The LODE Line Zone passes through Liverpool and is connected by the LODE and Re:LODE project to people and places along this pathway
LODE 1992 Re:LODE 2017
LODE Legacy
This map shows how on 1st October 2020 increased transmission rates of Covid-19 are distributed in concentrations of cases in parts of the Midlands, across the North West of England, North East England, South Wales and North Wales, parts of the central belt axis between Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, and across Northern Ireland too. The current hot spots correspond to communities experiencing economic and social deprivation as well as the pandemic.
Liverpool and Knowsley recorded the highest infection rates in England. Cases are averaging more than 200 per 100,000 people across Merseyside – four times the England average.
Josh Halliday, North of England correspondent for the Guardian reports in the print edition of the Guardian, Thursday 1 October 2020, that:
Josh Halliday writes (Wed 30 Sep 2020):
The Merseyside economy may collapse and leave a legacy of poverty “for generations to come” without urgent financial support tied to new coronavirus restrictions, according to the region’s political leaders.Steve Rotheram, the metro mayor of the Liverpool city region, and six civic leaders, said Merseyside’s public finances were “at breaking point” and needed a “comprehensive package of financial support” from the Treasury when new lockdown measures are imposed.Additional restrictions are expected to be announced for Merseyside in the next 24 hours after Liverpool and Knowsley recorded the highest infection rates in England. Cases are averaging more than 200 per 100,000 people across Merseyside – four times the England average.Council leaders held a meeting with Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, on Monday when a ban on households mixing was discussed.Measures that restrict social gatherings in pubs, bars, and restaurants – such as those introduced in part of north-east England – would have a particularly significant impact on the Merseyside economy given its reliance on hospitality and tourism. The industries account for half of the business rates that fund public services in Liverpool.In a joint statement, the political leaders said their local authorities had already incurred losses of more than £350m since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Senior figures believe more than 20,000 jobs could be lost in the hospitality industry by Christmas without urgent support.They said: “We are already at breaking point. With new restrictions – and who knows for how long they might be needed – our economy and public services may collapse. If we do not act now, we will see a legacy of unemployment and ill-health that will cost lives for generations to come. So, today, we are calling on the government to work with us.“If government decide that new restrictions are required, they must also provide a comprehensive package of financial support for our economy and our public services.”The joint statement was signed by Rotheram, the Liverpool mayor, Joe Anderson, the leader of Knowsley council, Graham Morgan, the leader of Sefton council, Ian Maher, the leader of St Helens council, David Baines, and the leader of Wirral council, Janette Williamson.The leaders also called for an “immediate uplift” in testing capacity to match its rising cases. There has been concern that local authorities are losing control of the virus owing to a shortage of tests. Many council leaders believe the daily case data no longer provides an accurate representation of how widespread the disease is.
Josh Halliday follows up on this story with a report (The 1 Oct 2020) on further developments on the health, social and economic impact of the pandemic in Liverpool, Warrington and Teeside, and how the:
Middlesbrough mayor vows to defy government over new Covid restrictions
Josh Halliday writes under the subheading:
Threat made as Matt Hancock announces latest lockdowns in Merseyside, Warrington and Teesside
More than 2 million people in Merseyside, Warrington and Teesside will be banned by law from mixing with other households indoors in the latest extension of lockdown restrictions, as Middlesbrough’s mayor took the extraordinary step of saying he was prepared to defy the government.The measures were announced as coronavirus cases continued to rise sharply in the north-west and north-east of England.The new rules mean it will be illegal from Saturday for nearly 5 million people in those regions to meet others they do not live with in all indoor settings, including pubs, bars and restaurants. Similar rules came into force elsewhere in the north-east earlier this week.The health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: “I understand how much of an imposition this is. I want rules like this to stay in place for as short a time as possible, I’m sure we all do.“The study published today shows us hope that together we can crack this, and the more people follow the rules and reduce their social contact, the quicker we can get Liverpool and the north-east back on their feet.”Hancock said a £7m support package would be made available to each of the affected councils. There was an immediate backlash from local leaders, who called the financial help “a drop in the ocean”. Middlesbrough’s mayor took the extraordinary step of saying he rejected the new measures and was prepared to defy the government.Andy Preston, the independent mayor of Middlesbrough council, said his authority and Hartlepool council had asked for a ban on households mixing in their own homes, but that the government’s measures went much further. They were based on “factual inaccuracies and a monstrous and frightening lack of communication, and ignorance”, he said. “As things stand, we defy the government and we do not accept these measures.”He later said he would not condone anyone disobeying the new law, the BBC reported.Mike Hill, the Labour MP for Hartlepool, said he was “totally angered” by the government’s “absolutely disgraceful one-size-fits-all approach”.The restrictions also caution against all but essential travel on public transport and attendance at amateur or professional sports events. Visits to care homes should only take place in exceptional circumstances.Merseyside’s 14 Labour MPs, six council leaders and the mayor of the Liverpool city region, Steve Rotheram, said they welcomed the action being taken, but questioned whether it was enough to contain the virus.They said they were seeking urgent talks with the government to understand the scientific evidence behind the restrictions and to plead for a significant cash injection to prevent economic disaster.Liverpool council estimates that its budget deficit is £45.6m in a best-case scenario because of coronavirus, rising to £66m in a worst-case scenario.Liverpool’s mayor, Joe Anderson, said he recognised that the infection rate was “basically out of control”, but added that hotels, bars and restaurants were in danger of closing.He told BBC Merseyside: “It’s nowhere near enough. £7m wouldn’t be enough for Liverpool alone, let alone across the city region. It’s got to be in the hundreds of millions that we need to support businesses to survive just for a matter of weeks.”Hancock also announced the reopening of Bolton’s hospitality industry, two days after the town’s Conservative council leader told the Guardian that the area had been “forgotten” since its pubs, restaurants and bars were restricted to takeaway-only trade three weeks ago.Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said he supported the new measures, but that areas needed urgent financial support. Otherwise, “existing inequalities, which themselves have a health impact and allow the virus to thrive, will be exacerbated”, he said.“People need clarity as well. Areas like Leicester, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bradford have had restrictions imposed on them for months now. Millions of people in these local lockdown areas just need some reassurance that an end is in sight.”Hancock was unable to say when restrictions would be lifted in those areas, but said the measures were “vital for suppressing the virus”.Coronavirus cases in Merseyside are averaging more than 200 per 100,000 people, more than four times England average across England. Liverpool and Knowsley have the highest infection rates in England.Measures that restrict social gatherings in pubs, bars and restaurants, such as those introduced in part of north-east England, will have a particularly significant impact on the Merseyside economy, given its reliance on hospitality and tourism. The industries account for half of the business rates that fund public services in Liverpool.Rotheram and six civic leaders said Merseyside’s public finances were at breaking point and needed a “comprehensive package of financial support” from the Treasury.
The pandemic has exposed the structural and systemic social and health inequalities across the economies of a world dominated by global capitalism
Across England, the stark geographical concentrations of Covid-19 cases in areas of economic and social deprivation expose north south divides of long standing.
Niamh McIntyre and Josh Halliday report for the Guardian on some troubling data (The 1 Oct 2020) under the headline:
Covid cases doubled under most local lockdowns in England
Niamh McIntyre and Josh Halliday write under the subheading:
Exclusive: Confusing rules blamed for rise in infections in 11 of 16 towns and cities under long-term restrictions
Coronavirus cases have doubled in the majority of English cities and towns that are subject to long-term local lockdowns, Guardian analysis has found, amid growing concern that restrictions are confusing and done “on the cheap”.
In 11 out of 16 English cities and towns where restrictions were imposed nine weeks ago, the infection rate has at least doubled, with cases in five areas of Greater Manchester rising faster than the England average in that time.
In Wigan, cases have risen from seven per 100,000 residents to 102 in that period. Leicester is the only one of the 16 areas to record fewer cases than when the measures were implemented.
The findings will raise concerns after Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, said the government’s strategy was to limit the virus to regional hotspots. “If everybody follows the guidance, then we could actually contain it within the areas it is [now] in the way that happened to some degree in Italy and Spain,” he said at a press conference on Wednesday.
On Thursday, more than 2 million people in Merseyside, Warrington and Teesside were told they were to be banned by law from mixing with other households indoors. However, the mayor of Middlesbrough, Andy Preston, said he would not accept the measures because they were based on “factual inaccuracies and a monstrous and frightening lack of communication, and ignorance”. He added: “As things stand, we defy the government and we do not accept these measures.”
Scientists, MPs and local leaders said the growing patchwork of local measures – which now cover about 20 million people, nearly a third of the UK population – had failed to bring down coronavirus rates, in part because the rules were unclear.
There is concern that large parts of the country could be left with tighter restrictions for months after George Eustice, the environment secretary, said measures would only be lifted when local infection rates were “more in line with the national trend”.
Analysis shows that 28 areas of England, comprising nearly 9 million people, have double the country’s average infection rate of 55 cases per 100,000 people, including Leeds, Manchester, Bradford and Liverpool.
Sir Chris Ham, a former chief executive of the King’s Fund thinktank, said the figures showed that the government must “redouble its efforts in generating public support for restrictions and using a wide range of community leaders to do so”.He said case numbers were not falling because the lockdown rules were too “complex and confusing”, there was a lack of support for people self-isolating, and the test-and-trace system was “still not working well enough”.Using Public Health England data, the analysis measured the increase in case rates since restrictions were introduced in each area until the week ending 20 September. It excluded lower-tier local authorities and areas where lockdowns had been introduced in the previous two weeks.Cases in Wigan, Bolton and Bury had roughly quadrupled since restrictions were imposed on 31 July, a significantly faster rise than in the rest of England.The rise in cases is now affecting hospital wards. The number of admissions from Covid has nearly doubled in Greater Manchester since the measures were introduced, rising from 25 a day in the first week of August to 49 earlier this week. The number of Covid patients in intensive care in the area has jumped from 12 to 41.While it is not possible to know how high case numbers would have risen if no action had been taken, scientists said that if the aim was to bring down infection rates, local lockdowns had failed.Boris Johnson cited Luton on Wednesday as an example of local lockdowns working. Although its cases did fall when restrictions were imposed, allowing it to be released from the measures within days, they have since started rising and are now above their original level.Cases in most places continued to rise after lockdown restrictions were imposed
Guardian graphic. Source: Public Health England Surveillance reports. Note: Stockport and Wigan had restrictions lifted and subsequently reimposed, but this is not represented due to a time lag in PHE data. Parts of Bradford and Blackburn with Darwen also had lockdowns lifted and reimposed, not shown due to some parts of these areas being in lockdown consistently
Dr David Strain, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter and an honorary NHS consultant, said he believed another national lockdown was a “very realistic possibility” due to the failure to stamp out the disease before autumn. “The lack of clarity about what the rules are is a big part of the problem. We need very good, clear and consistent messaging across the board that we should minimise the spread by creating exclusive social bubbles.”
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said ministers had tried to contain the virus “on the cheap” by introducing local restrictions without a significant package of financial support for businesses, residents and local authorities.He said he would not want the rules to be tightened further in Greater Manchester; rather, they needed to be “more consistent”. “There is still a feeling that local restrictions only achieve so much and actually it’s only going to be anything [imposed] nationally that bring cases back down again,” he said.Matt Hancock, the health secretary, on Thursday announced a £7m payment for councils in affected areas, while some local authorities, such as Bolton, have been allowed to hand out up to £1,500 per business every three weeks. But local leaders described this as a “drop in the ocean”, calling instead for an extension of the furlough scheme for businesses in lockdown areas.
Looking to the future . . .
. . . and misrepresenting the past?
The image above is of Another Place on Crosby beach in Sefton, Merseyside, and some of the sculptural works by Antony Gormley that were installed here as a temporary commission by Lewis Biggs, then director of Liverpool Biennial, back in 2005, but still here, in situ by popular demand. In the background a wind farm, off the Sefton and Wirral coastline of Liverpool Bay, is clearly visible in the photo.
Offshore wind . . .
. . . and the windbag!
Boris Johnson's speech to the "virtual" Conservative party conference
Q. What did Boris Johnson's conference speech really mean?
So runs the headline for an analysis of the Conservative conference 2020 by Peter Walker, political correspondent for the Guardian (Tue 6 Oct 2020).
Boris Johnson’s speech at Conservative conference drew on a number of themes, and was as notable for what it did not talk about as what it did. Here were the main ideas, and the arguments behind them.
CoronavirusWhat he said: “I don’t know about you, but I have had more than enough of this disease that attacks not only human beings, but so many of the greatest things about our country.”The background: Conference speeches tend to be light on detail, and Johnson’s survey of Covid-19 was a particularly blancmange-like mix of jokes about visor-wearing hairdressers dressed “as though they are handling radioactive isotopes” and a sober acknowledgement that the UK has “mourned too many”.The PM was keen to stress his hope for a relatively quick return to a more normal life, and the watching Tory faithful would expect the speech to focus more on optimism than specifics about test-and-trace. But Johnson has previously been bullish about an end to many restrictions by Christmas, which is very obviously not going to happen. There are only so many more times he can get by just on blithe confidence.A post-Covid worldWhat he said: “In the depths of the second world war, in 1942, when just about everything had gone wrong, the government sketched out a vision of the postwar new Jerusalem that they wanted to build. And that is what we are doing now – in the teeth of this pandemic.”The background: Johnson is the latest politician to make this parallel. Ed Miliband summoned up the image of the reforming Clement Attlee government as a model for a green transformation for the economy. The PM was less specific, mainly saying a key goal would be to boost growth. It was notable how he compared this with the last “12 years of relative anaemia” – 10 of which have been under Conservative prime ministers.His own healthWhat he said: “I have read a lot of nonsense recently, about how my own bout of Covid has somehow robbed me of my mojo … I could refute these critics of my athletic abilities in any way they want: arm-wrestle, leg-wrestle, Cumberland wrestle, sprint-off, you name it.”The background: A good rule of thumb about whether criticism of a politician has hit home is how earnestly they rebut it. While Johnson was typically colourful in his language, this section shows how the PM is worried about the impression of someone waylaid by long-term symptoms following his serious brush with Covid-19. This ties into the narrative of a broad-focus leader for the good times struggling with the serious, detailed logistics of a global pandemic, and potentially set to stand down soon. Johnson spoke again how his weight could have exacerbated his symptoms, saying he has now shed almost two stone.Wind power and green issuesWhat he said: “I can today announce that the UK government has decided to become the world leader in low cost clean power generation … and we believe that in 10 years’ time offshore wind will be powering every home in the country.”The background: Perhaps the one real policy idea in the speech, this was the element trailed in advance. While the amounts pledged so far have been dismissed as nowhere near enough for this wind-powered transformation, it is notable in the longer context for a Conservative leader to focus on clean energy, let alone wind turbines, which for years has been an object of derision, even hate, for many in the party.Role of the private sectorWhat he said: “We must be clear that there comes a moment when the state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it … We must not draw the wrong economic conclusion from this crisis.”The background: A general nod to the concerns of the Tory faithful about the massive state response to the coronavirus pandemic and the colossal levels of borrowing this brought. Consider this just a statement of intent, and one which could easily get abandoned amid the tough economic realities of the coming months and years.Culture warsWhat he said: “We are proud of this country’s culture and history and traditions; they literally want to pull statues down, to rewrite the history of our country, to edit our national CV to make it look more politically correct.”The background: Complete with a dismissive mention of “lefty human rights lawyers and other do-gooders”, this was Johnson on what he still sees as strong political ground, contrasting his embrace of tradition with Labour’s supposed metropolitan effeteness on such matters. Whether it hits home is another matter, given Keir Starmer’s embrace of patriotism in his own conference speech, and the Labour leader’s disinclination to dig himself into the trenches on such issues.BrexitWhat he said: “Be in no doubt that they are secretly scheming to overturn Brexit and take us back into the EU.”The background: The dog that did not bark. Aside from this mention of Labour’s supposed – and not actually true – desire to stop Brexit, Johnson barely mentioned the defining issue of the 2019 election. Why? One possibility is the type of Brexit discussion that would thrill the watching membership might also annoy the EU at a crucial time for talks about a departure deal the PM still wants to seal.PoliciesWhat he said: “We will fix the injustice of care home funding, bringing the magic of averages to the rescue of millions” … “explore the value of one-to-one teaching, both for pupils who are in danger of falling behind, and for those who are of exceptional abilities” … “this government is pressing on with its plan for 48 hospitals – count them”.The background: Light on detail even by the standards of conferences speeches, the plan for care homes was, literally, just a sentence, and a particularly opaque one. Similarly, there were no clues about how one-to-one teaching could be funded, or achieved amid an ongoing recruitment shortfall. As of this week we do have some facts about the hospital building programme – that the majority will not happen until as late as 2030, and most projects are rebuilds or new wings.
Build Back Better?
Never mind the bollocks . . .
. . . Boris Johnson has said in his speech to the Conservative party conference that Britain must not return to the status quo after the coronavirus pandemic, promising a transformation akin to the 'New Jerusalem' the postwar cabinet pledged in 1945.The prime minister also mounted a robust defence of the private sector, saying 'free enterprise' must lead the recovery and that he intended to significantly roll back the extraordinary state intervention that the crisis had necessitated.
The wartime government of Winston Churchill was a coalition government with the politically and technocratically skilful and competent Labour party ministers in the cabinet. The capacity and capability of the state will always outperform 'free enterprise', as clearly evident today with the so-called "NHS" Test and Trace fiasco, and which is a private enterprise driven disaster.
The 1945 Labour landslide election result made it possible for the founding of the National Health Service and the beginning of the implementation of universal social security measures that, more recently, have been stripped away by a Conservative government and its policy of ten years of austerity, the bedroom tax and the failure of "universal credit".
When it comes to a new Jerusalem, whoever came up with the concept knows it could prove a useful lead in to recent culture war territories. Re:LODE Radio references the recent opportunistic distraction, by distraction, from distraction, of the sung, or unsung, last night of the Proms.
William Blake's PREFACE to Milton
We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations
The date of the printing plate of William Blake's "Preface" to the "Prophetical" illuminated bookwork Milton is 1804, although the work was published four years later in 1808. It is from this page of text that the text of And did those feet in ancient time first appears. It follows a preface text full of Blake's anger and "unpleasantness" (a positive quality in Blake according to T. S. Eliot), an invective against the establishment of his own time. Boris Johnson, a man without qualities, typically apes the "classic" pose with his "posh quotes", something that Blake would detest and deride, as the false interpretation of the "classics". This is a continual theme in Blake's work.
Today this text is best known as the lyric of the hymn "Jerusalem", with music written by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916. The famous orchestration was written by Sir Edward Elgar, composer of "Land of Hope and Glory".
The Composer of 'Land of Hope and Glory' Would Have Hated Everyone Buying It Today, says Jack Davies (26 August 2020) writing on Vice. He suggests that today "Edward Elgar's composition has become the latest battleground in the reactionary right's culture wars, but the man himself was totally at odds with the British society that has come to venerate him".
Stewart Lee, as usual, cuts through the influence machine of a Conservative Rightwing Aided by the Press (or CRAP), with this Opinion piece, published just over a month ago (Sun 6 Sep 2020) in the Observer New Review, and headlined: The divided land of 'woke' and Tory, and with the subheading: The rightwing press is practised at poisoning our politics with confected outrage
Stewart Lee begins his piece thus:
Writing last weekend on the scandal surrounding the Proms’ absence of patriotic songs, the former minister of fun David Mellors opined, “the person I feel most sorry for is Edward Elgar”, the composer of Land of Hope and Glory. Not black Britons offended by Rule, Britannia!’s references to slaves; not black Britons annoyed by people taking offence on their behalf; and not the blameless female Finnish conductor suffering death threats for, in Mellors’s words, “uttering a load of woke nonsense about Black Lives Matter”. No. Who’s the most oppressed minority in the world today? Dead, white, male Victorian composers! And Laurence Fox!!
I felt sorry for Elgar too. In 1998, I worked with Keith Harris, the ventriloquist famous for Orville the Duck. But Harris told me he now hated “that bloody bird”, regarding it as an albatross even though it was a duck. By 1918, according to unsubstantiated “diary” extracts published in the Daily Mail in 2018, Elgar hated Land of Hope and Glory too, writing, “I went to the Coliseum and they played Land of Hope and Glory not once, but twice; the whole audience joined in. I could not. I regret very profoundly how this song has become an anthem to war… I am awfully tired of it.” Elgar would have been delighted to see his piece abandoned, just as Harris would have liked to see his puppet duck dismembered by a puppet fox, perhaps Basil Brush, violent when drunk. I hope Elgar and Harris, haunted by their Frankingsteins, can comfort each other in heaven somehow.
I read of Mellors’s misguided sympathies in last weekend’s Mail on Sunday, in the Coach and Horses in Pinvin, Worcestershire. I had walked the Malvern hills alone on my final Covid summer expedition, Elgar undulating on my iPod, saturating the landscape he loved. I tried to understand the Great Proms Patriotism Scam, a turbo-charged Brexit era version of the Great Winterval Hoax of 1997-1999, when the rightwing press falsely claimed Birmingham city council would chemically castrate any white people who wished anyone a Merry Christmas. The Winterval Hoax later featured in the Leveson inquiry into newspaper ethics, an Elastoplast on a severed artery. The Tory press poisons our discourse as deliberately as Russia poisons politicians. Both escape justice.
Building Jerusalem?
Re:LODE Radio supposes that Boris Johnson's version of building back a better Jerusalem will prove more PR than effort and achievement, and unlikely to echo the ambitions of the nineteenth century urban renewal programmes as set out in Tristram Hunt's Building Jerusalem.
For Boris Johnson, Jerusalem, the hymn that isn't a hymn, or the best national anthem we have never had, has got nothing to do with William Blake, but everything to do with English, and NOT British, exceptionalism. And it's "pie in the sky" when we are all gone.
John of Patmos watches the descent of New Jerusalem from God in a 14th-century French tapestry
According to the curious mythology surrounding this text is that Blake's poem was supposedly inspired by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus, accompanied by Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant, travelled to what is now England and visited Glastonbury during his unknown years. This improbable occurrence emerges in mythology created in the period of British imperial ascendancy, as has been identified and questioned by A.W. Smith, who concluded that "that there was little reason to believe that an oral tradition concerning a visit made by Jesus to Britain existed before the early part of the twentieth century".
For Blake the poem's theme is linked to the Book of Revelation (3:12 and 21:2) describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a New Jerusalem.
In the most common interpretation of the poem, Blake implies that a visit by Jesus would briefly create heaven in England, in contrast to the "dark Satanic Mills" of the Industrial Revolution. Blake's poem asks four questions rather than asserting the historical truth of Christ's visit. Thus the poem merely wonders if there had been a divine visit, when there was briefly heaven in England. The second verse is interpreted as an exhortation to create an ideal society in England, whether or not there was a divine visit.
A green and pleasant land?
William Blake lived in London for most of his life, but wrote much of Milton while living in the village of Felpham in Sussex.
Blake's poem offers an inevitable interpretive contrast for a modern reader between dark Satanic mills on one side, and a green and pleasant land on the other, full of green pastures and overlooked by clouded hills. Blake's Satanic mills may well have been linked to the fate of the Albion Flour Mills in Southwark, the first major factory in London. This rotary steam-powered flour mill, engineered by Matthew Boulton and James Watt, could produce 6,000 bushels of flour per week.
The factory could have driven independent traditional millers out of business, but it was destroyed in 1791 by fire, perhaps deliberately. London's independent millers celebrated with placards reading, "Success to the mills of Albion but no Albion Mills."
Opponents referred to the factory as satanic, and accused its owners of adulterating flour and using cheap imports at the expense of British producers. A contemporary illustration of the fire shows a devil squatting on the building. The mills were a short distance from Blake's home in Hercules Road, Lambeth. This common interpretation stereotypically casts the modern industrial and urban landscape as an image of hell, and the green pasture as the fields of heaven.
In the late eighteenth century the green and pleasant land of England was rife with conflict, poverty and injustice, as a result of landowners enclosing common land by acts of "their parliament", and the consequences of an agrarian revolution that swept away hitherto sustainable livelihoods on the land. There was a dark side to the landscape.
Detail from Manchester from Kersal Moor, by William Wyld, 1852
But these days mapping "Toryland" is no longer a simple matter, and neither is it obvious that industrial cities are a natural "Labour heartland". It's complicated.
Green fields and the 'red wall'
Across the LODE Zone pathway from Liverpool to Hull, when it comes to uninformed and presumptuous political stances, the usual stereotypes won't do. It is complicated. The "red wall", also referred to as Labour heartlands and Labour's red wall, is a term used in the politics of the United Kingdom to describe a set of constituencies in the Midlands, Yorkshire, North East Wales and Northern England which historically tended to support the Labour Party. The term was coined in 2019 by pollster James Kanagasooriam. When viewed on a map of previous results, the block of seats held by the party resembled the shape of a wall, coloured red, which has traditionally been used to represent Labour.
2017 election results and the red wall
The red wall metaphor has been criticised as a generalisation. Lewis Baston argues that the "red wall" is politically diverse, and includes bellwether seats which swung with the national trend, as well as former mining and industrial seats which show a more unusual shift.
In 2014, political scientist Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford documented the erosion by UKIP of the Labour-supporting working-class vote in Revolt on the Right.
In the 2017 UK General Election, the Conservatives lost seats overall, but did gain six previously safe Labour seats in the Midlands and North: NE Derbyshire, Walsall North, Mansfield, Stoke-on-Trent South, Middlesbrough South & East Cleveland and Copeland (held from the 2017 Copeland by-election). In 2019, the Conservatives increased their majority in the seats previously gained.
Conservative gains across the LODE Zone in the 2019 UK General Election
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has suggested prior support of many northern Labour voters for UKIP and the Brexit Party made it easier for them to vote Conservative.
In the 2019 general election, the Conservative Party gained 48 seats net in England. The Labour Party lost 47 seats net in England, losing approximately 20% of its 2017 general election support in red wall seats. All of these seats voted to leave the EU by substantial margins, and Brexit appears to have played a role in these seat changes.
Voters in Bolsover and swing voters of the type thought to be typified by Workington man cited Brexit and the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn as reasons why they chose not to vote Labour. Labour lost so much support in the red wall in some seats, like Sedgefield, Ashfield and Workington, that even without the vote increase for the Conservatives, the Conservatives would have still have taken those seats.
Labour’s lost working-class voters have gone for good
So Chris Bickerton asserts in his Opinion piece for the Guardian (Thu 19 Dec 2019) following the UK General Election.
Chris Bickerton writes under the sub heading:
British politics post-Brexit will be no kinder to a party that has taken supporters for granted, particularly in the north
This is an extract from Chris Bickerton's Opinion piece:
Is the Labour party dying? It’s a question that commentators have asked since the devastating election defeat last week. But in fact, as a party of working-class self-representation, Labour is already dead.
Throughout much of the 20th century, there were parts of northern England where jobs came with firm expectations about Labour party membership. Labour, the unions and the nonconformist churches were the great social institutions of 20th-century working-class politics. Secularisation in the 1960s saw the decline in the role of the church. Then the unions were dismantled in the 1980s. Now the Labour party, as we once knew it, is gone. Constituencies that had been held by Labour almost since the modern two-party system was born – such as Don Valley and Wakefield – have voted in the Tories.
Change does not happen overnight. The roots of the present defeat take us back several decades. Labour’s dramatic victory of 1997 was built upon a shift in the composition of the Labour vote: more middle class, more concentrated in the home counties. In the 2000s, Ukip’s rise was widely seen as a threat to the Tory vote. But as Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin documented so well in Revolt on the Right, Ukip was also starting to erode the working-class Labour vote. It shifted from its origins as an anti-EU party, criticising instead the government’s commitment to an open labour market and its embrace of EU free movement rules. Lacking real debate within Labour, the immigration issue became a symbolic one for voters, exemplifying the detachment of the London leadership from grassroot concerns.
But all is NOT lost . . .
. . . it's complicated though.
Modern, multicultural and surprisingly liberal: this is the real 'red wall'
So says John Harris in his Opinion column for the Guardian Journal (Sun 4 Oct 2020).
Opinion illustration for John Harris: Matt Kenyon for the Guardian
John Harris writes:
The election of 2019 and the political climate surrounding it now feel like relics of a different age. But one of the key elements of those distant weeks has stuck around: the concept of the red wall, a byword for the post-industrial places in the Midlands, the north of England and north Wales that were once solidly loyal to Labour but now have new Conservative MPs.
In the Guardian, Keir Starmer’s speech to Labour’s virtual conference was framed as urging “red-wall voters to ‘take another look at Labour’”. Last week, protests by north-east Tory MPs about Covid restrictions were characterised as a “red wall revolt”, while government plans to abolish district councils boiled down to an attempt to “shore up the red wall”.
For anyone curious about our new politics, there is the pollster Deborah Mattinson’s recent book Beyond the Red Wall, the fascinating story of encounters with voters in three such places.
Starmer and his people may be determined to revive Labour’s bond with these areas, but elsewhere on the political left, there is unease about the red wall’s sudden centrality. In some people’s view, Labour’s new attempt to begin a conversation with voters there by emphasising family and patriotism – themes Starmer returned to in Sunday’s interview with the Observer – risks “pandering”. There are suggestions that some former Labour heartlands are so reactionary that progressive politics should simply accept their loss and move on. These views reflect a received wisdom in our politics since the referendum of 2016: the idea of an England supposedly split clean in two.
We all know the drill by now. Urban places are held to be liberal, future-facing and welcoming of immigration and cultural diversity. By contrast, the red wall and provincial England are supposedly authoritarian, nostalgic, monocultural and bigoted. This perhaps handily positions a sizable share of the country to the Tory side of a culture war, which recent reports suggest will be based around everything from alleged BBC bias to trans rights, to shipping asylum seekers around the world.
Such provocations may demonstrate that politics has irrevocably changed, and voters have permanently realigned – and if that’s true, Starmer’s efforts to calm things down and appeal to people on either side of an unbridgeable divide will probably be doomed.
Yet, as the old David Bowie song goes, this is not America, and the red wall is far from a Trumpian redoubt of hard-right politics. Its new relationship with Boris Johnson’s Tory party feels tentative and provisional, as was evident in plenty of the conversations I had with Labour-Conservative switchers last December and embodied by an exchange with a man in Stoke-on-Trent who had just backed the Tories for the first time in his life, just before the polls closed. How did it feel, I wondered. His face screwed into a grimace. “Not good,” he said.
People had – and still have – a sense of the Labour party being distant and condescending (Mattinson’s book captures people in red-wall constituencies seeing Labour as a party of “naive and idealistic middle-class students … arrogant kids boasting degrees but lacking life experience”), and biting disdain for Jeremy Corbyn. And when it came to Brexit, there was also a moral sense of an agreement that had not been honoured. “We voted three years ago, and it’s still not happened,” a man in the Nottinghamshire former mining town of Worksop told me. His wife then chipped in: “What’s the point in having a democratic country if they’re not going to listen to the word of the voters?”
Told to make a choice, people had done so, and then watched as the winning option failed to materialise. Such was the incisive appeal of “Get Brexit done”: the fact that someone heeded the call does not automatically put them in the same ethical and political category as, say, Nigel Farage.
Red-wall areas are not really the hidebound, reactionary places of some people’s imagination. Many large places there – Walsall, Wolverhampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Bolton, Bury – are diverse and, in their own way, quintessentially modern. As they do everywhere else, attitudes in such places vary according to age, but the liberalising transformations that have changed society – on race, gender and sexuality – since the 1960s are often clear, even among people others might see as being stuck in the past. As Sunder Katwala, the director of the thinktank British Future, puts it: “The social conservatives of 2020 are probably as or more liberal as the social liberals of 1990.” Whatever has happened recently in the red wall, he warns against interpreting it as a backlash “against modern life and all of the gains of social liberalism in the last half-century”.
Yes, people in such places voice anxieties and resentments about immigration and the benefits system. These views clearly fed into the vote to leave the EU and some people’s recent support for the Conservatives, and they can sometimes be ugly and nasty. But these opinions are often impossible to disentangle from such on-the-ground issues as housing shortages and pitiful work opportunities. This is not to deny the existence of straight-up racism and other prejudices; the point is that most human beings are more open and accepting than they are often given credit for, and focused on the daily grind rather than furores that might be convulsing social media.
A recent quote on the Vice website from a newly elected Tory MP speaks volumes: “There’s an interesting view by some within the party that red-wall seats will automatically not be as pro-LGBT. That’s nonsense. People in red-wall seats in general just want to be allowed to get on and live their damn lives … and they want everyone else to live their lives freely.”
On the other side of England’s divide, cities are equally full of nuance. It is worth remembering that in the 2016 referendum, a third of Asian voters supported leave (among black voters, the figure was 27%). Three-quarters of people who belong to an ethnic minority say they have a strong British identity (a trait they share with white non-graduates, and which is less prevalent among white left-leaning graduates). It is easy to ignore the social conservatism of many black and Asian voters, and the fact that some of them may be as open to certain narratives about family and country as white people.
Everywhere, complexities abound. When I was a reporter, the first interviewee I ever recorded talking about latter-day immigration “opening the floodgates” was a senior Muslim community figure in Leicester. In the buildup to the referendum, the place that convinced me leave might win was Handsworth in Birmingham, where South Asian businesspeople talked about voting for Brexit in terms of national and personal self-reliance. Of course, there was no implication of any affinity with the nativist right. But again, what people said highlighted the fact that values and attitudes are more mixed up than some accounts of stark, binary divisions suggest.
Given that basic fact, it should not be hard to conceive of a left-leaning politics that begins to speak to people on the various sides of our national divides, not least after the pandemic has so vividly exposed Britain’s deep social and economic inequalities, and the decades wasted by leaving them unchecked. The red wall is not lost to the Tories, nor as distant from the rest of the country as we might think. If we want rid of this grim government, moreover, our estrangements and divisions demand not to be accepted, but healed.
John Harris reviewed Deborah Mattinson's recent book Beyond the Red Wall in this Book of the day book review on Politics books for the Guardian, along with Tom Hazeldine's The Northern Question (Thu 24 Sep 2020).
This is an extract from John Harris's review, with particular reference to Beyond the Red Wall:
Deborah Mattinson’s Beyond the Red Wall is all about life and politics in the latter kind of place. As a pollster who once worked for Gordon Brown, she specialises in focus groups, and her latest book is centred on what people have gathered to tell her in Stoke-on-Trent, Darlington and Accrington. Somewhat inevitably, her narrative gives the impression of someone flitting in and out of such places, but her material is both fascinating and sobering – full of loss, resentment and the sense of politics suddenly being turned upside down. Contrary to Kanagasoorium’s suggestion about the degradation of memory, moreover, it implies that the north-south divide might denote something not just cultural, but almost philosophical: the difference between people who want to live with a kind of future-facing weightlessness, and those connected to the industrial past, and proud of it.
According to the people Mattinson gathers together, Labour is now a party of the south, simultaneously the representative of “losers and scroungers”, but also “naïve and idealistic middle-class students … arrogant kids boasting degrees but lacking life experience”. It is telling, too, that the party is seen by some as “Keeping everyone down and dependent on them”: not a force that addresses inequality, but one that sustains it, in its own political interests.
What do the people she calls “Red Wallers” want? Mattinson summarises the views of two men in Accrington, who want to “shift power north and end the north–south divide: make the Northern Powerhouse really happen; get all industries working together” and “bring investment back into this part of the world again”. This suggests the basis of potential agreement with the more socially liberal voters who represent Labour’s new core support, but the book also details what would get in the way – chiefly, a string of grimly familiar views about immigration and the benefits system. In March this year, Mattinson assembled in a Manchester hotel a group of people split between “Red Wallers” and “Urban Remainers”: despite regular outbreaks of consensus, wildly divergent values were expressed. Yet what her account perhaps fails to grapple with are the political complexities around age. Her most voluble subjects seem to be well over 30, and you occasionally wonder if Labour’s Red Wall woes might be eased by the simple passage of time.
Boris Johnson receives warm reviews during Mattinson’s conversations in the Tories’ new territories. “He’s said that he’ll get Brexit done, that he’ll end the north-south divide, and now, that he’ll deal with this Coronavirus thing,” an unnamed resident of Darlington tells her. “We’ll see, but he seems pretty confident to me, and I like that in him.” What an era of north-south tensions has led to, it seems, is not just politics being transformed, and an expression of popular affinity with a man whose middle name is De Pfeffel, but a huge expectations problem. If I were a Tory reading those words, I would feel more than a frisson of fear.
Promises, expectations, delivery?
PM pledges to to transform country in keynote address to Conservative party conference
Jessica Elgot, Deputy political editor at the Guardian reports on Boris Johnson's transformative vision for the United Kingdom (Tue 6 Oct 2020). She writes in her report of Johnson's view that:
“The UK economy had some chronic underlying problems: long-term failure to tackle the deficit in skills, inadequate transport infrastructure, not enough homes people could afford to buy – especially young people – and far too many people, across the whole country, who felt ignored and left out, that the government was not on their side. And so we cannot now define the mission of this country as merely to restore normality.”
Reiterating his pledge to recruit 20,000 new police officers, Johnson criticised the legal profession, saying his government would stop the criminal justice system from being “hamstrung by what the home secretary would doubtless, and rightly, call the lefty human rights lawyers and other do-gooders”.
Though Johnson underlined how he expected the private sector to be at the forefront of the economic recovery, his speech outlined many new public spending commitments – including the introduction of one-to-one teaching for both gifted and struggling students, as well as the overhaul of social care.
“We will fix the injustice of care-home funding, bringing the magic of averages to the rescue of millions,” he said. “Covid has shone a spotlight on the difficulties of that sector in all parts of the UK, and to build back better we must respond; care for the carers as they care for us.”
However, he said free enterprise would be at the heart of future growth, a key theme of previous Johnson speeches, and sounded an early warning about the extent of state intervention on schemes such as furlough. He said Rishi Sunak had “done things that no Conservative chancellor would have wanted to do except in times of war or disaster”.
“There comes a moment when the state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it,” he said. “We must not draw the wrong economic conclusion from this crisis.”
He said the state would help the private sector by “becoming more competitive, both in tax and regulation”.
The prime minister also set out plans briefed by Downing Street overnight to power every home in the UK with offshore wind energy within a decade, a move he said would create “hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jobs” in the next decade.
He added that the UK would “become the world leader in low-cost, clean power generation – cheaper than coal and gas”, comparing its offshore wind resources to Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth.
Johnson was a prominent critic of wind power during his career as a columnist, and joked in his speech that “some people used to sneer at wind power 20 years ago and say that it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding”, a phrase he himself used.
Downing Street said the initial investment would rapidly create about 2,000 construction jobs and enable the sector to support up to 60,000 jobs directly and indirectly by 2030 in ports, factories and the supply chains.
In a nod to Tory backbenchers who have threatened to vote down any future curbs on freedoms because of the pandemic, Johnson said he hoped there would be no more restrictions on daily life by the time of the next Conservative conference in 2021.
“I don’t know about you, but I have had more than enough of this disease that attacks not only human beings but so many of the greatest things about our country – our pubs, our clubs, our football, our theatre and all the gossipy gregariousness and love of human contact that drives the creativity of our economy,” he said.
Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, said: “The British people needed to hear the prime minister set out how he and his government will get a grip of the crisis. Instead we got the usual bluster and no plan for the months ahead.
“We end this Conservative conference as we started it: with a shambolic testing system, millions of jobs at risk and an incompetent government that has lost control of this virus and is holding Britain back.”
Green and pleasant land V.2
For Boris Johnson to deliver on his Green promise to power all UK homes via offshore wind by 2030, the UK government . . .
. . . will need to spend £50bn
Jillian Ambrose and Fiona Harvey report for the Guardian on the future costs of Boris Johnson's pledge on his wind generated energy target (Tue 6 Oct 2020). They write under the subheading:
Aurora Energy Research calculates investment would have to quadruple capacity
Boris Johnson’s bold new vision for offshore wind to power every home in the UK by 2030 would require almost £50bn in investment and the equivalent of one turbine to be installed every weekday for the whole of the next decade.
The huge investment, calculated by Aurora Energy Research, an Oxford-based consultancy, would increase the UK’s offshore wind power capacity by four times what it is today, to reach 40GW by 2030.
The wind energy industry has become one of the country’s most prized industrial success stories. In the past 10 years the capacity of the UK’s offshore turbines has grown from 1GW to almost 10GW at the start of 2020, and building costs have been driven down by almost two-thirds.
The government’s new plan has emerged as central to Britain’s aim to “build back better” after the coronavirus crisis towards its 2050 climate goals. But the prime minister’s green agenda will still need to clear multiple hurdles to prove that the promise of billions in investment and much-needed green jobs can be delivered.
Keith Anderson, the chief executive of Scottish Power, one of the largest investors in Britain’s renewable energy industry, said there is “no shortage of capital or investor appetite in offshore wind” but the pace and scale of the industry’s growth will depend on the government’s ability to grant new seabed licences and project contracts at record speed.
The government plans to attract investment from the private sector through a major contract auction next spring, which will also include support for onshore wind and solar power projects for the first time in four years. This upcoming auction alone could secure more than £20bn of investment and create 12,000 jobs, mainly in the construction sector, according to RenewableUK.
“I am absolutely confident that the industry can achieve this,” said Anderson. “My only nervousness is that people will start to see the 40GW as a cap. We should achieve that, and power past it. We are going to need far more clean electricity.”
The government is under pressure to produce a programme of measures that will show the UK is taking its net-zero target seriously, as host nation of the crunch UN climate talks, Cop26, which have been postponed by a year because of Covid-19.
So far, the only sizeable green measure in the chancellor’s rescue plan has been a £3bn scheme for home insulation. Even with the push to offshore wind, that still leaves a lot to be done to reach net zero.
Lady Brown of Cambridge, deputy chair of the Committee on Climate Change, said: “If we’re to reach net zero UK emissions by 2050, we’ll need to see similarly bold commitments to cut emissions from our buildings, industry, transport and land.”
There are also doubts about whether the green jobs the government says will accompany the offshore wind expansion will materialise. At least 60% of the “content” of offshore wind farms will be made in the UK, the government has promised.
Sue Ferns, from the trade union Prospect, said the prime minister’s desire to kickstart a green jobs revolution has been set out before, but “the reality has never quite matched up”.
“There is a long way to go,” she said. “The number of green jobs is still below 2014 levels despite repeated promises from the government, partly due to particular supply chain jobs being created overseas. If the prime minister’s plan for wind is to have anywhere near the promised impact on jobs then it needs a credible plan for a functional UK supply chain.”
The government’s £160m investment in upgrading the UK’s ports to manage the size of a new generation of mega-turbines will help to create supply chain hubs in port communities which face economic decline.
Nick Molho, executive director of the Aldersgate Group, said the “much-needed commitment to invest in port infrastructure” should be matched by “a clear focus on low-carbon skills” to help to grow domestic supply chains and create jobs in the sector.
But Britain will need to move fast to catch up after the head start clinched by its European neighbours, according to Dennis Clark, a 40-year North Sea oil and gas veteran who chaired Offshore Group Newcastle, a supplier to oil platforms.
Clark said the companies building offshore wind farms currently in the UK were sourcing the high-value end of their supply chain from their own countries, including Spain and Norway, and from low-cost countries such as Dubai, where working conditions and standards were lower
“We have missed out on tens of thousands of jobs, which have gone overseas,” he said. “Brexit gives us the opportunity to change that.”
History matters . . .
This painting, titled The Boyhood of Raleigh by John Everett Millais, and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871, is referenced throughout the Re:LODE project, as it encapsulates what it came to epitomise in the culture of heroic imperialism in late Victorian Britain, and in British popular culture up to the mid-twentieth century.
The painting depicts the young, wide-eyed Walter Raleigh and his brother sitting by the beach and sea wall at Budleigh Salterton on the Devonshire coast. He is listening to a story of life on the seas, told by an experienced sailor who points out to the sea.
Q. To what object does this index finger point?
A. Black history matters!
This indexical sign, this indexicality, points to English history too, with exactly the same exceptionalist tonality as Boris Johnson continues to use, one hundred and forty nine years later, when he made historical asides in his virtual conference speech.
Dan Bloom of The Daily Mirror reports (Tue 6 Oct 2020):
Boris Johnson awkwardly attacks Boris Johnson's past comments in conference speech
Boris Johnson has launched a somewhat surprising attack on Boris Johnson for "forgetting the history of the UK".
The Prime Minister, who has written books on Churchill and Shakespeare, slammed the Prime Minister for pooh-poohing wind farms.
He will declare in today's Tory conference speech: "I remember how some people used to sneer at wind power, twenty years ago, and say that it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.
"They forgot the history of this country. It was offshore wind that puffed the sails of Drake and Raleigh and Nelson, and propelled this country to commercial greatness."
Fortunately, the PM doesn't need to cast his eye back 20 years to find someone "sneering" at wind power.
Only seven years ago, he himself told LBC Radio: " Labour put in a load of wind farms that failed to pull the skin off a rice pudding. We now have the opportunity to get shale gas - let's look at it."
Shale gas is better known as fracking and is furiously opposed by environmental campaigners, who say it is damaging and polluting.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak was unable to explain the contradiction when he was challenged on the PM's 2013 comments on LBC Radio.
He said: "I don’t know about then. The difference now is wind power, we know it’s clean, but it’s also now cheap and affordable, and it’s something we're very good at in this country. We can be a global leader in it. It can be a brand new industry for us, create lots of jobs."
Forgetting English history?
The wind that puffed the sails of Drake and Raleigh, puffed the sails of Drake's second cousin too, the pioneering English naval commander and administrator, privateer and an early promoter of English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, John Hawkins.
Sir John Hawkins is considered to be the first English trader to profit from the Triangle Trade, based on selling supplies to colonies ill-supplied by their home countries, and their demand for African slaves in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Venezuela in the late 16th century.
His first voyage of 1562-63 followed Hawkins receiving a commission from Queen Elizabeth I which allowed him to privateer. England was not at war with Spain, but the commission allowed Hawkins to plunder the Spanish fleet for loot.
Hawkins formed a syndicate of wealthy merchants to invest in trade. In 1562, he set sail with three ships to Sierra Leone where he captured 300 slaves, and took them to the plantations in the Americas where he traded the slaves for pearls, hides, and sugar.
The trade was so prosperous that on his return to England the Crown supported additional voyages and granted Hawkins a coat of arms.
Detail of The Slave Trade by Auguste François Biard, 1840
By the 1690s, the English were shipping the most slaves from West Africa. Following The Acts of Union 1707, with Scotland becoming part of a British state, the Atlantic slave trade and the Triangular Trade system became a foundation of a British economy.
The first side of the triangle was the export of goods from Europe to Africa. A number of African kings and merchants took part in the trading of enslaved people from 1440 to about 1833. For each captive, the African rulers would receive a variety of goods from Europe. These included guns, ammunition, alcohol, Indigo dyed Indian textiles, and other factory-made goods. The second leg of the triangle exported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and the Caribbean Islands. The third and final part of the triangle was the return of goods to Europe from the Americas. The goods were the products of slave-labour plantations and included cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses and rum.
The British maintained this position during the 18th century, becoming the biggest shippers of slaves across the Atlantic. It is estimated that more than half of the entire slave trade took place during the 18th century, with the British, Portuguese and French being the main carriers of nine out of ten slaves abducted in Africa. At the time, slave trading was regarded as crucial to Europe's maritime economy, as noted by one English slave trader: "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is ... It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves."
The financial agreements and transactions that took place in Lloyds Coffee House in London to mitigate risks, both maritime and commercial, and were important for individual voyages, led to the insurance and reinsurance market and the founding of Lloyds of London. Investors mitigated risk by buying small shares of many ships at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares could be freely sold and bought.
By far the most financially profitable West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and control over key islands such as Jamaica, Trinidad, the Leeward Islands and Barbados and the territory of British Guiana gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many British did not make gains, a handful of individuals made small fortunes.
This advantage was reinforced when France lost its most important colony, St. Domingue, to a slave revolt and the Haitian Revolution in 1791, and then supported revolts against its rival Britain, in the name of liberty after the 1793 French revolution. Before 1791, British sugar had to be protected to compete against cheaper French sugar.
After 1791, the British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly became the largest consumers. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an additive to Indian tea. It has been estimated that the profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations created up to one-in-twenty of every pound circulating in the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution in the latter half of the 18th century.
Black history is British history
Less than a week into Black History Month in the United Kingdom Boris Johnson is either forgetting his English history, or, his version of English history is incomplete. Or, it is the continued peddling of an ideological construction, originally formulated in the nineteenth century, a fake history to validate British colonialist triumphalism, and providing grist to Johnson's political, and possibly satanic, mill.
A good reason for Re:LODE Radio to reference the Millais painting The Boyhood of Raleigh, is to "point" to some of the origins of this constructed history, a tip of an iceberg though it may be, in a present era where echoes of "Empire" have merged with a fake version of national identity, and a mass fake memory syndrome, driven by a constructed "pattern of feeling" through the worst kind of nostalgia.
The painting was influenced by an essay written by James Anthony Froude on England's Forgotten Worthies, which described the lives of Elizabethan seafarers. Froude's historical writing was characterised by its dramatic rather than scientific treatment of history, somewhat akin to the bluster some associate with the faux history Boris Johnson peddles in today's Brexit inspired culture wars.
Later in life, James Anthony Froude turned to travel, particularly through the British colonies, visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the West Indies.
From these travels, he produced two books, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies (1886) and The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (1888), which mixed personal anecdotes with Froude's thoughts on the British Empire. Froude intended, with these writings, "to kindle in the public mind at home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his own heart was full.".
However, these books caused great controversy, stimulating rebuttals and the coining of the term Froudacity by Afro-Trinidadian intellectual John Jacob Thomas, who used it as the title of, Froudacity. West Indian fables by J. A. Froude explained by J. J. Thomas, his book-length critique of Froude's - The English in the West Indies. This work of 1889 was a breakthrough for Trinidad's Black intelligentsia, where Thomas countered Froude’s attack on the black population of the West Indies and thereby demolishing Froude's odious opinions. It attracted international attention and Thomas became established as an author of scholarship and ability.
According to Cedric Robinson in his study, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1st ed., London: Zed Books, 1983. 2nd ed., Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Thomas had a discernible impact on the evolution of Trinidad's Black intelligentsia. His work made possible the approaches to Trinidadian radical traditions that was crystallized in the lives of figures like C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, and Eric Williams, among others.
Millais's painting was also probably influenced by a contemporaneous biography of Raleigh, which imagined his experiences listening to old sailors as a boy. Millais travelled to Budleigh Salterton to paint the location.
Millais's sons Everett and George modelled for the boys. The sailor was a professional model. Millais' friend and biographer, the critic Marion Spielmann, stated that he was intended to be Genoese. He also argues that the sailor is pointing south towards the "Spanish main".
The possible Genoese connection points to the history that must be told of how maritime exploration and so-called "discovery" was realised on one hand by Genoese mariners, and on the other by Genoese bankers who financed the Spanish wars, the Reconquista, and the Conquistador led colonial conquests. This is the beginning of capitalist expansion on a global scale.
On the eve of Black History Month (Wed 30 Sep 2020) the Guardian published this Exclusive:
Labour leader marks Black History Month with call for diverse school curriculum
The story appears in the Guardian print edition on the first day of Black History Month, Thursday 1 Oct 2020.
Heather Stewart, Political editor for the Guardian, reports:
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, is to call for schoolchildren to be taught more about Britain’s black history, to help them reach “a full understanding of the struggle for equality”.
As he marks the start of Black History Month by visiting the Museum of London with the shadow equalities minister, Marsha de Cordova, Starmer will join calls for the curriculum to be made more diverse.
“This month we celebrate the huge achievements of Black Britons and the Black community. But Black British history should be taught all year round, as part of a truly diverse school curriculum that includes and inspires all young people and aids a full understanding of the struggle for equality,” he said, in pre-released remarks.
“While some schools are already doing this, the government should ensure all students benefit from a diverse curriculum.”
Research by the education charity Teach First found that pupils could complete their GCSEs and leave secondary school without having studied a single literary work by a non-white author.
The debate over whether the curriculum sufficiently reflects the role of BAME Britons and the diverse nature of society has been raging for many years.
The Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999, asked that “consideration be given to amendment of the national curriculum aimed at valuing cultural diversity and preventing racism, in order better to reflect the needs of a diverse society”.
More than 20 years on, the Windrush “lessons learned” review suggested, “the Windrush scandal was in part able to happen because of the public’s and officials’ poor understanding of Britain’s colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration, and the history of black Britons”.
Marsha de Cordova
De Cordova said: “The Black Lives Matter movement shone a light on racism in the UK and around the world. One way for the government to act would be to ensure that young people learn about Black British history, colonialism and understand Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. Black history is British history.”
Starmer called on Boris Johnson to do more to tackle racial inequalities at Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions.He highlighted in particular the fact that black mothers are five times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than their white counterparts. He called the statistic “truly shocking” and urged the prime minister to launch an inquiry.Johnson replied: “This government has launched an urgent investigation into inequalities across the whole of society, and we will certainly address them in a thoroughgoing way, and I am amazed that he seems ignorant of that fact.”The prime minister was referring to the recent launch of his commission on race and ethnic disparities.Starmer’s spokesman later described that response as “disappointing and dismissive”, adding: “We do hope he will take this issue seriously.”Starmer has faced calls from some on the left of his party to take a more vocal stance on BAME issues since the death of George Floyd at the hands of US police gave fresh impetus to the Black Lives Matter movement.He was photographed with his deputy, Angela Rayner, taking a knee in solidarity with campaigners but made clear he didn’t agree with some of the actions taken in the campaign’s name – including toppling the statue of slaveowner Edward Colston in Bristol.He said at the time: “Stepping back, that statue should have been taken down a long, long time ago. We can’t, in 21st-century Britain, have a slaver on a statue.”
But he insisted: “It shouldn’t have been done in that way, completely wrong to pull a statue down like that. That statue should have been brought down properly, with consent, and put, I would say, in a museum.”He also expressed regret for referring to Black Lives Matter as a “moment”, which critics had said meant he thought it was a passing phase instead of a sustained movement.Labour has been treading carefully on “culture war” issues, which Downing Street hopes will help Johnson to draw a dividing line with Starmer’s party and help the Tories hold on to “red wall” seats.
Forgotten histories . . .
This plaque is to be found along the LODE Zone Line between Liverpool and Hull, on the outskirts of Rochdale. It was created by BBC History and is one of twenty placed around the world for the series Black and British: A Forgotten History.
This plaque commemorates the Rochdale millworkers who supported the struggle against slavery during the American Civil war and located by the Cotton Famine Road in 2016.
The cotton industry that fuelled the mills and factories of Britain’s industrial revolution came directly from the American South – produced through the labour of nearly two million African slaves.
Slavery may have been made illegal across the British Empire in 1833, but economically Britain was dependent on it. This contradiction between British morality and Britain’s economic interests came into stark relief in 1861 with the American Civil War.
The Northern states and the Southern states went into battle over the issue of slavery. The North established a Naval blockade on the Southern cotton trade and the free flow of cotton from the Mississippi valley came to an abrupt halt.
For the previously productive workers of Britain’s cotton industry this was a social and economic disaster. Lancashire was soon in the grip of what became known as ‘the cotton famine’. By the end of 1862, a total of 485,444 were receiving some form of poverty relief. The Northern states even sent food aid.
Detail from the engraving 'The cotton famine -group of mill operatives at Manchester' from the Illustrated London News, published 22 November 1862
The British government remained officially neutral. And some in Britain even found ways to break the northern blockade on cotton. But not everyone put their own interests first. One mill town was determined to do what was right. Rochdale.
Rochdale had a long history of working class radicalism. It had been one of the hot beds of the abolitionists and the anti-slavery movement.
This plaque commemorates the Rochdale mill workers who supported the struggle against slavery during the American Civil War. It is located by a road still called today what it was known as then – "Cotton Famine Road".
The road was cut across the landscape by unemployed workers from Lancashire in a public works scheme – a response to the humanitarian crisis that was unfolding in the region.
The Confederate States had hoped that distress in the European cotton manufacturing areas (similar hardships occurred in France), together with distaste in European ruling circles for Yankee democracy would lead to European intervention to force the Union to make peace on the basis of accepting secession of the Confederacy.
After Union forces had repulsed a Confederate incursion at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery had been abolished in the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 three decades earlier after a long campaign, so the Unionists believed that all the British public would now see this as an antislavery issue rather than an anti-protectionism issue and would pressure its government not to intervene in favour of the South.
Many mill owners and workers resented the blockade and continued to see the war as an issue of tariffs against free trade. Attempts were made to run the blockade by ships from Liverpool, London and New York. 71,751 bales of American cotton reached Liverpool in 1862. Confederate flags were flown in many cotton towns.On 31 December 1862, a meeting of cotton workers at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, despite their increasing hardship, resolved to support the Union in its fight against slavery. An extract from the letter they wrote in the name of the Working People of Manchester to His Excellency Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America says:... the vast progress which you have made in the short space of twenty months fills us with hope that every stain on your freedom will shortly be removed, and that the erasure of that foul blot on civilisation and Christianity – chattel slavery – during your presidency, will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honoured and revered by posterity. We are certain that such a glorious consummation will cement Great Britain and the United States in close and enduring regards.— Public Meeting, Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 31 December 1862.On 19 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln sent an address thanking the cotton workers of Lancashire for their support,... I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working people of Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this Government which was built on the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of slavery, was unlikely to obtain the favour of Europe.Through the action of disloyal citizens, the working people of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under the circumstances I cannot but regard your decisive utterances on the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity and freedom.I hail this interchange of sentiments, therefore, as an augury that, whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exists between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.— Abraham Lincoln, 19 January 1863
Black history is a global history, and a testament to international solidarity between people, regardless of race!
Tank and the Bangas & Friends - What The World Needs Now
Black and British: A Forgotten History is the four-part BBC Television documentary series, written and presented by David Olusoga and first broadcast in November 2016, that instigated the placing of the Cotton Famine Road plaque.
This BBC History series documents the history of Black people in Great Britain and its colonies, starting with those who arrived as part of the Roman occupation, and relates that history to modern Black British identity.
As part of each programme, commemorative plaques - twenty in all - honouring the people discussed, were erected. In reviewing the series for The Guardian, Chitra Ramaswamy wrote:
Olusoga excavates our shared heritage with humanity and verve. One of his main messages is that remembrance is a political act. And in a present as tumultuous as ours, facing a future as uncertain as it gets, we need to look to the past more than ever. History never seemed so prescient.
David Olusoga's book that accompanied the series was awarded the 2017 Hessell-Tiltman Prize. On Sunday (Sun 4 Oct 2020) he contributed to the Guardian Black History Month with this Opinion piece.
David Olusoga writes under the headline and subheading:
Black History Month is now an established part of the year. Let’s celebrate its success
Millions are now addressing issues of race and racism thanks to this event
Black History Month is an American import, a concept brought to Britain in the 1980s. In the US, it is celebrated in February and began life as Negro History Week in the 1920s. Transplanted from there to here it has slowly grown to become a modern tradition, an established part of the calendar for many people of all races.
In the 1980s, everyone in Britain, including black people themselves, knew less about black British history than we do today. Much of the key scholarship had yet to be done, many of the discoveries yet to be made. So as well as importing an American tradition much of its content was also brought to Britain.
Back then, Black History Month events were more likely to remember Rosa Parks and the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott than they were to shine a light on the Bristol bus boycott and the British colour bar. Thirty-three years later and Black History Month has both evolved and matured. It is bigger, better funded, stamped with the imprimatur of official approval and more firmly focused on British history.
But while Black History Month was establishing itself as a new tradition, a parallel tradition was also developing. It has long been obligatory, it seems, for Black History Month to be dismissed and denounced in ways that would be utterly unimaginable for, say, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each year, it is labelled “politically correct” and in 2018 there were calls for it to be made into a broader celebration of wider diversity, effectively BAME History Month. One council went as far as rebranding its events under the banner “Diversity Month”. And every year, as regular as clockwork, as inevitably as death and taxes, Black History Month is greeted with the same fatuous and disingenuous claim that it is somehow unfair, as there is no white history month, a ploy every bit as cynical as the phrase “All lives matter”.
What makes Black History Month contentious in the UK is not the “black” part, but the “history” bit. If it were black culture month or black music month, few people would have a problem. The issue is that any proper debate about black history inevitably entails discussions of parts of the British past – slavery, imperialism, the development of racial thinking – that have long been brushed under the historical carpet. This means that once a year black Britons become the delivery system for parts of British history that many people are deeply uncomfortable discussing.
This year, the attack line has been that Black History Month and black history itself is divisive. The same government that officially supports Black History Month has warned schools not to teach what it characterises as “victim narratives” that are supposedly “harmful to British society”. The favoured version of black history focuses only on the “contributions” of black soldiers, sailors and airmen who served in the armed forces and pioneering black “firsts” in civilian life. Slavery, racism and the murderous violence of empire are pushed to the margins.
This year, like every year, there have been those unable to control the reflex to vomit up the “where’s white history month” trope – like a racist fur ball – but overall there has been less criticism. Black History Month 2020 feels more confident and celebratory than those of previous years; the celebrations of 2018 and 2019 were muted affairs, coming as they did in middle of the Windrush scandal and its aftermath.
This positivity is a reflection of the year we have lived through and the remarkable events we have witnessed. The summer of 2020 was one of those moments when it felt as if history’s fast-forward button had been pressed and the pace of historical events suddenly accelerated. After the summer of Black Lives Matter, it seems as if every institution and every company is determined to express its support for Black History Month.
The scale of Black History Month, the fact that political leaders and huge corporations feel compelled to play a part and list their initiatives, is in itself an achievement, one that would have been unimaginable to the pioneers who put together the first programmes of talks and gatherings back in the 1980s.
That a royal couple would also seek to play a role would have seemed utterly implausible. Undoubtedly there are companies whose support is paper thin and motivated by self-interest, but there are others where the desire to celebrate and to change is genuine.
While criticism of the existence of Black History Month has been muted, companies and individuals have found themselves condemned for doing it wrong. Uber Eats celebrated the arrival of October with a pratfall of an advertisement that showed a black women eating chicken. Not being able to see the problem with that is the problem.
But despite the gaffe, the underlying aim of the company’s initiative was, as a spokesman explained, to “make it easier for people to support black-owned restaurants”. If this really is the ambition behind the promotion, might we not, for the greater good, forgive the clumsy messaging and the triggering of an old and ugly stereotype?
Also in line for criticism were the Duke and Duchess of Sussex who marked the start of October by condemning structural racism, unleashing a predictable broadside of hysteria. Attacking Meghan for wanting to combat the racism that exists within British society, when the vilification of her is, in part, a manifestation of that racism, represents a new form of meta-irony, a rare and previously unknown element in the periodic table of tabloid hypocrisy.
Despite the gaffes and the sniping, Black History Month 2020 is infused with the spirit of this remarkable year, one in which millions of people have engaged with ideas of race and racism as never before. A year in which books on race and black British history have been in the bestseller lists and the concept of “anti-racism” has caught the imagination of the young. 2020 might therefore be the year in which Black History Month truly comes of age.
Guardian coverage over the last seven days includes:
Andrea Levy. Her book Small island ‘provides context for the lived experiences of so many’.
Race in education - Sally Weale and Lanre Bakare report (Wed 30 Sep 2020)
Many GCSE pupils never study a book by a black authorReport highlights rarity of BAME writers in GCSE English literature syllabus of exam board AQA
Paul Stephenson: the hero who refused to leave a pub – and helped desegregate Britain
When he sat down in a pub that banned black people, Stephenson helped change Britain’s discrimination laws. He talks about organising the Bristol bus boycott, attacks from the National Front – and why Muhammad Ali composed a poem about him
by Kehinde Andrews (Thu 1 Oct 2020)
Black History Month - Haroon Siddique reports (Thu 1 Oct 2020)
Steve McQueen and Bernardine Evaristo named among '100 great black Britons'
List celebrates high-achieving black British individuals over past 400 years
Lavinya Stennett, founder of the Black Curriculum, said she had yet to see ministers, despite promises of a meeting.
Race in education - Sally Weale Education correspondent reports (Fri 2 Oct 2020)
Ministers taking 'way too long' to bring black history into curriculum
Campaign founder fears that momentum for change in English schools will be wasted
The medium is the massage
Facing the future often requires facing the past but not looking in the rear-view mirror
But facing the past, or the present, is not something Boris Johnson and his advisers feel comfortable with.
Acknowledging reality will just burst their bubble.
Peter Walker, Haroon Siddique and Jamie Grierson report for the Guardian on the controversy following the appointment of Munira Mirza by Boris Johnson, someone who doubts the existence of institutional racism (Mon 15 Jun 2020). They write under the headline and subheading
Dismay as No 10 adviser is chosen to set up UK race inequality commission
Munira Mirza has doubted existence of institutional racism and criticised ‘culture of grievance’
Oh oh we're in trouble . . .
Britain needs a New Deal . . .
. . . but all we get is confusion
This image of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a photo from 1936, was published in the print edition of the Guardian on Friday 2 October 2020 to accompany the Opinion column for the Guardian by Larry Elliott, with a headline referencing FDR's New Deal. In fact Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal consisted of a first New Deal (1933-34), and then a second New Deal (1935-36).
Larry Elliott writes for the Guardian free web pages (Yes, free!), and reflecting on Boris Johnson's Conservative party virtual conference speech (Thu 1 October 2020) under the headline and subheading:
Without clarity and leadership, there's plenty to fear for the UK economy
With Covid cases and unemployment both rising, and a no-deal Brexit possible, a coherent strategy is urgently needed
It was the sort of speech Boris Johnson used to make. Britain is on course for the most spectacular quarter of growth in its history. Consumers are spending freely on houses and cars. Good news about the economy is being crowded out by the doomsters and gloomsters in the media. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
This, though, was not the prime minister, because since the start of the coronavirus crisis Johnson has turned from Tigger into Eeyore. Instead it was left to the chief economist at the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, to make the sort of rallying cry that was once the PM’s trademark, hitting out at those determined to wallow in pessimism. The Threadneedle Street official called it the economics of Chicken Licken, after the fictional fowl who, having been hit on the head by an acorn, felt the sky was about to fall in.
Haldane’s speech might have been better timed. This, after all, was the week when the death toll from Covid-19 passed the million mark, the number of new cases in the UK reached a record daily level, and one-third of employers surveyed said they were likely to announce redundancies in the next three months. Some acorn.
That said, Haldane has a point. The economic news has been better – a lot better, in some respects – than was expected when the UK was in full lockdown, between late March and early May. The recovery in consumer spending has been remarkable.
It is also true that there is a disconnect between the low levels of consumer confidence and actual spending patterns. Individuals have been telling pollsters that they are uncommonly downbeat about the prospects for the economy, but that hasn’t stopped them applying for a mortgage or trading in their car for a new model.
This seeming conundrum is actually easy to explain. Although economic output contracted by almost 20% in the second quarter, disposable household incomes barely fell at all. The government has so far picked up the tab, paying the wages of the millions of workers who were furloughed when the economy was locked down. For the first few months of the crisis, households saved money. When the restrictions were eased they went on a bit of a spending spree using some of the cash they had squirrelled away.
As a result, the first six months of Covid-19 have been something of a phoney war. There has been pain, but it has been much less severe than might have been expected given the drop in output. The tricky bit starts now because, as Haldane acknowledged, the UK faces an “unholy trinity” of risks: a rising Covid-19 caseload that is leading to local lockdowns and the reimposition of national restrictions, higher unemployment, and the possibility of a no-deal Brexit.
Leadership matters, and it would help if Johnson could articulate his message as clearly as FDR did when he blamed the Great Depression on speculative excesses of Wall Street, said mass unemployment would not be tackled merely by talking about it, and declared that he would treat the crisis as seriously as if America had been invaded.
That, however, would require the government to decide what its strategy is, because it can’t seem to make up its mind whether the aim is to manage the virus, to suppress it, or a mixture of the two.
Britain needs its equivalent of the New Deal; what it is getting is muddling-through.
In August, when the number of new cases was low, Rishi Sunak was encouraging people to dine out on the Treasury in order to boost the struggling hospitality industry. The public, flush with cash, didn’t need much persuading to take advantage of the cut-price offer.
A month after the end of “eat out to help out”, restaurants now have to turf customers out by 10pm, meaning in effect that they can arrive no later than 8-8.30pm. There is talk of another national lockdown – a two-week circuit breaker – in response to the recent surge in Covid-19 cases. This sort of zig-zagging breeds fear.
If the government decides that coronavirus trumps all other considerations, ministers must do whatever is necessary to minimise the knock-on impacts on the economy: to stop businesses from going bust, to provide financial help for especially vulnerable sectors, to extend more generous welfare payments, and to have local furloughs where there are local lockdowns.
But where there should be clarity, there is confusion. The chancellor says he is focused on saving as many jobs as possible but is scaling back support to the labour market because the Treasury is uncomfortable about the cost of fighting Covid-19. Sunak is clear that the deficit – which will be bigger this year than ever before in peacetime – has to come down. Measures aimed at doing just that have been postponed, not abandoned.
Here too there is an echo of FDR, who watered down the impact of the New Deal by cutting spending before the economy had fully recovered, and sent the US plunging back into recession in 1937. The Great Depression really came to an end only when the need to prepare for war meant budgetary considerations were no longer relevant.
This is the real lesson from the 1930s and early 1940s. Either Covid-19 represents a threat that will soon disappear, or it is an existential threat. If the former, there is no point in cratering the economy to combat it. If the latter, there should be no expense spared to protect jobs and businesses.
Larry Elliott concludes this Opinion column writing:
Nobody asked the chancellor of the exchequer whether more Spitfires could be afforded in the summer of 1940. Wars are not won by soundbites, however memorable.
Spitfires . . .
More than a New Deal, Re:LODE Radio considers that what Britain needs, and what the world needs NOW, is a Green New Deal.
An alternative to the UK government's policy will be forthcoming later this month when Ed Miliband MP, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary and Anneliese Dodds MP, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor report on the recent consultation on how to help the UK make a green and just economic recovery from the Coronavirus crisis.
The House website carries an article by Georgina Bailey asking the question (21 September 2020):
What happened to Labour's Green New Deal?
Following the summary dismissal of Rebecca Long-Bailey from the opposition front bench, the architect of last years Green New Deal proposals, the hiatus caused has been of widespread concern amongst climate change activists. Georgina Bailey's report does some way to reassuring readers while waiting for the consultation outcome. This is an excerpt from the article:
Jake Sumner, co-chair of Sera, Labour’s environment campaign, and a former party adviser, says he has heard Starmer and shadow cabinet members express support for green policies on multiple calls throughout the pandemic, and is positive about the overall direction of the party.
“What’s happened, and been very noticeable over the last few years, is how much more joined up Labour’s policy is on the environment – how much more mainstream it is. It’s now weaved through every element of our policy programme,” Sumner explains.Adam Williams agrees: “I’ve still got faith and I’m not here to call anyone out just yet. It all seems okay to me – it would be great to have more official declarations but there’s a lot going on at the moment. And it’s just our job to do the best we can to show how good the Green New Deal can be.”Luke Myer, on the Labour for A Green New Deal leadership team and a Sera member, says the picture is “mixed”, but he takes heart from the fact that although the party leadership may have changed, the membership remains much the same.“It wasn’t the leadership who pushed for a Green New Deal last year it was the thousands of members who put in the motions through 128 CLPs. And I think that commitment is still there,” he explains
“Ed Miliband is a massive advocate. In many ways, Ed Miliband is our new Rebecca Long-Bailey,” Williams explains.
Barry Gardiner, former shadow climate change minister, believes that Miliband’s appointment was a clear indication from Starmer about the future of Labour’s Green New Deal.
“It is at the heart of Labour policy, it must remain at the heart of Labour policy, because it’s about the future of a sustainable economy. It’s about the future of jobs in this country...So I think it was a very key message that Keir gave, when he put Ed into that position, that this had to be at the centre of our economic future and our industrial future.”
And Labour sources are quick to dismiss reports of tension between Starmer’s office and Miliband’s on Labour’s environmental messaging.
Two weeks ago Miliband chaired the inaugural meeting of the shadow cabinet’s climate action sub-committee, with nine different shadow teams represented. Miliband and the Labour leadership are also currently considering responses to the Green Recovery consultation run with Labour members over the summer, with an “ambitious” report due in October. Labour for a Green New Deal say that statements in support of their proposals make up around two-thirds of all submissions.
The international dimensions of a Green New deal are essential - capitalist competition and a "race to the bottom" forms a spectre that haunts possible futures!
A progressive movement for Europe
DiEM25 is a pan-European political movement founded in 2016 by a group of people across Europe, including former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat. The movement was officially launched at ceremonial events on 9 February 2016 in the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin and on 23 March in Rome.. Its tendencies are alter-globalisation, social ecology, ecofeminism, post-growth and post-capitalism. Implementation of a universal basic income is widely defended among its members.
DiEM25 argues that European people need to seize the opportunity to create political organisations at a pan-European level. Its participants consider that the model of national parties forming fragile alliances in the European Parliament is obsolete and that a pan-European movement is necessary to confront the great economic, political and social crisis that Europe is going through. In its analysis, the movement considers that this crisis threatens to disintegrate Europe and has characteristics that are similar to the Great Depression experienced in the 1930s.
Radical internationalism in the face of climate breakdown: Why we need a Global Green New Deal
This article by Benjamin James Davies (24/09/2020) explains why:As plagues of locusts, nightmarish infernos and a deadly pandemic sweep the planet, it has become easy to slip into despair in the face of the immense challenges facing humanity.Even the Doomsday Clock has had to switch to measuring our proximity to armageddon in seconds as opposed to minutes, with the twin threats of nuclear war and climate destruction leaving us 100 seconds from doom.In the face of such unprecedented challenges the neoliberal establishment have retreated behind a nativism that seeks to preserve the status quo as they bury their heads in the sand when it comes to tackling the imminent threat of climate disaster. Some piecemeal proposals have been made in the name of international cooperation towards averting climate catastrophe, such as the European Green Deal, a lumbering effort towards a carbon-neutral European Union which promises to offer too little, too late.
In the midst of this nadir of international cooperation, the Progressive International (PI) held its inaugural virtual summit on 18 September.
Aiming to “unite, organise and mobilise progressive forces around the world”, the PI offers a much broader scope than other internationalist organisations across the political spectrum, and underscores humanity’s now looming stark choice: “Internationalism or Extinction”.With keynote speeches from Yanis Varoufakis, Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, the inaugural summit covered a wealth of topics, from how to reclaim the world post-Covid, a blueprint for radical democratic internationalism that doesn’t ignore provincialism, and ultimately the urgent need for a Global Green New Deal.The necessity for progressives around the globe to cooperate could not be any clearer; recent years have seen a perverse reactionary nationalist international that has positioned itself as the “true opposition” to the corrupt neoliberal establishment which pushed “business as usual” in the face of unprecedented economic disaster and climate disaster. This illusory struggle between liberalism and proto-fascism has made it impossibly difficult for true progressives to be heard above the din, meaning that so many opportunities to arrest rising inequalities and undo some of the damage of climate destruction have been missed.To put their words into action, Yanis Varoufakis urged attendees to adopt a “common program and an uncommon collective action plan”, offering a blueprint for collective action that will enable cooperation on an international scale without ignoring local issues. At the heart of this blueprint is the Global Green New Deal, a synthesis of existing programs that will offer a more radical, coherent vision in the face of climate disaster.This deal will offer a roadmap out of austerity towards a greener future, adopting many of the ideas of the Green New Deal for Europe, championed by DiEM25. The adoption of zero-carbon infrastructure and the centering of green, dignified and well-paid jobs must be central to this Global Green New Deal, and this will also require progressives to coordinate the distribution of costs and benefits between the Global North and South.The recognition that socialist struggles against inequality are inextricably linked to the fight against climate disaster is one that many progressives must be forced to reckon with.
Nick Estes, co-founder of The Red Nation, an organization dedicated to Native liberation, ‘The future must be socialist’.
As long as the world’s richest 1% create twice as many CO2 emissions as the poorest 50%, socialism is the only alternative to a reactionary, climate-destroying authoritarianism, as Vijay Prashad reminded attendees. Similarly, Lakota historian Nick Estes spoke of the urgent need to decolonise the atmosphere and offer an earth-centric, rather than anthropocentric blueprint for humanity. While Indigenous peoples make up less than 5% of the Earth’s population, their stewardship protects around 80% of the planet’s biosphere. The Amazon rainforest, which serves as the lungs of the world, is in grave danger, and Indigenous activists are the most vital line of defence against irreparable climate disaster.Any Global Green New Deal must incorporate Indigenous leadership, inspired by the Cochabamba conference of 2010 and the climate courts which it called for. It is vital that the Global North creates atmospheric space for the Global South through the reduction of and absorption of their emissions, assuming the costs of transfer technology transfer, opening their borders and paying off their climate debt through land restoration.Naomi Klein offered her vision for the “Years of Repair” that will inevitably follow the current COVID-19 crisis.
Discussion during PI’s Inaugural Summit panel session ‘The Years of Repair’ with Naomi Klein, Tasneem Essop, Vanessa Nakate, Aruna Roy, Carola Rackete, and moderated by David Adler.
She posited that the pandemic can serve as our “teacher”, granting us the time and space to reassess the lop-sided priorities of our pre-COVID lives. On an individual level, Klein said that this crisis has given us pause to question our overconsumption, and demonstrated to us that nobody belongs in warehouses, prisons, meat packing plants, detention camps or factory-like old age homes where the virus spread: “Places where human lives were already sacrificed, human machines for extension of profit.”
The Global Green New Deal must be the cornerstone of these Years of Repair. For those of us who wake up every day to stories of a burning, broken world, the Progressive International and the Global Green New Deal offer us an imperative that disparate forces around the planet can unite around, sharing stories of a collective purpose and collaborating towards a just and equitable transformation. In the words of Klein herself,
“By being willing to look at our state of brokenness there is the room for grief and care for one another.”
The absolute imperative need for compassion, solidarity and love in the face of climate destruction and the collapse of liberal democracy could not be any greater, urged Noam Chomsky in his keynote speech. Progressives everywhere must work together to rebuild (or in some cases, build outright) a vibrant and well-informed democracy. Echoing the calls of some of the world’s leading climate scientists, Chomsky urged us to panic. People around the world are simply not doing enough, and we are cursed with the worst leaders at the worst possible time.
A Global Green New Deal would demonstrate that the means to alter our course and avert this crisis are available right now, but not for long.
One of the primary aims of the PI must be to ensure that we “panic now and act accordingly.” Dr Cornel West also made the urgent plea for progressives to fight against extinction “with a smile on our face”, tackling the twin crises of complicity, complacency and cowardice in the political and intellectual classes.
Progressive internationalists working towards a Global Green New Deal must panic, but in a controlled, meaningful and decisive way, urged John McDonnell MP, former UK Shadow Chancellor. The current pandemic has lifted the veil over many, exposing the crippling failures and weaknesses of the neoliberal system which is destroying the planet. Decades of austerity following the 2008 crash in the UK and further afield have left public services stripped to the bone and unable to deal with the pandemic, meaning that few have any confidence their ruling classes will be able to take decisive action against climate destruction.
Progressive political parties such as Labour in the UK must make a Green New Deal central to their political program, rather than offering a “Britain First” rhetoric.
In the face of extinction, internationalism and socialism are the only alternatives, and the Progressive International offers a blueprint for a radical, democratic Global Green New Deal which will save our planet.
Re:LODE Radio considers this as the only way to face the future in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"
Larry Elliot of the Guardian takes a view on the looming debt crisis that is about engulf the poorest countries of the world in the middle of a global pandemic.
Poor countries need debt relief now to avoid default - or millions will suffer
The image above is of the copper smelter at the Mopani Mines sites at Mufulira. Zambia has its debts collateralised against its copper mines but falling global growth in the Covid-19 pandemic has cut exports.
Larry Elliott's analysis (Sun 4 Oct 2020) begins with the stark news that:
Zambia is running out of money to pay its debts.
It has asked bondholders for breathing space so that it can put a restructuring plan in place. The copper-rich African state is at risk of being the first country to default on its debts since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Not the last though. Zambia is the canary in the coalmine, a harbinger of a full-blown crisis that has been lurking in the background from the moment the seriousness of Covid-19 became apparent.All the ingredients were in place for trouble. A lot of countries, Zambia included, had behaved recklessly in the good times. As the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, pointed out last week, they went into the crisis with levels of debt that were already uncomfortably high.Larry Elliott's analysis ends with a significantly practical but politically challenging suggestion:
Georgieva has already made the case for a new debt framework and that is indeed sorely needed. Debt relief is no longer simply a question of getting a bunch of rich western governments to agree a deal: it now requires the involvement of private sector creditors, such as BlackRock, and Beijing.Securing that involvement has so far proved to be difficult and it is time for the IMF and the World Bank to step up the pressure, warning private creditors that they can either take a “haircut” voluntarily or face a disorderly process. G20 countries should be prepared to change their laws to ensure full participation and to prevent their courts being used to prosecute claims for unpayable debt contracts often entered into with a complete lack of transparency.China should be reminded that it would suffer immense damage to its reputation unless it agrees to take part in a programme – overseen by the IMF and the World Bank – that see the benefits of debt relief channelled into higher spending on health, education and stronger social safety nets.Above all, it is time for the IMF and the World Bank to make a simple argument;
the world’s poorest countries can try to repay their debts or they can save lives. They can’t do both.
Bretton Woods - a plan to secure the future of capitalism
Re:LODE Radio knows that Yanis Varoufakis is amongst those who take a view on the modern history of the global capitalist economic system, that a global plan in the mid 1940's produced significant economic outcomes, including the IMF and the World Bank. And this all happened while World War II was still raging in Europe and the Pacific.
The Global Minotaur By Yanis Varoufakis
Yanis Varoufakis begins chapter 3: The Global Plan under the heading:
The remarkable opportunity
The United States of America came out of the Second World War as the major and, in fact, if one excludes Switzerland, the only creditor nation. For the first time since the rise of capitalism, all of the world’s trade relied on a single currency, the dollar, and financed from a single epicentre, Wall Street. While half of Europe was under the control of the Red Army, and Europeans were openly questioning the merits of the capitalist system, the New Dealers, who had been running Washington since 1932, realised that history had presented them with a remarkable opportunity: To erect a post-war global order that would cast American hegemony in stainless steel. It was an opportunity that they seized with glee.
America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, is the subtitle of the new edition (cover on the left above). The original, 2011, edition’s subtitle was America, the True Causes of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy (cover on the right above).
In chapter 3 of his book The Global Minotaur, titled The Global Plan, Varoufakis writes . . .
. . . in July 1944, seven hundred and thirty delegates converged upon the plush Mount Washington Hotel located in the New Hampshire town of Bretton Woods. Over three weeks of intensive negotiations, they hammered out the nature and institutions of the post-war global monetary order.
They did not come to Bretton Woods spontaneously but at the behest of President Roosevelt whose New Deal administration was determined to win the peace, after almost having lost the war against the Great Depression. The one lesson the New Dealers had learnt was that capitalism cannot be managed effectively at a national level. In his opening speech Roosevelt made that point with commendable clarity: "The economic health of every country is a proper matter of concern to all its neighbours, near and far."
The two issues that were, ostensibly, central to the Conference were the design of the post-war monetary system and the reconstruction of the war- torn economies of Europe and Japan. However, under the surface, the real questions concerned the institutional framework that would keep a new Great Depression at bay and who would be in control of that framework. Both questions created significant tensions, especially between the two great allies represented, in the US corner, by Harry Dexter White and, in the British corner, by none other than John Maynard Keynes.
In the aftermath of the conference, Keynes remarked: "We have had to perform at one and the same time the tasks appropriate to the economist, to the financier, to the politician, to the journalist, to the propagandist, to the lawyer, to the statesman - even, I think, to the prophet and to the soothsayer."
Two of the institutions that were designed at Bretton Woods are still with us and still in the news. One is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the other the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, today known simply as the World Bank. The IMF was to be the global capitalist system's 'fire brigade'; an institution that would rush to the assistance of any country whose house caught (fiscal) fire, handing out loans under strict conditions that would ensure that the failures would be fixed and the loans repaid. As for the World Bank, its role would be of an international investment bank with a remit to direct productive investments in regions of the world devastated by the war.
Yanis Varoufakis ends his chapter on The Global Plan with a summary, under the heading:
Conclusion: Capitalism's Golden Age
This historical example illustrates how global plans actually work. In this case the plan was to preserve the future of global capitalism and the future hegemonic interests of the United States of America. Here is the text:
Gore Vidal once said that the trouble with golden ages is that, if you live in one, everything looks a little yellow. The countless Americans who took to the streets to protest against their government in the 1960s undoubtedly did not see their era as golden. Yet, in retrospect, at least through our current lens, it looks like a remarkable period. An era during which administrators truly believed that they could create a rational world order that promotes inter-continental stability, growth and relative equality. Compared to our current crop of poll-driven politicians, whose raison d' être is to stay on the right side of Wall Street, lobbyists and assorted business interests, it is easy to romanticise the first post-war phase - the Global Plan era.
The Global Plan lasted from around 1950 to 1971. It boiled down to a simple idea: A system of fixed exchange rates binding together the capitalist economies complete with a particular type of Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (GSRM) which guarantees the system's immunity from centrifugal forces that would otherwise tear it apart. How did that particular GSRM work? The idea was that the United States would retain its large post-war trade surplus but, in return, it would export its surplus capital (or profits) back to its protégés in the form of direct investment, aid or assistance, thus enabling them to continue to buy American products. At the same time, the United States would ensure that Japan and Germany could maintain a similar surplus position at a regional level, even at the expense of America's own bottom line.
The Global Plan's most impressive feature was its incredible adaptability; the way successive US administrations amended the Plan every time bits of it got unstuck. Their policies toward Japan are an excellent example: After Mao's unexpected victory, and the demise of the original plan to turn the Chinese mainland into a huge market for Japanese industrial output, US policy makers responded with a menu of inspired replies.
First, they utilised the Korean War, turning it into an excellent opportunity to inject demand into the Japanese industrial sector. Secondly, they used their influence over America's allies to allow Japanese imports freely into their markets. Thirdly, and most surprisingly, Washington decided to turn America's own market into Japan's vital space. Indeed, the penetration of Japanese imports (cars, electronic goods, even services) into the US market would have been impossible without a nod and a wink from Washington's policy makers. Fourthly, the successor of the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, was also enlisted as a further boost for Japanese industry. A useful by-product of that murderous escapade was the industrialisation of South East Asia, which further strengthened Japan by providing it, at long last, with the missing link: a commercial vital zone in close proximity.
My argument here is not that the Cold Warriors in the Pentagon and elsewhere were pursuing the New Dealers' Global Plan. While not innocent of the idea, as the heavy involvement of military leaders in the Marshall Plan reveals, they naturally had their own geo-political agenda. The point is that, while the generals, the Pentagon and the State Department were putting together their Cold War strategic plans, Washington’s economic planners approached the wars in Korea and Vietnam from a quite distinct perspective.
At one level they saw these wars as crucial in maintaining a continual supply of cheap raw materials to Europe and Japan. At another level, however, they recognised a great chance to bring into being, through war financing, the vital economic space that Mao had robbed ‘their’ Japan of. It is indeed impossible to overstate the point raised earlier that the South East Asian ‘tiger economies’ (Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, which were soon to become for Japan what France and Spain were to Germany) would never have emerged without these two US-financed wars, leaving the US as the only sizeable market for Japanese industrial output.
In retrospect, by the standards of large scale human design, the Global Plan was a grand success. Not only did the end of World War II not plunge the United States, and the rest of the West, into a fresh recession, as it was feared that the winding down of war spending would do, but instead the world experienced a period of legendary growth. The figure below offers a glimpse of these golden years. The developed nations, victors and losers of the preceding war alike, grew and grew and grew.
The Europeans and Japan, starting from a much lower level than the United States, grew faster and made up for lost ground while, at the same time, the United States continued along a path of healthy growth. However, this was not a simple case of a spontaneously growing world economy. There was a Global Plan behind it, one that involved a large scale, and impressively ambitious, effort to overcome and to supplant the multiple, conflicting imperialisms that had characterised the world political economy until World War II.
While the Global Plan was put together to establish and bolster American hegemony, the United States was happy to pay the price of intentionally bolstering foreign demand levels and capital accumulation, in Japan and Germany particularly. To maintain American prosperity and growth, Washington purposefully dished out part of the global 'pie' to its protégés: While the United States lost almost 20% of its share of world income during the era of the Global Plan, Germany saw its share rise by 18% and Japan by a stupendous 156.7%.
Was this a form of internationalist altruism at work? Of course not. At the heart of the New Dealers' thinking, from 1945 onwards, was an intense anxiety regarding the inherent instability of a single-currency, single-zone global system. Indeed, nothing concentrated their minds like the memory of 1929 and the ensuing Depression. If a crisis of similar severity were to strike while global capitalism had a single leg to stand on (the dollar), and in view of the significant growth rates of the Soviet Union (an economy not susceptible to contagion from capitalist crises), the future seemed bleak. Thus, these same minds sought a safer future for capitalism in the formation of an interdependent network comprising three industrial-monetary zones, in which the dollar-zone would be predominant (reflecting the centrality of American finance, and its military defence of the realm in the sphere of securing inputs from the Third World). To them, this Global Plan was the optimal mechanism design for the rest of the 20th century and beyond.
In this context, the notion that European integration sprang out of a European urge to create some bulwark against American dominance appears to be nothing more than the European Union’s ‘creation myth’. Equally, the idea that the Japanese economy grew inexorably against the interests of the United States does not survive serious scrutiny. However strange this may seem now, behind the process of European integration and of Japanese export-oriented industrialisation lies a prolonged and sustained effort by Washington policy makers to plan and nurture it, despite the detrimental effects on America's balance of trade that the rise of Europe and Japan eventually entailed.
The simple lesson that the Global Plan can teach us today is that world capitalism's finest hour came when the policy makers of the strongest political union on the planet decided to play an hegemonic role; a role that involved not only the exercise of military and political might but also a massive redistribution of surpluses across the globe that the market mechanism is utterly incapable of effecting.
Similarly, the market mechanism is utterly incapable of effecting the changes required to mitigate global heating. Quite the opposite.
A remarkable opportunity?
As with debt relief for the poorer nations so it is with addressing the Climate Crisis. It is no longer simply a question of getting a bunch of rich western governments to agree a deal, as Larry Elliott suggests: it now requires the involvement of private sector creditors, such as BlackRock, and Beijing. In the stand off between the US and China, as the two biggest global emissions polluters, and with India the third, the struggle for global influence takes on a new significance, hegemony in contention, as it were, presents, perhaps unexpectedly, a remarkable opportunity.
Barbara Finamore is a senior director at the Natural Resources Defense Council and author of
Will China Save the Planet?
Barbara Finamore contributed to the 2020 Guardian's environment pledge in this Opinion piece (Mon 5 Oct 2020) for the Guardian Journal published in the print edition on Tuesday 6 October 2020.
Barbara Finamore writes under the headline and subheading:
What China's plan for net-zero emissions by 2060 means for the climateThough the country is a huge polluter, it leads the world in the clean technologies that could make this feasible
When I first moved to China in 1990, winter meant coal. The moment Beijing turned on the municipal heating system, our faces would become covered with soot. People stockpiled loose coal in huge piles outside their homes for heating and cooking. I could see the smokestacks of four large coal power plants and the country’s largest steel mill in the distance. China’s addiction to this most carbon-intensive of fossil fuels made the prospect of a country dedicated to fighting climate change seem fanciful.
Now, in perhaps the most important news of 2020 that you may have missed, China has stepped up on its own as a climate leader. On 22 September, President Xi Jinping announced in a video address to the UN general assembly that China would aim to become “carbon neutral” before 2060 – Beijing’s first long-term target. In so doing it joins the European Union, the UK and dozens of other countries in adopting mid-century climate targets, as called for by the Paris agreement.
And not a moment too soon. China is currently responsible for 28% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, more than the United States and the European Union combined. As a practical matter, becoming “carbon neutral” means that China will have to reduce its carbon emissions by as much as 90%, and offset the rest through natural systems or technologies that absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than they emit. If successful, this effort alone will shave around 0.2C to 0.3C from global warming projections, making Xi’s pledge the world’s single largest climate commitment to date.
Achieving this goal will be a colossal undertaking for a nation that is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. China burns half the world’s coal and is still building new coal power plants, though they are increasingly uneconomic and unnecessary. It also burns coal directly in factories that produce half the world’s steel and cement. One notable aspect of my smog-filled days in Beijing was the virtual absence of private cars – the streets were mostly filled with bicycles. China has since become the largest global automobile market, as well as the world’s largest importer of crude oil.
But here’s the paradox: it also leads the world in the very clean technologies that make Xi’s plans feasible. China is by far the largest investor, producer and consumer of renewable energy. One out of every three solar panels and wind turbines in the world are in China. It is also home to nearly half the world’s electric passenger vehicles, 98% of its electric buses and 99% of its electric two-wheelers. The country leads in the production of batteries to power electric vehicles and store renewable energy on power grids. By 2025, its battery facilities will be almost double the capacity of the rest of the world combined.
China’s clean energy drive and economies of scale have driven down the once-exorbitant cost of these technologies to the point where they are threatening their fossil fuel competitors everywhere. Large-scale solar photovoltaics and onshore wind projects are now the cheapest form of new power generation for at least two-thirds of the world’s population. It will soon be cheaper to build new solar and wind plants than to continue to operate existing coal plants. The cost of electric cars and buses continues to plunge, and they will be as cheap as their polluting alternatives within the next five years.
To reach carbon neutrality, China will need to rapidly accelerate all that it has done so far. It must double its annual investment in solar and triple or quadruple its investment in wind. It will also need to channel enormous efforts toward developing the next generation of expensive but potentially transformative technologies such as green hydrogen, energy storage and offshore wind. China is already in a race with the EU to take the lead here. These efforts will transform our global climate fight by helping to make essential next-generation climate technologies available and affordable in every country.
Can we trust these ambitious promises? I think so. China has a track record of underpromising and overdelivering on its climate commitments. It’s highly unlikely that Xi would have made the announcement himself in such a major international forum unless it was supported by strong evidence that the target is achievable. The timing was also clearly designed to take advantage of the lack of US climate leadership at the international level – and perhaps to preempt pressure to act on climate from a new US administration. But we shouldn’t forget that Xi’s words were also intended for domestic consumption. It sends a powerful domestic signal to everyone in China that addressing climate change is a top priority.
China’s central government has some built-in advantages over the EU and US. It has the capacity for long-term industrial planning, backed by massive investments and supportive policies. It can, and will, direct every provincial governor and city mayor to develop their own long-term climate plans.
But central government can expect stiff resistance from many of the powerful vested interests whose cooperation is most needed. Local governments, still dependent on the fossil fuel economy for jobs and tax revenue, continue to build new coal plants at an alarming rate, despite central government efforts to slow construction down. China’s power industry is calling for even more coal, while the State Grid Corporation, the world’s largest utility company, has long resisted crucial power sector reforms. China’s slumping economy has also strengthened the hand of those calling for more carbon-intensive stimulus projects.
Although the news from the UN may have been quickly drowned out by remarkable developments elsewhere in the world, it represents a giant step towards avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of global climate breakdown. It’s a dramatic shift from 30 years ago, when I watched first-hand as representatives from China and 40 other developing countries crafted a negotiation strategy that would relieve them of any binding obligations.
Like other countries that have made similar pledges, China must now develop detailed implementation plans and policies. The upcoming 14th five-year plan (2021-25) is a critical place to start. After four years of inaction and regression from the world’s other superpower, Xi’s announcement should provide some much needed momentum to the international climate negotiations. The planet deserves nothing less.
Barbara Finamore - book talk
This video on YouTube comes from the Oxford Martin School channel and documents a joint book talk with The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School.Now that Trump has turned the United States into a global climate outcast, will China take the lead in saving our planet from environmental catastrophe? Many signs point to yes. China, the world's largest carbon emitter, is leading a global clean energy revolution, phasing out coal consumption and leading the development of a global system of green finance.But as leading China environmental expert and author of Will China Save the Planet? Barbara Finamore will explain in this talk, it is anything but easy. The fundamental economic and political challenges that China faces in addressing its domestic environmental crisis threaten to derail its low-carbon energy transition. Yet there is reason for hope. China's leaders understand that transforming the world's second largest economy from one dependent on highly polluting heavy industry to one focused on clean energy, services and innovation is essential, not only to the future of the planet, but to China's own prosperity.
Q. But what about the abuse of human rights in China?
A. But what about the world's richest 1% causing double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%?
The issue of human rights abuse remains a continuing problem of governance across the world, and is amplified and exacerbated by social injustice and inequality. It is the multiplicity of social and economic inequalities that the present pandemic and the climate crisis has exposed, and will shape the future for us all.
The recent Oxfam report on the discrepancy between the environmental impact of the world's richest 1% and the poorest 50% makes the case that the world's fast-shrinking carbon budget should be used to improve the lot of the world's poorest.
Fiona Harvey, Environment correspondent for the Guardian reports (Mon 21 Sep 2020):
The wealthiest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for the emission of more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015, according to new research.
Carbon dioxide emissions rose by 60% over the 25-year period, but the increase in emissions from the richest 1% was three times greater than the increase in emissions from the poorest half.
The report, compiled by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, warned that rampant overconsumption and the rich world’s addiction to high-carbon transport are exhausting the world’s “carbon budget”.
Such a concentration of carbon emissions in the hands of the rich means that despite taking the world to the brink of climate catastrophe, through burning fossil fuels, we have still failed to improve the lives of billions, said Tim Gore, head of policy, advocacy and research at Oxfam International.
“The global carbon budget has been squandered to expand the consumption of the already rich, rather than to improve humanity,” he told the Guardian. “A finite amount of carbon can be added to the atmosphere if we want to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. We need to ensure that carbon is used for the best.”
The richest 10% of the global population, comprising about 630 million people, were responsible for about 52% of global emissions over the 25-year period, the study showed.
Globally, the richest 10% are those with incomes above about $35,000 (£27,000) a year, and the richest 1% are people earning more than about $100,000.
Carbon dioxide emissions accumulate in the atmosphere, causing heating, and temperature rises of more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels would cause widespread harm to natural systems. That accumulation gives the world a finite carbon budget of how much carbon dioxide it is safe to produce, which scientists warn will be exhausted within a decade at current rates.
If left unchecked, in the next decade the carbon emissions of the world’s richest 10% would be enough to raise levels above the point likely to increase temperatures by 1.5C, even if the whole of the rest of the world cut their emissions to zero immediately, according to Monday’s report.
Oxfam argues that continuing to allow the rich world to emit vastly more than those in poverty is unfair. While the world moves towards renewable energy and phases out fossil fuels, any emissions that continue to be necessary during the transition would be better used in trying to improve poor people’s access to basic amenities.
“The best possible, morally defensible purpose is for all humanity to live a decent life, but [the carbon budget] has been used up by the already rich, in getting richer,” said Gore.
He pointed to transport as one of the key drivers of growth in emissions, with people in rich countries showing an increasing tendency to drive high-emitting cars, such as SUVs, and take more flights. Oxfam wants more taxes on high-carbon luxuries, such as a frequent-flyer levy, to funnel investment into low-carbon alternatives and improving the lot of the poor.
“This isn’t about people who have one family holiday a year, but people who are taking long-haul flights every month – it’s a fairly small group of people,” said Gore.
While the coronavirus crisis caused a temporary dip in emissions, the overall impact on the carbon budget is likely to be negligible, according to Gore, as emissions have rebounded after lockdowns around the world. However, the experience of dealing with the pandemic should make people more aware of the need to try to avert future catastrophe, he said.
Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, said: “This is a stark illustration of the deep injustice at the heart of the climate crisis. Those who are so much more exposed and vulnerable to its impacts have done least to contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing it. The UK has a moral responsibility here, not only because of its disproportionately high historic emissions, but as hosts of next year’s critical UN climate summit. We need to go further and faster in reaching net zero.”
World governments are meeting virtually for the 75th UN general assembly this week, with the climate crisis high on the agenda. Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, is expected to set out his vision for the next UN climate summit, called Cop26 and to be convened in Glasgow in November 2021, after the coronavirus crisis forced a year’s delay to the event.
As host nation, the UK government is being urged to set out its plans for reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, a target enshrined in law last year, but for which there are still few national policies.
Collectivity versus inequality
In today's Guardian newspaper, Wednesday 7 October, in the print version, there are three stories on page 33, part of the Guardian's Financial section.
The top of the page story reports on the IMF chief warning the UK chancellor against over-hasty withdrawal of support.
Larry Elliot's story (Tue 6 Oct 2020) covers the speech delivered via streaming video, by Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund.
Re:LODE Radio has chosen to quote the last paragraphs in this story. Larry Elliott writes under the headline subheading:
IMF chief says world economy faces long ascent from Covid crisis
Kristalina Georgieva warns against premature withdrawal of government measures
“The IMF in June projected a severe global GDP contraction in 2020. The picture today is less dire,” Georgieva said. “We now estimate that developments in the second and third quarters were somewhat better than expected, allowing for a small upward revision to our global forecast for 2020. And we continue to project a partial and uneven recovery in 2021.
“We have reached this point, largely because of extraordinary policy measures that put a floor under the world economy.”Governments, Georgieva said, had provided about $12tn (£9tn) in fiscal support to households and firms, but some had been able to do more than others. “For advanced economies, it is whatever it takes,” she said. “Poorer nations strive for whatever is possible.”The chancellor is scaling back support for the UK economy at the end of this month, when the furlough scheme is replaced by the less generous job support scheme. He told the Conservative party conference this week that he had a “sacred responsibility” to balance the books.Georgieva said governments should avoid a premature withdrawal of policy support. “Where the pandemic persists, it is critical to maintain lifelines across the economy, to firms and workers – such as tax deferrals, credit guarantees, cash transfers, and wage subsidies,” she said.She identified the other priorities for policymakers as: to defend people’s health; to prepare their countries for the structural change triggered by the pandemic; and to deal with debt, especially in poor countries.“The global economy is coming back from the depths of the crisis. But this calamity is far from over. All countries are now facing what I would call ‘the long ascent’ – a difficult climb that will be long, uneven, and uncertain. And prone to setbacks,” she said.“As we embark on this ascent, we are all joined by a single rope, and we are only as strong as the weakest climbers. They will need help on the way up.”Georgieva said there was a risk of severe economic scarring from higher unemployment, bankruptcies and the disruption of education.The hit to both human and physical capital would reduce the capacity of the global economy and result in output remaining well below the IMF’s pre-crisis projections for years to come. “For almost all countries, this will be a setback to the improvement of living standards,” she said.Sacred responsibility?
Parts of the midlands, the north west and north east of England have been facing the greatest restrictions in coming out of lockdown. This is probably because relaxing lockdown measures to get the economy functioning again was timed in a way that suited London and the south east of England. As lockdown was eased nationally, the transmission of Covid-19 was just beginning to take off in the poorer regions of England. The "sacred responsibility" to secure the economy and livelihoods for all the people of England and the countries of the United Kingdom is taking second place to balancing the books.
"Nobody asked the chancellor of the exchequer whether more Spitfires could be afforded in the summer of 1940."
Meanwhile . . .
The two other stories on this page are related and covered by Rupert Neate and Jasper Jolly. The stories run under the headline:
World's richest have done 'extremely well' in pandemic
Rupert Neate, Wealth correspondent for the Guardian covers the story (Wed 7 Oct 2020) under the headline and subheading:
Billionaires' wealth rises to $10.2 trillion amid Covid crisis
Super-rich increase fortunes by more than a quarter during market turmoil
Rupert Neate writes:
The world’s billionaires “did extremely well” during the coronavirus pandemic, growing their already-huge fortunes to a record high of $10.2tn (£7.8tn).A report by Swiss bank UBS found that billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes.The report found that billionaires had mostly benefited from betting on the recovery of global stock markets when they were at their nadir during the global lockdowns in March and April. UBS said billionaires’ wealth had hit “a new high, surpassing the previous peak of $8.9tn reached at the end of 2017”. The number of billionaires has also hit a new high of 2,189, up from 2,158 in 2017.Josef Stadler, the head of UBS’s global family office department that deals directly with the world’s richest people, said: “Billionaires did extremely well during the Covid crisis, not only [did] they ride the storm to the downside, but also gained up on the upside [as stock markets rebounded].”Stadler said the super-rich were able to benefit from the crisis because they had “the stomach” to buy more company shares when equity markets around the world were crashing. Global stock markets have since rebounded making up much of the losses. The shares in some technology companies – which are often owned by billionaires – have risen very sharply.Stadler said billionaires typically have “significant risk appetite” and were confident to gamble some of their considerable fortunes.Luke Hilyard, executive director of the High Pay Centre, a thinktank that focuses on excessive pay, said the “extreme wealth concentration is an ugly phenomenon from a moral perspective, but it’s also economically and socially destructive”.“Billionaire wealth equates to a fortune almost impossible to spend over multiple lifetimes of absolute luxury,” Hilyard said. “Anyone accumulating riches on this scale could easily afford to raise the pay of the employees who generate their wealth, or contribute a great deal more in taxes to support vital public services, while remaining very well rewarded for whatever successes they’ve achieved.“The findings from the UBS report showing that the super-rich are getting even richer are a sign that capitalism isn’t working as it should.”Stadler said the fact that billionaire wealth had increased so much at a time when hundreds of millions of people around the world are struggling could lead to public and political anger. “Is there a risk they may be singled out by society? Yes,” he said. “Are they aware of it? Yes.”Stadler has previously warned that the yawning inequality gap between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.Billionaires’ fortunes have swelled by $4.2bn (or 70%) in the three years since Stadler warned about the threat of a global uprising against the super-rich. “We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”The world’s current super-rich people hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the US Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century, when families such as the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts controlled vast fortunes.The UBS report did not rank the fortunes of the world’s wealth, but the richest person on the planet is Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, with $189bn. Bezos’s wealth has increased by $74bn so far this year, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index, due to the surge in Amazon’s share price as more people turned to the company. One of the few women is the cosmetics entrepreneur, Kylie Jenner.Elon Musk, the maverick founder of electric car company Tesla, has made the most money so far this year with his fortune increasing by $76bn to $103bn.UBS said many billionaires had quickly and generously donated some of their wealth to help with the fight against Covid-19 and the financial impact of lockdowns on families.“Our research has identified 209 billionaires who have publicly committed a total equivalent to $7.2bn from March to June 2020,” the report said. “They have reacted quickly, in a way that’s akin to disaster relief, providing unrestricted grants to allow grantees to decide how best to use funds.”The research shows that UK billionaires donated much less than those from other countries. In the US, 98 billionaires donated a total of $4.5bn, in China 12 billionaires gave $679m, and in Australia just two billionaires donated $324m. But in the UK, nine billionaires have donated just $298m.Is it a tendency of the UK's super rich to always race to the bottom?
The third story on Page 33 of the Guardian today, Wednesday 7 October 2020, concerns 37 MEP's from the European Parliament writing to the richest man in the world Jeff Bezos.
The cross party group of 37 MEP's sent a letter to Jeff Bezos has demanding information from the online retailer Amazon on its monitoring of trade union activists and politicians, after the company had deleted job postings describing unions as "threats".
It is a human right, according to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 23:
- Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
- Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
- Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and her/his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
- Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of her/his interests.
Amnesty International UK
Amnesty International UK has this page with a listing - A summary of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Amazon spy claims
Jasper Jolly writes (Wed 7 Oct 2020) under the headline and subheading:
EU lawmakers ask Jeff Bezos whether Amazon spies on politiciansConcern over job ads referring to monitoring of ‘hostile leaders’ and union ‘threats’A cross-party group of MEPs has written to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, demanding information on the online retailer’s monitoring of trade union activists and politicians in response to deleted job postings that described unions as “threats”.The letter, from 37 members of the European parliament, said they were concerned Amazon deliberately targeted workers seeking to organise, and also questioned whether the company had “spied” on politicians.Trade unions last week called for a European commission investigation into whether Amazon’s monitoring of workers was legal, after two job posts on the US company’s website advertised “intelligence analyst” roles that referred to “labor organizing threats against the company”. The advertisements, aimed at candidates with law enforcement or military experience, also mentioned the monitoring of “hostile political leaders”.The posts grouped organised labour with hate groups and terrorism, two illegal activities, and listed French and Spanish language skills among the preferred qualifications, suggesting European workers could be targets.Amazon deleted the posts after Vice News first reported on them. A spokeswoman said: “The job post was not an accurate description of the role – it was made in error and has since been corrected.”The letter to Bezos, coordinated by Leïla Chaibi, a French MEP from the leftwing La France Insoumise party, expressed concerns about “increasing warnings about your company’s anti-union policy”. The MEPs, mainly from leftwing and green parties, represent constituencies across the EU, including in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.The letter said: “We are concerned about whether European trade unions, as well as local, national or European elected representatives, are affected by this approach to ‘threat monitoring’, which aims to repress collective action and trade union organising.”Amazon is one of the largest private-sector employers in the world, with more than a million employees catering for the ever-increasing demand for online shopping that has been boosted during the pandemic.The share price gains made by Amazon have swelled Bezos’s personal wealth by $79bn (£61bn) during 2020 to $189bn, making him the world’s richest person, according to Bloomberg.The MEPs wrote: “The exponential growth of Amazon’s profits since the beginning of the global pandemic does not allow you to exonerate yourself from respecting fundamental legal principles.”Trade unions have warned repeatedly of a pattern of opposition to workers organising. Amazon workers’ rights have come under particular scrutiny during the pandemic after multiple coronavirus outbreaks in warehouses. Amazon last week belatedly reported that almost 20,000 US workers were presumed to have caught the virus.Chaibi said it was “very, very surprising” that Amazon had referred to terrorists, union organisers and politicians in the same sentence. She added that Amazon workers from around the EU and beyond had repeatedly told hearings that they felt pressure against unionising.“They don’t speak the same language but they all use the same words,” she said. “They are afraid of losing their jobs.”Christy Hoffman, the general secretary of the UNI Global Union, which represents service workers, said the job adverts revealed a “deep-seated […] anti-union ideology” at Amazon.An Amazon spokesperson said: “We already have works councils and employee bodies at Amazon. The fact is we already offer excellent pay, excellent benefits and excellent opportunities for career growth, all while working in a safe, modern work environment. At Amazon, these benefits and opportunities come with the job, as does the ability to communicate directly with the leadership of the company.“We encourage anyone to compare our overall pay, benefits and workplace environment to other retailers and major employers in the communities we operate in. For us, it will always be about providing a great employment experience through a direct connection with our employees and working together as a team to provide a world-class customer experience.”Vice News breaking the story . . .
Gerald Bryson, left, join workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, N.Y., protesting conditions in the company's warehouse, Monday, March 30, 2020, in New York. Workers say Amazon is not doing enough to to keep workers safe from the spread of COVID-19. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
Leaked Amazon memo details plan to smear fired warehouse organizer
Paul Blest on Vice News,covered a story back in April (02 April 2020) this year when Amazon had fired an employee, the warehouse worker Christian Smalls, after he led a walkout of a number of employees at a Staten Island distribution warehouse. Amazon says he was fired for violating a company-imposed 14-day quarantine after he came into contact with an employee who tested positive for the coronavirus.Smalls says the employee who tested positive came into contact with many other workers for longer periods of time before her test came back. He claims he was singled out after pleading with management to sanitize the warehouse and be more transparent about the number of workers who were sick.
This is the report by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai that Vice ran, and that broke the story (01 September 2020), and referenced in Jasper Jolly's Guardian report.
Amazon is looking to hire two intelligence analysts to track "labor organizing threats" within the company.The company recently posted two job listings for analysts that can keep an eye on sensitive and confidential topics "including labor organizing threats against the company." Amazon is looking to hire an "Intelligence Analyst" and a "Sr Intelligence Analyst" for its Global Security Operations’ (GSO) Global Intelligence Program (GIP), the team that's responsible for physical and corporate security operations such as insider threats and industrial espionage.The job ads list several kinds of threats, such as "protests, geopolitical crises, conflicts impacting operations," but focuses on "organized labor" in particular, mentioning it three times in one of the listings.Amazon has historically been hostile to workers attempting to form a union or organize any kind of collective action. Last year, an Amazon spokesperson accused unions of exploiting Prime Day "to raise awareness to their cause" and increase membership dues. Earlier this year, the company fired Christian Smalls, a Black employee who led a protest at a fulfillment center in New York over Amazon's inadequate safety measures in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. During a meeting with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, company executives discussed plans to smear Smalls calling him "not smart, or articulate."These job listings show Amazon sees labor organizing as one of the biggest threats to its existence.After this story was published, Amazon deleted the job listings and company spokesperson Maria Boschetti said in an email that "the job post was not an accurate description of the role— it was made in error and has since been corrected." The spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions about the alleged mistake. The job listing, according to Amazon's own job portal, had been up since January 6, 2020.Dania Rajendra, the Director of the Athena Coalition, an alliance of dozens of grassroots labor groups that organize amazon workers, criticized the listing."Workers, especially Black workers, have been telling us all for months that Amazon is targeting them for speaking out. This job description is proof that Amazon intends to continue on this course," Rajendra told Motherboard in a statement. "The public deserves to know whether Amazon will continue to fill these positions, even if they’re no longer publicly posted."On Monday, the Open Markets Institute, a nonprofit that studies monopolies, published a report on Amazon's employee surveillance efforts, claiming that these practices "create a harsh and dehumanizing working environment that produces a constant state of fear, as well as physical and mental anguish."After a week of the jobs being posted online, 71 people have applied to the Intelligence Analyst position, and 24 people to the Sr Intelligence Analyst job, according to Linkedin. The first job was posted in the Amazon Jobs portal in January, the second job on July 21, according to the company’s site.UPDATE Sept. 1, 12:04 p.m. ET: Shortly after this story was published, Amazon removed the listings from its job portal.UPDATE Sept. 1, 2:48 p.m. ET: this story was updated to include Amazon’s comment.Lauren Kaori Gurley contributed reporting.When it comes to identifying where we will find the abuse of human rights, come to find out it's happening everywhere. That's why there is a UN Charter!
Young dad torn apart from family
This Amnesty International UK appeal on behalf of Yiliyasijiang who is believed to have been taken to a Chinese ‘re-education camp’.
Yiliyasijiang and his pregnant wife were at uni together in Egypt when he went missing in July 2017.He was one of about 200 Uyghur Muslims rounded up by the Egyptian government for the Chinese authorities. Three weeks later his wife Mairinisha gave birth to their second child.Mairinisha now lives in Turkey with their two young children and is struggling with grief every day.‘My husband should be released as soon as possible. We need a warm and complete family. Our children need their father. I will never give up until we can be reunited.’Mairinisha AbuduainiShe believes that Yiliyasijiang was sent back to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China, where 1 million people are locked up in secret ‘re-education camps’. Most of them are Muslim.Those sent to the camps may face torture and other ill treatment. They don’t have a trial or any help from lawyers. They can’t even challenge the decision.
Civil society . . .
While the role of China is crucial in the any future solution to both the current health and climate crisis, the health of civil society is equally necessary in effecting future action to transform the politics of;
"business as usual".
Along the LODE Zone Line in India, the erosion of civil society includes a direct assault by the Indian government on the work of Amnesty International India.
Responding to Amnesty International India’s bank accounts being frozen by the Enforcement Directorate, an investigative agency of the Government in India, Julie Verhaar, Acting Secretary General of Amnesty International said:“This is an egregious and shameful act by the Indian Government, which forces us to cease the crucial human rights work of Amnesty International India for now. However, this does not mark the end of our firm commitment to, and engagement in, the struggle for human rights in India. We will be working resolutely to determine how Amnesty International can continue to play our part within the human rights movement in India for years to come.“The Amnesty movement is very proud of the vital work carried out by our outstanding colleagues in India regardless of the risks they faced, including their unequivocal calls for accountability for the actions of the authorities during the Delhi riots and in Jammu and Kashmir and their work on gender based violence."Sadly, this enormously important work standing up for victims has been met with the heavy-handed tactics that Indian civil society has become increasingly familiar with – part of the government’s drive to silence critical voices and stoke a climate of fear."“The staff of Amnesty India have shown great dignity in the face of a concerted and vicious smear campaign of spurious allegations, raids by various investigative agencies, malicious media leaks, and intimidation without an iota of credible evidence of wrongdoing. No laws have been broken.“It is a dismal day when a country of India’s stature, a rising global power and a member of the UN Human Rights Council, with a constitution which commits to human rights and whose national human rights movements have influenced the world, so brazenly seeks to silence those who pursue accountability and justice. As many of our colleagues have lost their jobs this week thanks to the actions of the Government of India, we will look for ways to continue our support to them as we continue to call on the Government to end its shameful crackdown on those who stand up for human rights of Indians.”
Julie Verhaar, Acting Secretary General of Amnesty International
Simon Tisdall provides an Opinion on this in the Observer Foreign Affairs Commentary (Sun 4 Oct 2020) under the headline and subheading:
Amnesty specialises in hard truths. No wonder Modi froze it out of India
Forced shutdown of the human rights group will only increase international scrutiny of systemic mis-governance
Simon Tisdall writes:
Speaking truth to power has ever been a fraught and dangerous occupation, as Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was recently reminded after he narrowly survived a poisoning plot he says was directed from the Kremlin.
Uncounted Kurdish activists languish in jail for challenging Turkey’s modern-day sultan. In Iran, human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh is punished mercilessly for championing women’s causes. In Zimbabwe, Catholic clergy who condemn abuses by Emmerson Mnangagwa’s regime are accused of treason.When China jailed Ren Zhiqiang, a noted communist party critic who ridiculed emperor-president Xi Jinping as a “clown”, much of the world shrugged. What else to expect from an authoritarian dictatorship sustained by gulags and mass surveillanceBut when supposed democracies behave in similar fashion, alarm bells ring. This is now the case with India. Its rightwing populist prime minister, Narendra Modi, has erected an oppressive, Hindu majoritarian power vertical, where inclusive, secular traditions trailblazed by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru once proudly stood.Like Russia, Turkey, Iran and Zimbabwe, India has elected leaders, a representative parliament, independent judges, and a lawful constitution. And like them, this increasingly resembles a deceptive facade. Under Modi, the “world’s largest democracy” has become an eastern house of cards, dominated by Hindu nationalist knaves and jokers.Discussing Modi’s landslide election victory last year, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra said this would-be guru, who stresses his humble origins, had seduced India with envy and hate, exploiting inequality, division and grievance against elites in the style of demagogues the world over. Modi’s method, Mishra wrote, was “to titillate a fearful and angry population with the scapegoating of minorities, refugees, leftists, liberals and others while accelerating predatory forms of capitalism… He has licensed his supporters to explicitly hate a range of people from perfidious Pakistanis and Indian Muslims to their ‘anti-national’ Indian appeasers.”The latest manifestation of Modi’s intolerant ethnic-religious supremacism came last week with his government’s bid to silence a leading “appeaser” – Amnesty International, the global advocacy group that has made a habit of bravely speaking truth to power.Amnesty came into being in 1961 after an English lawyer, Peter Benenson, wrote an impassioned article in the Observer, The Forgotten Prisoners, highlighting the plight of people around the world jailed for peacefully expressing their views. The organisation has since helped secure the release of thousands of “prisoners of conscience”.Amnesty announced last week that it had been forced to shut down operations in India after the government arbitrarily froze its banks accounts – in apparent connection with an inquiry into alleged financial misconduct. In truth, the move was a crude bid to stop Amnesty’s reporting on rising human rights violations suffered by Muslims and other minorities since Modi first took power in 2014. It marked the culmination of a prolonged campaign of harassment and intimidation similar to that faced by other independent civil rights groups, journalists, activists and lawyers.If Modi hopes to stifle Amnesty India’s criticism, he will be disappointed. On the contrary, the shutdown is likely to increase international scrutiny of systemic mis-governance. Let’s start with Kashmir.Modi imposed direct rule on the state last year in what amounted to a constitutional coup. The ensuing draconian lockdown, detailed by Amnesty, was lifted, then reimposed as Covid-19 spread. The Indian army maintains half-a-million troops in Kashmir, thousands of arbitrary detentions continue amid sporadic violence, and internet and media restrictions, and limits on access, ensure the majority Muslim population remains largely isolated.Economic uplift and new investment promised by Modi have not materialised. “Normalcy” has not returned. Meanwhile, an officially sanctioned programme of Hindu settlement is under way, prompting accusations of colonialism. Kashmir, it is claimed, is the “new Palestine”.A scathing Amnesty report about “multiple human rights abuses” committed by police, and inflammatory hate speeches made by Modi’s political allies before and during communal riots in Delhi in February, is also worthy of broader attention.Dozens of Muslims died in the riots. And yet, Amnesty said, “six months on, there has not been a single investigation into the role of the Delhi police.” It condemned “ongoing state-sponsored impunity”.Amnesty has also focused attention on the daily violence, harassment and discrimination faced by women and girls. A rape is reported every 15 minutes in India. Lethal gang-rapes of two young Dalit women in Uttar Pradesh provoked nationwide protests last week.In 2018, Modi – previously accused of misogyny – mapped out a “women first” national strategy. But like many of his grand wheezes, it has not amounted to much.There have been some advances, such as expanded rural electrification and banking, and cooking-gas and toilet-building schemes. But Modi’s reign has not brought India the rapid growth, national security and enhanced global status he pledged six years ago.Unemployment rose sharply after he was elected. His 2016 currency reform was disastrous, as has been his handling of the pandemic. And there have been recent armed clashes with Pakistan and China, with India coming off worst on both occasions. Bizarrely, Modi is sending tanks to the Himalayas. It may be an uphill battle.Internationally, India continues to punch below its weight. As an ostensibly likeminded partner for the west, its present leadership is a big disappointment.Donald Trump may approve of “strongman” Modi’s divisive “new India” rhetoric and disdain for civil rights. Joe Biden will not. Kamala Harris, Biden’s Indian American running mate, has been highly critical over Kashmir. Many in Europe have not forgotten his woeful record as chief minister of Gujarat.The way things are going, it’s uncertain whether India, once an outstanding role model for the post-colonial developing world, can still be deemed a functioning democracy at all.
This is chilling. This is grim. This is Modi.
This is modern India . . .
Hannah Ellis-Petersen South Asia correspondent reports for the Guardian (Wed 30 Sep 2020) under the headline and subheading:India’s BJP leaders acquitted over Babri mosque demolitionCourt clears 32 men of inciting clashes that led to destruction of site by Hindu rioters in 1992A special court has acquitted all senior figures in India’s ruling party of their role in the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu rioters, in a further court victory for the Hindu nationalist government over the bitterly disputed holy site.All 32 men, including the former deputy prime minister LK Advani, three leaders from the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and a sitting BJP politician, were cleared of inciting the violence in 1992 that led to a 16th-century mosque in the city of Ayodhya being torn down by an armed Hindu nationalist mob.The mob, which included members of the BJP and the militant Hindu nationalist organisation the RSS, alleged the mosque stood on the ruins of a Hindu temple built for Lord Ram.The destruction of the building led to religious riots in India, which killed about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. The incident is a pivotal moment in the deep fracturing of India along communal lines.Bringing the 28-year saga to a close, the judge ruled that the demolition of the mosque had been the spontaneous action of a crowd.“Antisocial elements brought down the structure. The accused leaders tried to stop these people,” said Surendra Kumar Yadav, presiding at a special court hearing in the Indian city of Lucknow.There had originally been 49 people named in the case, but 17 died over the course of almost three decades of proceedings. Twenty-six of the 32 named in the case were present for the ruling, at which there was tight security. However, Advani, 92, was told to stay home because of Covid risks.A commission spent 17 years investigating the demolition and several witnesses had testified that it had been preplanned, even rehearsed, and that professionals had been brought to the site to ensure its destruction.The verdict proved divisive. A spokesperson for the BJP said they welcomed Wednesday’s verdict as a “vindication” but some politicians, including Sitaram Yechury from the Communist party of India (Marxist), said it was “a complete travesty of justice”.This is the second court ruling on the contested Ayodhya site that plays into the Hindu nationalist agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. For more than a decade the BJP had made the reclamation of Ayodhya for Hindus a keystone policy.In November, India’s supreme court awarded the bitterly contested mosque site to Hindus, paving the way for a new temple dedicated to Lord Ram. In August, Modi presided over a ceremony laying the first stone for the construction of the temple and hailed the “dawn of a new era”.Kapil Komireddi, the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India, said the evidentiary burden of the case was very high and it was therefore “not surprising” the authorities had failed to meet it.“The mosque’s destruction was the culmination of a campaign that sought to bring it down anyway,” he said. “The intent to raze it was always present; the case was about the method deployed to bring it down.“The men who mobilised Hindus against Muslims were then treated by the state as villains. Now they are exonerated and treated as heroes. Their journey is one measure of India’s transformation into an awful majoritarian state.”Iqbal Ansari, a petitioner in the Babri case, welcomed the court’s decision. “It’s good that this is now over. Let’s all live in peace. Let there be no fresh trouble of this nature. Hindu and Muslim have always lived in peace in Ayodhya,” he said.However, Zafaryab Jilani, a lawyer for the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, said they would contest the verdict. “This is an erroneous judgment as it is against evidence and against law,” he said.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen, South Asia correspondent for the Guardian, reports on the following day (Thu 1 Oct 2020) on prominent opposition politicians being arrested for political reasons.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen, writes under the headline and subheading:Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi arrested on way to meet Indian rape victim's familyPolice in Uttar Pradesh say former Congress party leader and politician sister were detained to prevent violenceTwo of India’s most prominent opposition leaders have been detained by police as they attempted to visit the family of a young woman who died after an alleged gang rape.
Siblings Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, prominent figures within the Congress party, were accosted and detained by police in the state of Uttar Pradesh as they attempted to make their way to the village of Hathras on foot, after their vehicles had been stopped by officers on the motorway.They were later released by Uttar Pradesh police and taken back to Delhi.Hathras village has become a hotbed of protest this week following the death of a 19-year-old Dalit girl from the village, who was allegedly gang-raped and violently tortured by four neighbours. She died in hospital on Tuesday morning from her injuries.Her family have alleged that she was the victim of a caste-based attack, carried out by upper-caste men because she was a Dalit – the lowest caste.Protests began over allegations that police did not take her case seriously because of her status, and outrage was further inflamed on Wednesday when the family alleged that the police had cremated her body at night against their wishes.A section 144 order, preventing gatherings of more than five people, was imposed on the village. The area was also deemed a coronavirus containment zone, which prevented outsiders from entering, which some opposition leaders claimed was a politically motivated move in an attempt to contain the unrest.On Thursday morning, Priyanka and Rahul Gandi, who had both spoken out in support of the victim’s family, attempted to drive to Hathras to meet the family and protesters. Their car was stopped around 100 miles from the village by police, and so the leaders continued the journey on foot.A wall of police blocked their way, and Rahul Gandhi was pushed to the ground by officers, who then detained him. “I am standing here peacefully. I want to march alone to Hathras. Section 144 talks about public assembly. I will go alone to Hathras. On what basis are you detaining me?” Gandhi was heard saying to the officers as they arrested him.Speaking to the gathered crowds, Rahul said: “Just now police pushed me, lathi charged me and threw me to the ground. I want to ask, can only Modi-ji walk in this country? Can’t a normal person walk? Our vehicle was stopped, so we started walking.”The Congress party leaders had been accused by ministers in the ruling Bharatiya Janata party of stirring up tensions by visiting the village and engaging in “political tourism”.Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said the case had been handed over to a special investigating team and would be quickly sent to trial.A police forensic report released on Thursday stated that the 19-year-old had not been raped, though this did not correspond with the report from the Delhi hospital where she was admitted and the girl’s own account to her family and police before she died.The alleged rape has brought the issue of sexual violence against lower-caste women, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, to the fore. India is the most dangerous country in the world to be a woman and it is women from the lower castes who bear the brunt of the sexual violence. Over the past month, there have been multiple incidents of young Dalit girls being raped and murdered in Uttar Pradesh, which has some of the highest incidents of caste-based violence in India.On Thursday, news broke of a 22-year-old Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh who was allegedly drugged and gang-raped while applying for admission to a local school two days earlier. She too later died from her injuries.Caste and cultureFatima Bhutto reviews the recently published book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson for the Guardian Politics books – a dark study of violence and power (Thu 30 Jul 2020). The subheading for her review states:A renowned writer considers the social divisions in American society, many of them unacknowledged, using comparisons with India and Nazi Germany
Fatima Bhutto writes:
As US president in the 1830s, Andrew Jackson was a feverish advocate of “Indian removal”, the banishing of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands and relocation on desolate reservations. It was Jackson who oversaw the infamous “Trail of Tears”, the forced migration on which more than 20% of the Cherokee people perished. History has been kind to Jackson; it remembers him as Old Hickory, a nation-builder who drove America’s westward expansion and honours him by placing his image on the $20 bill. It doesn’t remember him as the enslaver of 161 people or as a man who went horseback riding with reins carved from the flesh of indigenous Americans. And this is precisely how caste works, according to Isabel Wilkerson: it elevates and empowers members of a “dominant caste” at the perpetual expense of a “subordinate caste”.
The full pageantry of American cruelty is on display in Caste, an expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice. It was while working on her sweeping, Pulitzer prize-winning first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a history of African Americans’ great migration out of the South, that Wilkerson realised she was studying a deeply ingrained caste system that had been in place longer than the nation itself had existed, dating back to colonial Virginia. In Caste, Wilkerson sets out to understand American hierarchy, which she compares with two of the best known caste systems in the world: that of India, the very birthplace of caste, and of Nazi Germany, where caste as a modern experiment in barbarism was ultimately vanquished.BR Ambedkar, the Indian social reformer who fought the scourge of caste all his life, called it “graded inequality”. Caste is a complex system of infinite hierarchy; in Indian society, it divides humans according to varnas, or classes – Brahmins, or priests; warriors; traders; and labourers. Dalits are considered so low that they stand outside the varnas. Caste in India is a fraught and ugly thing, degrading everything in its path.Wilkerson’s is essentially a two-tier caste system – dominant or white and subordinate or non-white. The signal of rank in the American hierarchy is caste’s “faithful servant”, race. Caste and race continually bleed into each other; Wilkerson defines a racist as someone who harms, mocks or institutionalises inferiority on the basis of race. A casteist is someone who upholds or benefits from an ingrained system of hierarchy, never challenging its assumptions. Wilkerson’s choice of examining caste rather than race is a valuable one; this book is not about biology, social history or science, but about structural power. Caste is a “hologram”, she explains, an “insidious” force that operates outside of hatred or intolerance, animated by practice and reflex. It’s not just the far right or trigger-happy cops; even the “good” can be casteists – such as the guest at a Tina Brown book party who asked the then state senator Barack Obama to get them a drink.Since its inception, the American caste system has reinvented itself in terrifying and hideous ways. “Before there was a United States of America,” Wilkerson writes, “there was enslavement. Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations.” Caste is a dark history of the inexhaustible scope of human violence. Enslaved Africans were seen as incapable of injury, worked to the bone and starved, and routinely subjected to torture and rape. The American caste system, like India or Germany’s, was constructed and practised openly; it did not hide its savagery. Even Hitler recorded his admiration for the uniquely American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death”. Wilkerson reminds us that the Nazis, though inspired by America’s race laws, ultimately thought they went too far.Writing of the South, where the purest form of American caste is practised, Wilkerson threads microhistories into the larger, horrendous tapestry. She describes local lynching trees, schools letting out early so children could accompany their parents to watch murder, advertised by newspapers as though they were sporting events. Photographers brought portable printing presses to sell photos of the hanged men as souvenirs. Lynching postcards were a thriving industry at the turn of the 20th century, wish-you-were-here’s of the severed, half-burned head of Will James, lynched in Illinois in 1909 or of burned torsos from Waco. “This is the barbeque we had last night,” a Texan wrote to his mother on the back on one such card.Wilkerson writes about a country trembling with indignation when asked to simply acknowledge that black lives matter. Congress has steadfastly refused even to debate reparations for the descendants of the people they enslaved, refusing for 30 years to pass HR 40, a bill that would do nothing more than table a discussion on the matter. The author unearths much disquieting material in Caste. We know that during the Jim Crow era, black Americans were forced to drink from separate water fountains, but before they were given fountains, Wilkerson writes, they had to drink from horse troughs.Caste as a concept can be dizzying, but Wilkerson makes plain the deeply embedded infrastructure of American hierarchy. Caste is why Robert E Lee, the Confederate general who went to war against his own country for the right to enslave other humans can be honoured by 230 memorials across the land. It is why Alabama was the last state in the union to throw out its law banning interracial marriage, which it did in 2000, 36 years after the Civil Rights Act ended segregation. And it is why Lyndon B Johnson, who signed that act into law, was the last Democrat ever to win the presidency with the majority of the white electorate.Wilkerson ends the book by holding up Nazi Germany as a caste system successfully dismantled. But if Germany is an example of how caste can be ended then India is the understressed counterpoint: the nightmare of how caste can thrive and become more monstrous if casteists are put in charge. There is no mention of the spate of bloody lynchings that has gripped India since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014; no mention of Modi himself, a disciple of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a crypto-fascist casteist organisation allegedly inspired by nazism. This blind spot would not be worth mentioning if it were not for the author’s stated intention to examine India, and the fact that the book is based on a distinctly Indian idea, one that has grown more visible and gruesome in recent years.This is an American reckoning and so it should be. Wilkerson has a deft narrative touch and she activates the history in her pages, bringing all its horror and possibility to light, illuminating both the bygone and the present. Caste joins the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in exposing the edifice of white platinum privilege and exploding how we understand American power and supremacy. It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time.
When it comes to facing the future, acknowledging the past must include Caste, Class, and Race!
History matters!
Many of these issues were picked up in the Information Wrap for the LODE Cargo of Questions and the cargo created in Puri, India, in 1992.
Along the LODE Zone Line other places have required the attention of Amnesty International including Belarus.
Belarus
Free LGBT+ activist Victoria Biran
On 26 September human rights activist Victoria Biran was detained on her way to the Women’s March in Minsk. Two days later she was sentenced to 15 days of administrative detention which she is serving at the infamous detention centre on Akrestina street which has become synonymous with torture. She is a prisoner of conscience and must be released immediately and unconditionally.
Take Action NOW
The situation in Belarus for an opposition struggling under the violence and intimidation of an illegitimate regime is reaching a critical time. Recent focus on events in Belarus by news-media will inevitably be substituted for by stories on the pandemic, as the surge in coronavirus infections continues to rise in regions across the world.Shaun Walker reports for the Guardian from Moscow (Mon 5 Oct 2020) and quotes opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in her recent Skype interview.
Shaun Walker writes under the headline and subheading:
Belarus opposition leader to ask Merkel about upping pressure on LukashenkoSvetlana Tikhanovskaya says in interview that people can no longer live under dictatorship, as more 100,000 protest on SundayThe Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya will meet Angela Merkel in Berlin on Tuesday, as the standoff in Belarus increasingly takes on a geopolitical dimension, becoming one more bone of contention between Russia and the west.Tikhanovskaya said she will ask the German chancellor about “her potential participation as a mediator” in talks between protest leaders and the government of the embattled autocrat Alexander Lukashenko, who has been backed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and has flatly refused to participate in negotiations.“We will discuss ways to put pressure on Belarus, because Belarusians think that only with pressure can we force the authorities into dialogue with the people,” said Tikhanovskaya in a Skype interview from her office in Vilnius. She has been based in the Lithuanian capital since she was forced to flee Belarus after being threatened in a conversation with officials the night after the disputed 9 August election, which saw Lukashenko win a sixth term.“The Belarusian people already consider Lukashenko to be illegitimate,” she said. “When we say negotiations with the government, we are talking about people lower down; some people should take responsibility and start these negotiations to find a way out of the crisis.”Tikhanovskaya, who officially received only 10% of the vote in the election, has declared herself national leader, and wants to be a transitional figure until new, free elections can be held. For the past two months, huge protests have rocked Belarusian cities every weekend, with authorities responding with arrests, violence and threats.On Sunday, more than 100,000 people marched in Belarus’ capital, Minsk, calling for Lukashenko’s resignation, and freedom for political prisoners. Police used water cannon to disperse the crowds, but protesters remained undeterred. One video from the rally showed a group of protesters approaching a water cannon vehicle, opening a hatch on its side and removing pieces from inside. Media reports say the water cannon malfunctioned after that and drove away.Tikhanovskaya has increasingly received support from western politicians, meeting the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in Vilnius last week and Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, before that. After visiting Berlin, she will travel to Bratislava to take part in an international conference.Tikhanovskaya and other protest leaders have been keen to emphasise from the beginning that theirs is not an anti-Russian or pro-EU movement, and has no geopolitical agenda. But as Lukashenko clings on, relying on the support of Russia, his claims that the opposition want to pull Belarus away from Russia may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.In the first two weeks of the protest, the Kremlin appeared to be sitting back and weighing its options, but soon after there was a shift in tone in official statements and on Russian state television, calling Lukashenko the legitimate president and suggesting the protesters had backing from abroad.As Tikhanovskaya meets Macron and Merkel, Lukashenko has travelled to Sochi to meet Putin, and received a number of Russian regional governors in Minsk, who have showered his regime with praise. The Kremlin has dismissed the opposition coordination council as unconstitutional, and Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, described Tikhanovskaya’s meeting with Macron as “a meeting between the French president and a Belarusian citizen”.Tikhanovskaya said she and her team had received no contact at all from Russian officials, even informally or through intermediaries. She conceded that perhaps the opposition should have tried harder to speak with Russian representatives in the early stages of the protest movement. “We were open to talk to everyone and said it many times, but maybe we should have taken some steps to proactively seek out this dialogue,” she said.Tikhanovskaya said the Kremlin should realise that betting on Lukashenko is bad policy. “They are experienced politicians, and I’m sure they can see that Belarusians can’t accept these current authorities, and cannot forgive them,” she said.Asked what she would say if Putin did call her, Tikhanovskaya said: “I would say I’m pleased to hear from you, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Let’s discuss the fact that the Belarusian people in their own country want to make decisions about with whom they want to build the country, and the Belarusian people can no longer live under dictatorship, because we have changed.”She said she would also ask Putin to act as a mediator, but said if the Kremlin asked for a guarantee that a new government would not exit the Union State, the current alliance between Moscow and Minsk, she would not be able to give it, words that are likely to alarm the Kremlin.“I won’t talk for the future president of Belarus … if the majority will want to build closer relations with one or another country, it’s the will of the people, and the president will do what the people want.”Tikhanovskaya, a 38-year-old former English teacher, had no political experience before this summer, when she became a last-minute presidential candidate. Her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, a popular YouTube blogger, had planned to stand in the August election, but was jailed, along with another would-be candidate, banker Viktor Babariko.Tikhanovskaya said she would run in place of her husband, and was allowed on to the ballot, apparently because Lukashenko believed a woman would pose no threat. However, a growing protest mood coalesced around her, and led to fury when the official results were announced. Tikhanovskaya said she still has no ambitions to be president in the long term, only to act as a transition figure, and said she was getting used to her new role in international diplomacy.“I wasn’t prepared for such high-level talks, I would have needed a lot of time to prepare, but life has pushed me into them, and I think I am coping with it well,” she said.
Along the LODE Zone Line in Poland there are concern too. In Poland, the independence of the judiciary - essential for ensuring fair trials and upholding human rights - was threatened as the ruling party took bolder steps to control judges and courts.
Judges and prosecutors found themselves at risk of disciplinary proceedings for speaking out in defence of the judiciary and risked becoming victims of human rights violations themselves. Many were subjected to smear campaigns on state and social media.
Poland is rolling back on human rights - according to Amnesty International
Following the victory of Andrzej Duda in Poland’s presidential election, Amnesty International’s Europe Director, Nils Muiznieks said:
“We are steadfast in our resolve to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with groups and individuals targeted by the state and to help resist the rollback of human rights protection in Poland.“We will not be cowed by those who attempt to muzzle Poland’s critical voices and create an atmosphere of fear. We will continue to push back against attempts to stoke hostility towards LGBTI communities, refugees and migrants.“We will continue to demand access to safe abortion care as well as education about sexuality in order to ensure women can make healthy decisions in a country where sexual and reproductive rights are already extremely limited.We are steadfast in our resolve to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with groups and individuals targeted by the state and to help resist the rollback of human rights protection in Poland“We will continue to defend the Polish judiciary against the government’s continued assault on judges and prosecutors who speak out against the crackdown on rights and freedoms“We will continue to push back against homophobic and transphobic propaganda and the absurd idea that the choice of how someone lives their life threatens Polish identity.“The work of organisations defending rights in Poland remains vital and we are totally committed in our resolve to stand with them.”Nils Muiznieks, Amnesty International
Poland: Activists at risk of 10-year jail term for COVID-19 poster campaign challenging government statistics
11 June 2020
Charges brought by Polish authorities against two activists who face possible prison sentences of up to 10 years for a poster campaign should be immediately dropped said, Amnesty International.The activists were detained overnight on Monday and Tuesday respectively and charged yesterday, after they put up posters in Warsaw accusing the government of manipulating COVID-19 statistics. They were charged with “theft and burglary” for removing the glass covering of advertisements on bus shelters to replace them with their own posters, despite not having taken anything with them.“Threatening activists who simply stuck up posters with criminal proceedings that could lead to 10 years in prison is a blatant attempt intimidate and silence critical voices.”“These charges are absurd and appear to be intended to punish those who express their criticism of the authorities. If they are not dismissed, they may have a chilling effect and create additional barriers to the vital work of human rights defenders in the country.”“These strong-arm tactics are part of a wider pattern of harassment of protesters and activists in Poland.”
While tackling COVID-19 Europe is being stalked by a shadow pandemic: Domestic violence
By Nils Muiznieks Europe Director for Amnesty International 31 July 2020Around the world, there has been a spike in reports of violence against women and girls during lockdowns and other restrictions, which left many women and girls trapped at home with their abusers or unable to easily access safety and support services.The surge in domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, has brought into sharp relief the need for governments across the world to strengthen their protections for women and girls’ rightsIn Poland, the situation for women and girls may become even more dangerous after the country’s Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro, announced last weekend a proposal to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, a landmark European treaty to prevent violence against women, including domestic violence. The treaty was, he claimed, “harmful" because it “contains elements of an ideological nature” requiring schools to teach children about gender. Critics say this language masks the government’s wider desire to reinforce the patriarchy while demonizing women’s rights and gender equality.The Prime Minister said today that the Convention should be checked by Constitutional Tribunal to see if it is in line with Polish Constitution. This may delay the decision, but it nonetheless a worrying development, particularly because the independence of the court is highly compromised.The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and its coalition partners are closely aligned to the Catholic Church and are actively pushing forward a neoconservative social agenda. For a number of years, their misrepresentation of women’s rights and gender equality as what they call “gender ideology” has fuelled attacks on the rights of LGBTI people. The Istanbul Convention has long been a target for populists who endorse the Minister’s spurious claim it poses a threat to “traditional family values.”Behind his words lies a profound contemptfor the rights of women, girls and LGBTI people. Withdrawing from the convention would be a dangerous measure with disastrous consequences to millions of women and girls and to organizations providing vital support to survivors of sexual and domestic violence. It sends a signal that their personal wellbeing and safety are not worth protecting. It would also be a retrogressive step, prohibited in international human rights law.Official statistics, while incomplete, show a harrowing picture. Figures from 2019: more than 65,000 women and 12,000 children in Poland reported incidents of, or were found to have been, subjected to domestic violence. Only, 2,527 rape investigations were opened that year and NGOs estimate that percent of reported rapes is dramatically low.A recent Europe wide survey found that Polish women report fewer cases of domestic violence than other EU countries. This low level of reporting to the police, as Amnesty International’s research in Europe has shown, is associated with a lack of faith in the criminal justice system and a fear of victims not being believed.Since the outbreak of COVID-19, helplines and women’s shelters across Europe have reported an alarming spike of calls from women at risk of violence due to lockdowns and other restrictive measures. Poland is not an exception. While restrictions may be needed to control the spread of the virus, States should also respond with adequate measures to ensure women and girls’ safety. Withdrawing from the Convention does exactly the opposite.The Istanbul Convention provides some vital safeguards for women and girls. It is the first European treaty specifically targeting violence against women and domestic violence. It covers all forms of gender-based violence. States that ratified the Convention including Poland have an obligation to protect and support survivors of such violence. They must also establish services such as hotlines, shelters, medical services, counselling and legal aid.To date, the Convention has been signed by the vast majority of European states and the EU as a whole and ratified by 34 of them. In 2018 alone the convention entered into force in nine countries (Croatia, Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, North Macedonia and Switzerland) and in 2019 Ireland also ratified the treaty, following the historic landmark vote that put an end to the almost total ban on abortion in the country.But among some countries the desire to withdraw from the Convention has been high on the agenda. In Turkey, for example, women’s groups are expressing concerns at the intensification of the calls to withdraw from the Convention due to be discussed at the ruling party’s central executive committee on 5 August, this in the context of several brutal murders of women in the hands of men being widely reported in the media.In other countries, such as Bulgaria and Slovakia and most recently, in Hungary, the parliaments have failed to ratify the Convention based on misconceptions of the notion of ‘gender’, and deliberately ignoring the harmful impact of gender stereotypes in the societies that put women and girls at risk of violence.Similar misconceptions are stalling the ratification of the Convention in Ukraine where the existing laws on combatting domestic violence remain poorly implemented. Although ratification of the Convention is not on the Ukrainian parliament's agenda, the country is looking into the issue after more than 25,000 people signed a petition calling on the President to initiate the ratification.In 2018 in Bulgaria, the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that the Convention was not compatible with its Constitution, further perpetuating harmful misconceptions about the treaty’s scope and nature.The surge in domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, has brought into sharp relief the need for governments across the world to strengthen their protections for women and girls’ rights.Were Poland to do the exact opposite, it would send a deeply disturbing signal that ensuring that women and girls live free from violence, is no longer a priority.
Pope urges nations to work towards a just world
Given that part of the problem of social prejudice and intolerance to both the rights of women and LGBTI people in Poland is the social influence of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis's third encyclical is especially relevant to the need to face the present in order to secure a just future, as he warned against “myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism” in some countries, and . . .
. . . "a growing loss of the sense of history”
Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent for the Guardian reports (Sun 4 Oct 2020):
Pope Francis has warned against “myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism” in some countries, and a “growing loss of the sense of history” in a major document outlining his view of the world.Fratelli Tutti – the third encyclical, a pastoral letter addressed to the whole of the Catholic church, of his papacy – was published on Sunday, the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, amid global uncertainty and anxiety over the Covid-19 pandemic and rising populism.In the 45,000-word document, the pope urges nations to work towards a just and fraternal world based on common membership of the human family. He expands on familiar themes in his teachings, including opposition to war, the death penalty, slavery, trafficking, inequality and poverty; concerns about alienation, isolation and social media; and support for migrants fleeing violence and seeking a better life.Pope Francis had begun writing the encyclical when the pandemic “unexpectedly erupted”. But, he says, the crisis has reinforced his belief that political and economic institutions must be reformed to address the needs of those most harmed by it.
The global health emergency has demonstrated that “no one can face life in isolation” and that the “magic theories” of market capitalism have failed.“Aside from the differing ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident,” Francis writes. “Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at ‘promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity’ and makes it possible for jobs to be created, and not cut.”Francis says a “certain regression” has taken place in today’s world. He notes the rise of “myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism” in some countries, and “new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense”.The leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics says “we are more alone than ever” in a world of “limitless consumerism” and “empty individualism” where there is a “growing loss of the sense of history” and a “kind of deconstructionism”.“Hyperbole, extremism and polarisation” have become political tools in many countries, he writes, without “healthy debates” and long-term plans but rather “slick marketing techniques aimed at discrediting others”.He notes that “we are growing ever more distant from one another” and that voices “raised in defence of the environment are silenced and ridiculed”.Addressing digital culture, he criticises campaigns of “hatred and destruction” and says technology is removing people from reality. Fraternity depends on “authentic encounters”.He writes: “Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travellers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all.”The Right Reverend Richard Moth, the bishop of Arundel and Brighton, said the encyclical was very consistent with previous teachings and messages, but had particular relevance now. “He is saying there are very clear risks to not learning the lessons of history,” he said.Christine Allen, the director of the Catholic aid agency Cafod, said Pope Francis was “unflinching in his message”.“Politics is failing the poor, and it is shameful that some political decisions that are made affect the poorest, plunging them further into poverty, suffering and despair,” she said, adding: “This is a message not just to Catholics, or people of other faiths, it is to everyone. It is a powerful voice amid the pandemic, growing inequality, conflict and racial unrest. Pope Francis’s message is clear: we cannot just switch on the reset button and go back to ‘normal’.”The pope says his inspiration for the encyclical came from St Francis of Assisi and non-Catholics such as Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu and Mahatma Gandhi. Fratelli Tutti, he says, develops some of the themes of the Document on Human Fraternity that he signed with the grand imam of al-Azhar University, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, in Abu Dhabi last year.In the run-up to the publication of the encyclical, a row erupted over its title – which means “brothers all” – as critics said it excluded women. The Vatican said the plural form of the word was gender-inclusive and that the document by its very nature was inclusive of women.
Facing the demands of the present distracts from facing the past and the future. This is understandable.
This report on new research that shows that Greenland's ice is melting faster than at any time in the past 12,000 years. This raises the serious possibility that if global heating continues Greenland's vast ice sheet is likely to vanish over the next 1000 years.
Greenland's ice melting faster than at any time in past 12,000 years
Increased loss of ice could trigger sea level rise of up to 10cm by end of centuryFiona Harvey, Environment correspondent for the Guardian reports on this new research (Wed 30 Sep 2020):Greenland’s ice is starting to melt faster than at any time in the past 12,000 years, research has shown, which will raise sea levels and could have a marked impact on ocean currents.New measurements show the rate of melting matches any in the geological record for the Holocene period – defined as the period since the last ice age – and is likely to accelerate, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.The increased loss of ice is likely to lead to sea level rises of between 2cm and 10cm by the end of the century from Greenland alone, according to the study.Jason Briner, a professor of geology at the University of Buffalo and lead author of the paper, said: “We have altered our planet so much that the rates of ice sheet melt this century are on pace to be greater than anything we have seen under natural variability of the ice sheet over the past 12,000 years.”These changes, over the relatively short period of less than a century, appear to be unprecedented. Greenland’s ice sheet shrank between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, and has been slowly cumulating over the past 4,000 years. The current melting will reverse that pattern and within the next 1,000 years, if global heating continues, the vast ice sheet is likely to vanish altogether.If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise strongly, the rate of melting could accelerate further to be four times greater than anything found in the past 12,000 years.“We are increasingly certain that we are about to experience unprecedented rates of ice loss from Greenland, unless greenhouse gas emissions are substantially reduced,” wrote Andy Aschwanden, of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in a commentary accompanying the study.The findings underline the extent of the changes that human actions are wreaking on the planet. Last week, a separate team of scientists found that melting of the Antarctic ice cap would continue even if the world met the Paris agreement goal of holding temperature rises to no more than 2C, and would eventually raise sea levels by 2.5 metres at that level of heating.Although the Antarctic ice cap, like the Greenland ice sheet, will take centuries to melt, the study found the melting trend that had been set in motion through human changes to the climate was likely to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.Arctic sea ice is also melting at a fast pace. This year’s summer sea ice minimum was the second lowest in the last 40 years of continuous measurements. Unlike Greenland’s ice sheet, which sits on land, the Arctic ice cap floats and so its melting will not produce much impact on sea levels.However, its melting hastens warming further by reducing the earth’s albedo – the reflection of light back into space from the ice – and exposes the darker water underneath, which absorbs more heat.The findings also follow a study last month that found last year’s melting in Greenland was likely to have been the worst for centuries.The team behind the latest Greenland study made their estimates by producing a computer model of a section of the south-western region of the ice sheet over the past 12,000 years and then projecting forward to the end of this century.They checked their findings against what we can tell actually occurred with the ice, through satellite measurements and other instruments, and also by mapping the position of boulders containing beryllium-10.These are deposited by glaciers as they move, and measurements of beryllium-10 can reveal how long the boulders have been in position, and therefore where the edge of the ice sheet was when the boulder was deposited.“Before our study, science did not have a great handle on the long-term trends of the rate of Greenland ice loss,” Briner said.“Very meticulous work has been done to quantify today’s rates of ice mass loss on Greenland, but we did not have a long term view to put today’s rates into perspective. Our study provides that perspective.”
These timescales point to action NOW to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the dire effects of global heating!
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