Running out of time in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

The city of Hull is a nodal point on the LODE Zone Line

Together with Liverpool's Bluecoat Arts Centre, Hull Time Based Arts commissioned the LODE Artliner project in 1991, and it was the specific location of these two cities, Liverpool and Hull, functioning as nodal points, that determined the trajectories of the project along the LODE Zone Line.

This image of Queen Victoria Square, a public space at the heart of the City of Kingston upon Hull, was used in a story by the Hull Daily Mail at the beginning of April 2020. Normally this city space would be full of people crossing the square as they go about the business of their daily lives, but this picture was taken in the first days of a national lockdown. The story by Dan Kemp (2 April 2020) was headlined: 

Why Hull has the lowest coronavirus figures in the UK

This story helps explain a tragic reversal of this situation and today's news headline and subheading in the Daily Mirror:

Hull becomes England's worst coronavirus hotspot as new league table released

The city recorded 1,888 new cases in just seven days, meaning its infection rate has soared - along with other areas including Scarborough, North East Lincolnshire and Melton

Back in April . . . 

. . . Dan Kemp's news article for the Hull Daily Mail (2 April 2020) explains that the probable cause for Hull experiencing the lowest incidence and transmission of the Covid-19 disease is Hull's geographical position. Dan Kemp writes: 

Like the UK as a whole, Hull and the East Riding have been deep in the UK lockdown for 10 days - an unprecedented period in the history of the region and the nation.

The death toll continues to rise and current forecasts suggest the peak of the pandemic could still be weeks away, putting extraordinary strain on the NHS in the short term and uncertainty upon just how bad it could further down the line.

Close to home, five people have sadly lost their lives to Covid-19 while being cared for at either Castle Hill Hospital or Hull Royal Infirmary.

But, while one death is obviously too many and will alter the lives of their loved ones forever, Hull appears to be fairing relatively well in contrast to other Yorkshire cities and the nation as a whole.

In fact, Hull has the lowest number of cases per population in the UK.

As of Wednesday evening, 14 people had tested positive for coronavirus in the city - a slim figure compared to the 192 confirmed cases along the M62 in Leeds or the 541 further south in Sheffield.

A heatmap of all UK cases broken down by local authority shows Hull as a small dot compared to the numbers recorded at the other side of Yorkshire.

Smaller council areas, in terms of population, including Barnsley and York have more recorded cases, while the likes of Doncaster and Rotherham which are comparative in size to Hull also far exceed the figures.

Various reasons may lay behind the statistics.

Hull is isolated

It is a phrase attributed to Hull long before Covid-19 became apparent but the city really is the 'end of the line'.

Naturally, more people pass through cities like Leeds, Doncaster and Sheffield - the are major rail hubs, their proximity to other cities entices shoppers and they are generally easier to access.

The fact that Hull is out on a limb in no way means it cannot be touched by coronavirus but it does make it likely that it will take longer to arrive in the way seen elsewhere.

The city has the same amount of known cases of as the Isle of Wight - a place naturally cut off from the rest of the nation.

State-of-the-art technology across the border

Even the East Riding's figures dwarf Hull's.

Forty six cases are known in the authority that borders Hull almost every way you turn.

Significantly, while patients are known to be being treated for Covid-19 at Hull Royal, Castle Hill, in Cottingham, has a new, state-of-the-art infectious diseases ward.

The £1.63m ward only opened in May 2018 but few could have imagined the role it would play when the new strain of coronavirus came to our shores.

Ward Seven became the UK's first front line on the virus in late January when two people staying in a York hotel were found to have Covid-19.

Now, patients in Hull and other parts of Yorkshire are benefiting from the world-class technology accessible to the Castle Hill team.

Meanwhile, Hull Royal opened a dedicated Covid-19 ward last week when its acute medicine rapid discharge ward was transformed into a new front line.

Hospital trusts are testing differently

Hull is fortunate to have dedicated healthcare staff who we see travelling to and from its hospital every day to lead on the battle to contain the virus - at this time, more than ever, they are all our heroes.

But the way the coronavirus is being looked out for can change from trust to trust.

According to the Guardian, in an article published on Wednesday evening concerning the 541 cases recorded in Sheffield, it could be that Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust is simply testing more people.

As an example, the report explains how the trust decided to test all staff with Covid-19 symptoms 11 days before many other parts of the country.

Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, only ordered that critical care staff, ambulance services and emergency departments be tested this week.

Places like Sheffield have been testing longer, so will naturally have more cases to record.

People are listening

Or perhaps people are heeding advice?

Pictures taken in recent days show Hull frozen in time, without the people that make the city such a vibrant place to live.

The streets are empty 

Despite the occasional report of people loitering in the street, it appears that the Government's essential travel only mantra has really hit home.

Most businesses in the city centre have been closed, apart from those selling essential foods and other products, meaning the virus will naturally find it harder to spread.

The national picture

In terms of local authorities, Hull has the lowest figures of any in Yorkshire - but that is not where the interesting statistics end.

Just Rutland, with a population of around 40,000, has fewer cases in the entire country - four have been recorded there.

At the other end of the scale, London's world-city status and its many well-connected boroughs mean it is the worst affected of any place in the UK.

More than 8,000 have been recorded in the city.

Elsewhere, Birmingham and Hampshire have more than 600 cases each.

In total, 2,352 deaths have been recorded in the UK and the numbers are expected to continue on an upward trajectory for days and weeks to come.

As of today: UK death toll from Covid-19 passes 50,000

The subheading of the report for the Guardian by Kevin Rawlinson, Tobi Thomas and Pamela Duncan runs: 

Milestone reached on Wednesday after a further 595 people died, bringing total to 50,365

Meanwhile in Hull . . .

Hull's deadliest day so far as coronavirus ravages city 

"These aren't just statistics. The numbers represent real people who are seriously ill" 

Nathan Standley reports for the Hull Daily Mail (11 Nov 2020): 

Hull has seen its deadliest ever day for coronavirus deaths, revealed on the same day that the city became the worst area in the country for weekly coronavirus infections.

Since the start of the pandemic, the most deaths that occurred on any single day was seven, which happened on April 24, at the height of the first wave.

On Tuesday, November 10, Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust announced that they had recorded eight new Covid-related deaths at either Hull Royal Infirmary or Castle Hill Hospital over the previous days.

Two of those people lost their lives on Sunday, November 8, while six more patients passed away on Monday, November 9.

But the Trust's announcement of a further five deaths on Wednesday, two of which were also revealed to have taken place on Monday, means that November 9 has officially become the city's deadliest day of the coronavirus pandemic.

Geography versus policy

Re:LODE Radio considers that there is some probability that UK government policy during the Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to the conditions that have resulted in this flare up of cases and in the transmission of the disease for the people of Hull.

The first lockdown was TOO LATE, and the lifting of restrictions timed to enable the London economy to emerge from lockdown was TOO EARLY to control rising transmission rates in the North of England and the West Midlands.

The summer period was the time, a "window of opportunity", to track, trace and eradicate the Covid-19 infection and therefore transmission. But capacity to address the scale of the problem was not in place. A local approach to the North of England and the West Midlands might have been part of a solution. 

Mixed messages . . . 

On 26 June Prime Minister Boris Johnson warns that the UK could be set back if people continue to ignore social distancing rules as those who visited the south coast the previous day have done.

But, forget the virus! Shop 'til you drop!

On the same day Professor Neil Ferguson, a former government scientific adviser, said he does not believe a second national lockdown would be necessary, but instead would expect to see "targeted" measures to deal with outbreaks.

The summer period was NOT spent in adequately preparing for the opening of schools and universities. Test and Trace has been an expensive shambles. Calls for a circuit breaker on 21 September by SAGE scientists were ignored by the government. Calls by the Labour opposition to go for a circuit breaker lockdown at half term were dismissed in a cavalier way by Boris Johnson. 

For the people of Hull, partly because of its geography, after all the city is "at the end of the line", it appears as if the spike in cases NOW is turning out to be a delayed full blown catastrophic coronavirus first wave, tragically combined with the current and expected autumn and winter upsurges. A double whammy?

AFTER LOW

Steve Bell on Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer's first PMQs

For the print edition of the Guardian last Thursday 5 November 2020, John Crace's Sketch of Prime Minister's Questions in parliament on Wednesday 4 Nov, has a headline that reads: 

Weary Starmer can't even be bothered to gloat after another U-turn

John Crace writes: 

Maybe it was because most minds were concentrated on the results of the election taking place in the US. Or maybe it was that all the arguments had already been made when the prime minister had given his statement on the second national lockdown on Monday. Either way, this week’s prime minister’s questions felt curiously underpowered. Rather as if Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson were going through the motions, with both taking it as read that it would be yet another easy points win for the Labour leader.

Still, no politician has ever let repetition be a hindrance to what they are saying, regardless of whether they are right or wrong. So after inviting Johnson to agree that it wasn’t for any candidate in the US election to declare which votes counted and which didn’t – like all good populists, Boris believes you can have too much democracy, so he predictably declined to answer – Starmer moved on to the business of the lockdown.

What had taken the government so long with this particular U-turn? After all, it had been two weeks since the PM had introduced a three-tiered regional system. Boris ummed and ahhed and tugged at his hair, aware that his more coiffed appearance on Monday had widely been seen as a sign of weakness, and proceeded to talk nonsense. He had been absolutely right to introduce regional lockdowns and they had been working brilliantly up until the moment he suddenly realised they weren’t working after all and that the infection rate was increasing across the country.

Perhaps Starmer was as confused as everyone else by that logic or just wasn’t in the mood for gloating. Winning an argument against Boris has become too easy. All you do is argue the opposite of what he says he will do and you’ll be proved right with a government climbdown in next to no time. So rather than making a big deal of Johnson’s clear failure of leadership and that the Tories were now adopting Labour policy, Starmer kept to some simple facts. If the government had implemented the two to three-week “circuit breaker” lockdown over half-term as Sage and he had recommended, there would have been fewer deaths and less damage to the economy. Simples. So what was the plan if the R value wasn’t below 1 by 2 December?

Here Boris struggled rather. While he could be sure that the lockdown regulations that parliament would be voting on later that afternoon would end on 2 December, he had no idea what might replace them if they had been insufficient in bringing down the rate of infection. Even he seems to have given up on Typhoid Dido’s test-and-trace system improving enough to bail him out, so all he could say was that he very much hoped the lockdown would work and it was political point-scoring to suggest it wouldn’t.

Which was slightly ungracious as it had been Starmer’s promise to vote for the government measures that would ensure they became law. But then Boris has never been noted for either his loyalty or gratitude. He ended by incongruously saying Keir ought to be more like Tony Blair, who had written a piece in the Daily Mail about lockdowns, test and trace and vaccines that could as easily have been written by the current Labour leader. No wonder Starmer looked startled. He had spent most of the last week fending off the Labour left who felt he was already far too much like Blair.

Seconds out, round three. Soon the two party leaders were slugging it out again for the debate on the new lockdown measures. Unsurprisingly, both Johnson and Starmer appeared even less enthusiastic or combative than they had earlier. Boris spent most of his time trying to dampen the concerns of the libertarians in his own party who were threatening to vote against him, rather than take pot shots at Labour, while Starmer delivered his stock speech on auto-pilot. It was all very under-powered.

Things picked up a bit when Theresa May was called as Johnson seemed to make a point of walking out the chamber the moment she started talking. There is little love lost between the two and May began by saying how she would be unable to vote with the government. She must have enjoyed that. Having been serially betrayed by Boris over the years, it was good to even things up – if only a little.

As so often, what was missing among the lockdown refuseniks was any sense of what they might vote for. How many Covid deaths a day were they prepared to accept to protect the economy? What alternatives to circuit breakers did they suggest, given that infection rates in regions under lockdown almost invariably only seemed to go up? Still, not having the answers has always been the backbenchers’ main privilege.

It was left to Matt Hancock to close the debate for the government. He too regretted the need for the lockdown restrictions and promised to think again about people’s right to play golf and tennis. He also hinted the government might back down on communal worship. No bad thing, as prayer is all we seem to have left. With Labour backing it, the motion passed easily with fewer than 40 Tory rebels. But few were in any doubt they’d all be back to debate the same thing in a month’s time. 

Re:LODE Radio considers that the David Low cartoon that Steve Bell brutally references in his cartoon on Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer's first PMQs, is the classic depiction of Hitler and Stalin's Nazi Soviet pact.

The Manchester Evening News covers the story of a powerful mural honouring Marcus Rashford MBE appearing in a Manchester suburb where he lived as a boy. Sophie Halle-Richards reports (6 Nov 2020) that the artwork has been created by Akse, a local street artist who is well known for a number of murals across the city.

"It doesn't need much explanation as to why we wanted to pay homage to Marcus Rashford given what an inspirational young man he is," said Withington Walls organiser, Ed Wellard.

"The compassion and humility and decency and determination and wisdom he has shown fighting for disadvantaged children is really special

"Withington and Manchester are rightly proud of one of their own."

The print edition of the Guardian on Monday 9 November 2020 covers Boris Johnson's U-turn over extension of free school meals under the headline: 

'Rashford 2 Johnson 0'

Haroon Siddique writes: 

On the day his political soulmate was being urged to belatedly show some humility after defeat in the US election, Boris Johnson once again bowed to the better judgment of a 23-year-old footballer, in the latest of a series of high-profile U-turns.

After weeks of digging in his heels and refusing to cede to calls to extend free school meals to children from low-income families during school holidays in England, Johnson phoned the Manchester United and England footballer Marcus Rashford on Saturday night to inform him of his change of heart.

The package includes a £170m Covid winter grant scheme to support vulnerable families in England and an extension of the holiday activities and food programme to the Easter, summer and Christmas breaks next year.

The reversal came after a crescendo of criticism, led by Rashford, but also from charities, the opposition, media on both sides of the political divide and even some Conservative MPs, who realised how out of tune their party was with the public mood.

It was the second time the Manchester United star had forced the government to change course this year. On the previous occasion, which last month earned Rashford an MBE, No 10 had initially rejected his plea for it to keep paying for £15-a-week food vouchers for some of England’s poorest families over the summer, only to cave in amid a public outcry.

Just under five months later, the Old Etonian prime minister picked up the phone and again called Rashford, who has spoken of his experience of food poverty growing up in Wythenshawe, breaking the news in what the striker described as a “good conversation”.

Showing diplomatic skills to match his footballing prowess, Rashford said: “There is still so much more to do, and my immediate concern is the approximate 1.7 million children who miss out on free school meals, holiday provision and Healthy Start vouchers because their family income isn’t quite low enough. But the intent the government have shown today is nothing but positive, and they should be recognised for that.”

Among those who hailed Rashford’s role were Save the Children UK, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the archbishop of Canterbury. The tennis coach, Judy Murray simply tweeted: “Rashford 2 Johnston [sic] 0.”

The children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, said: “I welcome these steps towards providing more free meals and healthy diets for children who need them and holiday activities. Families are facing hard times financially and this will help.”

Longfield had previously likened the debate over the issue to something out of the pages of Charles Dickens’ 19th-century novel Oliver Twist. Tory MPs had suggested that extending free school meals would increase dependency or destroy the currency because of the cost.

One Conservative MP, Brendan Clarke-Smith, called for “less celebrity virtue-signalling on Twitter by proxy and more action to tackle the real causes of child poverty”. After the Conservatives’ defeat of a Labour motion to extend free school meals prompted councils, local businesses, charities and community groups to step in to fill the void over half-term, opposition and accusations of virtue-signalling appeared ever further removed from reality. Nevertheless, Downing Street repeatedly declined to praise the organisations, saying only that it did not believe free school meals were necessary outside term.

In a year that has also seen U-turns on the second national lockdown, extending the furlough scheme and A-level and GCSE results, Rashford’s warning that “there is still so much more to do” may be liable to bring Johnson out in a cold sweat.

Of the three demands in Rashford’s petition to end child food poverty, which has attracted more than 1m signatures, the one that remains unfulfilled is: “Expand free school meals to all under-16s where a parent or guardian is in receipt of universal credit or equivalent benefit.” The government is also poised for a battle over the £20-a-week pandemic supplement to universal credit, which is due to end in April.

Longfield and the Trussell Trust were among those who tempered their appreciation for the latest policy about-face by calling for the £20 universal credit increase to be retained. Becca Lyon, head of child poverty at Save the Children UK, said: “Families need to know that they’re not going to be £1,000 down next year, when the increase ends in April.”

Running out of time . . .

Whether it's too late, or too early, or not at all, is not what struggling families need in a time of national and international crisis. 

When LODE Artliner was originally performed, in Goole and in Hull back in 1992, it was in the context of the Hull Time Based Arts festival:

 

"root" or "running out of time"

The pilot publication of Hybrid magazine covered the LODE/ARTLINER project in the run-up to the ROOT '92 festival.

Twenty-eight years on . . . 

. . . we are really running out of time in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

LODE-Artliner 1992  

Speaking of which . . .

'It travelled 4,000km': Donegal surfers find Russian time capsule

Vivienne Clarke reporting for The Irish Times (Thu 5 Nov 2020) writes about:

Friends out walking on Bloody Foreland came across ‘weird tube looking thing’

A Donegal surfer who found a Russian time capsule while searching for a surfing location has told of her concern that it might have been a bomb.

Sophie Curran was walking on Bloody Foreland with her friend Conor McClory when they found “this weird tube looking thing” on which Russian words were engraved. Fearing that it might be a bomb or a container for someone’s ashes, she contacted her brother who has a Russian friend.

The brother’s friend translated the words and let them know that it was safe to open the item which was in fact a time capsule.

Speaking to Oliver Callan on RTÉ radio’s Ryan Tubridy show, Ms Curran said that they discovered that the time capsule had not been in the sea for very long.

“It was actually placed on ice at the North Pole at the 90 degrees point, so that means that the ice has melted and it travelled 4,000km down to us in Donegal in just over two years, which is scary.”

The intrepid sleuths contacted a Russian Instagram blogger called Svetla who had been on the boat from which the time capsule was despatched. “She told me that they thought it would be 30 or 50 years before this would be found so the fact that it was found within two years is really scary - that the ice is melting so quickly.”

Ms Curran was told that the people on board the ship were a mixture of paying passengers and researchers. “Svetla, the lady I was talking to, is writing a travel novel, so she just travels all over the world and she’s writing a story about this one. She said she wants the next destination after this to be Ireland.”

“The time capsule was filled with letters from people who were on the boat and there was photographs of them, menus, itineraries, everything from the ship. It was very interesting.”

So interesting in fact that she didn’t get to go surfing that day. “I got a bit distracted by the time capsule.”

This story was picked up by the Ireland correspondent for the Guardian, Rory Carroll. The story is significantly framed by the Guardian's campaign to foreground reliable data on global heating, in its efforts to counteract the marginalisation by media of the climate change crisis.

Arctic time capsule from 2018 washes up in Ireland as polar ice melts

Rory Carroll, Ireland correspondent for the Guardian contextualises the story (Thu 5 Nov 2020):

In the past decade, Arctic temperatures have increased by nearly 1C. Arctic sea ice has reached its second-lowest extent in the 41-year satellite record.

Last year the Greenland ice sheet lost a record amount of ice, equivalent to 1 million tonnes every minute. With annual snowfall no longer enough to replenish snow and ice lost during summer melting, scientists fear it has passed the point of no return.

A Nature Climate Change study predicts that summer sea ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean could disappear entirely by 2035.

For €29,600 (£26,740) the Russian-owned 50 Years of Victory takes passengers on 14-day expeditions to the north pole, calling it a “magical destination”.

The last chance . . .

. . . green economy

Fiona Harvey, Environment correspondent for the Guardian reports (Mon 9 Nov 2020) that in the wake of Covid, leading figures call for bold green measures to boost economy. The headline runs:

World is running out of time on climate, experts warn

Fiona Harvey writes: 

World leaders are running out of time to forge a green recovery from the Covid-19 crisis, with only a year to go before a crunch UN summit that will decide the future of the global climate, leading experts have warned.

Progress on a green recovery, which would reduce emissions while repairing the damage from the pandemic, has been hampered by the need for an emergency rescue of stricken economies around the world and the resurgence of the coronavirus in Europe, the US and some other countries.

But with global heating showing no sign of slowing, and the danger signals of climate breakdown increasingly evident – from the Arctic ice to American wildfires – the race is on to build the global economy back better.

Ban Ki-moon, former UN secretary-general, told the Guardian: “It is important to build back the economy but if we do not keep global temperature rises below 1.5C this will create a huge, huge problem. Cities and countries across the world may simply cease to exist in a 3C world [which is where current climate commitments would lead]. So we must redouble our efforts before we pass the point of no return.”

 

Ban Ki-moon says the world must redouble its efforts or we will pass the point of no return.  

 

"If not for the pandemic, governments would have been meeting on Monday in Glasgow for the start of vital UN climate talks aimed at putting the 2015 Paris agreement back on track. That has been postponed to next November, while governments grapple with the coronavirus." 

The first stage of the pandemic crisis focused on staving off economic collapse, as lockdowns were imposed by governments, starting in China and moving swiftly around the world in the spring. These unprecedented shutdowns sent greenhouse gas emissions plunging, but created economic chaos which countries have been scrambling to repair.

Within the next few months, leaders must shift to a more sustainable model, promoting low-carbon economies to provide jobs and clean growth, instead of cementing high-carbon infrastructure into the recovery – which would mean losing hope of meeting the Paris goals, Ban warned.

“I have been urging world leaders – it is absolutely OK, it’s only necessary that they spend money to resuscitate their economy [but] at the same time, they should never put climate ambition back,” said Ban. “I’m afraid that most of the important priorities have been focused only on Covid-19.”

Economists argue that building a green recovery will provide jobs quickly, to counter the sharp rise in unemployment resulting from the lockdowns. Insulating homes, installing solar panels and other renewable energy, extending broadband, remodelling cities to make them easier to walk and cycle, planting trees and building flood defences: all are needed to reset national economies on to a low-carbon footing, and all are labour-intensive. While governments are spending trillions to resolve the crisis, this would be spending that also helps to secure a low-carbon and prosperous future.

Countries could still turn themselves around, Ban said, pointing to the announcement by China’s president Xi Jinping that the world’s biggest emitter would for the first time adopt a net zero target, for 2060, and ensure its emissions peaked before 2030. This was followed by a commitment to net zero by 2050 by Japan’s new prime minister and by South Korea’s government.

“This is an extraordinary, remarkable decision by the Chinese government,” said Ban. “So many countries are now joining with the strong political will to realise net zero by 2050. We might have lost some time but this is the time to really resuscitate and regain the political will. I think we can do it.”

 

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, says what is needed is a ‘clean energy and economic recovery plan’.

Everything rests on whether China, which has barely started on a green recovery, takes swift action on Xi’s new net zero target, said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, the global authority on energy. “If China does not come up with green recovery packages, putting a new five-year plan in line with the target of net zero, then the world’s chances of reaching its climate targets will be close to zero,” he warned.

“Many countries have been building firewalls round the economy,” he added. “Now what is needed is a clean energy and economic recovery plan.”

Connie Hedegaard of the EDF says the green recovery is an economically sound way to do things. 

The EU has embarked on its green recovery, earmarking 30% of a €750bn (£677bn) fund. But member states must still come up with better plans of their own, said Connie Hedegaard, the former EU climate commissioner, now on the European board of the Environmental Defense Fund.

“If member states come forward with plans that are too weak, the European commission must be strong enough to say no, this is a wasted opportunity,” she said. “We have to show people why [the green recovery] is not just a good thing for climate change but an economically sound way to do things.”

The UK is expected to set out its plans to reach net zero emissions by 2050 in the next few weeks, ahead of a virtual summit of world leaders to be held in December, marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris agreement. Boris Johnson is planning to set out beforehand a 10-point plan on how the UK will pursue renewable energy, electric vehicles, nuclear power, nature restoration and other low-carbon efforts, to reach its target of net zero emissions by 2050.

Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, calls for the UK to put forward an ambitious target ahead of the postponed Cop26 gathering in Glasgow.

“All eyes are on the UK,” said Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and twice a UN climate envoy. “We need the British to rally the world ahead of the next Cop in Glasgow in 2021. They can do this by putting forward an ambitious climate target for 2030 and encouraging all other nations to make similar commitments.”

For governments facing economic disaster in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, the prospect of making bold spending commitments for a green recovery might seem daunting. But the alternative would be to see a long period of recession with all the discontent and hardship that would entail, warned Lord Nicholas Stern, the climate economist and chair of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics.

“My worry is that there would be a really long period of recession, where nothing much happens, and political and social tensions would rise,” he said. “That’s why it is so important to try to get out of this in a good way. It would be a terrible step backwards if we went back to austerity.”

As Biden gets to work and Trump fumes . . .

. . . it's revealed that: 

Covid plans threaten global climate

This is a front page story in the print edition of the Guardian newspaper, Monday 9 November 2020, in apposition to the latest news on the US elections. This kind of balance of stories of this kind is NOT typical of news media worldwide. Climate crisis stories related to policy are usually ignored, or tucked away on inside pages. This is especially true in the UK. Giving equivalent value to stories involving climate change and policy goes against the grain of those sections of UK media, dominated by private interests that are well connected to global capitalist interests.

Fiona Harvey, Environment correspondent for the Guardian, reports (Mon 9 Nov 2020) under a subheading that runs: 

Exclusive: analysis finds countries pouring money into fossil fuels to fight recession

Fiona Harvey writes: 

The prospect of a global green recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is hanging in the balance, as countries pour money into the fossil fuel economy to stave off a devastating recession, an analysis for the Guardian reveals.

Meanwhile, promises of a low-carbon boost are failing to materialise. Only a handful of major countries are pumping rescue funds into low-carbon efforts such as renewable power, electric vehicles and energy efficiency.

A new Guardian ranking finds the EU is a frontrunner, devoting 30% of its €750bn (£677bn) Next Generation Recovery Fund to green ends. France and Germany have earmarked about €30bn and €50bn respectively of their own additional stimulus for environmental spending.

On the other end of the scale, China is faring the worst of the major economies, with only 0.3% of its package – about £1.1bn – slated for green projects. In the US, before the election, only about $26bn (£19.8bn), or just over 1%, of the announced spending was green.

In at least 18 of the world’s biggest economies, more than six months on from the first wave of lockdowns in the early spring, pandemic rescue packages are dominated by spending that has a harmful environmental impact, such as bailouts for oil or new high-carbon infrastructure, outweighing the positive climate benefits of any green spending, according to the analysis.

Only four countries – France, Spain, the UK and Germany – and the EU have packages that will produce a net environmental benefit.

:vivideconomics

“The natural environment and climate change have not been a core part of the thinking in the bulk of recovery plans,” said Jason Eis, chief executive of Vivid Economics, which compiled the index for the Guardian. “In the majority of countries we are not seeing a green recovery coming through at all.”

Even countries that have boasted of green recovery plans are frequently spending much more on activities that will maintain or increase greenhouse gas emissions. South Korea set out plans for a green new deal in July, worth about $135bn. But its continued spending on fossil fuels and carbon-intensive industries means it ranks only eighth in the world for the greenness of its stimulus.

Canada similarly is spending C$6bn (£3.5bn) of its infrastructure funding on home insulation, green transport and clean energy, but its total rescue package is worth more than $300bn and contains measures such as a massive road expansion and tax relief for fossil fuel companies. India is spending about $830m on its green economy, but plans to prop up coal have dragged down its performance.

But the election of Joe Biden as US president has the potential to transform the green recovery globally, the Vivid analysis shows. Although he may face a Republican majority in the Senate, if Biden’s plans for a $2tn green stimulus were implemented in full the US would overtake the EU as the biggest investor in a low-carbon future.

“That would be a transformative shift,” said Eis. “These are very bold plans from Biden, and it would be a huge signal to other countries. They would mean the US could start a race-to-the-top dynamic globally, especially with China, for a green recovery.”

Biden wants to boost renewable energy, powering the US entirely through clean energy by 2035 and reaching net zero emissions by 2050, investing $1.7tn over the next decade, with the expectation of private investment taking the total to $5tn. However, his plans must pass a hostile Republican Senate and will face opposition and possible legal challenges from sections of US business, and potentially some states.

Yet even if only a portion of Biden’s green plans survived intact, that could still have a powerful transformative effect, both on the US economy and around the world, said Eis. “You would expect there to be some compromise, but compared with where the US is now there would be a huge shift [in green spending] under a Biden presidency,” he said. “Many other countries are influenced by the perception of US leadership. Having the US at the G20 table pushing a green recovery would certainly help.” 

Countries failing to initiate a green recovery were missing out on the potential to create millions of jobs, added Ed Barbier, professor of economics at Colorado State University, whose landmark study of the 2008 financial crisis pegged that recovery as about 16% green. “There is huge potential for boosting employment, particularly in construction,” he said, pointing to measures such as installing home insulation, solar panels and electric car charging infrastructure, which are labour-intensive and often “shovel-ready”. 

While countries fail to muster a green recovery, they are also falling behind on their obligations under the Paris climate agreement.

International Energy Agency

The International Energy Agency has calculated, exclusively for the Guardian, that countries are planning emissions cuts that amount to only 15% of the reductions needed to fulfil the Paris agreement. The IEA has also found that China’s emissions, which dipped sharply in the initial phases of the pandemic, have already rebounded to 2019 levels and are likely to exceed them.

Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, said: “China has not yet started on a green recovery. But they have not yet missed the opportunity for a Chinese reset, if China changes its next five-year plan [due to be settled next March]. Whatever China builds now should be green.”

Without China, a global green recovery looks impossible. “If China does not come up with green recovery packages, putting a new five-year plan in line with the target of net zero, then the world’s chances of reaching its climate targets will be close to zero,” Birol warned.

Climate Action Tracker

Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis, found that governments in many countries, far from prioritising low-carbon growth, were bolstering carbon-intensive industries and loosening environmental regulations. Niklas Höhne, of the NewClimate Institute, one of the partner organisations behind CAT, warned: “What we’re seeing more of is governments using the pandemic recovery to roll back climate legislation and bail out the fossil fuel industry, especially in the US, but also in Brazil, Mexico, Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other countries.”

However, Lord Nicholas Stern, the climate economist, said countries still had time to move into a new phase of recovery, where green spending could be prioritised. Most of the initial $12tn in rescue packages around the world has gone to increase liquidity, prop up wages and stop companies going bust, which offers little opportunity for greening.

When it comes to the next stage, in a few months’ time, countries must have green plans ready, said Stern. “The green recovery has been delayed because we are still dealing with the virus, except in countries such as China,” he said. “Had we done better at managing the virus in Europe, I would have said we should be doing better by now [at a green recovery]. But we are still in the lockdown and rescue phase. The recovery can’t kick in until we are doing better at managing the virus.”

It's NOT just Biden who will be around for the next four years . . .

. . . we are still around and will have to keep pushing!  

Greta Thunberg Interview

Damian Carrington, Environment editor for the Guardian, reports on a Guardian interview with Greta Thunberg (Mon 9 Nov 2020). He writes under the headline and subheading: 

‘Hypocrites and greenwash’: Greta Thunberg blasts leaders over climate crisis

Exclusive: Leaders are happy to set targets for decades ahead, but flinch when immediate action is needed, she says

Greta Thunberg has blasted politicians as hypocrites and international climate summits as empty words and greenwash. Until humanity admits it has failed to tackle the climate crisis and begins treating it as an emergency like the coronavirus pandemic, society will be unable to stop global heating, she said.

In an interview with the Guardian, Thunberg said leaders were happy to set targets for decades into the future, but flinched when immediate action to cut emissions was needed. She said there was not a politician on the planet promising the climate action required: “If only,” said the teenager, who will turn 18 in January.

But she is inspired by the millions of students who have taken up the school strike she began by herself in Sweden 116 weeks ago. Since then she has addressed the UN and become the world’s most prominent climate campaigner. She also has hope: “We can treat a crisis like a crisis, as we have seen because of the coronavirus. Treating the climate crisis like a crisis – that could change everything overnight.”

Thunberg said the scale and speed of the emissions reductions needed to keep global temperature close to the limit set by the Paris climate agreement are so great that they cannot be achieved by the normal operation of society. “Our whole society would just shut down and too many people would suffer,” she said.

“So the first thing we need to do is understand we are in an emergency [and] admit the fact that we have failed – humanity collectively has failed – because you can’t solve a crisis that you don’t understand,” Thunberg said.

A vital UN climate summit had been scheduled to begin on Monday in Glasgow but has been postponed for a year because of Covid-19. Thunberg, however, said she was not disappointed by the delay: “As long as we don’t treat the climate crisis like a crisis, we can have as many conferences as we want, but it will just be negotiations, empty words, loopholes and greenwash.”

She is also unimpressed with pledges by nations including the UK, China and Japan to reach net zero by 2050 or 2060. “They mean something symbolically, but if you look at what they actually include, or more importantly exclude, there are so many loopholes. We shouldn’t be focusing on dates 10, 20 or even 30 years in the future. If we don’t reduce our emissions now, then those distant targets won’t mean anything because our carbon budgets will be long gone.”

Thunberg is particularly scathing about the EU’s MEPs who in October approved almost €400bn (£360bn) in subsidies for farmers, the majority of which has weak or non-existent green conditions attached. Agriculture is responsible for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and Thunberg said: “It is a disaster for the climate and for biodiversity.”

She said MEPs had asked for her support in September when the EU was deciding its target for emissions cuts by 2030. “When it’s about something that is in 10 years’ time, they are more than happy to vote for it because that doesn’t really impact them. But when it’s something that actually has an effect, right here right now, they don’t want to touch it. It really shows the hypocrisy.”

Thunberg said she will back the best party available when she reaches voting age, but that there were no politicians she rates as good: “If only. I wish there was one politician or one party that was strong enough on these issues. Imagine how easy it would be if you could just support a politician.”

Justice is at the heart of her campaigning, Thunberg said. “That is the root of all this,” she said. “That’s why we are fighting for climate justice, social justice. They are so interlinked, you can’t have one without the other.”

“The climate crisis is just one symptom of a much larger crisis, [including] the loss of biodiversity, the loss of fertile soil but also including inequality and threats to democracy,” she said. “These are symptoms that we are not living sustainably: we have reached the end of the road.”

On campaigning, Thunberg said: “We need to do everything we can to push in the right direction. But I don’t see the point of being optimistic or pessimistic, I’m just realistic. That doesn’t mean I’m not happy, I’m very happy. You need to have fun, and I’m having much more now than before I started campaigning for this. When your life gets meaning you become happy.”

She said she was inspired by fellow school strikers. “It is so inspiring to see them because they are so determined and so brave,” Thunberg said. “In some countries, they even get arrested for striking. For instance, Arshak Makichyan in Russia, he had troubles with the police, but he just continues because he knows what he’s doing is right. And then also in places like China, Howey Ou is incredibly brave.”

The school strikers brought headline-grabbing crowds to the streets of cities and towns around the world before the coronavirus pandemic, but are now largely confined to online activism. “We are still around and we will have to keep pushing, unfortunately. But we will. We’re not planning to go away,” Thunberg said.

Bring a green recovery plan forward ahead of Cop26 urges Labour!

Heather Stewart, Political editor for the Guardian, reports (Sun 8 Nov 2020)on Labour urging the UK government to:

'redouble efforts to tackle climate crisis after Biden victory'

Heather Stewart reports:

Labour is urging the government to seize on Joe Biden’s presidency to redouble Britain’s efforts to tackle the climate crisis by bringing forward a multibillion pound “green recovery” plan in the run-up to next year’s Cop26 summit in Glasgow.

“You can’t overstate the impact a Biden presidency will have on the climate issue,” the shadow business secretary, Ed Miliband, told the Guardian. “There are so many issues on which this is going to make such a big difference. Internationally, climate is top of the list.

“But you also can’t overstate the scale of the task that we face on this issue, and in particular making a success of Glasgow,” he added.

Miliband called on the government to use “the power of example” in the next 12 months, to show that a “green recovery” from the deep recession triggered by the Covid pandemic can create employment, and accelerate the transition to a net zero economy.

“We need people to be coming to Glasgow in 12 months’ time, to a country that has been creating green jobs, showing the power of a green recovery, showing what can be done,” he said.

Miliband will publish a report with the shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, this week, detailing how the government could create hundreds of thousands of green jobs in the next two years by bringing forward billions of pounds of investment.

“In this country we have an unemployment emergency now, we have a climate emergency now. Put those two things together, and it’s so obvious what we should be doing,” he said.

“What we should be doing is bringing forward investment, a green recovery, to create hundreds of thousands of green jobs. Why is that the right thing to do? It’s the right thing to do because the people who are losing their jobs, need work to be doing. It’s the right thing to do because as Keir [Starmer] has rightly said, we want to go back to normal as soon as possible, but we can’t go back to business as usual: we’ve got to build something better. And it’s the right thing to do on value-for-money grounds, because we’ve got to spend this money anyway. We’re going to have to do this.”

Asked for examples of “green jobs,” he said, “it’s about the electric vehicle charging points that we need around this country. It’s about the ports and the supply chain that we need, so we can actually get the offshore wind into place. It’s about carbon capture and storage, it’s about leading in the hydrogen economy. It’s about the green spaces we need. I mean, there are so many jobs to be done.”

He accused Boris Johnson and the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, of accepting a sharp rise in unemployment as all but inevitable, despite last week’s announcement that the Treasury would extend the furlough scheme.

“We say it’s not inevitable. What we’re going to be doing this week is opening a new front in the economic argument by saying we’ve got to create these jobs, these jobs need to be created, they need to be done,” he said.

The UK government has promised to invest more than £600bn over the next five years in infrastructure; but Labour is concerned that much of this is in longer-term projects that will not create urgently needed jobs.

With Biden promising a $2trn climate plan, Miliband added that the UK should use its chairmanship of the G7 group of leading nations in 2021 to press for a coordinated green stimulus – but could only do so if it had its own ambitious plan.

“We could be pushing internationally for green recovery. We can’t be doing that if we’re doing a few billion pounds with our green recovery, while France is doing tens of billions, Germany’s doing tens of billions, and we’re hanging back. So, we’ve got to show leadership on that.”

He called on the prime minister to “strain every political sinew” to secure a global commitment to ambitious emissions targets for 2030 at next year’s summit, which is a follow-up to the Paris climate summit of 2015.

“Science is telling us we’ve got 10 years to turn this around,” he said. “If we keep emitting at similar rates now, if we don’t have dramatic reductions, then it will be too late. That requires America, China, Europe.”

The US formally left the Paris accord this week, the result of a process initiated by Donald Trump. But Miliband said, “we desperately need America back in it”.

“Boris Johnson should be insisting – subject to Covid – that leaders are at Glasgow, either virtually or in person. Because, you know, this has got to be a forcing mechanism.”

Johnson made offshore wind one of the themes of his Conservative party conference speech last month, claiming the UK could become “the Saudi Arabia of wind power”. The prime minister is also expected to offer further details of his environmental plans in another forthcoming speech.

But Miliband, who was energy and climate change secretary in the last Labour government, said the levels of investment Johnson was promising were not ambitious enough.

“He’s big on rhetoric, he’s short on delivery. He’s short on a plan. And he’s short in my view on urgency and ambition.”

Delivering a “green industrial revolution” was at the heart of last year’s Labour manifesto, when Rebecca Long-Bailey was shadow business secretary.

Asked how Labour’s latest proposals differ from that, Miliband said: “What it shares is a sense of urgency. What is different is the sense that we are in the middle of the Covid crisis. So if anything, the economic case for action now is even stronger than it was in 2019.”

Miliband returned to the shadow cabinet when his close ally Keir Starmer took over the Labour leadership earlier this year, after five years on the backbenches following his defeat in the 2015 general election.

He praised the start Starmer had made: including his handling of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report into antisemitism in the party – which resulted in the controversial suspension of Jeremy Corbyn.

“That EHRC report, it makes really, really bad reading. And it’s right to deal strongly with it,” he said. He declined to comment on Corbyn’s suspension, insisting: “one of the things the EHRC have said is that it’s got to be independent, everybody needs to be able to make their case, it shouldn’t be political interference in these decisions.”

But he added: “You know, from my part, let me say, I think, the way Keir has handled this has been absolutely right.”

Steve Bell on Labour's antisemitism woes

Steve Bell - After Caravaggio - Thu 29 Oct 2020

Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (London), c. 1607/1610, is a painting by  Caravaggio now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

The seemingly inevitable and "burlesque" spectacle of the "left" undoing itself while the forces of the "right" are temporarily disabled through a disconnection from reality, compounded by incompetence, is a sad truth, brutally exemplified in Steve Bell's cartoon, and likely to generate more heat than light in today's cancel/culture/wars ideological battlegrounds.  

Steve Bell's reference to David Low's "burlesque" of an imagined meeting of Hitler and Stalin provides Re:LODE Radio with a tenuous link to an altogether larger set of resonances along the LODE Zone Line.

This secret agreement between Hitler and Stalin to carve up the territories of the newly restored Polish state is known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that enabled these two powers to partition Poland between them. 

Soon after the pact was agreed, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin did not hesitate for long, and ordered the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September, one day after a Soviet–Japanese ceasefire came into effect.

The territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union after the 1939 Soviet invasion east of the Curzon line remained in the Soviet Union after the war ended and are now in Ukraine and Belarus. 

This relatively recent history is especially relevant in the light of recent and ongoing events in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, and that today commemorates the end of the Great War, "the war to end all wars".  

The Information Wrap for the LODE Cargo created in the outskirts of the Polish city of Szczecin, a city that was until 1945 the German city of Stettin, references a Guardian Opinion piece article from October 2018 written by Christian Davies, a journalist based in Warsaw, Poland. His article "flags up" the situation of a divided country as it celebrates the centenary of the modern state of Poland. This is preceded by an article on the history of the borders of Poland, as a state, an empire, and as a people, partitioned by the "great powers" of Germany, Russia and the Austrian Empire. 

First there is a nation, then there is no nation, then there is!

Update - Wed 31 Oct 2018 

On the centenary of the country’s independence Poles should be unified. Yet behind the flag-waving lies a divided and unhappy country

Demonstrators with a banner calling for ‘Death to enemies of the homeland’ at the far-right independence day rally in Warsaw in 2017.

Don’t judge Poland by what has happened here since 2015

Christian Davies writes (Wed 18 Oct 2018):

On 11 November, as much of Europe marks the centenary of the armistice that brought the first world war to an end, Poland will celebrate 100 years since the re-establishment of an independent Polish state after more than a century of partition by foreign powers. In theory, at least, the commemorations should be a time to unify the nation in a way that next year’s 30th anniversary of the negotiated fall of communism in 1989 – the nature of which continues to divide Polish society – cannot.

But Poles are not so easily reconciled. Behind the flag-waving and patriotic banalities stands a divided and unhappy country. Throughout the 19th century and again throughout the communist period, many Poles yearned not just for their own independent state but for that state to fulfil the nation’s imagined destiny as an integral part of the west. But what did “the west” mean?

For many, including successive generations of Polish leaders after 1989, this meant anchoring the country in western political and security institutions and adopting the liberal democratic values that underpinned them. But others, who regard godless liberal rationalism as little more than a variant of Soviet social engineering, harboured the delusion that the west represented a kind of pre-Enlightenment medieval Christendom. As they have become disabused of this fantasy, so many are creeping towards the conclusion that they are stuck within a value system they do not believe in. Membership of the European Union meant money and respect, but little attention was given to the nature of the transformation of the Polish economy and society – and the ensuing obligations – that would accompany it.

In retrospect, it seems a miracle that liberal democracy took hold in Poland in recent decades in the way that it did. Contrary to national myth, which often confuses the long-held desire for national liberation with a genuine collective commitment to democratic values, the democratic tradition was never very deeply embedded in Polish society. Liberal democratic values in Poland have long had to contend not only with the legacy of communism but also with that of a peculiarly Polish brand of national Catholicism that shares with communism a commitment to hierarchy, dogma and ritual, and the associated authoritarian vices of ignorance, passivity and paranoia that have come to the fore in recent years.

To see the dramatic shift in Polish attitudes towards the west, one needs only to look at the young. For those of a certain age, Poland’s hard border with the west before EU accession had immense symbolic power. It suggested that Poles were not yet to be trusted, that they were not yet to be considered as equals. The opening of its western borders in 2004 represented not just liberation and convenience, but also acceptance and respect. But for many younger Poles who have since left the country looking for work, Europe’s open borders have come to represent the collusion of Polish and European elites in the economic exploitation of the young. As a result, many have rejected liberalism and democracy and instead been drawn towards nationalism and the narratives of the far right.

This growing nationalist sentiment is expressed in the ever larger “march of independence” organised each year by parties of the far right. Although the march has been a fixture for several years, it is only in the age of Trump that it has received widespread attention in the international media. But while one must be vigilant about the increasing visibility of the extreme right, breathless commentaries about the rise of fascism in Poland overlook a much more immediate and realistic threat: the ongoing construction of a conservative autocracy underpinned by an authoritarian brand of Catholicism – Salazar on the Vistula.

As the Polish government’s present confrontation with European institutions shows, however, this new authoritarian order cannot be fully implemented as long as Poland remains in the EU. Not only does EU law not allow for the kind of authoritarianism that some in Poland want, but allowing such a direct and sustained challenge to the authority of that law threatens its very existence.

For some Europeans, the fact that the Polish crisis has reached this point constitutes proof that the country should never have been allowed to join the EU in the first place. This is deeply unfair – Poland should be judged on the achievements of the last 30 years, not the events of the last three. But it does serve as a reminder that it was never Poland’s “destiny” to be so deeply embedded in the west. It was a choice, and it is a choice that must be renewed by each successive generation if it is to be sustained. As the British are finding out at the moment, the decision to pursue a European future can be “unmade” more easily than you think.

As a result, the question of Poland’s long-term future – something that had long been thought to have been settled – will hang heavy over this year’s independence festivities. For many Poles there is something deeply, deeply maddening and shaming about the possibility that after centuries of struggle, culminating in the victory and international admiration of 1989 and accession to the EU 15 years later, their nation could have achieved so much, and yet proceed to throw it all away again in a fit of pique – the final confirmation of warnings from their ancestors that beneath the patriotic bombast, Poles will always be their own worst enemy.

But one cannot dismiss the possibility that this maddening and charismatic nation is still capable of unexpected and formidable acts of resistance. The emotion, the hypocrisy, the cynicism, the sense of bewilderment and frustration, the ability to rise up in anger one moment and to remain stubbornly passive the next – these are all inherent to the Polish soap opera.

For that reason, to be Polish – even only in part, as I am – is a kind of agony. Dragging you into its drama, it is a nation that never fails to give you hope, even as it lets you down. As I rage against it, I cannot escape the feeling that I am condemned to love it forever.

As Kenan Malik writes in his Observer column (Sun 8 Nov 2020):

Look to Poland for a lesson in how popular protest works

Demonstrations against new abortion restrictions have forced the government to call for talks

Kenan Malik writes:

Last month, Poland’s top court ruled it unconstitutional to have an abortion on the grounds of a foetal defect. In a country in which abortion was already highly restricted, this all but banned the procedure – 98% of all abortions in Poland are because of foetal abnormalities.

In 2016, when the governing rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS) attempted to push similar anti-abortion legislation through parliament, it was forced to back down in the face of mass protests and a national women’s strike. So this time, the PiS government chose the judicial route, having already packed the constitutional court with conservative judges.

It may find, though, that this path proves no easier. The decision of the constitutional court has led to even bigger protests, the largest since the days of Solidarity and the overthrow of the communist regime in 1989, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets, defying both coronavirus and government bans on protests. The size of the demonstrations has forced the government into delaying implementation of the court ruling and calling for talks with pro-abortion groups.

Preventing the implementation of the constitutional court ruling will, however, be insufficient to protect abortion rights in Poland. It’s true that virtually all abortions will be outlawed by the ruling. But the vast majority of Polish women who have legal abortions do not do so in Poland. So restrictive are the laws that there are just 1,000 legal abortions in Poland each year, while up to 120,000 women are forced to go abroad and a similar number are believed to have backstreet abortions.

Nevertheless, Poles have shown that the verdicts of even stacked supreme courts can be defied by popular protest. Over to you, America.

Artists and dancers protesting in Warsaw on 30 October. Photograph: Kasia Strek 

A backlash against a patriarchal culture': How Polish protests go beyond abortion rights

Mass demonstrations have exposed underlying anger at political and religious interference in people’s everyday lives

So says Jon Henley, Europe correspondent for the Guardian published together with photos by Kasia Strek in Warsaw (Fri 6 Nov 2020). Here are some extracts from this informative article: 

For 14 nights they have marched, enraged by a near-total ban on abortion that has stirred a generation to stage the largest mass demonstrations that Poland has seen since Solidarność toppled the communist regime in the 1980s.

Until soaring coronavirus numbers and a looming national lockdown made it almost impossible, up to a million people nightly defied a government ban on protests, taking to the streets from Warsaw to Łódź, Poznań to Wrocław, Gdańsk to Kraków.

The protests, led by the grassroots women’s movement Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (OSK, or All-Polish Women’s Strike), have shocked the ruling conservatives and created a new political faultline that, analysts say, could spell more serious problems for the party.

“I think it is a whole backlash against a patriarchal culture, against the patriarchal state, against the fundamentalist religious state, against the state that treats women really badly,” said Marta Lempart, a 41-year-old lawyer and one of OSK’s leaders.

The group has outlined areas extending far beyond abortion rights where it says urgent change is needed: stronger and wider women’s and LGBTQ+ rights in general; the separation of church and state; more support for healthcare, small businesses and education; full judicial independence.

Predominantly Catholic Poland already had one of Europe’s strictest abortion laws when, on 22 October, its constitutional tribunal ruled that terminations in instances of severe foetal anomalies, which accounted for all but about 30 of the 1,110 abortions performed legally in Poland last year, were “incompatible” with the constitution.

The decision by the court’s 15 pro-PiS judges, many of them appointed unlawfully, would allow terminations only in instances of rape, incest and when the mother’s life is at risk – a tiny fraction of cases. Women’s groups estimate an additional 200,000 Polish women have abortions either illegally or abroad each year.

The ruling sparked an immediate reaction. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, mainly women and young people, took to the streets with banners proclaiming “I wish I could abort my government”, “This is war” and “Women’s hell”.

On Tuesday – apparently in response to the protests – the government indefinitely postponed publishing the court’s decision in the official journal, preventing it from coming into effect (and raising major constitutional questions if it tries to do so later).

But the genie may be out of the bottle.

While surveys show more than 60% of Poles support the status quo on abortion, barely 15% back the proposed changes. This has mobilised a generation not previously engaged with politics and stoked existing, wider anger at what many see as the steady erosion of democratic norms since PiS came to power in 2015.

Maria Kowalczyk, 38, a beauty journalist, said at a protest in Warsaw that Poland was “years behind. In this country, because of the politics and doctrine of the government and the religious fanatics, someone who is different is worse. The way they treat LGBT people, migrants, all minorities – and now women … Society has had enough.”

Julia Estera at a protest in Warsaw on 30 October. Photograph: Kasia Strek

Julia Estera, 30, a performance and makeup artist from Łódź, said Poland was no longer a free country. “We are a religious state where we are all demanded to think in one possible way.” Bianka, 15, and Maja, 16, said Poland’s youth would not back down. “We don’t want to live in a country where we don’t have a choice, where everything is decided for us.”

Andrzej Kompa, a historian and university researcher, said on another march in the capital that he was protesting “not just against this hell for women, decided by this so-called constitutional court, but against this government, against church involvement in political affairs, for minority rights. Simply for freedom.”

Support for the PiS, who were re-elected last year, and its founder, Jarosław Kaczyński, 71, has plunged by almost 10 points to 30.9% in a month, according to one poll. Another showed 70% of Poles would like Kaczyński – widely seen as the country’s true powerbroker – to step down as PiS leader.

Breaking long-held taboos, the protests have also challenged the Catholic church and its influence on Polish policy, education and culture, with some demonstrators disrupting services and defacing churches. Support for the church has fallen eight points to 49% since March, one poll showed.

Kaczyński last week urged the party faithful to call for a defence of the Catholic church “at all costs”. He also said the protests were “intended to destroy Poland”, and urged his supporters to fight for “Poland and patriotism” in order to avert “the end of … the Polish nation as we know it”.

The protests could hardly have come at a worse time for PiS. As Covid-19 infections and death tolls break new records, the government – which warned this week of a new national lockdown within 10 days unless things improve – is coming under increasingly heavy fire for its handling of the pandemic.

It now appears to have few easy ways out. Many Poles view the court ruling as a tactical play by Kaczyński to bolster support on the traditionalist right while bypassing parliament, where the ruling coalition has only a slender majority. It has sparked an explosion of popular fury unlike any PiS has seen.

“It certainly feels different,” said Adam Mrozowicki, a sociologist at the University of Wrocław. “We need to study it properly, but the heart of this does seem to be young people. Anecdotally, I’ve never seen this level of engagement among my students – in my faculty, maybe 70-80% of students have taken part in some kind of protest.”

The scale and nature of the protests was new, Mrozowicki said: “They are led by young women. This is decentralised, locally based, grassroots. And personally, in 20 years, I’ve never seen anything like these numbers. To have 65,000 people on the streets of Wrocław …”

Ben Stanley, a political scientist at the SWPS university in Warsaw, said the protests felt “qualitatively different”. Previous anti-PiS demonstrations over the rule of law mainly drew “Solidarność-era protesters, people in their 50s and 60s. It wasn’t an issue that resonated so much with young people.”

Women’s rights are “a lot more tangible for 25-year-olds; they really mean something concrete. This ruling has animated many more people by personalising the culture war PiS has declared: its chosen narrative of a Poland whose authentic identity and traditions are at threat from rootless cosmopolitanism.”

The protests had “blown a hole in the idea that Kaczyński is always three steps ahead, that PiS always has its finger on the pulse of what Poland really feels”, Stanley said, “at the same time as Covid has blown a hole in their reputation for competence”.

The party could salvage the situation in the short term, he said, but “processes are accelerating that will make the nationalist, clericalist PiS narrative more difficult to sustain longer term. All this may not bring PiS down immediately, but it could make things a lot more difficult in future.”

Mrozowicki said it was unclear how the protests would immediately affect Poland’s politics because the protesters had no clear links to parliamentary politics, and their leaders have said they do not want to become a political movement. “But it feels like something, definitely, is shifting,” he said.

Meanwhile in neighbouring Belarus . . . 

. . . partisan tactics once used to fight the Nazis have been turned against Alexander Lukashenko’s brutally repressive regime 

Shaun Walker in Minsk, reporting for the Guardian (Sun 8 Nov 2020) writes under the headline:

‘Crush the fascist vermin’: Belarus opposition summons wartime spirit

In Minsk, what people here call the Great Patriotic War is never far away. Monuments, street names and museums venerate the memory of the awful years from 1941 to 1945, when the Soviet Union was at war with Nazi Germany.

Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, has used the years of partisan resistance against the Nazi occupation of the country, and the eventual victory by the Red Army, as the basis for a neo-Soviet, Belarusian identity.

But in recent months, something strange has happened, as Lukashenko faces angry and sustained protests to his continued rule and has launched a vicious crackdown. The war narrative that his regime has done so much to promote still resonates among the population, but with a twist: now, his authorities have become the Nazis.

It has become normal for people to speak about the authorities as “fascists” and “occupiers” who remain in power only due to their military and police might.

Given some of the images that came from the crackdown in August, it is not hard to see why: thousands of Belarusians were subjected to ritual beatings and abuse from security officers dressed in black and wearing balaclavas; military vehicles patrol the streets; and anyone supporting the opposition movement can be snatched for interrogation at any moment.

“We were brought up on endless films and books about fighting the fascists, and then, when you look at the uniforms, the style, the methods used by the authorities, it’s not hard to see why these memories resonated,” said Yulia Chernyavskaya, a Belarusian cultural anthropologist.

Under Lukashenko, the war has been the centrepiece of school history teaching and the focus of hundreds of monuments and museums. The country’s independence day is celebrated on the day Minsk was liberated from the Nazis in 1944, not on the day Belarus actually achieved independence from the Soviet Union.

“We will expand this space to raise new patriots who are able to defend not only themselves, their family and children, but also their country,” said Lukashenko on a visit earlier this year to the Stalin Line, a museum complex outside Minsk where visitors can see bunkers from a defensive line built by the Soviet Union in the 1930s, ride on tanks and get tours from guides in Red Army uniforms.

In 2014, Lukashenko and Russian president Vladimir Putin re-opened Minsk’s main second world war museum, updated for the 21st century. Putin has also used the war victory as the basis for a new Russian identity. Belarus, unlike most of the Soviet Union, spent the majority of the war under occupation, and here, the memories and veneration of the local partisan movement, which fought against the Nazi occupiers and local collaborators, are strong.

One example of protesters drawing on this legacy in the fight against Lukashenko is Vozhyk, a one-page A4 pamphlet of anti-regime caricatures and satirical articles. Vozhyk was a wartime partisan leaflet that was originally called “Crush the fascist vermin”; now, it is released in digital form on an encrypted Telegram channel, and comes with the following message to would-be distributors: “Partisans! Download the PDF, print it out, and stick it in your apartment entrance … We are the majority and together we will win!”

One of the editors of Vozhyk, who wished to remain anonymous, said she had chosen the name because of the resonance with the war period: “The authorities are monsters and they fit the definition of fascism. During the August violence, it was incredible how people were surviving: they went out, came home, had a quick sleep and then went out again. The partisan gene is alive in all of us.”

It is true that almost overnight, tens of thousands of Belarusians acquired their own white-red-white flag, which had been effectively banned for the past two decades. Groups on the app Telegram have sprung up to organise the protest in individual towns, streets or apartment blocks, with the participants often using conspiratorial methods to shield their identities from each other, so that if one gets caught by authorities, they will not be able to give the others away. In short: a modern partisan movement sprang up in a matter of weeks.

Lukashenko’s supporters claim they can’t see the parallels. “Lukashenko has helped a lot of people, people here have good lives, and they are crying about fascists. What fascists?” said Alexander Metla, who runs the Stalin Line complex. Tens of thousands of school pupils and other visitors each year watch military reconstructions and relive a heroised version of the war effort at the complex, which features a bust of Stalin and a large photograph of Lukashenko in military uniform at the entrance.

For their part, the authorities have tried to show that it is the protesters who are the descendants of the Nazis, pointing out that the white-red-white flag was used by Nazi collaborators (but ignoring its longer history). During the weekly Sunday protests, the army guards the second world war museum with barbed wire and a row of armed troops. Defence minister Viktor Khrenin said rallies using the white-red-white flag in such “sacred places” would be dealt with firmly by the army.

Such rhetoric worked well in Ukraine in 2014, when the Kremlin portrayed the Maidan revolution in Kyiv as a “fascist coup” and backed a separatist movement in the country’s east that rallied behind Soviet second world war symbolism. Using the same playbook has not had the same effect in Belarus, however. Partly because far-right nationalists simply do not exist in Belarus, and partly down to the sheer brutality of Lukashenko’s crackdown and the courage of those who continue to stand up against it.

“We always laughed at this stereotype of the Belarusians as partisans as if it was nonsense, but it was really quite surprising how people suddenly acquired these tactics as if they knew it from their birth,” said Chernyavskaya.

Come and See

Re:LODE Radio considers the Soviet anti-war film Come and See, a masterpiece of cinema. The film was completed in 1985 and directed by Elem Klimov. Its screenplay, written by Klimov and Ales Adamovich, is based on the 1978 book I Am from the Fiery Village, of which Adamovich was a co-author.

The film's plot focuses on the Nazi German occupation of Belarus, and the events as witnessed by a young Belarusian partisan teenager named Flyora, who—against his mother's wishes—joins the Belarusian resistance movement, and thereafter depicts the Nazi atrocities and human suffering inflicted upon the Eastern European villages' populace. The film mixes hyper-realism with an underlying surrealism, and philosophical existentialism with poetical, psychological, political and apocalyptic themes.

The title of the film is itself a quote from Chapter 6 of the Book of Revelation, an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Chapter 6, verses 7–8 have been cited as being particularly relevant to the film:

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, "Come and see!" And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

According to Klimov, the film was so shocking for audiences that ambulances were sometimes called in to take away particularly impressionable viewers, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Also according to Klimov, during one of the after-the-film discussions, an elderly German stood up and said: 

"I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht. I traveled through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify: everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and grandchildren".

"Come and See"

'Nobody can block it': 

How the Telegram app fuels global protest

Shaun Walker reporting for the Guardian in Minsk (Sat 7 Nov 2020), asks the question: 

The controversial messaging app has moved huge crowds on the streets of Belarus. But who is its secretive puppet master? 

One Sunday in August, two weeks after Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko declared an implausibly decisive victory in presidential elections, I joined a crowd of around 100,000 people as it moved through central Minsk. Protest in Belarus was no longer the domain of a few hundred hardy opposition figures, and the homemade placards many people carried illustrated how broad the coalition had become: “Let’s drink to love, from the bartenders of Belarus”; “Teachers against violence”; “Working class, go on strike!”

The previous fortnight had been a time of national awakening, as the country united around the goal of ending Lukashenko’s 26 years in charge. As grim footage of police violence circulated on the messenger app Telegram, large numbers came out to demand that their voices be heard.

The enormous crowd began to flow from Independence Square, through the broad central avenues of Minsk towards a second world war memorial – because many people had received messages on their phones telling them to head there. When we arrived, the monument had been surrounded by barbed wire and placed under armed guard. Some people shouted abuse; others offered the soldiers flowers and implored them to join the side of the people. After a tense, half-hour standoff, they looked down at their phones again. Mobile internet was not working for everyone (the authorities had been switching it off at key moments) but those tech-savvy enough to install the right virtual private network (VPN) apps were able to relay the news.

The first place they looked was Nexta Live (pronounced “Nekhta” and meaning “someone” in Belarusian), a channel on Telegram. “Nexta says we should go towards the residence!” one man called out, joining a column of people making the short walk to Lukashenko’s official residence. Outside was a police line: cars, makeshift fences and a few hundred riot officers in balaclavas with shields. It was clear that attempting to push through would result in bloody clashes. Again, advice flashed up in the Nexta Telegram feed. “Minsk! Do not approach the police line! The best decision now is to disperse.” The crowd did just that. Since then, every Sunday, they have come out; each week, Nexta has announced the time and place of the protest a day or two before.

Telegram, a messaging app created by the reclusive Russian exile Pavel Durov, is suited to running protests for a number of reasons. It allows huge encrypted chat groups, making it easier to organise people, like a slicker version of WhatsApp. And its “channels” allow moderators to disseminate information quickly to large numbers of followers in a way that other messaging services do not; they combine the reach and immediacy of a Twitter feed, and the focus of an email newsletter. The combination of usability and privacy has made the app popular with protestors (it has been adopted by Extinction Rebellion) as well as people standing against authoritarian regimes (in Hong Kong and Iran, as well as Belarus); it is also used by terrorists and criminals. In the past five years, Telegram has grown at a remarkable speed, hitting 60 million users in 2015 and 400 million in April this year. Each day, another 1.5 million people sign up.

In Belarus, it permeates the political landscape. Opposition politicians issue press releases on a Telegram channel; journalists swap tips about where things are happening and how to avoid being detained; and people who have been tortured or beaten by Lukashenko’s thugs can find groups offering free medical or psychological support. Most importantly, Nexta Live and a number of smaller opposition channels feed subscribers with organisational information and rallying cries.

“How can you stop these Telegram channels? Can you block them? No. Nobody can,” Lukashenko complained. But if he can’t beat Telegram, he has decided to join it instead. On the Sunday I followed protesters through Minsk, Lukashenko took off from his residence in a helicopter and flew over us. Later, his press service posted video footage, shot from inside the helicopter, to his newly created Telegram channel: the leader, dressed in black and wielding an automatic rifle, surveyed the crowds below; “They’ve scarpered like rats,” he muttered, as he peered down from the windows. Lukashenko was meant to appear uncompromising and in control, but the video was quickly copied to opposition Telegram channels, overlaid with insulting captions, voiceovers and memes, and seen there by far more. At the time of writing, Lukashenko’s channel has 86,000 subscribers, while Nexta Live has almost 2 million, an impressive feat in a country of fewer than 10 million. Last month, Belarusian authorities declared Nexta’s channel and logo to be “extremist materials” in an unsuccessful attempt to scare followers off.

It is a common trope for embattled autocrats to claim that protesters are in fact puppets in the hands of nefarious foreign plotters. This summer, Lukashenko suggested that his opponents were backed by the massed armies of Nato, or shadowy forces in Washington DC. But the truth is rather more embarrassing: his nemesis is a 22-year-old blogger working from a room strewn with pizza boxes 300 miles away.

***

Two weeks after that Sunday in Minsk, I meet with Stepan Svetlov at Nexta’s makeshift headquarters, inside the office of an NGO in a Warsaw apartment block. After buzzing me in, Svetlov appears at the apartment door in baggy jeans and a blue sweatshirt. There are armed police outside; unsurprisingly, given the volume of threats the group receives. “We get them all the time. They say they’re going to blow the office up, they say they’re going to kidnap us and drive us back to Belarus,” Svetlov tells me. We sit down in the room from which he and four others run Nexta. It contains a couple of computers, and a table covered with blue takeaway coffee cups.

Svetlov, who only recently turned 22, has not been to Belarus for two years. His parents were there until recently, but have now left the country, having been advised by friends with government contacts that things might get dangerous. “At the start of all this, my mum was quite sceptical, but now she has started to support me,” Svetlov says. Has it been a shock for his parents that their son is now seen as the revolution’s puppet master? “You could say they were quite surprised,” he says, smiling.

Svetlov launched Nexta as a YouTube channel in 2015, shortly before the last round of elections in Belarus. “Nobody to vote for/ Only mustachioed portraits everywhere,” ran the lyrics to a song that formed the channel’s first post. Nexta’s sharply satirical videos about Belarusian politics swelled subscriber numbers to 100,000, and quickly brought it to the attention of the authorities. A clip Svetlov made entitled “Lukasherlock”, about the Belarusian president’s claims to have solved a crime overnight, was deemed to be in potential violation of a law on insulting the president, and a criminal case was opened against him. By that time, he was studying in Poland, and he has not returned to Belarus since. In 2018, Svetlov switched his main activities from YouTube to Telegram, realising its potential to reach more people more easily.

Stepan Svetlov, creator of the Nexta channel.  

As the summer’s election campaign wore on, Nexta’s popularity began to grow, partly because other bloggers who remained inside Belarus were harassed or thrown in jail. Sergei Tikhanovsky, who ran a YouTube channel and intended to stand for president, was arrested in May. In June, Igor Losik, administrator of the second biggest Belarusian Telegram channel, was also arrested. Both remain in jail. Tikhanovsky’s wife, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, eventually ran against Lukashenko as an opposition unity candidate. The dictator assumed she would give the election a veneer of legitimacy while posing no threat; but her promise to be a transitional leader ahead of new, fair elections began to energise a population desperate for change. Svetlov and his small team in Warsaw were quick to share videos from her rallies.

On 9 August, election day, Belarusian authorities turned off the internet almost completely as they announced the results – 80% for Lukashenko and 10% for Tikhanovskaya – to widespread disbelief and fury. After three nights of protests and ruthless police violence in response, the internet returned, a sign the authorities felt they had the situation back under control. But as detainees were freed and began to tell their stories, the Nexta team in Warsaw was deluged with horrific testimony and graphic footage of violence and injuries. I spoke to a western diplomat who told me that it is hard to overestimate Svetlov’s role in this summer’s protests, with most traditional opposition leaders jailed or forced into exile before the presidential vote: “I think he’s been the most important person of this entire period.”

Svetlov’s small team was overwhelmed by the volume of information coming from Belarus. “During the peak, there were about 200 messages coming every minute, or 100,000 a day. It was impossible to work through. We ignored text and just looked at photos and videos, and put the best on to the channel,” he recalls. As we speak, a young woman enters the office with a brusque, “Hi” and settles down for a shift at one of the computers, sifting through the thousands of messages, videos and tipoffs that Nexta receives each day. “You can’t talk to her, she’s still working anonymously,” Svetlov tells me, suggesting we continue our conversation in the kitchen.

I ask Svetlov about the Sunday I followed the crowds in Minsk, who in turn were following his directions. There were three people in the office that day, he says, tracking events in the Belarusian capital. There was no great science behind it: no complex software mapping the crowds, or algorithms to determine the numbers – simply three young people scrolling through hundreds of messages sent from the ground, and trying to determine which were the most relevant. Before major logistical information is put on the channel, it is debated in a small Telegram chat containing about 15 people, Svetlov tells me, including Nexta’s administrators and those from a few other channels.

“We understood that people were by the war monument, and they needed to do something. Someone suggested they should go to the residence and everyone agreed, so we put it on the feed,” he says. And with that, a 22-year-old sitting in Warsaw moved a crowd of 100,000 people in Minsk.

***

None of this would have happened without Telegram’s creator, Pavel Durov. The reclusive 36-year-old Russian is ascetic in most lifestyle choices, arrogant in his interactions with others and quite brilliant at what he does. Born in St Petersburg, he learned coding in school, and immediately used it to subvert authority. According to a biography by the Russian journalist Nikolai Kononov, Durov hacked the system so that all the computers in the classroom displayed a photograph of the teacher and the caption “Must die”.

Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram. 

Later, as a student at St Petersburg State University, Durov set up a web forum for his fellow students. He did everything he could to promote it, organising real-life beauty contests that forum users could vote on, and creating controversial alter egos to ramp up controversy. “They were really juicy characters and people believed in them: an anti-feminist, a homophobe, a Stalinist,” he told Kononov. In much the same way that Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard forum grew into Facebook, Durov and his brother Nikolai, who still work together today, turned their university website into VKontakte (meaning “in touch”). The Durovs were joined by a team of young coders, working out of the famous Singer House building in central St Petersburg, and the company grew rapidly in Russia and the former Soviet countries, partly because it also allowed users to share music and videos.

As VKontakte evolved into a tech giant, Durov gained a reputation as a strange, imperious figure. Obsessed with The Matrix, he saw himself, like Keanu Reeves’ character Neo, as a coder with a mission. He looks a little like a boyish Reeves, and in his rare public appearances is always dressed in black. He is a fan of grand gestures, such as a 2012 stunt in which he threw 5,000 rouble notes (then worth about £100) from the windows of Singer House and watched people scuffle on the street below.

But many artists were unhappy at VKontakte’s failure to take action against widespread copyright infringements on the site, and it was also slow to act on offensive material or groups, including those belonging to “Occupy Paedophilia”, an organisation that shared videos of attacks on LGBT people to its 90,000 followers on the site. Durov has a libertarian streak and has often said over the years that he values free speech above all, though to many, his unwillingness to take quick action over hate groups looked like an evasion of moral responsibility.

He also refused to bow to Kremlin pressure to ban opposition political groups, after protests broke out in Russia in late 2011. “This is my official answer to the security services,” he wrote on Twitter at the time, posting a photograph of a dog wearing a hoodie. As the informal relationship he had with figures around the Kremlin broke down, he was forced to sell his stake in an investment fund linked to pro-Kremlin oligarchs; and in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he fled Russia, citing threats against him.

Durov acquired St Kitts and Nevis citizenship, and is now based in Dubai, spending long periods travelling the globe with his team of 15 or so coders in tow, often staying in hotels or rented houses. His precise movements are hard to track, and he ignored several interview requests for this article. (An associate of his tells me this is because “he has very high quality standards” and has met few journalists who lived up to them.) Instead, Durov communicates through a sporadically updated Telegram channel, where around once a month he drops his thoughts on freedom of speech, or the flaws of rival messenger services, particularly WhatsApp, which he loves to denigrate (“WhatsApp sucks”). Occasionally, the channel gives an insight into Durov’s lifestyle, such as a post last June in which he extolled the virtues of a “seagan” diet of wild fish and nothing else. He drinks no alcohol or caffeine, and claims not to have taken any pills or medicine for the past 15 years. In an October post marking his 36th birthday, he shared tips on how to stay looking young (you should live alone, for a start).

Since leaving Russia, Durov has focused on Telegram, the app he began developing as a way to speak securely with his brother and other associates. He has portrayed Telegram as a labour of love; it carries no advertising, and he says he has so far funded it himself, from the vast profits he made from VKontakte. A plan to launch a cryptocurrency called TON, which would have been integrated into Telegram, faltered earlier this year after the US Securities and Exchange Commission ordered the cash to be returned to investors.

Protests in Minsk.

One of the chief reasons Telegram is so beloved of protest movements is that it will run even if national regulators ban it. Used in conjunction with another app called Psiphon, it can circumvent most firewalls. Protesters in Iran used this approach to get around a government ban on Telegram in early 2018. But this loophole makes it just as useful for drug dealers, terrorists and other criminals. In Britain and many other places, one of the primary uses of Telegram is for buying drugs. In India, authorities have found Telegram has become a leading source of pirated music and film streams. Most notoriously, it also became known as the Isis app of choice. Former former prime minister Theresa May singled out Telegram in 2018 when she warned about “smaller platforms” that “can quickly become home to criminals and terrorists”.

According to Joshua Fisher-Birch, a researcher at the Counter Extremism Project in New York, Telegram was the forum Isis fighters used most often to communicate with each other at the height of the group’s dominance of parts of Iraq and Syria. “They felt it was a safe space, because they would not have their data shared with any government, and they also liked the ease of use,” he tells me. Durov’s explanations for why he does not lose sleep over this have been far from convincing: “Ultimately, Isis will always find a way to communicate within themselves, and if any means of communication turns out to be not secure, they’ll just switch to another one,” he said at a conference in 2015.

But, despite its initial reluctance to work with governments, Telegram has started taking action against terrorist-linked channels, Fisher-Birch says. In November last year, thousands of chats, bots and channels with Isis links were removed, in a joint operation with Europol, who said Telegram had gone to “considerable effort” to identify and remove Isis-linked content.

***

Earlier this year I spoke, via Telegram audio, to the administrator of a number of channels covering the Hong Kong protests, including one with more than 100,000 subscribers. Anticipating what would happen in Belarus, he told me that the organisers used channels for disseminating timely information to protesters, and the group chats for discussing their next steps. He particularly appreciated a Telegram feature that allows one user to delete a chat for both themselves and the other party, and had used it when friends had been arrested, in case police gained access to their phones.

He also liked the way people could be mobilised very quickly. “A big Telegram moment was at the Polytechnic University [in Hong Kong] last November, when a lot of students were trapped inside and the police were trying to attack. We used the channels to get as many people there as possible to help save them from arrest,” he told me. Although he was sure that some of the chats were infiltrated by police informants, a feature allowing users to hide their telephone numbers meant he felt more protected than on WhatsApp or other messengers. “With Telegram, we are pretty sure that we can’t be monitored by the government,” he said.

In Belarus, it is not just the tech-savvy youth who rely on the app. I realised this at the end of a reporting day in the provinces, when I stopped the car in a small village about an hour from Minsk, and got chatting to a 72-year-old woman who lives alone in a neat cottage. A former manager at one of Belarus’s many Soviet-built, state-run factories, Valentina is exactly the kind of person one might have expected to support Lukashenko – and she told me that until a few years ago she had, appreciating the way he had steered the country through the 90s without allowing the oligarchy and inequality that developed in neighbouring Russia and Ukraine to take hold. “If he had left 10 years ago, he would have gone down as a hero, but he has started to treat the people as though they are trash,” she said as we drank tea made from leaves she had foraged herself.

The transformation in Valentina’s political views began when she stopped watching state news on television and started using Telegram, which one of her grandchildren had installed for her on the chunky desktop computer in her bedroom. Now, each night before bed, she draws the orange curtains in the spotlessly tidy room and settles into an armchair at her computer desk to scroll through her Telegram feed. “It’s very addictive! I think, I’ll just take a look for half an hour, and before I know it, it’s nearly three in the morning. Which is a disaster as I have to wake up early to tend the allotment.” Almost all her friends are on Telegram, too, usually with the help of their children or grandchildren.

Meanwhile, the standoff in Belarus appears to have reached something of a stalemate: the Sunday protests continue, but Lukashenko remains reluctant to make concessions. A whole network of smaller Telegram chats and channels, coordinating protest in various cities, streets or even specific apartment blocks, has now appeared, creating a localised and fragmented protest movement that authorities cannot possibly crush.

Back in Warsaw, I ask Svetlov what comes next for Nexta. The evening before we meet, the channel had published the home address of a pro-Lukashenko official. Wasn’t this an incitement to violence? “That was not meant to exert physical pressure on him – it was more for psychological effect, so that people start thinking about their actions. We see the same thing with policemen who are scared to show their faces and hide behind masks,” he says. In the weeks after our meeting, Nexta releases the names and dates of birth of thousands of policemen, having been sent a leaked list.

Will Svetlov feel a sense of responsibility if the protests turn violent, given the volume of his followers? What if something happens to the people he outs on Nexta? He shrugs, with his usual half-smile, and dodges the question. “From the beginning, we saw it as a peaceful protest. It was the authorities who started the repression.”

As Lukashenko’s legitimacy has crumbled, he has increasingly looked to Vladimir Putin for support. While the Russian president has little affection for Lukashenko, he has even less for street protest. In the Kremlin, there has been horror at how quickly discontent has flared in a neighbouring country that appeared to be stable. Russian authorities banned the app in 2018, after Durov refused to comply with their demand that Telegram should share encryption data with the security services on request. But after two years in which millions of Russians got round the ban by using their own VPN, this June the Kremlin gave up and legalised Telegram again.

Still, events in Belarus show that even in the harshest of crackdowns, neutralising Telegram as a mobilising force is close to impossible. Lukashenko recently warned Putin that he, too, should be wary of Telegram: “You’re a powerful country, a nuclear country. But the Soviet Union was also a nuclear country. So you can’t relax… Through the internet, through these Telegram channels, they will get so deep into people’s brains.” The words were clearly meant to pressure Putin into continuing to prop him up, but Lukashenko might have a point – that the app, created by an exiled Russian, could one day play a similar role in Russia.

Recently, Svetlov inserted a poll into the Nexta Live channel to ask followers where they were based. Out of more than 700,000 respondents, over half were in Belarus, but 28% were in Russia. “When things quieten down in Belarus, we need to start reaching that Russian audience, too,” Svetlov says, smiling. “We won’t call for people to protest. But if they start, we’ll certainly cover it.”

Running out of time in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

NEXTA

. . . and who's next?

Democracy to Trump: you're fired!

Attempting to steal an election by false claims that the election was rigged is unlikely to succeed as a strategy, even in a low intensity democracy like the United States, but it reveals much about the way information is being increasingly, and knowingly weaponised, in an information age of "confirmation bias".   

Ed Pilkington in New York, reporting for the Guardian (Tue 10 Nov 2020) on US Department of Justice official's fury over attorney general's demand for US poll fraud inquiries:

Current and former US Department of Justice (DoJ) officials have reacted with anger and dismay to the latest move in support of Donald Trump by William Barr, the attorney general who has stoked further discord around the president’s refusal to concede electoral defeat by approving federal investigations into voter fraud, despite little evidence of any wrongdoing.

Barr’s two-page memo, delivered to the 93 US attorneys across the country on Monday, was immediately condemned by senior figures inside and outside the DoJ.

In the most dramatic response, the top DoJ official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned from his post, telling colleagues he did so because of the “ramifications” of Barr’s move.

In a statement, Pilger pointed out that for the past 40 years the justice department had abided by a clear policy of non-intervention in elections, with criminal investigations only carried out after contests were certified and completed.

Barr’s memo tears up that rule by giving federal prosecutors the go-ahead to investigate what he called “apparently-credible allegations of irregularities”. His action was specifically aimed at closely fought presidential contests in swing states with prolonged vote counts caused by the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.

Complaints about unsubstantiated irregularities have been received by the justice department from three states: Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Outside the DoJ, there was widespread unease that Barr has once again mobilised the might of the justice department in a politicised direction. The memo was interpreted as casting doubt on the propriety of the election, which on Saturday was called for Joe Biden following his victory by a clear and growing margin in Pennsylvania.

Vanita Gupta, a former head of the civil rights division of the DoJ under Barack Obama, denounced Barr’s tactics as “scaremongering”.

“Let’s be clear, this is about disruption, disinformation and sowing chaos,” she said on Twitter.

Gupta, now chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Barr’s aim was “stoking division, polarization and lies”, in order to “undermine confidence in outcome with Trump voters and ultimately a Biden administration”.

Other former prosecutors, legal scholars and election experts debated how serious Barr’s move was likely to be. Steve Vladeck, a specialist in national security law at the University of Texas, stressed that the DoJ had no power to block states from certifying election results – only judges could do that.

But Vladeck went on to describe the Barr memo as “ominous” in that it “perpetuates the illegitimacy narrative” that has been embraced by Trump and senior Republicans in the hope of clouding Biden’s victory.

Preet Bharara, who Trump fired in 2017 as US attorney for the southern district of New York, gave a similarly nuanced response. For now, he said, he was “more disgusted than scared” by Barr’s intervention.

“But stay tuned.”

Barr specifically refers in his memo to the 40-year-old non-intervention policy over which he has now run roughshod. He denigrates it as a “passive and delayed enforcement approach”, and says it was never a “hard and fast rule”.

Later in the letter, he softens his advice to federal prosecutors, urging them to follow “appropriate caution” in line with the DoJ’s commitment to “fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship”.

“Specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries,” he says.

Those sentences prompted some speculation that Barr was merely going through the motions to placate Trump. The president has by all accounts been on the warpath since the election was called for Biden, ordering his administration to take any action to forward the lie that the election has been stolen.

But such a theory of Barr’s conduct is countered by the fact that this is not the first time he has attempted to push prosecutors into intervening in the election. Three weeks before election day, he made a similar gambit to lift the decades-old restriction on intervening in the middle of a race.

Having been appointed by Trump to be the nation’s most senior prosecutor in February 2019, Barr has shown himself willing to side openly with the president in apparent breach of the time-honoured independence of his office. One notable example was his handling of the publication of the Mueller report into collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, which was criticized as spin on behalf of the president.

More recently, Barr has mirrored Trump’s attempts to sow doubt on the election. In particular, the attorney general has intensified baseless claims from the White House about rampant fraud in mail-in voting – a form of electoral participation that has long been practiced by some states and that was widely used this year.

Barr went as far as to lie on live television about an indictment for an electoral crime in Texas. Officials were forced to retract the statement, as the supposed incident never took place.

Doubts about Barr’s intentions were heightened after it was reported that a few hours before the letter to prosecutors was disclosed, he met with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader.

McConnell has remained in lockstep with Trump, showing no sign he is prepared to break with a president whose resistance to accepting defeat shatters a norm of a peaceful transition of power that has been central to US democracy since 1800.

McConnell, who is likely to continue to control the Senate for the Republicans unless Democrats can win two runoff elections in Georgia in January, has declared his loyalty to Trump.

He said: “President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.”

This follows in the wake of Trump unleashing a flood of fake news

This fact check by staff and agencies (Associated Press) for the Guardian (Fri 6 Nov 2020), reveals Trump's desperate attempts, and as a bad loser, to undermine confidence in the democratic process:   

Donald Trump has unleashed a torrent of misinformation in a White House speech that tried to undermine the legitimacy of the US election.

One allegation after another had no basis in fact, including claims that election officials in Pennsylvania and Detroit tried to ban election observers from polling stations. The president left without taking questions.

Here’s what the president claimed, and what’s actually true:

‘We have so much evidence’

Trump: “We’re hearing stories that are horror stories … We think there is going to be a lot of litigation because we have so much evidence and so much proof.”

The facts: Trump has produced no evidence of systemic problems in voting or counting. In fact the ballot-counting process across the country has been running smoothly for the most part, even with the US in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic.

One of his main complaints – that counting spilled over past election day – is meritless. No presidential election has had all the votes counted the same day, and there is no law or even expectation that it should be the case. The surge in mailed ballots and the high turnout have made the process slower than usual in some, but not all, cases.

Pennsylvania

Trump: “In Pennsylvania partisan Democrats have allowed ballots in the state to be received three days after the election and we think much more than that and they are counting those without any postmarks or any identification whatsoever.”

The facts: The state supreme court, not “partisan Democrats”, ordered that ballots filled out before the end of election day could be received up to three days later and still be counted. The US supreme court examined the case and did not stand in the way of the three-day timeframe but may review the matter later. A number of other states have also made accommodations for the additional mailed ballots.

Trump: “Pennsylvania Democrats have gone to the state supreme court to try and ban our election observers … They don’t want anybody in there. They don’t want anybody watching them while they are counting the ballots.”

The facts: That is false. The president is wholly misrepresenting the court case. No one tried to ban poll watchers representing each side and Democrats did not try to stop Republican representatives from being able to observe the process.

The main issue was how close observers representing the parties could get to election workers who are processing mail-in ballots. The Trump campaign sued to let observers to get closer than the guidelines had allowed. A court ruled in favour of that request.

Michigan

Trump: “Our campaign has been denied access to observe any counting in Detroit.”

The facts: That is false. Absentee ballots were counted at a downtown convention centre where 134 counting boards were set up. Each party was allowed one poll watcher per board, said the city clerk, Janice Winfrey. She was not aware of any Republican poll watchers being removed but noted some had been “very aggressive, trying to intimidate the poll workers and processors”.

Mark Brewer, former chairman of the Michigan Democratic party, said he was inside the convention centre and access was cut off to some people from both sides at one point because of capacity restrictions related to the pandemic.

Georgia

Trump: “The election apparatus in Georgia is run by Democrats.”

The facts: False. The state’s elections are overseen by a Republican – the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger.

Trump: “The 11th Circuit ruled that in Georgia the votes have to be in by election day, that they should be in by election day. And they weren’t. Votes are coming in after election day.”

The facts: Although the court ruled that votes must be in by 7pm election day for them to count, an exception was made for ballots from US military forces serving overseas. Those can be received until 5pm on Friday and still count. Election officials in Georgia are still counting votes but they are votes that have been lawfully received.

Legality of votes

Trump: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”

The facts: This is baseless. Neither Trump’s campaign aides nor election officials have identified substantial numbers of “illegal” votes, much less the big numbers it would take to ruin an easy win by Trump. He frequently speaks as if mail-in voting is illegitimate. But it has been done in accordance with state voting rules, in some cases adapted by officials to help voters get through the pandemic safely.

Trump: “We were winning all the key locations, by a lot actually.” (Complaining that underhanded activity sapped his leads in important races.)

The facts: The change in fortunes he speaks about is explained by the nature of vote counting in the states – not by any sudden surge of malfeasance.

Often, big cities are slower to report their numbers, and those big-city votes tend to skew Democratic. Likewise, states tend to count mail-in ballots at the end of the process. That portion of the vote has tended to favour Biden, because Trump had told his supporters to avoid mail-in voting, and to vote in person either early or on election day. This explains why Trump finished election night with leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, among the states most in play, then saw his advantage begin to fray by Wednesday and afterwards.

Running out of time . . .

'Whoa' - When Fox News cuts off the White House press secretary to "fact check", then it's the beginning of the end for Trump . . .

Helen Sullivan reporting for the Guardian (Tue 10 Nov 2020) writes: 

Fox News has cut away from a briefing held by the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, during which she repeated Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the presidential election and doubled down on allegations of voter fraud, for which there is scant if any evidence.

Speaking to media on Monday night in her “personal capacity” during what she said was a campaign event at the Republican National Committee headquarters, McEnany said Republicans want “every legal vote to be counted, and every illegal vote to be discarded”, prompting the conservative Fox News network to stop broadcasting the briefing.

Running out of time . . . 

President elect Joe Biden has an immense task ahead, both for himself and his administration. For people around the world, concerned about the urgency of acting to avert catastrophic climate change, the turn of events this week in the United States seems to offer some degree of hope.

In today's Guardian Fiona Harvey, Environment correspondent and much referenced Guardian journalist on this Re:LODE Radio platform, provides a summary and overview of the possible impact on the climate change agenda of a Biden presidency.

Fiona Harvey writes under the headline and subheading (Wed 11 Nov 2020):

US election result boosts preparations for UN climate summit

Joe Biden has vowed to return US to Paris agreement and result brightens prospects for Cop26 

Preparations for the next vital UN summit on the climate – one of the last chances to set the world on track to meet the Paris agreement – have been given a boost by the election of Joe Biden as president.

The election caps a remarkable few weeks on international climate action, which have seen China, the EU, Japan and others commit to long-term targets on greenhouse gas emissions to fulfil the Paris climate agreement.

Biden has vowed to return the US to the Paris agreement, from which Donald Trump withdrew, and to set a goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, commitments that were underlined by his references to the climate crisis in his speeches after the result became clear.

“The difference [between the US under Biden and under Trump] will be night and day,” said Todd Stern, climate envoy to Barack Obama. “This is critical. Joe Biden understands [the climate crisis] and that it will be about how we collectively drive a transformation to a net zero economy. The US will engage with China, the other big players, and the smaller players – the countries that care deeply about climate change [because they are most affected by it] – they all have a role to play.”

“With Joe Biden elected, what is indispensable can now become possible,” said Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister who oversaw the 2015 Paris agreement, now president of France’s Constitutional Council. He told the Guardian: “We shall have the conjunction of the planets which made possible the Paris agreement. Civil society, politics, business all came together for the Paris agreement. We are looking at the same conjunction of the planets now with the US, the EU, China, Japan – if the big ones are going in the right direction, there will be a very strong incentive for all countries to go in the right direction.”

That brightens the prospects considerably for the next UN climate summit, Cop26, which would have taken place this week, in Glasgow, had the Covid-19 pandemic not forced a postponement. The talks will take place just under a year from now, and negotiations have continued apace, though hampered by countries’ need to deal with the pandemic crisis.

The re-entry of the US into the Paris fold, and Biden’s proposals for a green economic rescue from Covid, cap a remarkable few weeks of international climate action. Leading nations have made a spate of commitments that have transformed the prospects for Cop26: countries responsible for more than half of global emissions and two thirds of the global economy are now committed to net zero emissions by mid-century – the goal that scientists say is vital to avoid the worst ravages of climate breakdown.

China surprised the world in late September, when President Xi Jinping told the UN general assembly that his country would reach net zero emissions by 2060 and cause its greenhouse gas production to peak by 2030. While details of how Xi intends to achieve this are scant, the plan by the world’s biggest emitter was hailed as a “game-changer” by climate diplomats.

After China’s announcement, Japan’s new prime minister also committed to net zero by 2050, and South Korea followed suit. The EU also reconfirmed in September its net zero goal for mid-century, under the EU green deal.

With China, the US and the EU now broadly aligned, and dozens of smaller countries also committed to net zero plans, success at Cop26 looks possible. But there are still key stumbling blocks.

The crucial issue will be the difference between the long-term targets for reaching net zero emissions by mid-century, and the shorter term targets needed to get there. With the long-term targets in place, attention will turn to the commitments countries are making to reduce emissions in the next decade.

Under the Paris agreement, nations are committed to holding global temperatures well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspiration to limit heating to 1.5C. To do this, when the agreement was signed in 2015, countries set out national plans – called nationally determined contributions – for cutting emissions by 2030, or similar dates.

Those plans were insufficient, and would lead to 3C of warming. The accord stipulates that every five years countries must put forward fresh targets, and the deadline for those NDCs now looms. Some countries will miss the deadline – Biden cannot make commitments until he takes office in January, and China is still finalising its five-year economic plan for next spring, and so may delay – but the UN is hoping that all will be ready in time for scrutiny ahead of the rescheduled Cop26.

The Guardian understands that the UK, which as host of Cop26 needs to set an example, intends to submit its NDC before a key meeting that Boris Johnson will chair, with the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, in a month’s time. The Climate Ambition Summit on 12 December will mark exactly five years since the gavel came down on the Paris agreement, and is intended to galvanise action on the NDCs.

That meeting will be a key test of Johnson’s climate diplomacy. Biden will not be present at the summit, as the Trump administration will still be in office. Trump will be invited, but it is not known whether he intends to attend. It will be Johnson’s first stint as host of a major international summit, and a dry run for both Cop26 and the UK’s G7 presidency next year, which is also expected to focus on the climate and the need for a green recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Johnson’s prospective relationship with Biden, proudly Irish-American, has come under the spotlight in recent days, particularly on Biden’s stated concerns over the safety of the Good Friday agreement under Brexit. However, those differences are unlikely to have a strong impact on the climate summit’s success, according to Tom Burke, co-founder of the green thinktank E3G and a veteran government adviser.

“Biden’s victory will be a boost and I don’t think Boris Johnson’s relationship with him will make much difference to that,” he told the Guardian. “There is no difference between the interests of Johnson and Biden on Cop26 – they both know they have to make progress, irrespective of whether there is a falling out over Northern Ireland. They will still work together on the climate, and only the vaporous will conflate the issues.”

Hurdles lie ahead . . .

Jonathan Watts, writing today for the Guardian (Wed 11 Nov 2020), sets out: 

Five post-Trump obstacles to a global green recovery

Environmentalists have been heartened by Joe Biden’s victory as, if the US rejoins the Paris agreement as expected, it will give the world a much better chance of averting climate catastrophe. However, there are still hurdles to overcome to rein in emissions and keep warming to within 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Dirty financing by China, Japan and South Korea

“Drinking poison to quench thirst”, is how energy analysts describe China’s efforts to boost economic recovery by pumping money into dirty industries, such as coal. No nation is as important to the global climate as China, the world’s biggest emitter, which is why President Xi Jinping’s promise to make his country carbon-neutral by 2060 generated optimism around the world.

But state and provincial financing institutions do not seem to have received the memo. A Guardian-commissioned ranking of national green recovery plans put China last among major economies, with only 0.3% of its stimulus package set aside for renewables and other sustainable projects. Instead, there has been a glut of new domestic coal financing.

Similarly, dirty power projects dominate energy spending overseas on the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global infrastructure development strategy introduced in 2013 to invest in nearly 70 countries and international organisations. Analysts say this needs to change if the world is to have any chance of keeping temperature rises to the Paris accord goal of between 1.5C and 2C.

Much will depend on China’s next five-year plan, being drawn up by the central committee. Although these deliberations have received scant media attention compared with the US election, they are more important in climate terms. Energy experts say an ambitious Chinese strategy would reduce coal use to less than 50% of the energy mix and increase renewables to around 25% by 2025. If the government also put in place an emissions cap, it would mark a positive step forward.

More important still would be a commitment to shift the focus of Belt and Road investment to renewables, which could see China leading the global transition away from fossil fuels. “The most critical recovery is China,” says Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute at LSE. “It holds a lot of debt in other countries and funds dirty industries overseas. If it continues, that it will undermine global efforts to cut emissions.”

The world’s other two main coal financiers, Japan and South Korea, also have a role to play. Both recently set 2050 zero-carbon goals, which is encouraging in the long term, but if their governments are serious about climate action, they need to overcome resistance from old-fashioned industries – notably Toyota and Hitachi in Japan and Doosan in South Korea – and send a clear message that all future investment must be fossil-fuel free.

US political division

Donald Trump has been the face of climate denial for the last four years, but his defeat will not be enough to transform the US into an engine for global green recovery unless the Democrats can regain control of the Senate.

Joe Biden, the science-friendly president-elect, is already assembling a team of climate experts. On taking office in January, he will almost immediately rejoin the Paris agreement. Whether this will be anything more than a symbolic victory will depend on the division of power in Congress.

If the Democrats can win the Senate run-off in Georgia and tie the number of seats in the upper chamber, then the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, should have the deciding vote on climate legislation and budgets, such as the $2tn green new deal promised in the campaign. If, on the other hand, the Republican party maintains control of the Senate, it is likely to continue to block ambitious action and international cooperation, as it did during the Clinton and Obama presidencies. Powerful lobbyists, well funded by the likes of Exxon, Chevron and Koch Industries, will also continue to deny, delay and disrupt. Legal challenges will go to the most conservative supreme court in recent memory.

Rob Jackson, chair of the Global Carbon project, fears division will once again stymie action at the national level. “I don’t see a path to the green new deal in the current political climate here,” he says. “A divided Congress would almost certainly mean that a big-picture climate bill wouldn’t happen over the next two years, and president Biden will be unlikely to get anything big through Congress.”

All is not lost. Jackson notes state-level actions have been leading the climate agenda in the US regardless of who is in the White House. Another big question is whether Wall Street will call time on fossil fuels, which would change everything. Unlikely as it seems, if the US could unite around a massive green stimulus programme, this would ripple positively across the world.

European industry lobbying

Europe is setting the green recovery pace, but it would be progressing at a substantially faster clip were it not for lobbying by powerful carbon-intensive industries such as farming in France, coal in Germany and Poland, or oil in the UK and Netherlands.

This is also true for the aviation sector, which has evaded responsibility for cutting CO2 in national climate plans. Airbus, Lufthansa, KLM and other carriers have long campaigned against higher airline taxes, binding targets for green fuel and low-carbon aircraft. Industry organisations including Airlines for Europe and Airlines for America have influenced Brussels to relax or drop emissions trading requirements.

Industry watchers say this resistance may be softening because of Covid, with airlines and plane-makers desperate for bailouts. This gives governments the leverage to insist on something in return. In Germany, Lufthansa has been told its public advocacy must align with Europe’s climate objectives, which should halt lobbying against ambitious green standards and stronger obligations under the emissions trading scheme. In France, the head of Airbus, Guillaume Faury, is starting to talk of “carbon-based decision making”. He wants to take advantage of a scrappage scheme to replace older polluting aircraft with cleaner new models and to win funding for research into hydrogen or electric aircraft. Spain, now the fastest mover in Europe, is mandating greater use of clean fuels.

Not all the changes are as progressive as they seem. In the Netherlands, KLM has become an enthusiastic supporter of higher standards for inter-European flights, though that is less impressive when you realise this accounts for only 20% of its business.

Andrew Murphy, aviation director at the NGO Transport & Environment says he is cautiously optimistic. “Things are changing in the way industry is behaving. Because they need government support, they are not openly opposing action as they used to do,” he says.

The crucial test will be a debate about the EU’s revised emissions reductions targets. “That will be a big decision,” says Murphy. “The EU should be explicit that aviation is included in emissions targets.” Just as important, he says, will be Europe’s willingness to move ahead without waiting for the rest of the world and the laggard UN aviation agency, Icao, which has been susceptible to industry pressure, particularly from the US.

UK failing to set example as Cop26 host

“Mind the Gap” should be stamped across the top of every climate briefing document handed to Boris Johnson over the next year, or the UK’s hopes of hosting a successful UN climate conference will founder in accusations of hypocrisy.

Cop26 is likely to be the most important international event of the prime minister’s tenure. The gathering, in November 2021, aims to go a step further than the Paris agreement, prompt governments to set more ambitious targets, and put the world back on track to keep global heating to between 1.5C and 2C above pre-industrial levels. It is also the most likely way for “Britain’s Trump” to reach out to Biden, with whom he shares little common ground.

In public, Johnson is increasingly positive about climate action, but he has a long way to go before he can convince anyone he is genuinely enthusiastic. As a newspaper columnist, his position on cutting emissions was lukewarm; as an MP, his climate voting record was even cooler.

The UK also has a gap to make up. Successive governments have presented themselves as global climate leaders. This administration boasts of being a frontrunner in setting a 2050 goal for carbon neutrality. But climate campaigners say long-term targets are irresponsible unless matched by action in the near term. The UK is still off course, even for the goals it set five years ago.

Long-term observers say the moment ought to be ripe to make a big change after Covid. Until now, however, “green recovery” plans announced by the government have failed to impress.

“My feeling is this government would be in a better place to do a proper green new deal than any previous because of it clearly being an interest of Johnson’s and because the fiscal constraints are suddenly off,” says Douglas Parr, chief scientist and policy director at Greenpeace UK. But he fears this is not yet a sufficiently urgent political priority, the public is wedded to cars, and UK institutions such as Ofgem, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), and local authorities are not designed or funded enough to act at the speed and scale of change required.

Others fear Johnson’s inner circle contains too many sceptics, including those who previously worked for rightwing thinktanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and TaxPayers’ Alliance, both of which opposed proposals for a green new deal after the 2008-9 financial crisis.

Many senior conservative politicians, despite talking up a green recovery from the pandemic, remain wedded to old industries. New data from the investigative journalist group DeSmog UK found BEIS ministers met BP, Shell and other fossil fuel producers almost 150 times in the early months of the lockdown, and renewable energy producers only 17 times.

“The government doesn’t reveal what is said in those meetings. But the level of access the industry gets implies that, at best, ministers are mainly listening to big polluters when planning a green recovery, or at worst are disregarding it in order to prop up the fossil fuel industry,” says Mat Hope, the editor of DeSmog UK.

Whichever is true, there is a credibility gap to close if the next Cop host wants to lead by example.

Global disinformers, delayers and deniers

From Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to populists such as the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, rightwing resistance to pro-climate government intervention takes many forms. But a starting point is disinformation: undermining climate science in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal or the Australian, downplaying the link between human emissions and extreme weather events such as fires, floods and droughts in news reports, or distracting attention with false equivalences such as the recent call on world leaders to “fight the virus not carbon” by the Climate Intelligence foundation (Clintel), a European group opposing climate action with links to British Conservatives and similar parties in the European parliament.

Opponents of green new deals say they are poor value for money and climate risks are exaggerated. In the UK, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, co-founded by the former UK chancellor Lord Lawson, recently put out a paper warning against a post-Covid green recovery package on the grounds that more wind and solar would make energy more expensive. Similar arguments are put forward in two recently published books by Bjorn Lomborg and by Michael Shellenberger.

Critics say such claims are refuted by the sharply falling costs of renewables, which are often now cheaper than coal and oil, and the cost of inaction: worsening forest fires, droughts, hurricanes and floods.

The increasingly evident global toll of the climate crisis makes out-and-out denial all but impossible. Instead, the extreme right shift their doubt-mongering toward ideology. Brazil’s foreign minister, Eduardo Araújo, suggests climate campaigns are part of a global Marxist plot. His boss, Bolsonaro, says environmental NGOs trying to protect the Amazon are part of a foreign conspiracy to stifle economic development. Neither has provided a shred of evidence to back up their accusations.

Brazil, meanwhile, is heading in the opposite direction of a green new deal. The state-led oil company Petrobras recently sold off its shares in renewable energy. The government is basing its hopes for economic recovery on opening up the Amazon to more mining, farming and logging. Once Trump leaves office, Bolsonaro will replace him as the global face of climate disruption.

It's NOT just climate concerns . . .

Shaun Walker, the much referenced Guardian reporter in this Re:LODE Radio project, especially with his coverage of events in Belarus, looks forward to the prospect of Joe Biden reversing Trump's 'gag' on NGO's when it comes to reproductive rights (Tue 10 Nov 2020). He writes: 

One of Joe Biden’s first acts as president is expected to be the rescinding of a rule on US foreign aid, which rights campaigners say has prevented millions of women across the globe from getting access to proper reproductive and sexual healthcare over the past four years.

Trump reinstated the so-called “global gag rule”, also known as the Mexico City policy, on his first Monday morning in office in January 2017. The rule, first introduced by president Ronald Reagan in 1984, means that if an organisation receives US government funding it cannot engage in providing abortion services, counselling or even advocacy over abortion law, even if it does so using other, non-US funds.

Reinstating the rule was an expected move for a Republican administration, but in the months afterwards, it was expanded to make it unprecedentedly broad. Previously, the rule only applied to reproductive health funding, but it now applies to all public health funds, affecting nearly $9bn (£6.8bn) a year in foreign aid. The new rule means that NGOs cannot receive money for sanitation, access to clean water or HIV/Aids programmes if they also run programmes that offer abortion services or counselling.

“It’s important we don’t underestimate the harm that has been done. This wasn’t the typical Republican administration, where some bad policies came back and now they’re going to be rescinded again,” said Serra Sippel, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity in Washington DC.

The US vice-president, Mike Pence, who has a long history of ultra-conservative positions on abortion, has driven the agenda. “Denying women access to contraception and abortion is core to who he is and the world he wants to create,” said Sippel.

Numerous reports have found that implementing the global gag rule leads to an increase in the number of unsafe abortions and endangers the health of women. “Girls have been losing lives just because of lack of access to services,” said Melvine Ouyo, a former clinic manager at Family Health Options Kenya, an organisation that had to close five clinics after declining to accept the new US aid conditions. “The impact of the global gag rule has been really devastating, and has been felt by most of the organisation in Kenya,” she said.

Keifer Buckingham, a senior policy adviser at the Open Society Foundations, said the rule left thousands of organisations with a “horrible” decision to make: “Do we reject very lucrative US government money in order to continue providing life-saving care, or do we take the money and compromise on our values and on the provision of reproductive healthcare?”

The organisation Marie Stopes International, which works in 37 countries across the globe, refused to sign up to the global gag rule in 2017, and thus had to decline $30m a year in US funding. The organisation estimates that over Trump’s full term, these funds would have allowed it to serve 8 million women with family planning help, preventing 6 million unintended pregnancies, 1.8 million unsafe abortions and 20,000 maternal deaths.

Dr Carole Sekimpi, who runs the organisation’s Uganda programme, said it had to cut back on five mobile outreach teams in the wake of Trump’s 2017 order, until donors from different countries stepped in to fill the funding gap. But the bigger problem was that other local organisations shied away from joint projects, fearful of losing their own funding.

“Because the regulation is so complicated, and often the interpretation by the US government is pretty blanket, everybody wants to be on the safe side,” she said.

Rights advocates hope that a Biden administration would be able to pass a piece of legislation introduced to Congress last year, known as the Global Health, Empowerment and Rights (HER) Act, that would repeal the rule permanently.

The vice-president elect, Kamala Harris, came out in support of the act last year. “The United States should never force non-government organisations to choose between receiving American aid and providing comprehensive reproductive healthcare to women across the world,” she said. It is not yet clear, though, whether the next administration will have the numbers to get the act through Congress.

As well as the global gag rule, the Trump administration has also sought to lead a global push to promote so-called “family values” and curtail access to abortion along with LGBT rights. In some cases, this rhetorical support may have been as damaging to the cause of women’s rights globally as the financial penalties.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the United States has defended the dignity of human life everywhere and always,” the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said last month at the signing ceremony of an anti-abortion document known as the Geneva consensus declaration. “He has done it like no other president in history. We have mounted an unprecedented defence of the unborn abroad.”

Nearly 30 governments, mainly from authoritarian states, signed up to the document, in which the signatories “reaffirm that there is no international right to abortion”. Hungary and Poland were the only two EU members to sign. There have recently been huge protests in Poland over a constitutional ruling that would outlaw almost all abortion in the country.

“There are plenty of governments out there that are emboldened and empowered by the last four years of the Trump administration pushing this rhetoric and will continue to push it globally,” said Buckingham.

However, along with acknowledgement of the damage done, there is also impatience for a new era to start, and for a change of tone in the White House.

“We did so much during the Obama administration, and I am expecting that Biden should really do this in his first days so we can get these things back. I am just so expectant and excited that things will change quickly for the better,” said Ouyo.

. . . it's about human rights! 

Time is running out in 2020 . . .

Brexit has already happened, but the trade deal with the European Union remains to be negotiated and agreed. In 1991-92 the LODE Artliner project in Hull benefitted from the development strategy among many agencies of Humberside, to promote and invest in commercial and cultural connections to Europe. Liverpool's maritime history was shaped by trades across the Atlantic, and by extension the entire world. Hull's maritime history was always oriented to northern Europe, to fishing, and whaling, a truly global maritime industry.

The LODE cargo made across northern Germany and Szczecin in Poland acknowledges the trading links that Hull established with the Hanseatic League, and there are many references in the Information Wraps for Friedrichskoog, Lübeck and Szczecin/Stettin, to the history of these trading centres as places where city air could make you free, free from a feudal system, free to trade, make money, and the collective freedom to form trade guilds:

Stadtluft macht frei . . .

. . . or, Stadtluft macht frei nach Jahr und Tag ("city air makes you free after a year and a day"), a German saying describing a principle of law in the Middle Ages. The period of a year and a day was a conventional period widely employed in Europe to represent a significant amount of time. From the 11th century onwards, liberated serfs and other members of the Third Estate founded settlements alongside the old Roman or Germanic ones. It was customary law that a city resident was free after one year and one day. 

In the EU Referendum of 23 June 2016, the national turnout of those voting represented 72.21% of the total electorate. Of those who voted, 17,410,742 voted Leave, representing 51.89% of the total who voted, and 16,141,241 voted to Remain, representing 48.11% of the total vote. 

In Hull the result was not so close with 67.6% voting to leave and 32.4% voting to remain. For the majority of people living and working in Hull, the everyday experience of life in Hull reflects an identity that is NOT European, whatever the history might have been, so a large majority voting for change, in a part of England "at the end of the line", was not unexpected.   

But when it comes to a deal, or no deal, as the end result of the ongoing UK-EU trade negotiations:

UK-EU trade faces major disruption even with deal, say auditors

Rajeev Syal for the Guardian and agencies, report on the likely disruption to trade, wit or without a deal (Fri 6 Nov 2020).

Rajeev Syal writes:

Billions of pounds worth of trade with the European Union will face “significant disruption” on 1 January, regardless of whether a trade deal is agreed, Whitehall’s spending watchdog has concluded.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said crucial IT systems have yet to be tested and transit areas for lorries are not ready as the government attempts to prepare new border controls for the end of the Brexit transition period. The planned controls, which had already been rated “high risk”, have been further hampered by the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report released today.

Officials have still not taken the steps required to ensure there were enough customs agents, auditors said, while civil contingency plans to maintain the supply of medicines and acquire extra freight capacity away from the main Channel crossings have been difficult to enact due to Covid-19.

Meg Hillier, the chair of the public accounts committee, said the government has not given businesses enough time to prepare, particularly when it comes to preparations for Northern Ireland after the end of the transition period.

“It’s incredibly worrying that, with two months to go, critical computer systems haven’t been properly tested. The government can only hope that everything comes together on the day but this is not certain,” she said.

Auditors highlighted concerns about the checks that will be required for goods moving to Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK.

Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Daera), which is responsible for checks on agri-food products, had been “severely hampered” by a failure to reach an agreement with the EU and a “lack of clarity” over the measures required. As a result, Daera had concluded it would not be possible to complete the necessary work on its systems and infrastructure by 1 January. It said it was having to explore “contingency options”.

Auditors said the government had left itself little time to mobilise its new trader support service, which will help businesses moving goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This meant there was a “high risk” traders would still not be ready when the new arrangements take effect.

According to the government’s latest “reasonable worst case planning assumptions”, between 40% and 70% of lorries travelling between the EU and the UK may still not be ready for the new border controls. Ministers have already warned hauliers they could face queues of up to 7,000 lorries at the main Channel crossings.

The NAO said while arrangements were being developed to minimise delays, these depended on new technology and would require the engagement of both trades and hauliers. There is little time left for ports to integrate their systems and processes with new government systems, and they may have to fall back on “manual processes”, it said.

The government has identified seven inland transit sites for lorries and HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has said getting them all ready for 1 January was proving “very challenging”.

Ministers have delayed the imposition of full import controls on goods coming from the EU until July 2021. Auditors said there was still uncertainty over where the infrastructure would be located and whether it would be ready in time.

HMRC still needs to make significant changes to its customs systems to handle the increase in customs declarations, the report said, even though it had known this was likely to be necessary since planning for a no-deal Brexit began in 2017. 

Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: “The 1 January deadline is unlike any previous EU exit deadline – significant changes at the border will take place and government must be ready.

“Disruption is likely and government will need to respond quickly to minimise the impact, a situation made all the more challenging by the Covid-19 pandemic.”

A UK government spokesperson said: “We are making significant preparations to prepare for the guaranteed changes at the end of the transition period – including investing £705m to ensure the right border infrastructure, staffing and technology is in place, providing £84m in grants to boost the customs intermediaries sector, and implementing border controls in stages so traders have sufficient time to prepare.

“With fewer than two months to go, it’s vital that businesses and citizens prepare too. That’s why we’re intensifying our engagement with businesses and running a major public information campaign.”

Observer comment cartoon - Brexit

Chris Riddell (Sat 31 Oct 2020)

This year’s ghouls and ghosts have been scarier than usual 

Halloween Brexit special – cartoon

For the LODE 1992 project, Australia provided five border locations for the creation of LODE cargo, four of these were geographical borders and one close by the state line between South Australia and Victoria at Bordertown. Australia does NOT have a free-trade deal with the EU, so:

What did Boris Johnson mean by an Australia-style system of trade?

Daniel Boffey reporting from Brussels for the Guardian (Fri 16 Oct 2020) explains:

What has Boris Johnson said?

The prime minister claimed that due to the stubborn intransigence of the EU he had to conclude that the “Canada-style” trade deal that he was seeking was not going to be successfully negotiated without a “fundamental” change in Brussels’ negotiating position. He said it was therefore important that business prepare to trade with the EU on the basis of “arrangements that are more like Australia’s, based on simple principles of global free trade”.

What is a Canada-style trade deal?

The EU has a trade deal with Canada called the comprehensive economic and trade agreement (Ceta). It is the type of arrangement that Michel Barnier said four years ago would be possible at the start of the Brexit talks if the UK wished to leave the single market and customs union.

There would be checks on imports and exports and a great deal more red tape for businesses as the UK would be outside the EU rule book. But such a deal does involve reducing tariffs, or taxes, on imports and quotas – the amount of a product that can be exported without extra charges.

What the UK and EU have been attempting to negotiate is something more than that enjoyed by Canada, however. Both sides say they want a “zero tariff, zero quota” agreement by the end of the year.

The Ceta deal gets close to doing that – 98% of products are tariff-free, but they do remain on poultry, meat and eggs, for example. Quotas also remain on some goods.

“If they actually wanted a Canada-style deal they should have extended the transition period and then we could have gone through all the products and put tariffs and quotas in place in return for lower demands on maintaining EU standards,” said one exasperated EU official.

Why does Boris Johnson say this is now off the table?

Because Downing Street says the EU is offering less generous terms than are included in the Ceta deal. There are various examples including the length of stay for short-term business visitors and the lack of sector-specific provisions for key industries with particular technical barriers such as motor vehicles, medicinal products, organics and chemicals.

The UK rightly says the demands on level playing field provisions also go beyond anything contained in the Ceta deal. These include non-regression from EU standards, with the raising of that baseline together over time, and a UK commitment to follow the bloc’s state aid, or domestic subsidy, rules. The EU has said the sheer level of trade between the UK and the EU means it needs to be vigilant in maintaining fair competition. It has also watered down its original demands on standards and state aid, but not enough, as far as Downing Street is concerned.

What are Australia-style arrangements?

Downing Street started using the term at the beginning of the year as a more palatable shorthand for a no-deal. The EU does not have a free-trade deal with Australia, although they are in negotiations. The two sides operate mainly on World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, with huge tariffs on imports and exports.

It would be more accurate to describe the outcome that would be secured by a no-deal as an Afghanistan-style arrangement, given the lack of formal cooperation in that trading relationship. This is because the EU does have a few agreements in place with Australia that it would not have with the UK in the event of a failure of the trade and security negotiations. These include an agreement on the transfer of EU passenger name records to Australian border authorities to help combat crime and terrorism and an agreement on the mutual recognition of conformity assessments, so that a product tested to EU standards in Australia is regarded as compliant, eliminating the need for duplicative testing when it is imported.

Afghanistan-style Boris! NOT Australia! 

Liar, liar, pants on fire . . . and for Boris . . .

. . . it's a bikini world!