Scepticism, accountability, opportunities in a crisis, and the power of nature in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

Five out of ten . . .

. . . for UK's green revolution

What is the UK government's plan for a green revolution?

Peter Walker and Jessica Elgot report for the Guardian under the headline in the print edition of the newspaper on Wednesday 18 November 2020: 

Scepticism as PM unveils £12bn green 'revolution' 

Boris Johnson has announced plans for the government’s self-styled green industrial revolution, bringing praise from environmental groups but also questions about the scale of new funding, and the planned expansion of nuclear and hydrogen power.

In a move aimed at retaking the initiative after a politically turbulent few weeks, the prime minister said the 10-point plan would create up to 250,000 jobs, with much of the focus aimed at the north of England, Midlands, Scotland and Wales.

But Labour called the plan “deeply, deeply disappointing” in ambition, saying it would neither properly tackle the climate emergency nor the jobs crisis caused by coronavirus.

One of the points is the previously trailed pledge to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030, 10 years ahead of the previous schedule. Another existing promise is to quadruple the amount of offshore wind power capacity within a decade.

Greenpeace said the measures marked a notable step forward for tackling the climate emergency, saying: “This landmark announcement signals the end of the road for polluting cars and vans and a historic turning point on climate action.”

However, the group warned the scheme also had flaws. “It’s a shame the prime minister remains fixated on other speculative solutions, such as nuclear and hydrogen from fossil fuels, that will not be taking us to zero emissions anytime soon, if ever,” said Rebecca Newsom, Greenpeace UK’s head of politics.

The programme is billed as costing £12bn, with Downing Street saying £8bn of this is new. However, Labour said it believed only £4bn was new spending.

The 10-point plan comprises:

• A ban on combustion engine sales by 2030, with grants for electric cars, and funding for charge points. The sale of some hybrid cars and vans will continue until 2035.
• A previously announced pledge to quadruple offshore wind power by 2030, to 40GW, enough to power every UK home.
• Moves to boost hydrogen production, with the promise of a town heated entirely by hydrogen by the end of the decade.
• Investment of £525m towards new nuclear power, based on “the next generation of small and advanced reactors”.
• £1bn next year for funds to insulate homes and public buildings, using the existing green homes grant and public sector decarbonisation scheme.
• An extra £200m invested in carbon capture initiatives.
• Support for greener energies in the aviation and maritime sectors, with £20m committed to the latter.
• 30,000 hectares of trees planted every year, as part of nature conservation efforts.
• Moves to promote public transport, cycling and walking, although no new schemes were announced.
• A pledge to make London “the global centre of green finance”.

While Johnson said the plan would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, while “making strides towards net zero by 2050”, Labour said it was “a pale imitation” of the green stimulus package needed.

Ed Miliband, the shadow business secretary, whose plan for a green Covid recovery involves £30bn spent over 18 months, said the No 10 proposals were low on ambition and contained several “reheated pledges”.

“People are losing their jobs now,” Miliband said. “This isn’t fundamentally a green stimulus, it’s nowhere near the scale of what is required.

“This announcement doesn’t remotely meet the scale of the jobs emergency or the climate emergency. France and Germany are investing tens of billions of euros. This provides, at best, £4bn of new money over several years.

“What we needed was a really bold green economic stimulus, and what we got was a pale imitation of that. It’s deeply, deeply disappointing.”

Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, condemned the plan as vague and underpowered.

She said: “This is a shopping list, not a plan to address the climate emergency, and it commits only a fraction of the necessary resources.”

Hilary McGrady, the director general of the National Trust, said the plan was “a fantastic platform” ahead of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow next year.

She said: “But technology alone can’t cut emissions and restore nature. The government will need to follow this up with an ambitious pledge to cut emissions by 2030 in line with the Paris agreement.”

The Confederation of British Industry’s acting director general, Josh Hardie, said the plan “represents a clear statement of intent from the government”.

He said: “It gives a springboard to the huge opportunities for UK-wide investment and green jobs that a true low-carbon economy can bring.”

Nicola Shaw, the UK executive director of National Grid, said:“The prime minister has set out great ambition for the net zero transition including commitments on offshore wind, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. We also welcome the earlier ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles and the support for the rollout of electric vehicles which will help improve the country’s air quality.

“Now, industry and government must work together to turn this ambition into reality, with transformational investments to deliver real change, which will create jobs in every part of the country.”

Re:LODE Radio considers that this plan amounts to just tinkering about with: 

business as usual!"

The GREEN NEW DEAL gives Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, "five out of ten" for a Ten Point Plan for a green 'revolution' that is anything but a revolution.

This is the view of GREEN NEW DEAL on the announcement made today:

Today Boris Johnson announced his ten point plan for a green recovery. The strength of our movement has meant that everybody (including the Government) is now  focusing on green jobs as a way to recover from the pandemic and fight climate change at the same time. But this plan is short on detail and on ambition.

The plan is a welcome shift in gear - but unfortunately the scale of the crises we face (both in climate breakdown and unemployment/inequality) means that we need to replace the whole engine. 

Let’s start with the positives. The ban on new petrol and diesel cars is a serious step forward. It is brilliant news for communities blighted by air pollution and will save many thousands of lives. But the ban must be met in ambition with financial backing for the industries of the future.

Meeting the scale of the crisis

We’re staring in the face of a huge recession, with nearly 2 million jobs at risk in the long-term. That's a rate of unemployment not seen since the 1980s, which will hit the poorest hardest. When Roosevelt responded to the Great Depression he didn’t just pledge a few million to the odd sector here and there. His New Deal for America put them on a path to economic recovery and prosperity. A Green New Deal can do the same for the UK. 

We can and must do so much more than this proposal. France and Germany have made much more ambitious pledges. If the government matched the scale of the problem with a comparable solution, the UK could do the same.

It might not sound like a green job to most people yet - but we know that care work and nursing is low carbon work. And it's this work that will stitch our communities back together after this crisis.  

Green jobs and investment goes beyond wind turbines and hard hats - it includes the frontline workers that have kept the UK going throughout the pandemic. These workers must be at the heart of the green recovery, with investment in these areas creating far more stable jobs than any of this government’s pet projects.  

There couldn’t be a better time for determined government action. The government has an opportunity to address multiple crises at once, starting right now - and if they leave it too late, the consequences will be disastrous for people’s livelihoods and our planet. 

We need much more than a half-baked plan - we need a Green New Deal.

So Boris, here are three things you could do tomorrow to really face the scale of our nation’s challenges:

• invest in creating 1.2 million green jobs over the next two years, 
• end austerity once and for all and invest in our public services
• roll out a huge programme of insulating every single leaky home in Britain.

It’s all well and good having a ten point plan. We need you to make sure it lives up to the challenges that lie ahead. 

How can the objectives of the 10-point plan be achieved?

Fiona Harvey, Environment correspondent for the Guardian, asks the question and comes up with considered and informed responses (Tue 17 Nov 2020).

Fiona Harvey writes: 

Boris Johnson’s £12bn plan for a “green industrial revolution” spans renewable energy, nuclear power and countryside restoration. However, some of the objectives are likely to be difficult to reach, and the plan has been criticised for a lack of ambition in key areas.

Offshore wind

Offshore wind has plunged in price in recent years, spurring an increase in windfarm construction even as government incentives have been slashed. However, the UK’s electricity grid has not kept up with the pace of change, and no commitment to offshore wind can be complete without explaining how the grid will be updated. Green groups are also concerned that a rush to new offshore windfarms will harm marine and coastal habitats, unless there is more coordination in their planning.

Industry experts are also worried that the boom in offshore wind will fail to benefit UK companies and will be led by those overseas that import components. While the government claims that jobs will be created here, many of them are likely to be low-value “muck-shifting” construction work rather than in high-value manufacturing, unless there is more support for manufacturers.

The government promises to produce enough offshore wind to power every home, but the electricity needs of the average family are likely to increase markedly as people switch to electric vehicles and heat pumps instead of gas boilers.

Onshore wind is cheaper than offshore wind, but the construction of onshore windfarms in England has all but ground to a halt, owing to planning reforms under David Cameron.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen has been touted as the fuel of the future for two decades, but despite advances in technology, the prospect of a hydrogen fuelled economy is still some way off. The International Energy Agency says investment in the technology now is a good idea, as part of a green recovery, but green groups are concerned that fossil fuel companies may see in hydrogen fuel an excuse to keep exploring for natural gas.

That is because currently the main source of hydrogen is as a byproduct of natural gas extraction. They warn that if hydrogen is to be truly low-carbon, the industry must invest instead in other forms of hydrogen production, such as producing the fuel from water.

Nuclear

Hinkley Point in Somerset is the UK’s only new nuclear power plant currently under construction, and has been plagued by lengthy delays and rising costs. When the plant finally comes on stream, it is likely to be the most expensive source of power in the UK. Plans for a second new reactor in Wales were finally abandoned in September by the Japanese company Hitachi, and proposals for a new plant at Sizewell in Suffolk are under review. If the government wishes to expand nuclear power, it will have to prove that it can be economical.

Tom Burke, chair of the E3G thinktank, said: “The only way to build another big nuclear reactor is if the government puts electricity bills up twice to pay for it – first to buy the concrete and steel to build it and then again to buy its electricity at far higher price than renewable generators will be charging. [And] the main problem with small modular reactors is that no one has one for sale – not even Rolls-Royce. They are actually offering to design one but only if the government will guarantee a £32bn order for 16 and pays half the £400m cost of the design. One word for deciding to go ahead on this basis is ‘brave’, a more appropriate word might be ‘foolhardy’.”

Electric vehicles

The move to bring forward the phase-out of fossil fuel vehicles has been widely trailed, and car manufacturers are now accelerating the shift to electric engines. What is so far missing is a plan for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Building such infrastructure could generate tens of thousands of “shovel-ready” jobs, but who will pay for it? Cash-strapped local authorities currently shoulder much of the cost for the limited infrastructure available, but it is a patchwork system with widely varying costs for drivers across the country.

There is also no answer yet to the question of how heavy goods vehicles will be shifted away from fossil fuels.

Public transport, cycling and walking

Lockdown this spring provided a clear demonstration of what environmentalists have been arguing for years: that our towns and cities have been ruled by the motorcar, to the detriment of public health and the climate, but with better planning a healthier way of life is possible. More people would cycle and walk if it was easier and safer to do so, but the strength of the car lobby has been demonstrated by the uproar in many areas over low-traffic neighbourhoods.

Covid-19 has also led to people forsaking public transport, and many will be difficult to entice back – though if the shift to home-working becomes permanent, this may be less of a problem.

Making streets more accessible to cyclists and pedestrians will inevitably mean discouraging private car use in most of our towns and cities, and that will require muscular intervention by central and local government to face down the motoring lobby. The question is whether this government will have the courage needed to follow through on this commitment.

Aviation and greener maritime

Aviation and shipping have been left out of the UK’s carbon targets, as they have been left out of international climate agreements. But as carbon dioxide from other sources has been reduced, they represent an increasing share of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrogen fuel, in the form of ammonia, offers hope for shipping – but that prospect is still years off, and the shipping industry has shown little sign of wanting to reform itself in the meantime, despite its many opportunities for reducing emissions.

As the Guardian has revealed, the vast majority of emissions from aviation are produced by a minority of flyers. Most people in the UK do not fly in any given year, and when they do it is usually for a single family holiday. A frequent flyer levy would help to discourage people from taking more flights, without penalising the majority of people who fly rarely, but the government appears to have rejected this option – perhaps not wishing to place further burdens on an industry that has all but collapsed during the pandemic.

Homes and public buildings

The UK has some of the leakiest, draughtiest housing stock in the world – but until the Green Homes Grant was introduced at the end of September, there was no government assistance for homeowners wishing to insulate and upgrade their dwellings. Teething problems with the new scheme have meant a lack of installers signing up, however.

If the government wants to encourage installers to sign up to the Green Homes Grant, the message from the construction industry is clear: the £3bn scheme must be extended beyond its current end date of next March.

Heat pumps offer a green alternative to gas boilers, but they are expensive and there are few installers with the skills needed. If the government wants people to choose heat pumps – which can cost £10,000 – over gas boilers, some form of compulsion, on the same lines as the phase-out of electric vehicles by 2030, is likely to be needed alongside financial incentives to reduce the costs to householders.

Carbon capture

Capturing and storing carbon dioxide – in disused oil and gas fields under the North Sea, for instance – is likely to be needed for the UK to meet its target of net zero emissions by 2050. Over the last two decades, successive governments have made several attempts to kickstart the industry, but government funding was finally pulled by the then chancellor George Osborne under austerity.

The technology has now been proven in pilot projects around the world, but if it is to be deployed at scale the key question is who will pay for it? Some form of carbon tax on high-carbon industries would provide the funds needed, but companies already facing turmoil from Brexit are likely to push back strongly against any such plans.

Nature

Tree-planting provides a long-term way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but the government has so far failed to meet its own targets on growing new woodlands. Farmers are still waiting for details of the environment land management contracts that will replace their current EU subsidies, which are supposed to reward them for restoring natural features such as bogs and wetlands. Natural England has been demoralised and starved of funds. If ministers want to encourage tree-planting and nature restoration, farmers will need incentives and the government’s own agencies will need a boost. 

Innovation and finance

Public companies are facing new rules on how to report on their exposure to the risks from climate breakdown, and many already do so. Green finance, prioritising low-carbon technologies, is also a growing sector, and investors such as pension funds are increasingly looking to green their portfolios. Tax incentives could help encourage more investors down the same route.

The main question is whether the government will put forward public funding – there have been proposals for a publicly funded green infrastructure bank, to invest in the changes needed to decarbonise the UK’s ageing buildings, and transport, communications, water and energy networks. That would require long-term commitment: the original Green Investment Bank, set up with public money under the coalition government, was quickly abandoned a few years later, and produced little tangible return.

The original 10-point plan contained a guarantee that the UK would halt government funding for fossil fuels overseas. That commitment appears to have been dropped, though it may resurface if internal government rows are resolved.

Re:LODE Radio considers this omission to be a significant pointer to the many impediments to an effective strategy for addressing the climate emergency that are the product of a "business as usual" approach of governments across the world, and the subsidies they continue to give to fossil fuel industries and their capitalist investors. 

For example . . .

Almost half of thermal coal firms are set to defy the Paris agreement climate pledge

Jillian Ambrose, Energy correspondent for the Guardian, covers this story (Thu 12 Nov 2020). She writes:

Almost half the companies involved in the thermal coal industry are expected to defy global climate commitments by deepening their coal interests in the coming years, according to a report.

The study, by the green campaign group Urgewald, revealed that almost 1,000 companies should be blacklisted by investors because they remain tied to the thermal coal value chain almost four years after the Paris climate agreement came into effect.

Almost 440 of these companies plan to build coal plants, mines or other infrastructure in the years ahead, according to Urgewald’s global coal exit list, which it produced alongside 30 NGO partners. Meanwhile, only 25 companies on the list have set a date to phase out their coal use.

Heffa Schücking, the director of Urgewald, said the findings should provide a wake-up call to investors who planned to continue to back companies linked to the coal industry as global governments signal a shift to cleaner energy sources.

“When we speak to the financial industry many believe that it’s important to stick with these companies through the energy transition. But half of these companies aren’t interested in transitioning,” Schücking said.

“We are in a climate emergency and a speedy exit from coal is more urgent than ever. Our database identifies 935 companies the finance industry needs to blacklist if it is serious about fulfilling the Paris goals.”

The global coal exit list includes all energy companies that either hold more than 5GW of coal-fired power plant capacity, produce 10m tons of thermal coal a year, or rely on coal for a fifth of their energy generation or revenue.

The list also includes a growing number of companies outside of the energy industry that are planning to invest in coal power alongside established energy players, or to meet their future energy needs.

The ongoing financial support for coal-fired power plants has caused the world’s coal-fired power plant capacity to grow by 137GW since the Paris climate agreement came into effect, or the same amount as the coal plant fleets of Germany, Russia and Japan combined.

The pipeline for new coal-fired power plants has reached 522GW-worth of coal-fired power plants, of which half are expected to be built in China, where four of the world’s top five coal plant developers are based.

China Energy plans to build 43GW of coal-power capacity followed by China Datang (34GW), China Huaneng (29GW) and China Huadian (15GW). The world’s fifth most prolific coal-plant developer is India’s NTPC, which has plans for another 14GW of coal-power capacity.

“Waiting for coal companies to transition is a recipe for runaway climate change,” Schücking said. “Unless financial institutions speed up their exit from the industry, we will fail the most basic of all climate tests: leaving coal behind.”

The International Energy Agency has been measuring fossil fuel subsidies in a systematic way for more than a decade. The IEA's data on this can be found in their Energy subsidies section.

A lack of "joined up" policy in UK government planning and  regulation is leading to the risk of failure in meeting the commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This is because of the increase in carbon emissions from the incineration of plastics as a part of the expansion of energy-from-waste incineration plants.

Sandra Laville reports for the Guardian (Mon 16 Nov 2020). She writes with the headline and subheading: 

Increase in burning of plastic 'driving up emissions from waste disposal'

Expansion of energy-from-waste incineration could stop UK hitting its net zero carbon target, campaigners warn

Carbon emissions from waste disposal are increasing because of the expansion of energy-from-waste incineration plants, a coalition of campaigners has warned.

By 2030 the government’s push to increase incineration of waste will increase CO2 emissions by 10m tonnes a year, mostly from the burning of plastics, the groups said. They argue that the growth in energy-from-waste incineration means the UK will not be able to meet its commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The coalition, which includes Extinction Rebellion’s zero waste group, Friends of the Earth, the UK Without Incineration Network (UKWIN), Greenpeace and the MP John Cruddas, says the expansion of waste incineration is forcing up carbon emissions.

In an open letter to the prime minister they are calling for a law requiring the waste sector to decarbonise by 2035, similar to legislation passed in the Scandinavian countries and Finland.

Rembrandt Koppelaar, an environmental economist and co-author of the open letter, said: “The UK will not be able to deliver on its net zero commitments unless the government intervenes in the waste sector.

“Without a change in government policy, we can expect large-scale expansion of energy-from-waste incineration to lock us into an additional 10m tonnes of CO2 emissions per year by 2030, primarily from the burning of plastics.”

The amount of waste incinerated in the UK increased from 4.9m tonnes in 2014 to 10.8m tonnes in 2017-18 and is set to continue rising. Meanwhile, recycling rates have reached a plateau and the UK is expected to miss its 50% recycling target by the end of this year.

Evidence presented to MPs last year suggested that areas that had increased levels of incineration of waste had correspondingly lower levels of recycling.

The Guardian and Greenpeace revealed that incineration plants are also three times as likely to be situated in the most deprived and ethnically diverse areas of the UK, raising concerns about the impact on air quality and the health of vulnerable people.

There are 50 incinerators planned or in development in the near future.

Government figures show that in 2018-19 nearly half (43.8%) of waste collected by local authorities from households in England was burnt, or 11.2m tonnes. This increased from just over 12% a decade earlier, and meant incineration overtook recycling and composting as the largest single municipal waste management method.

Incineration rates in England varied from below 30% in the south-east to almost 60% in London. In Wales, rates of incineration were 25.1%.

The government appears determined to press ahead with increases to waste incineration. In the December 2018 resources and waste strategy, published under Theresa May’s premiership, the government said: “Incineration currently plays a significant role in waste management in the UK, and the government expects this to continue.”

Koppelaar said: “The past decade has witnessed a rapid expansion of energy-from-waste incineration capacity, which has already led the sector’s carbon impact to reach 7.4m tonnes. Last year waste incineration gave rise to 13% of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with electricity generation, even though it provided only 2.4% of the UK’s electricity.”

Dr Anne Velenturf, from the Resource Recovery from Waste academic research programme, said: “Building energy-from-waste plants now, when we need to decarbonise, is inconsistent with the Paris agreement and the UK’s legally binding net zero commitments. Ministers must consider whether planned construction of incinerators is compliant with climate obligations, otherwise the government effectively inhibits the decarbonisation of the UK economy.”

The signatories of the letter are calling for:

• a waste and resource sector law that requires net zero carbon by 2035, inclusive of energy-from-waste incineration emissions, in line with targets set by the governments of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden;
• a recycling target of 70% by 2030 under the environment bill, as per the Committee on Climate Change recommendation for meeting the UK carbon budgets and a net zero carbon economy by 2050;
• a circular economy capital investment programme to mobilise infrastructure investment that will support reuse, repair, remanufacturing, and recycling of scrap steel, glass, paper and card, plastics and biowaste.

Multi-lateral action is the only solution

The UK's Ten Point Plan gets Five Out of Ten, but at least it is a start for the nation hosting the upcoming Cop26 in a years time. Setting international policy on the climate emergency and meeting the Paris agreement promises may well be enabled by countries setting an example, but it is only international agreement that can reduce carbon emissions. 

The Covid-19 health crisis has revealed how deep inequalities exist within societies and between nations across the world. The behaviour of the one percent richest people in the world is costing the earth. As mentioned in Fiona Harveys's analysis of the ten point plan The Key areas of Boris Johnson's 'green industrial revolution', Damian Carrington, Environment editor of the Guardian ran an exclusive story (Tue 17 Nov 2020) on research that says the current Covid-19 hiatus in aviation passenger volume is the time to tackle the fact that:

1% of people cause half of global aviation emissions

Damian Carrington reports: 

Frequent-flying “super emitters” who represent just 1% of the world’s population caused half of aviation’s carbon emissions in 2018, according to a study.

Airlines produced a billion tonnes of CO2 and benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, the researchers estimated. The analysis draws together data to give the clearest global picture of the impact of frequent fliers.

Only 11% of the world’s population took a flight in 2018 and 4% flew abroad. US air passengers have by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries. Its aviation emissions are bigger than the next 10 countries combined, including the UK, Japan, Germany and Australia, the study reports.

The researchers said the study showed that an elite group enjoying frequent flights had a big impact on the climate crisis that affected everyone.

They said the 50% drop in passenger numbers in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic should be an opportunity to make the aviation industry fairer and more sustainable. This could be done by putting green conditions on the huge bailouts governments were giving the industry, as had happened in France.

Global aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis was growing fast before the Covid-19 pandemic, with emissions jumping by 32% from 2013-18. Flight numbers in 2020 have fallen by half but the industry expects to return to previous levels by 2024.

“If you want to resolve climate change and we need to redesign [aviation], then we should start at the top, where a few ‘super emitters’ contribute massively to global warming,” said Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, who led the new study.

“The rich have had far too much freedom to design the planet according to their wishes. We should see the crisis as an opportunity to slim the air transport system.”

Dan Rutherford, at the International Council on Clean Transportation and not part of the research team, said the analysis raised the question of equality.

“The benefits of aviation are more inequitably shared across the world than probably any other major emission source,” he said. “So there’s a clear risk that the special treatment enjoyed by airlines just protects the economic interests of the globally wealthy.”

The frequent flyers identified in the study travelled about 35,000 miles (56,000km) a year, Gössling said, equivalent to three long-haul flights a year, one short-haul flight per month, or some combination of the two.

The research, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, collated a range of data and found large proportions of people in every country did not fly at all each year – 53% in the US, 65% in Germany and 66% in Taiwan. In the UK, separate data shows 48% of people did not fly abroad in 2018.

The analysis showed the US produced the most emissions among rich nations. China was the biggest among other countries but it does not make data available. However, Gössling thinks its aviation footprint is probably only a fifth of that of the US.

On average, North Americans flew 50 times more kilometres than Africans in 2018, 10 times more than those in the Asia-Pacific region and 7.5 times more than Latin Americans. Europeans and those in the Middle East flew 25 times further than Africans and five times more than Asians.

The data also showed a large growth in international flights from 1990-2017, with numbers tripling from Australia and doubling from the UK.

The researchers estimated the cost of the climate damage caused by aviation’s emissions at $100bn in 2018. The absence of payments to cover this damage “represents a major subsidy to the most affluent”, the researchers said. “This highlights the need to scrutinise the sector, and in particular the super emitters.”

The figure for the social cost of carbon emissions was actually a bit conservative, Rutherford said.

A levy on frequent fliers is one proposal to discourage flights. “Somebody will need to pay to decarbonise flight – why shouldn’t it be frequent flyers?” Rutherford said. But Gössling was less enthusiastic, pointing out that frequent flyers were usually very wealthy, meaning higher ticket prices may not deter them.

“Perhaps a more productive way is to ask airlines to increase the share of [low carbon] synthetic fuels mix every year up to 100% by 2050,” Gössling said. A mandate for sustainable aviation fuel starting in 2025 is backed by some in the industry.

A spokesman for the International Air Transport Association (Iata), which represents the world’s airlines, said: “The charge of elitism may have had some foundation in the 1950s and 1960s. But today air travel is a necessity for millions.”

He said the airline industry paid $94bn in direct taxes, such as income tax in 2019 and $42bn in indirect taxes such as VAT.

“We remain committed to our environmental goals,” the Iata spokesman said. “This year – in the teeth of the greatest crisis ever facing our industry – airlines agreed to explore pathways to how we could move to net zero emissions by around 2060.”

A key pillar of the industry’s plans is the carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation, produced by the UN’s air transport body. But this was heavily criticised in June when revisions were seen as watering down an already weak scheme, with experts estimating that airlines would not have to offset any emissions until 2024. “I think they have a zero interest in climate change,” Gössling said.

Other research by Gössling found that half of leisure flights were not considered important by the traveller. “A lot of travel is going on just because it’s cheap.”

He stopped flying for holidays in 1995 and more recently stopped going to academic conferences and taking long-haul flights. “I’m not saying I’ll never fly again. But if I can avoid it, I really, really try,” Gössling said.

Poland and Hungary veto EU budget and Covid recovery plan! - Law and Justice? Or, taking the PiS?

Along the LODE Zone Line for Polish people in Poland, the condition of the social and political environment has been deeply divided between progressive and reactionary movements as exemplified in PiS, the governing party in Poland, with 198 seats in the Polish Sejm and 48 in the Senate, PiS is currently the largest political party in the Polish parliament, and the dominant party of the United Right ruling coalition.  

Law and Justice (Polish: Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), or PiS is a national conservative and right-wing populist political party in Poland, a member of the Eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists Party. 

If this is this an upside down world, if you turn the world upside down, maybe that helps us . . .

. . . to see the way things really are?

The name and "banner" of this political party is an example of a process of "inversion" that characterises, at least for some theorists, the ideological. In other words, when it comes to PiS, you are unlikely to encounter either law or justice, except as a form of ideology that, to quote Louis Althusser; "exists in apparatuses and the practices specific to them.”

Althusser delineates a number of these apparatuses, most prominently the church, the school, trade unions, and the family. These social institutions have the capacity to not only inculcate a worldview that is conducive to bourgeois domination, but also enforce these beliefs by means of a series of rituals, habits, and customs, which are more or less compulsory. Because acquiescence to the ruling ideology is bound up in practical obedience, rather than intellectual orthodoxy, Althusser insists that “ideology has a material existence.” And, in Poland right now, these apparatuses provide the material conditions for laws that are unjust, and a system of justice that increasingly refuses to respect the validity of human rights.

Daniel Boffey, reporting for the Guardian from Brussels (Mon 16 Nov 2020), on Poland and Hungary voting against:

the rule-of-law mechanism

Daniel Boffey writes:

The EU is facing a crisis after Hungary and Poland vetoed the bloc’s historic €1.8tn (£1.6tn) budget and coronavirus recovery plan over attempts to link funding to respect for democratic norms.

The move unravels months of negotiations over the scale and terms of the EU’s spending and sets the stage for a stormy videoconference meeting of the bloc’s leaders on Thursday.

Without agreement among the 27 member states, projects financed by the bloc’s seven-year budget will go without funds and the €750bn plan to rebuild Europe’s shattered economy will not be activated.

“I think we have a crisis again,” a senior EU diplomat said. “We’re back in crisis.”

Hungary and Poland had announced their intentions shortly before ambassadors of the EU’s member states met on Monday to vote on various parts of the financial settlement.

The capitals’ representatives had been due to sign off on the total financial package, requiring unanimity, and on the details of a mechanism to link the provision of funds with continued respect for the rule of law, requiring the support of a qualified majority of member states. They were also due to agree by consensus on a roadmap for new EU taxes to fund an increase in spending.

With Hungary only able to count on Poland to vote against the rule-of-law mechanism, the two countries had to be creative in order to block progress. Representatives for the two member states refused to support the plan to create new EU taxes, with the result that the whole package was torpedoed.

“Hungary has vetoed the budget,” said Zoltán Kovács, a spokesman for the country’s rightwing prime minister, Viktor Orbán. “We cannot support the plan in its present form to tie rule-of-law criteria to budget decisions.”

In a previous warning to fellow governments, Orbán, whose government has been accused of becoming increasingly authoritarian in style and substance, had written that he could not agree to a “proposed sanction mechanism … based on legally vague definitions such as ‘violation of the rule of law’.” He wrote: “Such difficult to define concepts create opportunities for political abuses and violate the requirement of legal certainty.”

The 27 EU heads of state and government had signed off on the broad spending package and the inclusion of a link to respect for the rule of law in July, after days of hard debate.

The details of the deal were then subject to further negotiations between the member states, represented by the German presidency of the EU, and the European parliament. Those talks resulted in the spending total increasing by about €15bn to be funded by new EU taxes.

There was also provisional agreement between the two sides on procedures to block funds from rogue EU governments found to be putting the rule of law or the independence of judges at risk.

The mechanism would allow a qualified majority of member states to impose sanctions where governments fail to maintain democratic standards.

Its inclusion followed the ill-fated launch of procedures under article 7 of the EU treaties against Poland in 2017 and Hungary in 2018 over alleged attempts by the governments to undermine the independence of their judges.

The article 7 procedure requires unanimity among the member states before sanctions, such as the removal of voting rights in Brussels, can be imposed. Both Poland and Hungary had said they would protect each other from such measures, leaving it ineffective.

Under the new mechanism, there would be greater accountability over EU payments through removal of that veto.

A senior diplomat said the European commission and the German presidency of the EU would need to “take stock” before deciding on the next steps.

Rasmus Andresen, a Green MEP who was part of the European parliament’s negotiation team, said: “The resistance of Orbán and the Polish government is irresponsible. Orbán is afraid that the new rule of law mechanism will harm his autocratic regime. He is trying to take Europe and Covid hostage for his failed policies.

“Hungary and Poland risk plunging the EU into a deep crisis. If the EU budget and the recovery package are blocked, the economic crisis in the EU will intensify and the Hungarian and Polish economies will suffer massively as a result.

“Chancellor [Angela] Merkel must now take the lead. False compromises are now out of place. Now it is becoming a problem that the chancellor has so far done little to interfere in the negotiations.”

The Guardian Editorial takes a view 

When European Union leaders finally agreed on a groundbreaking economic recovery fund in July, there was understandable euphoria and relief. The huge €750bn package allowed the European commission, for the first time, to raise funds from the open markets on behalf of member states. The money would be distributed to the countries that needed it most, as the coronavirus pandemic led to soaring debt and unemployment. Hailing the deal, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said at the time: “Europe has shown that it is able to break new ground in a very special situation such as this one.”

Depressingly, it seems that Ms Merkel spoke too soon. On Monday, Hungary and Poland effectively vetoed the recovery package, along with the EU’s latest seven-year budget. Unless a solution can quickly be found, the deployment of vital funding could be delayed far into 2021. As countries cope with the second Covid wave and Europe heads towards a double-dip recession, this would be disastrous and destabilising. In Italy, for example, where social unrest has broken out in cities such as Naples and Turin, the €209bn allocated from the fund represent an economic lifeline.

Not surprisingly then, EU diplomats are warning of a serious crisis. And it is complicated by the fact that far more than money is at stake. Hungary and Poland are both set to receive generous sums from the joint recovery package; but their last-minute objections relate to a proposed linkage between the disbursement of funds and a respect for democratic norms and law in recipient countries.

For Hungary’s over-powerful leader, Viktor Orbán, and Poland’s aggressively conservative government, the rule-of-law clause is unacceptable because it provides a means for EU institutions, finally, to hold them to account. For years, with brazen contempt for Brussels, both have undermined the independence of their countries’ judiciaries and media organisations, and indulged in flagrant cronyism. Both have exploited the power thus accrued to wage culture wars on issues such as LGBT rights and migration. In doing so, both have defiantly transformed their countries into regressive outliers – the tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee of rightwing reaction in Europe. Most recently, a dubiously appointed judge in Warsaw decreed a ban on almost all forms of abortion in Poland, prompting the largest demonstrations since the fall of communism.

The EU has arguably been too slow and weak in dealing with this creeping authoritarianism on its eastern flank. At a summit in 2015, the former European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, notoriously greeted Mr Orbán by joking: “Hello, dictator!” It took until 2019 for the Fidesz party, Mr Orbán’s political vehicle, to be suspended from membership of the centre-right group in the European parliament. Attempts to sanction Budapest or Warsaw have been thwarted by the need for unanimity among the EU27 – impossible to achieve when Poland covers Hungary’s back and vice versa.

The onus to find a way out of the current crisis will fall on Ms Merkel, given that Germany holds the rotating EU presidency. It is possible that some judicious re-wording of the rule of law clause may allow a budget compromise to emerge. The price of a prolonged impasse will be paid in jobs, livelihoods and dangerous levels of national debt. That said, it is vitally important that Hungary and Poland are not permitted to blackmail other member states into ditching the rule of law clause. July was a breakthrough moment of cross-border solidarity. But major beneficiaries cannot expect to pocket the money and continue to flout the EU’s fundamental values.

Mr Orbán’s government currently enjoys sweeping emergency powers which have just been extended. Last week, he brought forward a constitutional amendment to restrict the adoption of children to heterosexual married couples. This forms part of a wider crusade against what he describes as “new modern ideologies in the western world”. Deep inside the EU, the Hungarian and Polish governments are seeking to create a safe space for an intolerant, illiberal way of doing politics. That cannot be allowed to stand indefinitely.

A Cargo of Questions . . .

. . . as part of Re:LODE at the Bluecoat Arts Centre Liverpool in 2017-18, this Information Wrap focussed on the many complex histories surrounding a contemporary understanding of the place of the Polish city of Szczecin in the context of its "becoming Polish".

This Information Wrap includes a link to this  Guardian report from 2017 (Wed 20 Dec 2020) by Daniel Boffey in Brussels and Christian Davies in Warsaw. The present crisis in Poland's relationship to the European commission has its roots in the PiS attempts to undermine the independence of the Polish judiciary. 

Poland cries foul as EU triggers 'nuclear option' over judicial independence

Another link on the Szczecin Information Wrap quotes a Human Rights Watch article that deals with:

Eroding checks and balances . . .

. . . and how the rule of law and human rights are under attack in Poland in this :

Poland: Dismantling Rights Protection

The recent "blocking" tactic of the Polish and Hungarian regimes to stymie the EU recovery plan, a plan with a nod in the direction of mitigating environmental impact, and encouraging sustainability, is not simply about resistance to a possible future mechanism of accountability. The proposal on the table that will render governments in the European Union accountable to the European Commission and the European parliament, when it comes to the rule of law, is just one particular and highly visible matter among multiple, but hidden, ideological dimensions. Re:LODE Radio suggests that this resistance is symptomatic, has a deeper cause, and a practical function, to maintain a particular version of Business As Usual.

Let's go back to Althusser . . . 

In 1969, against the background of the events of May '68, Althusser started an unfinished work that was only released in 1995 as Sur la reproduction ("On the Reproduction"). However, from these early manuscripts, he developed "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", which was published in the journal La Pensée in 1970, and became very influential on ideology discussions. 

Where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posited a thinly-sketched theory of ideology as false consciousness, Althusser draws upon the works of later theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to proffer a more elaborate redefinition of the theory. Althusser's theory of ideology has remained influential since it was written. 

Following the publication in 2014 by Verso Books of Althusser's work On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, translated by G.M. Goshgarian, a review was published in the International Socialist Review by Andrew Ryder, under the heading: 

Althusser's theory of ideology

Re:LODE Radio considers the following excerpts from Ryder's review helpful in encapsulating something of Althusser's thinking about the much bandied about term ideology: 

The recent translation of the entirety of the manuscript On the Reproduction of Capitalism, from which the famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was extracted, is an occasion to review some of Althusser’s ideas in the hopes of determining whether his work has made legitimate contributions to the struggle for socialism from below.

In On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Althusser attempts to register in theory what he had been unable to support in practice: that is, the new revolutionary potential that had suddenly appeared in French culture. Despite Althusser’s commitment to the masses, his writing style is often quite difficult and many of his works draw considerably on the epistemology of science. On the Reproduction of Capitalism is one on his most accessible books, and has more immediate political consequences. For this reason, it is a good choice for someone unacquainted with his project to develop an initial familiarity. Althusser believed that Marxism was widely distorted by false interpretations that depended on humanism and economism.

Marx and Lenin, Althusser argued, understood history as overdetermined by a complex and multiple series of social and political factors, without an underlying humanist or economic guarantee for change. The revolution could only be the product of multiple interrelated social conflicts, rather than an overcoming of one basic contradiction in human experience. In his view, while the mode of production is determining of society, it can never be analyzed in isolation. While he intended his theory to explain and develop a revolutionary outlook, his rejection of humanism created the sense that agency was illusory. Without a theory of human alienation, his approach risked positing the eternity of capitalism. His work in the wake of 1968 was meant to remedy this and to explain cultural struggles in terms of a new understanding of ideology.

An essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” was extracted from this book and has been widely distributed, anthologized, and translated. In it, Althusser argues for a materialist understanding of ideology. Rather than considering ideology as mistaken ideas about the world, for him ideology is essentially practical. “Ideology does not exist in the ‘world of ideas’ conceived as a ‘spiritual world,’” he writes. “Ideology exists in institutions and the practices specific to them. We are even tempted to say, more precisely: ideology exists in apparatuses and the practices specific to them.”

Althusser delineates a number of these apparatuses, most prominently the church, the school, trade unions, and the family. These social institutions have the capacity to not only inculcate a worldview that is conducive to bourgeois domination, but also enforce these beliefs by means of a series of rituals, habits, and customs, which are more or less compulsory. Because acquiescence to the ruling ideology is bound up in practical obedience, rather than intellectual orthodoxy, Althusser insists that “ideology has a material existence.”

In Althusser’s view, these ideological apparatuses can properly be described as belonging to the state, even if they appear formally separate from it. He argues that the state actually has two components: a repressive state apparatus, which includes the army, the police, and the courts, and enforces class domination directly, and the ideological state apparatuses (ISA), which maintain complicity and identification with class society. Controversially, Althusser argues that the domestic sphere of family life is included in the domain of the state, because it functions to maintain and develop an ideology that will maintain psychological adherence to and participation in class society.

Strictly speaking, however, Althusser’s argument is that the public/private distinction with regard to power and class domination is an idealist effect of bourgeois law that a Marxist perspective cannot accept. For him, a private school system, an independent church authority, privately owned media, or even the family, all operate as functions of the state regardless of their apparently private-sector status. 

Althusser argues that ideology has a profound relationship with subjective experience. He writes, “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.”  What he means by this is that the practices and beliefs inherent to ideology produce a sense of identity. Our and sense of individual personhood is always bound up in effects of the social institutions that have raised and educated us. Furthermore, it is in the nature of ideology to conceal this basically artificial and imposed nature. Rather than viewing our immediate experiences as conditioned, they appear to be “free” or obvious interpretations of the world. Althusser’s point is not that an obscure veil of appearance inevitably conceals the real world. Rather, he argues that this mediated experience of the world is constructed according to a rational purpose, that is, to “ensure the reproduction of the relations of production.”  In his analysis, ideology is basically tasked with “knotting together of superstructure and base.” It is the cultural necessity that maintains the durability of a mode of production. This leads to ambiguity on the question of ideology outside capitalism. Althusser believed that ideology was a basic aspect of subjective experience, thereby persisting even in a post-capitalist society. However, because his theory and description of ideology are rooted in capitalism, it is very unclear in his work which aspects of ideology are contained in the capitalist mode of production, in contrast to a more general conceptual claim.

Althusser states very clearly that the ISAs are not permanent or stable; their ability to produce ideological practices is always limited and threatened by a basic contradiction: class struggle. In fact, Althusser’s entire project is rooted in the recognition and advocacy of organized struggle against oppression and exploitation, and the means by which class struggle appears in less economically based forms of oppression and subject formation. Jeanne Theoharis has shown that Rosa Parks’s rebellion was not the product of a spontaneous individual moment of freedom, but the consequence of an entire conscious mass movement. (Marlene Martin, “Fight Jim Crow,” Review of Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, International Socialist Review: Quarterly Journal of Revolutionary Marxism 91 (2013), 136–141.) This can be understood in Althusserian terms as the appearance of class struggle in ideology. Effects of class struggle appear within ideology, and class struggle presents the possibility of a complete overthrow of bourgeois ideology. In an appendix to On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Althusser responds to the criticism of his work that it is merely descriptive and “functionalist”; that his analysis tends to make everything explained and reified by apparatuses. In response, Althusser insists that his entire theory depends on the primacy of class struggle. In fact, there would be no need for ISAs at all if resistance and struggle were not always present and in need of pacification.

Althusser’s point is that the economy is fundamentally structured by exploitation, and this exploitation always produces conflict. Ideology is a second-order formation that strives to ensure the continuation of the capitalist mode of production and continuing working-class adherence to a system that oppresses them. However, he argues that ideology cannot maintain an unbroken domination, because it is produced by apparatuses that are enmeshed in material class society. Because these apparatuses are bound up in labor, they cannot be fully owned and controlled by the capitalist state, and they are not fully reconcilable into a consistent social whole. As a result, ideology carries with it proletarian values, as well as bourgeois domination. The proletarian elements that have been distorted in capitalist ideology can be strengthened and clarified to the degree that eventually the entire edifice can be overthrown in a revolutionary process. But because individual experience is always constituted by ideology, this process of liberation must always take place as part of a commitment to working-class activity, not as a personal break with delusion and conformity. 

Terry Eagleton defended the value of Althusser’s insight by clarifying that his advocacy of theory over experience depends on this recognition of working-class theory (Terry Eagleton, “Lenin in the Postmodern Age,” in Lenin Reloaded, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 42–58), 45–46.). His argument was not that academic intellectuals had a superior insight; in fact, his theory of ideology presupposes that academic Marxism is in the grips of a particularly complex and advanced form of bourgeois ideology, in need of disruption by contact with working-class activity. 

Althusser argues that the basic contradictions and irrationalities of the capitalist system will also interfere with the ability of ideology to fully capture a convincing experience of the world. These inherent contradictions produce “ideological sub-formations.” He argues that it was exactly these contradictions and sub-formations that characterised the eruption of discontent and insurrection by French workers and students in May 1968.

Demonstrations on the streets of Paris in May 1968

In the later stages of the Russian Revolution, insists Althusser, Vladimir Lenin understood this basic framework, and that is why he was so interested in reforming education and social institutions under the rubric of the cultural revolution.

The rule of law clause 

The problem for Polish and Hungarian populist, nationalist and nativist politicians, is that their adjustment ploys, when it comes to the ideological state apparatuses, suddenly become visible along with a more general exposure of the "value system" of family, religion and national identity, and so on. Keeping the lid on a bubbling cauldron of discontent is increasingly ineffective in societies increasingly divided. The "YEAR OF TRUTH", 2020 is NOT 1968, but; 

"something is happening here but you don't know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?"

Why Are There Protests in Poland?

One of the major tactics used by protestors was to use a wide variety of slogans using socially offensive language. The slogans from the first week of protests were deliberately vulgar, with protestors justifying the vulgarity as a response to the government and the Catholic Church's lack of respect for women.

Publicist Piotr Pacewicz  of OKO.press collected and classified slogans into categories. His classification included: women's rights – "My body is not a coffin" (Polish: Moje ciało to nie trumna); political institutions altogether – "The government is not a pregnancy, it can be removed" (Polish: Rząd nie ciąża, da się usunąć); Jarosław Kaczyński himself – "Jarek, you shat yourself, get up" (Polish: Jarek posrałeś się, wstawaj), "The cat can stay, the government get the fuck out" (Polish: Kot może zostać, rząd może wypierdalać, a reference to Jarosław Kaczyński's cat); the Catholic Church – "Fuck yourself in your own organs" (Polish: Napierdalajcie we własne organy); and PiS itself – "Fuck PiS" (Polish: Jebać PiS); along with a humorous mix of politeness and vulgarity – "Could you please fuck off" (Polish: Bardzo proszę wypierdalać). 

Ballad of a Thin Man 

Bob Dylan recorded "Ballad of a Thin Man" in Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City, located at 799 Seventh Avenue, just north of West 52nd Street on August 2, 1965. Record producer Bob Johnston was in charge of the session, and the backing musicians were Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar, Bobby Gregg on drums, Harvey Goldstein on bass, Al Kooper on organ, and Dylan himself playing piano. Driven by Dylan's sombre piano chords, which contrast with a horror movie organ part played by Al Kooper, this track was described by Kooper as "musically more sophisticated than anything else on the Highway 61 Revisited album."

Kooper has recalled that at the end of the session, when the musicians listened to the playback of the song, drummer Bobby Gregg said, "That is a nasty song, Bob." Kooper adds, "Dylan was the King of the Nasty Song at that time."

Anyway the song still holds up. Seems to be people around still like that. 

In March 1986, Dylan told his audience in Japan: "This is a song I wrote a while back in response to people who ask me questions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while. You just don't want to answer no more questions. I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right? So, every once in a while you got to do this kind of thing, you got to put somebody in their place... So this is my response to something that happened over in England. I think it was about '63, '64. [sic] Anyway the song still holds up. Seems to be people around still like that. So I still sing it. It's called 'Ballad Of A Thin Man'. 

Did the "thin man", forecaster-in-chief, see this coming?

Peter Walker, Dan Sabbagh and Rajeev Syal report for the Guardian (Fri 13 Nov 2020):

On Friday morning it was confirmed that Cummings was planning to leave by the end of the year following a bitter row over his close ally Cain. Cain’s promotion from head of communications to chief of staff was blocked by Johnson’s fiancee, Carrie Symonds, and other staffers this week, leading him to quit.

But soon after 5pm, government sources said Cummings had left his post with immediate effect following a discussion with the prime minister. He was filmed leaving through No 10’s famous black door brandishing a large cardboard storage box.

His exit came after 16 months when Cummings rose to become perhaps the most high-profile and notorious adviser of recent times in UK politics.

Five months ago Johnson was accused of wasting enormous political capital in refusing to sack Cummings for travelling from London to Durham in lockdown – as exclusively revealed by the Guardian and Daily Mirror – causing a headache for MPs who were bombarded with constituents’ angry protests.

Mark Brown, Arts correspondent for the Guardian reports (Wed 18 Nov 2020):

Boris and Dom may have gone their separate ways but their crazy antics live on, and this week they may finally get their comeuppance. Not yet in real life but in the Beano at least.

The 82-year-old comic will this week publish its first ever version aimed at grownups with a story that revolves around Sandra and Dennis Sr Menace, parents of Dennis, and the dastardly Wilbur Brown, father of Walter the Softy.

The cast list also includes Captain Tom Moore, Marcus Rashford, Greta Thunberg and, like an adult Dennis and Gnasher, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings.

It is a pullout section, BeanOLD, which both children and parents should enjoy, said Mike Stirling, the editorial director of Beano Studios. “We just wanted to cheer everyone up. One thing we noticed was that our readers were feeling a bit sorry for the adults in their lives.”

Stirling said the Beano had a team of kids they call “trendspotters” who form the Beano Brain and let the writers know what children all over the UK are talking about.

Both Johnson and Cummings have been huge subjects for the average 10-year-old, he said. One of the comic’s young trendspotters described the latter as someone who “broke all the rules. He got corona and got his kids to their grandparents … you’ve got to stick to the rules even if they are your own rules.”

Stirling said the Beano was well placed to tackle the subject of Cummings and his trip to Barnard Castle. “Although our characters are always really naughty and misbehave, our readers are very moral. When our kid characters break the rules there’s always a consequence for doing so.”

In the new Beano story, Dennis Sr loses his job at the Beanotown paperclip factory after a “restructuring” by owner Brown.

Cummings appears several times. “It’s like the rules don’t apply to him!” he fumes at the non-arrival of Santa. Later, Brown asks him to be the getaway driver for him and the prime minister: “Can you drive Dom? I can’t see very well!”

Stirling, who co-wrote the pullout, said they had tried to cram in as many references to the year as possible, whether that was video meetings, home schooling, the delayed Bond movie or toilet roll shortages.

It was not too difficult to write, Stirling admitted. “So many absurd things have happened, it was easy to build out a story and turn the Beano sense of humour on to it.”

That humour is one that, Stirling said, is “a little bit rebellious, a little bit cheeky but is a humour everyone can get on board with. It transcends ages.”

The Beano has been part of British life since 1938 with its first front page star an ostrich called Big Eggo (“Someone’s taken my egg again!”).

It has often addressed contemporary issues, notably during the second world war when Lord Snooty and his pals took on Adolf Hitler.

In one story they sent him a morse code message that translated as “Dear Herr Hitler nobody has heard of you in Britain”, prompting fury. “Sniff! Sniff! This is der terrible,” shouts a bent-double Hitler. “Why has he not told der British pig-dogs about me?”

The Beano’s golden age was the 1950s when its stories, often with literal lashings of corporal punishment, brought weekly sales figures of nearly 2 million.

Today’s readership is closer to 40,000 weekly but Stirling said there had been a significant increase during lockdown, probably down to people craving familiarity and security in uncertain times.

“We could all benefit from thinking a wee bit more like kids. I would say that, because I get to do it every day, but I really think it is a powerful thing … the optimism, hope and moral worldview that kids always have.”

The one-off comic is very much at the gentle, poking fun end of comedy. It is not meant to be Viz or indeed anything else people might think of. “We were very careful not to call it an adult edition,” stressed Stirling.

Nasty story . . .

While the Beano gets it, the Mail on Sunday goes for it!

. . . nasty newspaper? 

Jonathan Liew for the Guardian (Mon 16 Nov 2020) writes under the headline and subheading:

Mail on Sunday v Marcus Rashford: a sinister attack on a young black man

The MoS has published an article that is entitled, nappy-grabbing rage, dressed up in sensible clothes. Rashford must sense that he is winning

Perhaps Marcus Rashford knew all along that this was how it might all play out. Or perhaps he will have realised it at some point on the journey: that there would ultimately be a price to pay for putting this many important noses out of joint, for doing so fearlessly and unapologetically, for making too much of a difference. After all, you don’t get to embarrass a Conservative government for free. And on Sunday, Rashford would discover the real consequences of speaking truth to power.

“School meals Marcus’s £2m homes empire,” read the headline in the Mail on Sunday, referring to five properties recently purchased by the Manchester United forward in Cheshire. The “campaigning football star”, we were told, had taken out “mortgages from the Queen’s bank, Coutts, for all five properties”. Meanwhile the authors of the article seemed particularly keen to inform readers that Rashford has begun the process of trademarking his name in the US, and that his own house is worth £1.85m and has six bedrooms.

The first thing to say is that virtually none of this is really anyone’s business. And perhaps, given the gravity of everything else going on in the world now, the temptation will be to leave it at that: to sigh a little sigh, chuckle a little chuckle at the frivolousness of it all and say something trite about tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper. But read between the carefully arranged lines and something more pernicious and sinister is clearly taking place: a shot across the bows, a reducer challenge, a declaration of hostilities, the first severed thumb in the post.

There remains a curiously quaint view within journalism that we should refrain from criticising our own industry, a trope roughly analogous to “trying to get a fellow pro sent off”. The reality, of course, is that this is a convenient veneer of bullshit dreamed up by those who most benefit from bad journalism being allowed to flourish. And of course there’s plenty of bad journalism about, just as there is bad art, bad law, bad football, bad plumbing. What we so imperfectly describe as “the media” is better understood as a marketplace of competing voices. Many of you, I like to think, are here because we’re not the Mail. Doubtless the reverse is also true.

The Mail on Sunday article isn’t bad journalism, in the sense that it’s brilliantly effective at conveying what it wants. For buried amid the apparent sobriety of the article, its accretion of various random facts (“… it has a smart kitchen and dining area … Rashford, who came from humble beginnings on a council estate … residents include veteran Coronation Street actor William Roache…”), there’s an awful craft at work: a loathing so artfully sheathed you would barely know it’s there.

The juxtaposition of “school meals Rashford” with the “£2m homes empire”. The dog-whistle reference to the “campaigning football star”. The early mention of the player’s age (23). The picture of Rashford himself, frowning in a dark hoodie. Everything here is code, bound up in motifs and subtext, the mood music of sophisticated right-wing distaste. It’s entitled, nappy-grabbing, shit-hurling rage, dressed up in sensible clothes and babbling vaguely about property prices.

This is why it’s pointless attempting to engage with the internal logic of the piece, or indeed much of the criticism of Rashford since he stepped up his campaign during the summer. Trying to extract any sort of cogent argument or legible worldview here is the equivalent of trying to spot secret messages in your morning cereal. An example: on page 123 of the very same newspaper is a financial columnist urging chancellor Rishi Sunak to resist reforming capital gains tax on the basis that it would “deter wannabe landlords”. Yes, the irony feels cussedly satisfying. But hypocrisy is in many ways the least important of the misdemeanours here.

Because, if you take a broader view, the Mail on Sunday’s story is simply the latest escalation of the growing Stop Rashford movement, one begun by right-wing pundits and Conservative MPs on Twitter in recent weeks. Last month the Guido Fawkes website sardonically praised Rashford’s “ability to eloquently and magnanimously oppose verbal attacks on Tory MPs just minutes after the end of a football match”.

The subtext here – that a 23-year-old footballer should not habitually be capable of any of these traits – is familiar enough. And in a way, Rashford is the populist right’s worst nightmare: a young, black, working-class campaigner who bases his appeal not on culture war or tribal loyalty or fiery invective, but on unity, consensus, the common ground. He is a political campaigner who rejects party politics, rejects the idea that conflict and progress are the same thing, indeed refuses to acknowledge that there is anything remotely contentious or left-leaning about wanting hungry children fed. And – coincidence! – he gets things done.

Small wonder this country’s conservative establishment has come to see Rashford not as a fleeting irritation but as an existential threat: a man cheerfully exposing not just the worst privations of government austerity but our own snide and bickering political culture. Small wonder his personal finances and lifestyle choices are now considered fair game. If Rashford is allowed to succeed, who else might follow in his wake? Rashford did not choose this fight. But with unerring precision and a depressing alacrity, it has chosen him. Perhaps there’s something deeply depressing in the treatment of this decent and principled man by a section of the media that has always thrived on conflict, the vindictive urge to tear down, to expose, to disgrace. Rashford, you suspect, would see it as incontrovertible proof that he is winning.

David Squires on . . . Marcus Rashford v the Tory government 

This is a "must see" comic strip from the Guardian cartoonist David Squires (Tue 27 Oct 2020)

As Jonathan Liew says: 

"And of course there’s plenty of bad journalism about, just as there is bad art, bad law, bad football, bad plumbing."

And, to add to this list, Re:LODE Radio considers the current Brexit Bill going through parliament. This government legislation, recently introduced and passed in the UK House of Commons and defeated in the House of Lords, breaks international law, contained within a recent treaty agreement, signed off by this self-same UK government.

You could NOT make it up . . . 

Pantomime dame Boris Johnson and his not-so-magic lamp – cartoon

Chris Riddell on the PM breaking the law over Brexit and the ‘rule of six’ coronavirus restrictions

Observer comment cartoon Chris Riddell (Sat 12 Sep 2020)

Boris Johnson to press on with Brexit bill despite Lords defeat

PM risks major confrontation with Joe Biden by persevering with internal market bill

Lisa O'Carroll and Jessica Elgot report for the Guardian under this headline and subheading (Mon 9 Nov 2020):

Boris Johnson has put himself on a collision course with the Joe Biden administration in the US after Downing Street said it would press ahead with legislation designed to override the Brexit deal on Northern Ireland.

Peers inflicted a huge defeat on the government after voting overwhelmingly to remove measures that seek to “disapply” parts of the Northern Ireland protocol – measures that Biden has said would put the Good Friday agreement at risk.

Lords voted 433 to 165 on the amendment tabled by Lord Eames, the former primate of all Ireland, who spoke movingly of the fragile peace in Northern Ireland.

Northern Irish peer Lord Empey blamed the “mess” on Boris Johnson’s decision to opt for the border down the Irish Sea last year, a decision Ken Clarke said was one of the most “inferior” options available to the government, which, he said, was now acting like a dictatorship to remedy its errors. No 10 reacted to the defeat by saying: “We will retable these clauses when the bill returns to the Commons.”

Just before the vote result came in Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, warned that there would be no Brexit trade deal if the UK passed a bill “designed to break international law”.

He later told BBC’s Newsnight programme he thought a deal was still possible but said the bill had damaged trust with the EU and Britain’s reputation internationally.

“Anybody who is suggesting that this has been a successful or a good tactic ... doesn’t understand the conversations that are happening across the EU right now. This is a tactic that has backfired I think in a significant way,” he said.

Lord Judge, a former chief justice of England and Wales, opened the Lords debate on the amendment on Monday by describing the Brexit clauses as “pernicious, lamentable provisions” that had no other purpose than to give unilateral powers to Downing Street to “nullify” international law. The government has previously said the clauses would break international law in a “specific and limited way”.

Judge said the clauses had not been inserted as “guardian angels, pure and unsullied” into legislation aimed at smoothing trade between Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England after Brexit. “The executive is seeking powers that parliament should never have been asked to give,” said Judge, predicting an “overwhelming” majority for the amendment to demonstrate the Lords’ discontent with the government.

Downing Street and senior cabinet members including the environment secretary, George Eustice, on Monday, and the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, on Sunday, reiterated their insistence that the clauses were necessary to give domestic power over the EU if it threatened the Good Friday agreement.

In a pre-recorded lecture to Middle Temple on Monday evening, the former prime minister Sir John Major urged parliament to resist aspects of the bill, which he said threatened fundamental liberties and allowed ministers to break the law – a “slippery slope down which no democratic government should ever travel”.

He added that the bill had “damaged our reputation around the world” and warned of the “corrosive” impact of placing ministers above the law.

Lord Clarke, the former home secretary and chancellor, told the House of Lords there was no evidence for the supposed EU threat to the Good Friday agreement – describing the Brexit clauses as a “Donald Trump like gesture” born of “panic” by a government acting like a dictatorship.

Michael Howard, a former Tory leader and an ardent Brexit supporter, said he was “dismayed” that a party he had “supported for so long” had “chosen as one of the first assertions of its newly won sovereignty to break its word, to break international law, to renege on a treaty signed barely a year ago”.

In a sombre speech, Robin Eames, a former primate of All Ireland, who authored the amendment, said peace in Northern Ireland and mutual understanding of previous warring communities was “still a tender plant” that was being put at risk by the bill.

Margaret Ritchie, a former SDLP leader, said Raab had “totally misrepresented” the situation in comments on the BBC on Sunday when he claimed that the EU was trying to undermine the Good Friday agreement. It was “the EU that sought and is seeking to protect the Belfast agreement through the NI protocol”, she said.

As recently as September, Biden said the Good Friday agreement, which ended decades of bloody conflict in the region, could not be allowed to become “a casualty of Brexit”. He said then: “Any trade deal between the US and UK must be contingent upon respect for the agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”

The UK government has admitted the legislation breaches part of the Northern Ireland protocol as set out in the withdrawal agreement signed with the EU. The clauses would hand sweeping unilateral powers to ministers in two key areas yet to be agreed with the EU, breaching the terms of the treaty agreed in January.

It would give ministers the power to change or disapply export rules for goods travelling from Britain to Northern Ireland, and also give them power over whether to notify Brussels of any state aid decisions.

Eustice confirmed again on Monday that the government would reinstate the clauses that enable ministers to break international laws if they are rejected by the Lords.

Downing Street said it was acting responsibly in order to allow a smooth transition should no deal be reached with the EU. “Any Lords amendments will be considered when they return to the Commons but we do consider these clauses to be a vital safety net,” Johnson’s spokesman said.

Bad law, and good law . . .

Good Law Project:

Our mission is to achieve change through the law.

We defend, define and change the law to uphold democracy, protect the environment and ensure no one is left behind.

This is what the Good Law Project says it is about: 

"The Good Law Project is a not-for-profit membership organisation that uses the law to protect the interests of the public. We fight cases that defend, define or change the law and we use litigation to engage and educate. We challenge abuses of power, exploitation, inequality, and injustice."

Opportunism in a crisis and the smell of cronyism . . .

. . . has been detected recently by Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project, and he shares his opinion with Guardian readers in this Opinion piece (Mon 16 Nov 2020).

The photo used to illustrate this piece on the Guardian website is of Kate Bingham, as seen on ITV’s Lorraine show in September. ‘Despite having – by her own admission – no vaccines experience, she was appointed to head up the ‘vaccines taskforce’.’ But she does have "connections" to the Boris Johnson government.

Jolyon Maugham writes: 

There is an England of my mind. And in it those who have made their fortunes offer their time and talents in service of the public good, modelling self-sacrifice and respect for good governance to ensure the nation thrives. But that England is no longer this England.

Take the story of Kate Bingham. She is wife to a Treasury minister and cousin by marriage to Boris Johnson’s sister. Despite having – by her own admission – no vaccines experience, she was appointed by the prime minister, as far as we know without competition, to head up the “vaccines taskforce”.

With this role came responsibility for investing billions of pounds of public money, a task she performed while remaining managing director of a private equity firm specialising in health investments. While in post she gave, again apparently without competition, a £670,000 contract to a tiny PR firm, whose last accounts show net assets of less than a third of that sum. Its directors include Collingwood Cameron, a longstanding business associate of Humphry Wakefield (better known as Dominic Cummings’ father-in-law).

The Good Law Project, which I run, has received what I consider bullish legal advice from a leading procurement specialist that the letting of the contract to the PR firm, Admiral Public Relations and Marketing, was unlawful. But, as it happens, we already have two cases before the high court on the unlawful award of contracts to other communications agencies connected to Dominic Cummings: Public First and Hanbury Strategy.

We know, of course, that the government, in tabling the internal market bill, made a calculated and conscious decision to break international law. And we know it admits to breaking the law in holding back the details of £4bn-worth of Covid contracts. So why challenge Admiral PR? If a government stops caring about whether its actions are lawful, what use is a lawyer or the law?

But still the offences to the England of my mind mount up.

From documents leaked to us, whose authenticity the government does not dispute, we already know of the existence of special “VIP” channels for the procurement of Covid-19 protective equipment. We can see no good explanation for why so many hugely valuable PPE contracts have gone to its friends.

And what of the £100bn to be spent on the government’s “moonshot” for mass testing – all this, apparently, without consulting the national screening committee, its own body of experts, or seeking the consent of parliament? And of its ongoing preference for direct appointments over open competition for key Covid roles? Bingham is the most feted example, but others include the appointment of Mike Coupe as director of Covid testing, and Baroness Dido Harding as head of test and trace, neither of whom had any previous related experience.

Whether or not we would call this an abuse of power, or cronyism, what matters is its effect on the public good. For ministers or special advisers to choose their friends or close associates for these key roles is to exclude those who are more able, or better value. And ultimately it is the public interest that suffers.

When we come to look at the evidence of how we have managed the pandemic – with both excess deaths and the hit to the economy in the UK among the highest in the developed world – what will we conclude about who was served by handing out so many jobs and contracts to friends?

In challenging all these decisions, the Good Law Project aims to protect civil servants who worry that their careers will be jeopardised if they voice their concerns about bad practice. And we do it in the hope of an England where the government decides that perpetuating these practices becomes too much of a political risk.

UK government fails to publish details of £4bn Covid contracts with private firms

Earlier this month Juliette Garside of the Guardian (Mon 9 Nov 2020), reports on how the Good Law Project and some MP's have called for an independent inquiry over the UK government's apparent breach of UK law.

Juliette Garside reports: 

The government has failed to publish any information about £4bn of Covid-related contracts awarded to private companies, in what appears to be a continuing breach of UK law.

The gap was uncovered by campaign group the Good Law Project, which along with a cross-party group of MPs, is suing the health secretary, Matt Hancock, in the high court. They are accusing his ministry of an “egregious and widespread failure to comply with legal duties and established policies”.

The group is warning of a “transparency gap” and is pushing for an independent judge-led inquiry into the billions spent on personal protective equipment, medicines and virus testing and tracing since the pandemic began.

In a legal filing in the case, dated 30 October, government lawyers revealed that £17bn had been spent by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) on Covid-related goods and services since the start of the financial year in April. However, to date civil servants in Hancock’s ministry have only released details of £12.4bn in Covid-related contracts for that period – leaving £4.6bn unaccounted for.

The gap narrowed last week after the department rushed out details of £1.6bn in contracts. Many of the new deals are for the purchase of rapid test kits of the kind being used in Liverpool’s city-wide testing effort.

Government departments are required by law to publish details of contracts no later than 30 days after awarding them. The measures are designed to reduce the risk of fraud and improve value for money by allowing proper scrutiny of how taxpayer cash is spent.

Notices alerting the public to awards over a certain value by publicly funded bodies appear on a European database, Tenders Electronic Daily, and on the UK’s own Contracts Finder website.

Meanwhile, government guidance advises civil servants to publish the contracts themselves within 20 days.

“There is overwhelming evidence that entities connected to key government figures have made staggering fortunes from these procurement contracts,” said Jolyon Maugham, founder of the Good Law Project. “There is a clear public interest in us knowing promptly, whilst those contracts can still be challenged, who benefited and to the tune of how much.”

Among last week’s notices is the largest Covid-related purchase so far by DHSC. The ministry has signed a £496m deal with Innova Medical, which is supplying lateral flow kits. The devices look and work like pregnancy tests, and are made in China for Innova.

An earlier contract with Innova cost the taxpayer £107m. The California-based company is owned by the private equity group Pasaca Capital, which was founded by a Chinese investment banker in 2017.

Whether the deals are value for money remains in question. It is not yet known whether the tests can detect the virus in pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic people, and the government has not published its data on trials of the kits.

Good Law’s claim singles out a number of cases, including the award of a £252m PPE contract to a company called Ayanda Capital on 29 April. Notice of the award was not published on the European database until 2 July. The contract itself was not published until 4 September. Ayanda, which describes itself as specialising in currency trading and offshore property, secured the deal with the help of an associate who was previously an adviser to the government.

The legal challenge also names Pestfix, a pest control business, which has signed 11 PPE contracts with the government. So far, only six have been published.

Government lawyers have defended the delays, admitting “technical breaches” of the law, but saying the information will be made public “in due course”. They say any legal action risks delaying publication.

The DHSC said it could not comment on legal proceedings, adding: “As part of an unprecedented response to this global pandemic we have drawn on the expertise and resources of a number of public and private sector partners. This is completely in line with procurement regulations for exceptional circumstances.

“We have been clear from the outset that public authorities must achieve value for taxpayers and use good commercial judgement. Publication of contract information is being carried out as quickly as possible in line with government transparency guidelines.”

Spending watchdog the National Audit Office has prepared a report on government procurement during the pandemic. It is understood the report is with DHSC for factchecking and due to be released this month.

“It’s astounding that there could be a gap this big between what the government spent and what it has told the public it paid,” said Labour’s shadow Cabinet Office minister, Rachel Reeves. “There has been a whole catalogue of contracts that are either opaque, wasteful, unaccountable, or linked to Tory friends and donors. It’s little wonder that trust in the government’s handling of public contracts is dropping like a stone.”

The gap between the value of contracts awarded and the value of those published has been caused by delays in meeting the 30-day deadline. Research firm Tussell, which was commissioned by Good Law to monitor contract notices, said Covid-related awards are taking an average of 78 days to appear, compared with 41 days for non-Covid awards.

“While the Department of Health has published £12.4bn of Covid-response contracts, we know this is still not the full picture of its spending to date,” said Tussell founder, Gus Tugendhat. “It may be that the lag in publishing is even greater than that reported here.”

Damning report finds multiple shortcomings in UK government's £18bn contract process

This story was published in the Guardian today alongside the story of Jeremy Corbyn's reinstatement as a Labour party member.  

This story by David Pegg, Felicity Lawrence and David Conn was published on the Guardian website (Wed 18 Nov 2020) and runs under the headline: 

PPE suppliers with political ties given 'high-priority' status, report reveals

David Pegg, Felicity Lawrence and David Conn write:

PPE suppliers with political connections were directed to a “high-priority” channel for UK government contracts where bids were 10 times more likely to be successful, according to a report by the parliamentary spending watchdog.

Almost 500 suppliers with links to politicians or senior officials were referred to the channel, where their pitches for contracts were automatically treated as credible by government officials charged with procuring PPE.

The existence of the channel, a highly unusual departure from standard procurement practice, is documented in the report by the National Audit Office, which reveals the UK government awarded £18bn of coronavirus–related contracts during the first six months of the pandemic.

The news came on the day the UK recorded 598 deaths from coronavirus over the latest 24-hour period – the highest daily figure since 12 May. It raises the total number of fatalities in the UK to 52,745.

The revelation about a special lane for well-connected firms goes some way toward explaining why a slew of companies with links to senior Tories secured major contracts in recent months, leading to allegations of cronyism from transparency activists and senior figures in the Labour party.

More than half (£10.5bn) of contracts relating to the pandemic were awarded without competitive tender, according to the NAO. The watchdog found that some paperwork documenting why suppliers had been selected was missing, and that in some instances, contracts had only been drawn up after the companies had already started the work.

The NAO report acknowledges that government procurement officers were operating under extreme pressure, with procurement chiefs and suppliers forced to compete in an international PPE market subject to extraordinary and unprecedented demand.

However it also identifies instances of contracts, some for hundreds of millions of pounds, being awarded without essential documents that would ordinarily be drawn up to safeguard against the misuse of public funds.

That was particularly true of the high-priority channel. Of the 493 suppliers referred to the scheme by a political or official contact, details of the individual who made the reference were recorded in the government’s case management system in fewer than half of cases.

The report said 144 referrals originated in the private offices of government ministers, including “referrals from MPs who had gone to ministers with a possible manufacturer in their constituency, and where private individuals had written to the minister or the private office with offers of help”.

A further 64 suppliers were referred directly by MPs or members of the House of Lords, while 21 were referred by government officials. No written rules as to how the high-priority channel should operate were kept by officials, the NAO found.

Bids from companies referred by a political connection to the scheme were taken more seriously, with suppliers in the high-priority channel viewed as having been “pre-sifted for credibility by being referred by a senior credible source”.

“The criterion [for being referred into the high-priority channel] seems extremely wide and discretionary,” said Liz David-Barrett, a professor of governance and integrity at the University of Sussex. “It’s not clear to me why MPs or peers should have any special expertise on whether a company is qualified to provide PPE.”

She pointed out that individuals with links to politically exposed persons – or PEPs, in anti-corruption parlance – are ordinarily treated as high-risk and deserving of more scrutiny, rather than less.

“Normally we would expect that due diligence processes explicitly look for links to PEPs and treat suppliers that are associated with PEPs as high-risk, requiring further checks before you would enter into contracts with them,” David-Barrett said. “This seems to have done the opposite, in that suppliers with these links were treated as more credible and lower-risk.”

Around 10% of the suppliers referred to the high-priority channel by a political contact were awarded a PPE contract, the NAO reported. Suppliers without such links, by contrast, had only a 1% chance of winning a contract (104 out of 14,892).

“It does seem that you get a clear advantage once you’re in that channel,” David-Barrett said.

The NAO also identified a pattern of retrospective contracting, whereby key documents formalising contracts with private companies to provide services were only drawn up some time after the work had begun.

One such contract, for political communications, between the Cabinet Office and the social media company Topham Guerin was signed on 7 May 2020. But the company had started the work almost two months before, on 17 March.

“This contract was a direct award and we did not find evidence of documented requirements prior to the work beginning,” the NAO found. During the 2019 election, Topham Guerin worked on the Conservative party’s controversial digital campaign strategy. The company declined to comment on the NAO report.

In a statement, the Cabinet Office stressed that 99.5% of the PPE it acquired met clinical safety standards, and that an eight-stage due-diligence process was undertaken for all potential leads, including those referred to the high-priority channel. It said the NAO had found no evidence of conflicts of interest in the cases it reviewed.

The Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez said: “We have been dealing with an unprecedented global pandemic that has posed the biggest challenge to the UK in a generation. As this report rightly recognises, we needed to procure contracts with extreme urgency to secure the vital supplies required to protect frontline NHS workers and the public, and we make no apology for that.

“We have robust processes in place for spending public money to ensure we get critical equipment to where it needs to go as quickly as possible, whilst also ensuring value for money for the taxpayer.

“It is important to maintain the public’s confidence in how we manage their money, and we welcome the NAO’s scrutiny of our processes, and recommendations on how they can be improved.

Captain Hindsight versus . . .

. . . Boris the Menace 

Keir Starmer asks Boris some questions but gets NO answers! 

NOT a storm in a teacup . . .

. . . but a controversy nevertheless. This cartoon by the artist Steve Bell was referenced in the previous post and flagged by Re:LODE Radio as likely to generate controversy. Re:LODE Radio considers the political position of artists as something to acknowledge and debate, but not to censor or run away from, especially if the work points to an uncomfortable truth.

Today's front page of the Guardian has the apposite story of Jeremy Corbyn's reinstatement as a member of the Labour party, but, not as yet back taking the Labour whip in the parliamentary Labour party. 

Meanwhile . . .

. . . Elizabeth Ribbans, the Guardian and Observer’s global readers’ editor, responded to the many Guardian readers who were angered by Steve Bell's image of the head of the former Labour leader on a plate (Thu 12 Nov 2020), under the headline:

A cartoon that sparked reader complaints 

Elizabeth Ribbans writes:

On the evening that Jeremy Corbyn was suspended for his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s damning report on antisemitism in the Labour party, the Guardian published a Steve Bell cartoon showing the party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, holding his predecessor’s head on a plate. Borrowing from one of Caravaggio’s several portrayals of the beheading of John the Baptist, it put Starmer in Salome’s place on the canvas while Corbyn’s startled face stared out from the golden platter.

Readers were swift to react. The cartoon drew 32 complaints of using antisemitic imagery, half of which also complained that it was insensitive to depict a decapitation in the wake of recent killings in France. Six readers complained only about offence relating to France, while as many again objected without stating their grounds. Two people did not cite antisemitism but felt strongly that to cast Corbyn as a victim or martyr belittled the conclusions of the EHRC report. Among those who shared personal details with me were Jews, Christians and people of no faith at all.

One reader wrote: “Surely you can see that publishing a cartoon presenting Sir Keir Starmer as Salome with the head of Jeremy Corbyn, or John the Baptist to continue the allegory, on a golden platter, as delivered by the Jewish King Herod, was not only deeply offensive, but played upon the very antisemitic tropes that prompted the EHRC’s investigation in the Labour party to begin with?”

“It is extraordinary to me,” said another, “that on a day of such pain for the Jewish community, the culmination of many years of abuse and discrimination from the members of the Labour party, that the Guardian would choose to publish a deeply distasteful cartoon … with the clear antisemitic connotations that that brings (not to mention the lack of taste to have such a cartoon following the horrendous events in France).”

The cartoon also prompted criticism on social media, which was reported by newspapers in the UK and Israel.

Bell strenuously rejected claims that the work was antisemitic, saying he frequently used classical paintings to make a contemporary point, and that the Caravaggio was chosen only as the “best and most effective composition” to convey the head-on-plate image, with neither Jews, Christians nor notions of martyrdom in his contemplation.

“The figures in the painting are Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn, not Salome or John the Baptist. Believe it or not this picture has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with politics,” he said. “Starmer’s hasty and quite shocking decision (if indeed it was his decision rather than that of [the general secretary] David Evans) to suspend the recent leader of the party is both entirely unnecessary (the report did not call for it) and unjustified, in my view, and will ultimately prove counterproductive.”

To have someone’s “head on a plate” is a well-understood idiom to reflect a punishment viewed as severe, and Bell has borrowed from the Caravaggio to express that idea in the past. In 2015, predicting the result of an imminent general election that saw Labour wiped out in Scotland, he had the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, as the executioner handing Ed Miliband’s head to then prime minister, David Cameron.

In the New Testament telling, Salome dances so well for her stepfather, Herod Antipas, that he promises a reward of her choosing. Salome’s mother, Herodias, instructs her to ask for the head of John the Baptist: an act of revenge for his denunciation of her marriage to Herod as incestuous, in violation of Jewish law.

Salome has been imbued by artistic treatment down the centuries with more unsavoury qualities than attributed to her by the gospels. But editors were satisfied – I believe, correctly – that the story was not a historical slur, akin for example to the Jewish deicide trope that blames Jews for the killing of Jesus. Neither was the cartoon perceived on its own account to be engaging in classic antisemitic tropes; it was seen as a pared-down visual metaphor for one person’s political beheading of another, without more elaborate meaning.

That reading of the metaphor works for the 2015 cartoon. But context matters. I do not believe Bell to be antisemitic or that he intended his Starmer to embody any noxious myth about Jews (“My targets are taken on as individuals,” he said). His stout defence of Corbyn (who was suspended after saying opponents had “dramatically overstated” Labour’s problem with antisemitism) may offend, but it comes within the bounds of opinion. However, using a Jewish biblical figure who conspired against a saint was highly provocative and open to just the kind of interpretations made.

Some readers suggested the cartoon had been rushed to publication without scrutiny. In fact, there was considerable discussion, including with some Jewish colleagues and experts. But I believe that in mapping the biblical, historical and political detail, the bigger picture was lost. Whether John the Baptist is seen as a Jewish prophet killed for his righteousness or as the first Christian martyr, the immediate impression was of Starmer in Salome’s treacherous dancing shoes. I am not surprised that readers were hurt and angered; in fact, it is hard to see how reaching for Christian imagery when addressing antisemitism would turn out well.

The cartoon dismayed others in light of the recent killings in France, with one saying it “went beyond the boundaries of decency”. On the day of publication, three people had been attacked at a church in Nice, one of whom was nearly decapitated, while two weeks earlier a teacher had been beheaded outside his school near Paris. Staff were candid in saying consideration of this resonance had been eclipsed by focus on the biblical reference. Perhaps the fact that Corbyn was seen wide awake in the drawing damped the alarm bell, but it was undoubtedly insensitive timing, and it’s difficult to imagine this would have happened had the killings taken place in the UK. That may not be a comfortable question for a global publisher to ask itself.

Meanwhile . . .

. . . a named storm devastates the Caribbean coastal regions of Central America and San Andres, Colombia . . .

Hurricane Iota . . .

. . . lashes coastal communities!

Who is accountable for the consequences of the increased frequency of extreme weather events caused by global heating?

The nations whose industrial economies have been powered by fossil fuels, of one kind or another, for the last two hundred and fifty years? The same "great nations of Europe" and the United States? Or the state capitalist industrial interests of China, burning coal to maintain unsustainable "economic growth"? 

The impact of carbon emissions is global, but the costs are  disproportionately distributed amongst the poorest of populations across the planet. Even in the wealthy countries of the world pollution damages the poorest, and the most vulnerable, and in an economic system predicated on inequality, the harm is distributed disproportionally. 

There is wind power, but there is also the destructive power of extreme weather and hurricane force winds!

Associated Press in St Petersburg, Florida, is credited with this report published in the Guardian (Sun 15 Nov 2020) under the headline:

Hurricane Iota is 13th hurricane of record-breaking Atlantic season

Iota became the 13th hurricane of the Atlantic season early on Sunday, threatening to bring another dangerous system to Nicaragua and Honduras – both recently battered by a category 4 hurricane, Eta.

Iota was already a record-breaking system, the 30th named storm of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season. Such activity has focused attention on climate change, which scientists say is causing wetter, stronger and more destructive storms.

The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Sunday Iota had maximum sustained winds of 85mph (137km/h), making it a category 1 hurricane. But forecasters said Iota would rapidly strengthen and was expected to be a major hurricane by the time it reaches Central America.

Iota was centered about 240 miles (386km) east of Isla de Providencia, Colombia, and was moving west-north-west at 6mph. Forecasters said Iota was expected to pass or cross over Providencia sometime on Monday and approach Nicaragua and Honduras on Monday evening.

The system was forecast to bring up to 30in of rain from north-east Nicaragua into northern Honduras. Costa Rica, Panama and El Salvador could also experience heavy rain and possible flooding, the NHC said.

Forecasters said Providencia and parts of Nicaragua and Honduras were under hurricane warnings. Storm surge could increase water levels by up to 13ft in Nicaragua and Honduras.

Iota threatened to wreak more havoc in a region where people are still grappling with the aftermath of Eta. That system hit Nicaragua just over a week ago as a category 4 hurricane, killing at least 120 as torrential rains brought flash floods and landslides to parts of Central America and Mexico.

Then it meandered across Cuba, the Florida Keys and around the Gulf of Mexico before slogging ashore again near Cedar Key, Florida, and dashing across Florida and the Carolinas.

Eta was the 28th named storm of this year’s hurricane season, tying the 2005 record for named storms. On Sunday Theta, the 29th, was weakening over the far eastern Atlantic. It was expected to become a remnant low, forecasters said.

The official end of hurricane season is 30 November.

Q. Where is the island of San Andrés?

A. Google Earth shows how to get there  . . . 

. . . from Liverpool to San Andres, Colombia  

It's an island but not geographically a Colombian coastal island. The island's position, so far from the nearest Colombian coast, and the reason why the island is a part of Colombia, requires the telling of an even longer story. 

San Andrés, Colombia . . .

. . . is an island in the Caribbean Sea, part of the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina, which comprises one of the departments of Colombia. This Caribbean archipelago is closer to the coasts of the Central American countries of Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. 

This animated map shows the historical sequence of the changes that have taken place in the borders of Colombia's territories over the period from 1811 to 2012, and shows the position of the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina. 

San Andrés is not situated along the LODE Zone Line, but it is an island territory of the South American state of Colombia, and where the LODE Zone Line runs from the Pacific Ocean at the port of Buenaventura to the Caribbean shore by the port of Santa Marta. 

The archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina was previously associated with the Colombian province and isthmus of Panama, and which was, until the early twentieth century, a province of Colombia. 

The name "Colombia" is derived from the last name of the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus (Italian: Cristoforo Colombo, Spanish: Cristóbal Colón). It was conceived as a reference to all of the New World. The name was later adopted by the Republic of Colombia of 1819, formed from the territories of the old Viceroyalty of New Granada (modern-day Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, and northwest Brazil).

When Venezuela, Ecuador, and Cundinamarca came to exist as independent states, the former Department of Cundinamarca adopted the name "Republic of New Granada". New Granada officially changed its name in 1858 to the Granadine Confederation. In 1863 the name was again changed, this time to United States of Colombia, before finally adopting its present name – the Republic of Colombia – in 1886

The island was "discovered" by Columbus on his fourth voyage. Subsequently the history of both San Andrés and Providence includes stories of pirates, their invasions and occupation of the islands. The first appearance of San Andrés on Spanish maps was in 1527. The Dutch are reported to have come to these islands at the end of the 16th century and English settlers arrived there in 1628. 

The English Puritans were the first to arrive to the islands; they hailed from Barbados and also from England. Between 1627 and 1629, they came to settle in the salubrious climate and take advantage of the fertile land of the islands. The Puritans evicted the Dutch settlers in 1631. Some settlers also came from Wales. All colonists first came to San Andrés and later moved to the Providence Island colony on what is now Providencia Island as its mountain terrain provided fresh water resources and safety from invaders. Slaves were brought from 1633 onwards from Jamaica. They were initially brought to work in lumbering, as well as to grow cotton and tobacco.

In 1635, the Spaniards, realizing the economic importance of the island, attacked the archipelago. However the Spaniards were driven out soon after they occupied the islands. Privateers also operated from the island, including Welsh privateer Sir Henry Morgan, who used it in 1670 as one of the centres of his operations. The privateers attacked Spanish ships carrying gold and other precious material that sailed in the Caribbean waters but the convoy system of the Spanish treasure fleet made it more difficult. They also attacked Panama and Santa Maria, Central America's first permanent settlement. The bounty looted by the privateers is still believed to be hidden in some underwater cave in the area. 

After the failed Spanish invasion of the islands, they were controlled by England until 1787, when they agreed to return control of the island to Spain. In the year 1792, by royal warrant on 20 May, the Spanish informed the Captain General of Guatemala, Don Bernardo Troncoso, to recognize the archipelago as under Spanish control. 

On November 25, 1802, the inhabitants of the archipelago requested that they depend on the Viceroyalty of New Granada with the Mosquito Coast, and not on the Captaincy of Guatemala. The document was signed by Mr. Roberto Clark, procurator, Isaac Brooks, Solomon Taylor, Jorge Olis, and Juan Taylor. As early as 1803, reports suggest that it was for political and economic reasons that San Andrés became a dependent Viceroyalty of New Granada.

In 1810, factions in New Granada declared independence from Spain. Councils were established in San Andrés and Providence in this year. The government of Tomás O'Neill (of Irish and Canarian ancestry), granted land titles to English and Spanish-speaking families of the two islands assuring people the ownership of the land. In July 1818, Luis Aury, and the independent forces of Simón Bolívar occupied the islands, and it became part of Gran Colombia on June 23, 1822.

In 1821, the issuing of the Constitution of Cúcuta determined that every child born in Colombia, was born as a free citizen. This meant the eventual abolition of slavery in San Andrés.

On March 5, 1825, a League and Confederation Treaty with the United Provinces of Central America was signed and on June 15, 1826, the Treaty of Union, League and Confederation, between the Republics of Colombia, Central America, Peru and Mexico was signed in Panama in that "Contracting Parties shall ensure the integrity of its territories, then, under special conventions and to hold each other, have been demarcated and set their respective limits, the protection will then be placed under the protection of the confederation."

After independence was recognized by the coastal territories of the Caribbean Sea, the British proclaimed an independent territory in disregard of treaties and agreements of the time but the island remained free from British autonomy. In 1848, Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera declared San Andrés as a Free port. In 1851, slavery was abolished by the constitution of Colombia, which led to a successful literacy movement led by pastor Philip Beekman Livingston.

In September 1900, France issued a ruling in which it recognized all of the islands of the archipelago as belonging to Colombia. 

In 1902, two commissioners of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt came to San Andrés by boat and requested that the islands become part of Panama, but American proposals were rejected outright as unpatriotic, proving local loyalty to the Republic of Colombia. In 1903, the Colombian Department of Panama became an independent nation. The islanders again refused to join the United States or Panama when they were visited by a U.S. warship in the same year. 

Gunboat diplomacy . . .

It was the United States of America's intentions to influence the area, especially the construction and control of the Panama Canal that led to the separation of the Department of Panama in 1903 and the establishment of Panama as an independent nation.

The skulduggery that President Roosevelt employed to achieve this result, in the interests of the US, was an example of the brutal exercise of raw economic and military power.

The United States paid Colombia $25,000,000 in 1921, seven years after completion of the canal, for redress of President Roosevelt's role in the creation of Panama, and Colombia recognised Panama under the terms of the Thomson–Urrutia Treaty. 

In the Re:LODE 2017 project the section titled:

To every story there belongs another . . .

. . . there is a complex set of articles found in pages that resonate with a phrase from a poem by John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

"Silent, upon a peak in Darien"

This section provides some historical context for the emergence of the modern Central American and South American states, and their independence from the dominating role of the the Spanish Empire. This includes the surprising importance of this part of the world in the story of those competing powers on this global stage, of Britain and France, culminating in the twentieth century in the hegemony of the United States, that was applied to the entire western hemisphere. Amongst these articles is one called:

Darién - a nexus of the New World!

This set of articles includes reference to the creation of one of the twentieth-century's finest example of the English novel, Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad contained within The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff. The novel's setting is the fictitious South American republic of "Costaguana", but the background reality to this story of "globalisation" is the wrenching away of Panama from the Republic of Colombia.

Jasanoff begins in the fourth section of the book: Empire, in Chapter Eleven: Material Interests: 

The novel had grown bigger and more involved than any of his previous meditations on nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism. It had outgrown Conrad's personal travels and observations, something he'd recognized when he chose to write about South America in the first place. By introducing the United States as a player, it had outgrown all the reading he had done on Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela . . . 

Conrad certainly hadn't intended such complexity at the outset. 

But for better or worse, events unfolding in Latin America that year offered Conrad a real-time, real-world example of precisely the type of story he was now trying to tell. It was a tale of U.S. intervention on behalf of a valuable asset: long-dreamed- of project to build a canal in Panama. 

p 263 The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff

This map from 1824, shows how the borders of the Republic of Colombia (shown in red) were drawn across the territories now referred to as Gran Colombia, a state that was dissolved in 1830, and that included the territories of present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela, and parts of northern Peru and northwestern Brazil. The name Gran Colombia is an historiographical designation applied to the previous state of Colombia, a territory that corresponded more or less to the original jurisdiction of the former Viceroyalty of New Granada. 

Human history and human geography before European colonisation 

Indigenous people inhabited the territory that is now Colombia by 12,500 BCE. Nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes at the El Abra, Tibitó and Tequendama sites traded with one another and with other cultures from the Magdalena River Valley. 

A World Heritage Site in the making . . .

A site including eight miles of pictographs that is under study at Serranía de la Lindosa was revealed this November. Their age is suggested as being 12,500 years old (c. 10,480 B.C.) by the anthropologists working on the site because of extinct fauna depicted.

According to Francisco Javier Aceituno Bocanegra: 

"This project began in 2018 in collaboration with the University of Antioquia, the National University of Colombia and the University of Exeter and it aims to analyse the cultural and environmental conditions of the Serranía La Lindosa settlement. Also, we aim to investigate long-term scale adaptations and environmental management of the human groups that populated this region as well as how these human groups built their territory thousands of years ago. This information will be gleaned from traditional archaeological work, but also from the exceptional artistic representations that speak to the social, symbolic, and probably also religious thought that anchored their history to the territory of the Serranía La Lindosa." 

A recent research paper: Colonisation and early peopling of the Colombian Amazon during the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene: New evidence from La Serranía La Lindosa, was published in Quaternary International, 26 April 2020, on research by Gaspar Morcote-Ríos, Francisco Javier Aceituno, at University of Antioquia, Jose Iriarte at University of Exeter, Mark Robinson and Jeison L. Chaparro-Cárdenas.

The Abstract for this paper explains:

Recent research carried out in the Serranía La Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon (Department of Guaviare) provides archaeological evidence of the colonisation of the northwest Colombian Amazon during the Late Pleistocene. Preliminary excavations were conducted at Cerro Azul, Limoncillos and Cerro Montoya archaeological sites in Guaviare Department, Colombia. Contemporary dates at the three separate rock shelters establish initial colonisation of the region between ∼12,600 and ∼11,800 cal BP. The contexts also yielded thousands of remains of fauna, flora, lithic artefacts and mineral pigments, associated with extensive and spectacular rock pictographs that adorn the rock shelter walls. This article presents the first data from the region, dating the timing of colonisation, describing subsistence strategies, and examines human adaptation to these transitioning landscapes. The results increase our understanding of the global expansion of human populations, enabling assessment of key interactions between people and the environment that appear to have lasting repercussions for one of the most important and biologically diverse ecosystems in the world.

Between 5000 and 1000 BCE, hunter-gatherer tribes transitioned to agrarian societies; fixed settlements were established, and pottery appeared. Beginning in the 1st millennium BCE, groups of Amerindians including the Muisca, Zenú, Quimbaya, and Tairona developed the political system of cacicazgos with a pyramidal structure of power headed by caciques. The Muisca inhabited mainly the area of what is now the Departments of Boyacá and Cundinamarca high plateau (Altiplano Cundiboyacense) where they formed the Muisca Confederation. They farmed maize, potato, quinoa, and cotton, and traded gold, emeralds, blankets, ceramic handicrafts, coca and especially rock salt with neighboring nations. 

The Tairona inhabited northern Colombia in the isolated mountain range of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The Quimbaya inhabited regions of the Cauca River Valley between the Western and Central Ranges of the Colombian Andes. Most of the Amerindians practiced agriculture and the social structure of each indigenous community was different.

Parque Nacional Natural Tayrona

The Tayrona National Natural Park (Spanish: Parque Nacional Natural Tayrona) is a protected area in the Colombian northern Caribbean region and within the jurisdiction of the city of Santa Marta, 34 kilometres from the city centre. The biodiversity of this region includes the flora and fauna of a coastal landscape that then rises steeply into a mountain terrain thus containing a variety of climatic conditions. This a park that protects "nature", predominantly as a natural environment. The Indigenous People after whom the nature park is named have long gone, seeking refuge in the Sierra Santa Marta.

The name of the park comes from Tairona, the name used by the Spanish for the people who inhabited the region during their first contact with the Indigenous People, and it became the most common name for a hierarchical network of villages that had developed around 600 years before their arrival. 

Initially it was used to refer to the inhabitants of a valley and probably a chiefdom named Tairo on the northern slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. But by the 16th century, the Spanish used it for the whole group of complex chiefdoms in the area. The groups in the northern and western Sierra Nevada were largely indistinguishable to the Spaniards. 

Ethnohistorical evidence shows that initial contact with the Spanish was tolerated by the Tairona; but by 1600 AD confrontations grew, and a small part of the Tairona population moved to the higher stretches of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. This movement allowed them to evade the worst of the Spanish colonial system during the 17th and 18th centuries. The Indigenous Peoples of the Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuacos (Ijka, Ifca) and Kankuamo who live in the area today are believed to be direct descendants of the Tairona, but they no longer inhabit a park intended for the conservation of "nature". 

One of the best-known Tairona nucleated villages and archaeological sites is known as Ciudad Perdida (Spanish for "Lost City"). It must have been a major urban complex, judging by its considerable size, about 13 hectares (32 acres) in its "core" zone. The Kogi Indigenous People have always known of its existence, but this impressive settlement was revealed to a wider world when "discovered" by looters in 1975. 

The site is now under the care of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History. Recent studies suggest that it was inhabited by approximately 1,600 to 2,400 people, living in at least 11,700 square meters (124,000 square feet) of roofed space, in about 184 round houses built on top of terraces paved with stone. There are many other sites of similar or greater size.

A larger site, Pueblito, is located near the coast. According to Reichel-Dolmatoff's research, it contains at least 254 terraces and had a population of about 3,000 people. Archaeological studies in the area show that even larger nucleated villages existed towards the western slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, like Posiguieca and Ciudad Antigua.

Smaller villages and hamlets were part of a very robust exchange network of specialized communities, connected with stone-paved paths. Villages that specialized in salt production and fishing, like Chengue in the Parque Tairona, are evidence of a robust Tairona political economy based on specialized staple production. Chengue contains at least 100 terraces and was inhabited by about 800 to 1,000 people in 15 hectares by 1400. The Tairona are known to have built stone terraced platforms, house foundations, stairs, sewers, tombs, and bridges. Use of pottery for utilitarian and ornamental or ceremonial purposes was also highly developed as a result of fairly specialized communities.

Canavarel, in the Parque Nacional Natural Tayrona, is the location for a LODE cargo 

This 1992 video of the Super8 film documentation of the location for the assembly of a rudimentary compass for the LODE cargo, is complemented by more recent video showing something of the kind of tourism that takes place in this area of natural conservation. The Tayrona National Natural Park was the second most visited national park in Colombia in 2019, with 458,755 visitors. 

Parque Nacional Natural Tayrona 1992 and 2011

This 1992 video of the Super8 film documentation of the location for the assembly of a rudimentary compass for the LODE cargo, is complemented by more recent video showing something of the kind of tourism that takes place in this area of natural conservation. The Tayrona National Natural Park was the second most visited national park in Colombia in 2019, with 458,755 visitors. 

The descendants of the Tairona Indigenous People, the Kogi, have been proactive since 1990 in warning the wider world about the dangers of indiscriminate damage to the natural environment.  

What Colombia's Kogi people can teach us about the environment 

This article by Jini Reddy, published in the Guardian (Tue 29 Oct 2013), considers the significance of the warning given to global society that the Kogi people, of the Sierra Santa Marta in northern Colombia, have made in two groundbreaking collaborative film documentaries. Jini Reddy writes: 

Deep in Colombia's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains, surrounded by jungle (and guerrillas, tomb raiders and drug traffickers), live 20,000 indigenous Kogi people. A culturally intact pre-Colombian society, they've lived in seclusion since the Spanish conquest 500 years ago. Highly attuned to nature, the Kogi believe they exist to care for the world – a world they fear we are destroying.

Heart of the World

In 1990, in a celebrated BBC documentary, the Kogi made contact with the outside world to warn industrialised societies of the potentially catastrophic future facing the planet if we don't change our ways.

They watched, waited and listened to nature. They witnessed landslides, floods, deforestation, the drying up of lakes and rivers, the stripping bare of mountain tops, the dying of trees. The Sierra Nevada, because of its unique ecological structure, mirrors the rest of the planet – bad news for us.

The Kogi don't understand why their words went unheeded, why people did not understand that the earth is a living body and if we damage part of it, we damage the whole body.

Twenty-three years later they summoned filmmaker Alan Ereira back to their home to renew the message: this time the leaders, the Kogi Mama (the name means enlightened ones), set out to show in a visceral way the delicate and critical interconnections that exist between the natural world.

Aluna

The resulting film, Aluna, takes us into the world of the Kogi. At the heart of the tribe's belief system is "Aluna" – a kind of cosmic consciousness that is the source of all life and intelligence and the mind inside nature too. "Aluna is something that is thinking and has self-knowledge. It's self-aware and alive." says Ereira. "All indigenous people believe this, historically. It's absolutely universal."

Many Kogi Mama are raised in darkness for their formative years to learn to connect with this cosmic consciousness and, vitally, to respond to its needs in order to keep the world in balance. "Aluna needs the human mind to participate in the world – because the thing about a human mind is that it's in a body," explains Ereira. "Communicating with the cosmic mind is what a human being's job is as far as the Kogi are concerned."

The Kogi people believe that when time began the planet's 'mother' laid an invisible black thread linking special sites along the coast, which are, in turn, connected to locations in the mountains. What happens in one specific site is, they say, echoed in another miles away. Keen to illustrate this they devised a plan to lay a gold thread showing the connections that exist between special sites.

They want to show urgently that the damage caused by logging, mining, the building of power stations, roads and the construction of ports along the coast and at the mouths of rivers – in short expressions of global capitalism that result in the destruction of natural resources – affects what happens at the top of the mountain. Once white-capped peaks are now brown and bare, lakes are parched and the trees and vegetation vital to them are withering.

"The big thing in coastal development in this area is the 'mega-projects', especially the vast expansion of port facilities and associated extensive infrastructure to link new ports to large-scale coal and metals extraction and industrial plant such as aluminium smelters," says Ereira.

In a poignant scene in the film, CNN footage from September 2006 shows the Kogi walking for miles to protest against the draining of lagoons to make way for the construction of Puerta Brisa, a port to support Colombia's mining industry.

What happens at the river estuary affects what happens at the source, they say, over and over again. "The Kogi believe that the estuary provides evaporation that becomes deposited at the river source. So if you dry up the estuary you dry up the whole of the river source," says Ereira.

In the film, the views of the Kogi are backed up by a specialist in ecosystem restoration, a professor of zoology and a world leader in marine biology. "Along this stretch of coastline, you have a microcosm for what is happening in the Caribbean and also on the rest of the planet," says the latter, Alex Rogers, of Oxford University, on camera. "Their view that all these activities are having an impact at a larger scale are quite right."

It's not all doom and gloom: the Kogi end the film on a message of hope: don't abandon your lives, they say, just protect the rivers. But how to do that? One way forward is to engage the Kogi (and other indigenous communities who have an understanding of environmental impacts) in environmental assessment plans. The Tairona Heritage Trust has also been set up to support projects proposed by the Mamas. But Ereira stresses, "The Mamas are very clear about how we should take notice of what they say. Listen carefully, think, make our own decisions. They don't want to tell us what to do."

"I would hope that ordinary people will come away from the film feeling empowered to express what they already know – which is that the planet is alive and feels what we do to it," he says.

"Everybody who is a gardener in this country already has a Kogi relationship to the earth but they don't necessarily have a language to express that. They have an empathetic relationship to the land and what grows on it, and that empathy is what we have build on."

The Tairona Heritage Trust

Aluna

There is no life without thought . . .

. . . or nature! 

When reference is made to nature, or, as in this post title "the power of nature", we are using an English word "nature", that according to Raymond Williams is;

perhaps the most complex word in the (English) language.

The use of the phrase "the power of nature" in this post's title is an attempt to consider the renewable energy source of wind power, as a sustainable alternative to pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the planet's atmosphere using fossil fuels, at the same time as thinking about the impact of global heating, in ramping up the frequency of extreme weather events, such as Hurricanes Eta and Iota. 

Scientists link record-breaking hurricane season to climate crisis

Jeff Ernst in Tela, Honduras reports for the Guardian (Sun 15 Nov 2020):

Paddling in a canoe through the flood waters left by Hurricane Eta in his rural village near the north coast of Honduras, Adán Herrera took stock of the damage.

“Compared with Hurricane Mitch, this caused more damage because the water rose so fast,” said Herrera, 33, a subsistence farmer who is living on top of a nearby levee with his wife and child while they wait for the water to recede. “We’re afraid we might not have anything to eat.”

Hurricane Mitch in 1998 was the most destructive storm to hit Central America. But hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers across the region have lost everything in flooding caused by Eta, which made landfall in Nicaragua as a category 4 hurricane on 3 November. Now, with a second hurricane projected to make landfall on Monday near where Eta did, even more could find themselves in the same situation.

Climate scientists say that this year’s record-breaking hurricane season and the “unprecedented” double blow for Central America has a clear link to the climate crisis.

“In a 36-hour period [Eta] went from a depression to a very strong category 4,” said Bob Bunting, CEO of the non-profit Climate Adaptation Center. “That is just not normal. Probably it was the fastest spin up from a depression to a major hurricane in history.”

The evidence of the influence of the climate crisis is not so much in the record-breaking 30 tropical storms in the Atlantic so far this year, but the strength, rapid intensification and total rainfall of these weather systems.

“The warmer ocean waters that climate change brings are expected to make the stronger storms stronger and make them rapidly intensify more frequently and at a greater rate,” said Dr Jeff Masters, a meteorologist and contributor to Yale Climate Connections. “These things have already been observed, particularly in the Atlantic, and it’s going to be increasingly so in coming decades.”

Central America has been one of the regions most affected by the climate crisis to date, first with Hurricane Mitch, and in recent years with more extreme weather patterns, particularly in what’s known as the dry corridor, which extends from northern Costa Rica all the way to southern Mexico.

“Heat is energy,” said Masters. “Depending on the prevailing weather conditions you’re going to intensify those conditions.”

In the dry corridor, that has meant more frequent, prolonged and intense droughts as well as heavier rainfall when it does come, often causing flash flooding that washes away crops.

Subsistence farmers in the region have struggled to adapt to the new reality, and many in the region have simply given up and left. The climate crisis – and the hunger it brings – is increasingly being recognised as a major driver of emigration from the region.

“I don’t see a lot of options for Central America to deal with the global warming issue,” said Masters. “There are going to be a lot migrants and in fact, a lot of the migration that’s already happening in recent years is due to the drought that started affecting Central America back in 2015.”

Hondurans migrated to the US in significant numbers for the first time following Hurricane Mitch. In the year before the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 250,000 Hondurans were apprehended at the US south-west border, more than double any previous year and surpassed only by its neighbor to the north, Guatemala.

According to the Red Cross, at least 2.5 million people were affected by Hurricane Eta, including 1.7 million in Honduras. Many who have lost everything are already considering or making plans to migrate to the US and groups are beginning to organize caravans via social media.

Unable to fulfill the needs of their citizens before the pandemic, the economic downturn has stretched the finances of Central American governments to the brink. And unlike following previous natural disasters, the international community is dealing with pandemic-related problems of its own and is unlikely to step in to fill the gap.

Hurricane Iota could lead to even more widespread devastation across the region. Many areas still have high water levels from Eta, levees have been damaged or destroyed, dams are at or near capacity, and the saturated land could lead to more landslides like in Guatemala, where dozens are feared dead after part of a mountainside community was buried in mud.

The Atlantic hurricane season is expected to last until December this year, meaning that Iota might not be the last.

“When a season like 2020 keeps on cranking these things out, it’s going to keep on doing that,” said Masters.

So, who is accountable? Is it global leadership, or a global capitalist system, that includes the likes of China?