should be treated with “much scepticism.”
In 2015, Murdoch tweeted from a flight over the North Atlantic where he spotted sea ice: “Global warming!”
Later that year, Murdoch tweeted that a United Nations climate meeting would spark “endless alarmist nonsense”, and said he was a “climate change sceptic not a denier”.
In October 2018, Bolt himself described Murdoch as a sceptic, claiming that many mainstream media outlets had stopped quoting Murdoch’s views on the issue since his 2006 statement.
Extinction Rebellion makes witness in its own reports to: FREE THE TRUTH
euronews. covers the Extinction Rebellion protest action events in a report by Marthe de Ferrer: 08/09/2020
EXTINCTION REBELLION RESPONDS TO ‘RIDICULOUS’ CRIMINALISATION THREAT Home Secretary Priti Patel has today written in British newspaper The Daily Mail that she is looking at introducing “primary legislation” to tackle XR’s environmental protests. The move could see the activist organisation reclassified as an organised crime group, meaning protestors who break the law could face up to five years in jail. Nick Aldworth, a former counter-terrorism national co-ordinator, said he found the potential legislative changes “spine-chilling”, adding that Priti Patel’s suggestions that she may reclassify organisations like XR as terrorist or organised crime groups “are actually subversions of the intentions of the law.” In Broxbourne, Hertfordshire XR rebels built two bamboo structures to create a blockade, while in Liverpool a yellow boat was anchored outside the printing works which produces some of the UK’s biggest newspapers. The rebellion against the media was global too, as international activists dumped a pile of manure outside Rupert Murdoch’sNewscorp offices in Sydney, Australia. “What we read in the papers is controlled by a handful of powerful billionaires who feed us stories that suit their interests,” read a statement from XR. “The Truth about the terrifying emergency we face has been locked up for too long by corrupt media moguls and dodgy politicians, who jostle for power and undermine our democracy.” One of the activists arrested was former tabloid journalist Steve Tooze, who joined the blockade outside Newscorp’s printworks in Hertfordshire. “I was a newspaper journalist for 25 years and I wrote for all of these newspapers – The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Times. I saw some really brilliant journalists on these newspapers,” says Tooze, “but unfortunately they’re stuck inside a toxic system where they don’t have any choice but to tell the story that these newspapers want to be told. “Every person who works on them knows what story is and isn’t acceptable for their bosses, and their bosses know what’s acceptable to Rupert Murdoch or to [Viscount Jonathan Harmsworth] Rothermere, or to any of the other five billionaires who run 70 per cent of our media.”
On his decision to leave the media, Tooze explains, “I left that system because I couldn’t bear the way it worked. I feel, as a former insider, that they hold a huge amount of the blame for the situation we’re in today - by not telling the public what’s really happening, they make them think that there isn’t an emergency.”
Tooze adds, “I fear that the way things are going now, my children haven’t got much of a future, and that’s why I got involved with Extinction Rebellion.”
Merseyside Police announced that: "The 30 people arrested for aggravated trespass have been taken to police stations across Merseyside where they will be interviewed by officers. "A boat and two vans, used by the protesters to cause obstruction to and from the premises of News International have been removed. The incident has now been stood down and the surrounding roads and entrances have been fully opened." Newsprinters prints products for outlets including The Times, The Daily Mail, The S*n and The Evening Standard. Its website describes the company as a "wholly owned subsidiary of News Corp UK and Ireland", which is part of Rupert Murdoch's business empire and runs newspapers including The S*n and The Times. After the protesters arrived at the site on Friday night, the group hung banners and refused to move throughout the night. In a statement sent to the ECHO, Extinction Rebellion said: "The plan is to maintain the blockade throughout the night, using vehicles and bamboo lock-ons, in order to prevent these papers reaching news stands on Saturday. "People are holding banners that say ‘Free the Truth’ and ‘They want us divided / Stand Together.’
"The groups are using disruption to expose the failure of these corporations to accurately report on the climate and ecological emergency, and their consistent manipulation of the truth to suit their own personal and political agendas."
Q. Or, the freedom to politicise the information environment with highly selected news stories?
Demonstrators have been told not to enter Merseyside after being arrested during an Extinction Rebellion protest that targeted a printing site in Knowsley.
Thirty arrests were made on Saturday morning as police dealt with a demonstration targeting Newsprinters, which prints newspapers including The S*n and The Times.
Merseyside Police has revealed 26 suspects have now been charged with aggravated trespass following the incident at the Rupert-Murdoch-owned site. All have been released from custody and their bail conditions include not to enter Merseyside. All but two of the suspects have addresses in the region. Extinction Rebellion protesters blockaded Newsprinters on Friday night. Arriving at around 10pm, they used a van and a boat to prevent vehicles from leaving the Knowsley Industrial Estate site.
The Guardian reports on the experience of the Extinction Rebellion activists demonized by the climate change denial machine and "the usual suspects".
Mattha Busby reporting for the Guardian (Mon 7 Sep 2020) under the subheading:
From blockading printers to meditating outside Barclays, the climate crisis campaign has drawn a variety of participants
Mattha Busbywrites:
Thousands of Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists and supporters have been staging “die-ins”, preventing copies of newspapers from being distributed and meditating outside banks over the past week in a series of actions aimed at highlighting the worsening ecological crisis.
At printing plants in Merseyside and in Hertfordshire on Friday evening, many trucks carrying newspapers were unable to deliver to shops. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, accused XR of seeking to limit the public’s access to news amid suggestions that the environmental group could subsequently be treated like an organised crime group by the authorities.
Amanda, 23, a barista from Liverpool, was among those stopping newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch from leaving Newsprinters’ Knowsley plant, and said she was motivated by frustration about how some of the media have reported on the environment.
“I’m increasingly realising some newspapers don’t report on the climate crisis accurately,” she said. “With some of the billionaire owners climate change sceptics, how can you expect what they write to really represent what is happening?”
For Amanda, who did not wish to give her surname, the action highlighted the importance of “freeing the truth” and showed how people can take direct action to significant effect.
“I joined XR about 18 months ago out of despair and helplessness in the face of the terrifying prospect of runaway climate change. I realised anything I was going to do in my personal life wasn’t going to cut it, the system is the greatest problem.”
Activist John Lynes from Extinction Rebellion at a protest in Parliament Square, London, on 1 September.
Hundreds of XR supporters have been arrested over the last seven days – believed to be significantly fewer than in previous “rebellions” – the oldest of whom was 92-year-old retired engineer John Lynes, from Hastings.
“I don’t enjoy being a nuisance,” he said following his second arrest after protesting with XR and refusing to cooperate with the police on Parliament Square in London. “But we’ve tried everything else, there’s no sense of urgency; they’re talking about 2050, but by then it will be a bit late to do anything.”
He said it was crucial to keep pressure on the government ahead of the UN climate change conference next year, which the UK is chairing. “It’s my generation that has caused all this and we have a responsibility which I can’t duck,”Lynes said.
“The government response to climate heating is pathetic, that’s why we’re protesting. They’re doing so little and nothing in proportion to what’s needed.”
XR Youth activist Poppy Silk outside the office of her MP, Robert Courts, in Witney, Oxfordshire.
In Cardiff, 19-year-old Poppy Silk and her XR Youth comrades have been protesting to urge MPs to support the passage of the climate and ecological emergency bill, introduced to parliament by the Green party MP Caroline Lucas on Wednesday to reflect the urgency of the escalating climate emergency.
If passed into law, it would help ensure the UK has a comprehensive strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, amid frustration over inaction.
“We see how the government has dragged its feet and reacted slowly to the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s the same with the climate,” said Silk, who also protested outside her local MP’s office in Witney, Oxfordshire, this week.
“Neither of my MPs from home or where I study have backed the bill yet. Climate heating is the biggest threat to humanity and we need to act now. We’d far rather be having fun than putting our civil liberties at risk.”
An XR Buddhists demonstration outside a Barclays bank in central London last week.
Back in London, Barclays bank – which lends money to fossil fuel companies – was the object of activists’ ire. Katja Behrendt, 35, a non-clinical NHS doctor, was part of an XR Buddhists demonstration outside one of its branches by Tottenham Court Road.
“Often we meditate as part of our protests,” she said. “It takes some getting used to but I’ve found these are the moments I feel really connected to my values.
“I find in activism sometimes it can be a bit ‘us and them’ and that people burn out so I was really happy to find other Buddhists interested within XR because it’s about how do we participate and protest and not further division.”
Chidi Oti-Obihara speaking at a protest in the City of London last week.
However, Chidi Oti-Obihara, a former banker and 2017 Green party parliamentary candidate in East Ham, who protested outside Downing Street and in the City of London last week – making a speech calling for ecocide to be made a crime – said promises had been made by the government and others that were not being fulfilled.
“It’s incredibly important to keep the issue of climate change firmly on the agenda because so much has been done to deal with one emergency without contextualising it properly in terms of another emergency,” he said, contrasting the government’s dual responses to the pandemic and the climate emergency.
“The government has dropped everything, ignored due process and thrown everything at Covid-19 without considering the longer-term environmental impact of such bailouts.”
. . . but this government is crushing all opposition.
Polly Toynbee, columnist for the Guardian, writes in her Opinion piece (Mon 7 Sep 2020):
British democracy used to feel rock steady, unassailable: one could argue about the constitution, the voting system, the Lords, the monarchy, but about not the fundamental tenets.
We’ve been taught how democracy settles disputes, enables power to change hands without bloodshed, and lets citizens of wildly opposing beliefs consent to be governed, policed and taxed.
But the wreckers running this government have lost any instinct for democratic values. If electoral victory entitles them to absolute power, all opposition becomes illegitimate.
So Extinction Rebellion activists face being treated as “saboteurs of democracy” – as organised criminals and terrorists – as the prime minister calls for new laws to protect the freedom of the press. But for one day only these climate breakdown campaigners shone a searchlight on the UK’s dysfunctional press – 80% owned by Rupert Murdoch and a few rightwing press barons, largely arguing against climate-saving policies and with a relentless anti-tax, anti-welfare, small-state agenda.
The Institute for Government (politically neutral) published a highly critical report on Monday, warning that the government was “well off-track” to meet its target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and “lacking policies, with constant changes of direction, and failing to gain public consent”.
That calls for protest. Direct action risking arrest was always part of democracy. Protest – occasionally victorious, such as for the suffragettes – inhabits Britain’s history, whether it’s Peterloo, the miners, the Greenham women, the Iraq war march, anti-fracking or anti-HS2. That democratic tradition is now imperilled by threats of five-year prison terms and £10,000 fines.
In trying to exterminate opposing views, this government has lost any sense of balance or argument, as if planning to rule for ever.
The prime minister’s power-crazed chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, opens his mission-control centre, with data-tracking screens, staffed by “weirdos and misfits”. But his only mission is to destroy whatever holds the country together. Expect, we are told, a “big bang” for the British state.
The civil service is terrorised by five permanent secretaries being sacked or stepping down in six months, including the cabinet secretary: Cummings plans replacements with private-sector outsiders. Anyone not 110% with them is a foe: they will hear no other advice. Scapegoats are made of Public Health England (abolished) and Ofqual (decapitated). Judges are next, with curbs on their judicial reviews of government malfunctions.
Despised local government will see two-thirds of 218 district and county councils abolished, replaced by hundreds of mayors – gerrymandered, the Sunday Times suggests, to demolish what a government source called Labour “strangleholds” (not “heartlands”, note that language). Will Tory councillors who failed to rebel against a decade of depredations finally revolt at their own demise?
No one will stop any gerrymandering once the Electoral Commission is abolished. David Cameron made it harder for poor people, renters and young people to register for elections, in Donald Trump-style voter-suppression. No one will monitor political donations: the Mail on Sunday reports that City donors are threatening to “turn off the funding taps” to intimidate the chancellor into not raising inheritance, capital gains or corporation taxes. But they’ll pony up at election time.
No authority stops Boris Johnson giving multimillion-pound contracts to cronies and allies, or to PwC and Deloitte, without tendering. No protests stopped him putting the misogynist Tony Abbott on the board of trade, or stacking NHS and other posts with Tory politicians.
Shudder to think who they will impose as BBC chair. New director general Tim Davie’s opening speech took defensive action against the recent volley of assaults, restoring Rule, Britannia!. The Times splashed, “BBC should be cut down to size, says new chief”, but that wasn’t quite what he had said. The great majority of people who support the BBC wait to see if Davie is an appeaser who folds too easily or a strong pilot to navigate the national broadcaster through the oncoming storm.
The BBC is for ever the crucible. With a government that no longer accepts the norms of accountability, any factual report that reflects badly on it is “biased”. The country needs the BBC’s vigilant scrutiny to police the truth/ falsehood boundary, as a last bastion for a democracy that balances opposing ideas.
Wrecking took on new dimensions with the news on Monday that the government was trashing its own EU withdrawal treaty – negotiated and signed only months ago by Johnson himself. The SNP warned of a “disastrous Brexit outcome”. “Rogue-state behaviour”, said Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts. Anyone who gave a thought towards the union of the four nations would have urged a moderate, compromise Brexit to respect pro-EU majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Instead a crash-out or a thin deal will encourage these nations to depart.
Insults are the cut and thrust of democracy; Nye Bevan’s labelling of Conservatives as “lower than vermin” is printed on T-shirts. Hartley Shawcross once quipped, “We are the masters now”, but his frequent public differences with Labour earned him his Sir Shortly Floorcross nickname. Once Harold Wilson dared call Labour “the natural party of government”. If only. But neither Labour, nor even Thatcher’s Tories, had this megalomaniacal intent to delegitimise any opposing views.
The only hope – a dismal one – is that this government’s incompetence in everything means that all its “moonshots” fall to Earth as soon as they have left the gantry. Look at how last week ministers beckoned everyone back to offices, Prets and public transport – at the precisely predicted moment when Covid-19 was expected to shoot up again. All they touch turns to dross – yet we are condemned to that dross for four more years.
Priti Patel - A reminder . . .
The home secretary, Priti Patel, who has claimed Extinction Rebellion activists are “so-called eco-crusaders turned criminals”,and who, she claims,"threaten key planks of national life", and described XR as an “emerging threat” in a speech to the annual conference of the Police Superintendents’ Association on Tuesday, had a career before politics, that deserves some scrutiny.
Patel worked at public relations firm Weber Shandwick from 2000 to 2003. In her role as Policy, Media and Campaigns Adviser, she worked, among others, with Meat & Livestock Commission, IKEA, The Bar Council, and British American Tobacco (BAT).
Relationship with the Tobacco Industry
Working on the BAT Account at Weber Shandwick
Numerous internal tobacco company documents reveal Patel’s involvement with BAT, whilst employed at Weber Shandwick:
In August and September 2000, Patel attended BAT’s ‘Operational Planning Meetings’.
In October 2000, she provided summaries of media articles on BAT’s involvement in tobacco smuggling.
A memo from Shandwick to BAT in October 2000 set out roles on “Project Sunrise” and said that Patel was responsible for “day to day account co-ordination, project management” and “assists on media relations”. Two documents name Patel as “day to day” Account Co-ordinator, project management, assists on media relation 12 and responsible for “UK media”, as part of Project Sunrise. The documents are unclear what this project was, but Philip Morris ran a project with the same name which “laid out an explicit divide-and-conquer strategy against the tobacco control movement”.
In November 2000, Patel was part of a group sent a strategy about how BAT could influence the outcome of the World Health Organization’s negotiations on developing the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
In the same month, she was part of a group sent a letter lobbying MEPs on the proposed EU’s Tobacco Control Directive. The documents suggest Patel was a integral to BAT’s lobbying on the Directive. The document stated “Our campaign on the proposed EU tobacco control directive is reaching a critical stage”, and then added:
“With the vote in the European Parliament anticipated for the week commencing 11 December, and political groups meeting on 5 and 6 December to decide their positions, the EU Directive Task Force has decided to target ALL MEPs with a personal letter from Martin Broughton on Monday 4 December. The letter will be faxed to each of them, in English. As a matter of effectiveness and courtesy, we have also decided to attach to the letter a translation in the native language of each of the recipients … As the letter will go out on Monday, I would be very grateful if you could send your translated documents via lotus notes to Priti Patel by no later than opening of business Monday morning, 4 December – earlier if possible. (Priti will be handling the logistics of getting the letters faxed to each of the MEPs)”
A letter from Weber Shandwick to BAT in January 2001 outlined Patel’s role, including interacting with the Conservative Party: “Priti will be responsible for day-to-day activity on the account, including drafting advice notes and assisting you in preparing briefings, mailshots or the like. She will also provide strategic advice on the account, with a particular focus on the Conservative Party.” The document added that Patel would work for “15 hours in total” each month for BAT, “including principal responsibility for execution on day-to-day account activity, drafting documents, and attendance at monthly client meetings”.
A memo from March 2001 shows Patel“working with BAT External Communications Team” and also responsible for “social reporting” and a “global events calendar”.
Seconded to BAT’s Press Office
Four documents suggest that Patel may have been seconded to BAT’s press office in 2000:
On 30 October 2000, the Department for Trade and Industry announced an investigation into BAT’s involvement in tobacco smuggling. Patel’s name appeared in a BAT media release about the investigation as a contact at the company’s press office.
On 6 December 2000, Patel's name appeared again as a media contact on a BAT press release about the Government’s Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Bill.
On 20 December 2000, a fax to Patel suggests that she was working for BAT in the company’s London headquarters, Globe House.
On 13 March 2001, Colin Byrne from Weber Shandwick wrote: “Priti is now working with the communications team as an integral part of the team … working on developing communications ideas for projects such as the Marketing Standards and the Nigerian announcement and also sharing information/insights with the team on overall issues that come up while also dealing with press office requests when based in the press office.”
Opposed Tobacco Control Measures in the UK
Since she was elected MP, Patel has publicly supported tobacco industry positions in Parliament on various occasions.
Against Smokefree Legislation
In October 2010, Patel voted for the smoking ban to be overturned.
Against Point of Sales Display Ban
In December 2010, Patel signed a letter demanding the government reconsiders the tobacco display ban.
Against Plain Packaging
Patel is on record calling plain packaging a “completely mad” policy which is “a blunt instrument which will have a disproportionate impact on independent retailers.” She argues that “plain packaging will serve to harm the very businesses that are best-placed to prevent underage sales and fight back against illegal and illicit supplies.”Patel also believes that “new plain packaging rules that go further than this would only serve to be another nail in the coffin for many newsagents.”
After the Chantler review into plain packaging was published, Patel wrote to the chair of the Petrol Retailers Association (PRA), appealing for its members to lobby their MPs to object to the proposals. Patel wrote that she was concerned about the implications of plain packs for small shops, tax revenues and smuggling.
The Free Enterprise Group
Patel is a member of the Free Enterprise Group, a group of Conservative MPs, who, among other things, encourage a competitive and free economic environment.
On its website the Group reveals that “Administrative support for the group is supplied by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)”. The IEA receives financial support from the tobacco industry.
In the week following the announcement that the UK Government would reconsider plain packaging in November 2013, the Free Enterprise Group published a report, ‘The Business of Small Enterprise’. In the report the Group recommends that the Government “drop proposals for plain packaging”.
Q. Is it the case that Priti Patel's career is based on supporting a capitalist industry "par excellence", based on lies and greed?
On 8 November 2019 the World Health Organisation published:
Thousands of internal tobacco industry documents released through litigation and whistleblowers reveal the most astonishing systematic corporate deceit of all time. What follows is a survey of the documents, 1,200 relevant and revealing quotes grouped under common themes.
Chapter 1 Smoking and health Publicly the industry denied and continues to deny that it is clear that smoking causes lung cancer - yet it has understood the carcinogenic nature of its product since the 1950s. It is now clear that the industry’s stance on smoking and health is determined by lawyers and public relations concerns.
Chapter 2 Nicotine and addiction Until recently the industry has denied its product is addictive. Most recently it has used a definition of addictiveness so broad that it encompasses shopping and the Internet. Internally, it has known since the 1960s that the crucial selling point of its product is the chemical dependence of its customers. Without nicotine addiction there would be no tobacco industry. Nicotine addiction destroys the industry’s PR and legal stance that smoking is a matter of choice.
Chapter 3 Marketing to children
The companies deny that they target the young. The documents reveal the obvious - that the market of young smokers is of central importance to the industry. Many documents reveal the companies’ pre-occupation with teenagers and younger children - and the lengths they have gone to in order to influence smoking behaviour in this age group.
Chapter 4 Advertising The industry maintains that advertising is used only to fight for brand share and that it does not increase total consumption - academic research shows otherwise. The documents show that advertising is crucial in nurturing the motivation to smoke by creating or projecting the positive values, such as independence, machismo, glamour or intelligence, erroneously associated with the product.
Chapter 5 Cigarette design The documents show that the companies initially hoped to make safer cigarettes, but then abandoned the enterprise when it recognised that this would expose their existing products as ‘unsafe’. The industry has deliberately promoted ‘low-tar’ cigarettes knowing that they would offer false reassurance without health benefits. It has manipulated nicotine and introduced additives to change the delivery of nicotine. It recognises the cigarette as a drug delivery device.
Chapter 6 Second-hand smoke
The industry is challenged by second-hand smoke in two ways. First, measures to protect non-smokers will reduce the opportunities to smoke and contribute to its social unacceptability. Second, the ‘freedom to smoke’ arguments are confounded if non-smokers are harmed. The industry has refused to accept the now overwhelming consensus regarding the harm caused by second-hand smoke - instead it has denied and obfuscated, and sought to influence debate by buying up scientists on a spectacular scale.
Chapter 7 “Emerging markets”
Faced with reducing levels of smoking in the West and an insatiable need for money, the companies have moved aggressively into developing countries and Eastern Europe. The documents reveal an arrogance and fanaticism that has imperialist echoes.
Compared to the harm inflicted on people by the tobacco industry, upon people's lives and livelihoods, as well as the economic costs to society of the consequences on healthcare, XR is NOT as Priti Patel claims;
“a shameful attack on our way of life, our economy and the livelihoods of the hard-working majority”.
XR represents a moral imperative, and through legitimate direct action to make politicians accountable for their failure to address an impending climate catastrophe.
Given Priti Patel's track record on voting in parliament to advance the interests of the tobacco industry it is not expected that she will support the recently tabled UK Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. However, future debate and voting on this proposed legislation will sort the sheep from the goats, as it were, when it comes to the accountability of members of parliament.
Jefim Vogel, PhD Researcher in Ecological Economics, University of Leeds, and receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust through the 'Living Well Within Limits' project. He contributed to early drafts and discussions around the bill presented in this article on a voluntary, pro-bono basis. Vogel is a volunteer for Our Future Leeds. He contributes this well informed insider view of the importance of the CEE Bill to theCONVERSATION, September 7, 2020. He writes:
While there is debate about whether or not a second wave of the COVID-19 crisis is rolling in, the far bigger waves of the climate and ecological crisis are looming large on the horizon. For too long, governments have largely ignored the scientific evidence and now time is running out to avert catastrophic damage.
But civil society is rising up. Scientists are sounding the alarm. Environmental protests are seeing an unprecedented surge, from school strikers to Indigenous peoples.
And while the UK government is still doing too little too late, an alliance of campaigners, legal experts, leading scientists, MPs and academics has stepped up to propose a new bill that is designed to tackle these crises – and tackle them in a safe, fair and democratic way.
The “Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill” would significantly expand the remit and scope of the Climate Change Act 2008, assigning new duties to government, parliament and the advisory Committee on Climate Change to enact a strategy that meets more ambitious targets for both climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as stronger criteria of justice, responsibility and safety.
A new citizens’ assembly would put people at the heart of that strategy through a process of deliberative democracy informed by expert advice. The bill, recently tabled in parliament as a private member’s bill by a coalition of MPs from six political parties, now needs to gain the support of a majority of MPs to be passed into law.
Since last week, thousands of people have been on the streets across the UK to protest government inaction and campaign for the bill. As a contributor to the discussions and early drafts that led to this bill, let me explain why we need it, and why it would be a huge leap forward.
Ten reasons for the bill
1) It addresses two emergencies we cannot ignore. While the climate emergency has received at least some attention, the ecological emergency has been almost entirely ignored. Ignoring a planetary emergency is a very bad idea, especially one that is wiping out the ecosystems we depend on for our very survival.
2) It is equal to the challenge. The government’s current climate strategy allows the UK to release more than double its fair share of emissions. That means either aggravating the crises, or hoping for other countries to carry the burden. The bill would stipulate that the UK does its fair share.
3) It relies only on reliable measures. The government’s current climate strategy relies heavily on speculative and unproven technologies with large impacts on food production and water availability, and likely other yet unknown side-effects. The bill would make sure that the UK meets its climate targets based only on safe and reliable measures.
4) It takes full responsibility. Currently, the government takes responsibility for only half of the UK’s actual carbon footprint, ignoring the vast emissions generated abroad to produce goods and services that are imported and consumed in the UK. The bill would make sure the UK takes responsibility for its true carbon footprint, and reduce the climate and ecological impact generated by supply chains.
5) It puts real democracy at its heart. Everyone should have a voice in deciding how we tackle these crises. The bill would establish a citizens’ assembly, a randomly selected group of people that would reflect the diversity of the whole population. Drawing on expert advice, this assembly would recommend measures for tackling the crisis, before they go to parliament for scrutiny.
6) It protects vulnerable communities. Deprived and marginalised communities are particularly vulnerable not only to the impacts of the climate and ecological crisis, but also to the impacts of poorly designed “solutions” such as the rise in fuel taxes that sparked the Gilets Jaunes protests in France in 2018. The bill would rule out policy solutions that disproportionately impact vulnerable people.
7) It facilitates a just transition. Some sectors with high emissions or high ecological impact cannot be sustained in their present form. The bill would ensure a just transition for workers in impacted sectors by providing financial support and retraining.
8) It can help achieve climate justice. Injustice is at the heart of the climate crisis, and justice has to be at the heart of the solutions. Doing at least our fair share (2), accounting for our imports (4), cleaning up our supply chains (4), making everyone’s voices heard (5), and protecting vulnerable communities (6) and impacted workers (7) are all key to climate justice. So is making up for the UK’s disproportionately large historical emissions, and providing financial and technological support for less affluent countries. The bill covers all of them.
9) It is serious and based on expert advice. The bill is a serious tool that works within the given structures of government and the constitution to deliver what is necessary and fair, based on advice from leading experts on climate, sustainability, ecology, law and democracy.
10) It could supercharge international climate collaboration. The bill would make the UK the first affluent country to fully embrace the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” adopted in the Paris Agreement. While this might be a long shot, the bill could thus potentially initiate a new international climate regime that would be much fairer, in particular to less affluent countries but also to large exporting countries like China (by reassigning responsibility for emissions). With the UK set to co-host the next round of international climate negotiations (COP 26), this would certainly be the right moment for real UK leadership.
Imagine it is autumn 2019, and a bill has just been tabled that would decisively mitigate the looming COVID-19 crisis. Such a bill could have saved more than 40,000 lives just in the UK. The Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill is a real chance to save even more lives and livelihoods that are threatened by the looming climate and ecological disaster. It is not yet too late.
The Institute for Government says:
"Stronger leadership and co-ordination from the prime minister is needed
if the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050 is to be credible."
Authors:Tom Sasse, Jill Rutter, Marcus Shepheard, Emma Norris.
The Institute for Government introduces the report with this warning:
This report warns that over a year on from adopting the target – a decision made by Theresa May but which Boris Johnson has endorsed since becoming prime minister –
the UK has not yet confronted the scale of the task.
Meeting the commitment is a more difficult challenge than responding to the coronavirus crisis or getting Brexit done, and will require transformations in every sector of the UK economy, sustained investment over three decades and substantial changes to everyone’s lives.
The report says a lack of co-ordinated policies, constant changes of direction, a failure to gain public consent for measures and too little engineering expertise and delivery capability has left the UK well off track to meet its target. The absence of a comprehensive plan for achieving net zero has deterred private sector investment and left people unsure of how to act.
It calls on government to publish a clear plan setting out, sector by sector, how emissions reductions will be achieved and when decisions will be made where technology is uncertain. The Cabinet Office should be made responsible for co-ordinating the plan and holding departments to account for delivery.
Polling suggests two-thirds of people have not heard of net zero, despite the fact that it will mean changing the way they heat their homes, the cars they drive and what they eat. The government should build on parliament’s climate assembly initiative and level with the public on the changes net zero will require.
The government needs to work out how to pay for the shift to a carbon neutral economy – estimated at 1–2% of GDP per year – and how to ensure costs are distributed fairly. It should also renew its focus on preparing for the impacts of a changing climate, such as increased flooding and heatwaves.
If the UK fails to show that it is serious about its climate change targets, it risks wasting a golden opportunity to demonstrate leadership in the fight against climate change when it hosts next year’s rescheduled COP26 summit.
The report recommends that the government should:
Take responsibility for net zero out of BEIS, which lacks the clout to develop and implement the necessary plan, and create a new net zero unit in the Cabinet Office with a senior Cabinet Office minister given responsibility for net zero
Ensure that the Treasury makes net zero a big theme of the spending review and produces a tax strategy to support net zero
Build on parliament’s climate assembly initiative to maintain public support for action
Create a climate change cadre, with science and engineering expertise at its core, within the civil service
Build on the successful model of the Olympic Delivery Authority to ensure big changes like housing retrofit and the switch to electric vehicles happen smoothly
Support the creation of a dedicated parliamentary net zero committee to hold the government to account on progress in reducing emissions
The hypertext link is followed by a question that features on the photo illustration of a T shirt:
Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?
A narrative work said to begin in medias res (Classical Latin: lit. "into the middle of things") opens in the midst of action, as does everything created in LODE, Re:LODE and the Re:LODE Radio project.
As the Roman lyric poet and satirist Horace (65–8 BC) says, when first using the terms ab ōvō ("from the egg") and in mediās rēs("into the middle of things") in his Ars poetica ("Poetic Arts", c. 13 BC), where in lines 147–149 he describes the method of his kind of ideal epic poet, and yes, it is Homer:
Nor does he begin the Trojan War from the egg,*
but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things . . .
Horace. Ars poetica (in Latin). nec gemino bellum Troianum orditur ab ovo; / semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res / [...] auditorem rapit
* The "egg" reference is to the mythological origin of the Trojan War in the birth of Helen and Clytemnestra from the double egg laid by Leda following her seduction by Zeus in the guise of a swan.
The question on the T shirt is from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, and is a question asked by the door knocker in the shape of an eagle onthe entrance to the Ravenclaw common room, a wooden door with no handle. When the knocker is used, the eagle, in a musical voice, asks a question; if a reasonable answer is provided, the door will open.
‘Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?' Hmm . .' 'What do you think, Harry?' said Luna, looking thoughtful.' 'What? Isn’t there just a password?' 'Oh no, you’ve got to answer a question,' said Luna. 'What if you get it wrong?' 'Well, you have to wait for somebody who gets it right,' said Luna. 'That way you learn, you see?' 'Yeah . . . Trouble is, we can’t really afford to wait for anyone else, Luna.' 'No, I see what you mean,' said Luna seriously.' 'Well then, I think the answer is that a circle has no beginning.' 'Well reasoned,' said the voice, and the door swung open.' J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
The LODE Line works because it is a circle and therefore has no beginning.
So, LODE opens into the middle of things, as it were, and so any place on the LODE Line is a place in equal relation to all other places along the line, and any moment of making a connection to a place along the LODE Line is equal to all other moments that have occurred in that place.
What is happening at any given location along the LODE Line is happening, or has happened, in relation to all the other things happening or have happened along the the LODE Line, so there is no need to impose a strict sequence to ordering these moments. It is the spatial relationships and the patterns that seem to come through the mosaic of moments of time associated with locations, that form the psycho-geographic matrix of the LODE Cargo.
It seems a non linear structure works in revealing complex connections in a way that a linear structure cannot, hence the concept of the 'field' when considering how knowledge about things happening is mostly about realising that:
what we know now will not be the same as when we know more!
Presenting knowledge of the world may be ordered, but sometimes, as Jean-Luc Godard once said:
I agree that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order"!
As regards the matters addressed in this Re:LODE Radio post the usual suspects include:
Populist and nationalistic politicians
Autocratic leaders riding roughshod over the will of the people
Capitalist owned rightwing media and their well paid commentariat
Politicians with authoritarian tendencies, in positions of power, always seek to clamp down on legitimate protest
Politicians unable, or unwilling, to face the facts of social injustice, inequality and climate change
Incompetent and corrupt leadership serving the vested interests of private wealth and capital
So this post comes to . . .
. . . an ending with a beginning!
The video mash-up as used here includes a clip of the finale of Casablanca, 1942 American romantic drama film directed by Michael Curtiz, and merges into a scene from The Usual Suspects, a 1995 neo-noir mystery thriller film directed by Bryan Singer and written by Christopher McQuarrie. The film began as a title taken from a column in Spy magazine called The Usual Suspects, after one of Claude Rains' most memorable lines in Casablanca, and Singer thought that it would make a good title for a film.
The line is delivered by Rains' when the German Major Strasser, having been tipped off by Rains' character Renault, drives up alone and then is shot and killed by Rick when Strasser tries to intervene in the departure of the Lisbon plane and the escape of Laszlo and Ilsa from Casablanca. As the police arrive, Renault pauses, in what turns out to be the last in a dazzling sequence of plot twists, and then orders them to "round up the usual suspects".
Casablanca is a cult movie because it contains all the archetypes, because every actor reproduces a part played on other occasions, and because human beings do not live a “real” life but a life portrayed stereotypically in previous films. Peter Lorre drags behind him memories of Fritz Lang; Conrad Veidt envelops his German officer with a subtle whiff of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Casablanca pushes the feeling of déjà vu to such a point that the viewer even adds elements to the film that only appear in later films. It wasn’t until To Have and Have Not that Bogart took on the role of the Hemingway hero, but here he “already” reveals Hemingwayesque connotations for the simple fact that Rick has fought in Spain.
Casablanca stages the powers of narrativity in the natural state, without art stepping in to tame them. And so we can accept that characters have changes of mood, morality, and psychology from one moment to the next, that conspirators cough to break off their talk when a spy approaches, and that ladies of the night weep on hearing “La Marseillaise.”
When all the archetypes shamelessly burst in, we plumb Homeric depths. Two clichés are laughable. A hundred clichés are affecting—because we become obscurely aware that the clichés are talking to one another and holding a get-together. As the height of suffering meets sensuality, and the height of depravity verges on mystical energy, the height of banality lets us glimpse a hint of the sublime.
Re:LODE Radio chooses to end the post with the opening scene of A Night in Casablanca,the 1946 film starring the Marx Brothers: Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, a parody of Casablanca, and freely picking up some of the themes again, in a context of the post World War II German Nazis defeat, and the ongoing escape of war criminals to South America. A popular story (spread in part by Groucho himself) surrounding the movie is that the Marx Brothers were threatened with a lawsuit by Warner Bros. for the use of the word "Casablanca" in the title, it being an infringement on the company's rights to the 1942 film Casablanca.
Groucho responded with a letter asserting that he and his siblings had use of the word "brothers" prior to the establishment of Warner Brothers (and many others had before that), and often the story is told that Groucho threatened a counter-suit based on this assertion. He also mentioned that he would consider further legal action by pointing out to Warners that the title of their current hit film Night and Day infringed on the titles of two Marx Brothers films: A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.
The true story is that the original storyline for the film was intended to be a direct parody of Casablanca, with the characters having similar-sounding names to the characters and actors in the 1942 film. Groucho Marx has said that an early draft named his character "Humphrey Bogus", a reference to the leading actor in Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart. Warner Bros. did not actually litigate, or even threaten to litigate, but it did issue a formal inquiry to the Marx Brothers concerning the plot and script of the film.
The Marx Brothers exploited the situation for publicity, making it appear to the public that a frivolous lawsuit was in the works, and Groucho sent several open letters to Warner Bros. to get newspaper coverage. These letters were among those he donated to the Library of Congress, and he reprinted them in his book The Groucho Letters, which he published in 1967.
In the end, the matter died without legal action, and the storyline of the film was changed to be a send-up of the genre rather than Casablanca specifically. Warner Bros. now owns the distribution rights to this film via Castle Hill Productions.
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