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Meanwhile . . . From "Boris in a China Shop" to a "rotten regime" via "total rhubarb"!

PM and assorted underlings continue to astonish on another day in the life of a necrotic government

Boris Johnson hosting a cabinet away day at Middleport Pottery in Stoke-on-Trent on Thursday 12 May 2022

Kalyeena Makortoff reports for the Guardian (Thu 26 May 2022) that anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe says many people cannot afford to turn on the hob because of high energy bills so, consequently, the high demand at food banks for items to eat cold is; 

'mind blowing'! 

Kalyeena Makortoff reports:

Jack Monroe, the writer and campaigner, has described as “mind blowing” the rising number of food bank users who are asking for items that can be eaten cold because they can’t afford to heat them.

Monroe, a former food bank user who campaigns against poverty and publishes recipes that can be made on a tight budget, said cold foods were becoming a lifeline for families who could not afford to turn on the hob.

“People are increasingly asking for products that can be eaten cold,” Monroe told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “Their gas or electric has been cut off, or their energy bills are so high, or they’re on prepaid metres so they’re what’s known as ‘self-disconnected’, which is an industry term for: ‘I don’t have the money to put my heating on.’

“It’s mind blowing in the scale of it. I don’t have words actually.”

Monroe said food banks were increasingly in need of canned items as a result. “Baked beans, snacks, tin meats, things like spam, tin puddings, tend to be things that get missed out in people’s donation list because they’re not particularly fashionable anymore. But they are really useful ways to get something sort of mildly nutritious inside in a hurry,” Monroe explained.

Her comments came as the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, prepared to announce a package of support to help people with rising household bills, including through a windfall tax on energy firms.

Speaking on Thursday morning, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, Dame Clare Moriarty said food bank vouchers had become a fact of life for many households in recent months. She said more people were coming to the consumer charity despite being in work, and many were asking for food vouchers despite never needing them before.

“We’ve got people in this country who cannot put food on the table. They cannot keep the lights on and the heating on,” Moriarty told the Today programme.

“I was in Hammersmith and Fulham yesterday talking to our advisers, and they are desperately worried about people coming to them who have made sure that they’re claiming all the income they’re entitled to, they are living as cheaply as they can, and they still need food bank vouchers.”

“Food bank vouchers are becoming a fact of life … It’s not sustainable,” Moriarty said.

Going for WOKE 

For communities along the LODE Zone Line across the UK, from Liverpool to Hull, the mix of government lies, incompetence and corruption is maintained by an almost pathological state of denial amongst divided Britains struggling with the harsh conditions of a post-Brexit reality. Divisions in wealth and health, stark inequalities, rampant poverty cheek by jowl with examples of obscene levels of consumption, are amplified by the rhetoric of fear and stoked by the capitalist media in their version of so called "culture wars" against the "wokerati". 

Meanwhile . . . 

In this politics sketch headlined Sociopathy and stupidity worn like badges of honour in cabinet of all the talents, John Crace for the Guardian writes (Thu 12 May 2022):  

On days like these it’s hard to know if the government is criminally insane or just criminal. Perhaps it’s both. After telling parliament several times that the very idea of illegality in Downing Street was unthinkable, Boris Johnson was forced to admit that a further 50 fines had been handed out to members of his staff. That takes the total amount of fixed-penalty notices well into three figures, with the police barely having begun their investigation into the 12 parties.

Other than the prestige of being the main resident of the most law-breaking venue in the entire country during lockdown, the only comfort for the Convict was that this time he wasn’t among those who got collared by the Old Bill. Though his time will surely come again. Instead it was just his underlings – who had only gone to the parties because they had been assured they were perfectly legal by the prime minister – who got the criminal record. Yet again, Johnson was the go-to man for laying down his friends for his life.

The news of the latest police fines arrived just in time for the arrival of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Oliver Dowden at the cabinet play-date in Stoke. Rees-Mogg greeted the news with a sense of rapture. The FPNs proved that the Convict was a man of utmost probity and his only regret was that the police hadn’t issued more of them. The Mogg is completely abject in his needy devotion. Dowden took one look at the waiting press mob and dived into a doorway. Of a bunker. It was some time before he guiltily did the walk of shame.

It was fortunate, however, that the fines had come too late for Johnson’s LBC interview with Nick Ferrari, which had been recorded on his trip to Scandinavia the day before. Still there was just time for him to say he didn’t approve of a windfall tax but if everyone else wanted one he’d probably do it anyway as he’d never given much of a toss about anything anyway. Though it would break his heart to knowingly do the right thing. He’s a man whose convictions are strictly criminal.

Come the cabinet meeting, the best he could say was that he was delighted with the growth figures. An economy that is only flatlining is now apparently a Tory aspiration. By the end of the day, Johnson was blocking publication of the Security Service advice he had received on Evgeny Lebedev. Advice he was obliged to hand over after a binding Commons vote. The Convict never did think any of the rules applied to him. Least of all these ones. His amoral sociopathy is his strongest asset. Having a conscience can drag you down.

Elsewhere in government, Northern Ireland seems to bring out the stupidest and the worst. First off we had the attorney general, Suella Braverman, declare that she was perfectly OK with the UK breaking international law. Just as long as we didn’t make a habit of it. Or even if we did, come to think of it. Braverman is just another apparatchik whose job depends on her willingness to do whatever Johnson wants. She likes to boast of how well qualified she is, but her actions only make you think it can’t be too hard to become a top lawyer. No one has yet seen her approximate any cognitive ability

Still, she keeps good company. Step forward Liz Truss, who declared she was feeling tetchy with the EU after Maroš Šefčovič hinted there would be a trade war if the UK decided to trigger article 16. Our quarter-witted foreign secretary has yet to realise that the Northern Ireland protocol was negotiated and agreed by her own government just a few years ago in order to get a Brexit deal through the UK parliament. Somehow, in her barely functioning synapses, she has reconfigured events to an altered reality in which the EU duped the Brits into signing something against our will.

Then there was Conor Burns, a junior minister for Northern Ireland, who had gone to the US merely to post photos of himself on Twitter with a huge wad of paper, while observing that these formed the documentation now required to facilitate trade between the UK and the EU. Er, yes, Conor dearest. That’s precisely what so many people were warning your government back in 2016 as they suggested that Brexit wasn’t a particularly good idea. Give it a year or so and Conor might come to realise that leaving the EU has caused a 4% hit to the UK economy.

One member of the wankocracy not on view was Michael Gove. Though he should have been in the Commons to open the second day of the Queen’s speech debate on “fairness at work and power in communities”. But after his cocaine binge the day before – any minister can fuck up one media interview, but it takes a certain genius to fuck up all five – the Govester was lying down in a darkened room, nursing his nose and on the phone to his sponsor. “Thing is Mikey, you still haven’t quite got the hang of Step One.”

So it was the perfectly nice but wholly unremarkable junior business minister, Paul Scully, who was left to pick up the pieces of what passed for a levelling up agenda. He was looking forward to the economy growing a bit, he said hopefully. Weren’t we all, though there is little sign of it. Nor could Scully offer any clue when it might happen. He also looked forward to the UK benefiting from a flexible workforce, though not quite so flexible as P&O’s. And we’d be levelling up somehow or other at some unspecified time in the future. Thank you. I’m here.

Labour’s Angela Rayner wasn’t sure whether to take pity on Scully – it wasn’t his fault he was so useless – or to go for the jugular. So she pitched her response somewhere in between. A semi-detached contempt. Was that really it? Where was the employment bill? The Tories were making no effort to disguise they had no interest in working people. A miserable vision whose highlight was bus passes for elderly people so they had somewhere to keep warm. An old people’s creche.

Next they would be having gala dinners to open food banks. Tinned beans as finger food. Scrub that. They were already doing that: if they could get there in time before Lee Anderson closed them. Just another day in the life of a necrotic government. Viva the Twatterati. Lucky us.

Meanwhile . . . 

A Guardian Exclusive: Oil and gas majors are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal. If governments do not act, these firms will continue to cash in as the world burns

by Damian Carrington and Matthew Taylor

The world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are quietly planning scores of “carbon bomb” oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global impacts, a Guardian investigation shows.

The exclusive data shows these firms are in effect placing multibillion-dollar bets against humanity halting global heating. Their huge investments in new fossil fuel production could pay off only if countries fail to rapidly slash carbon emissions, which scientists say is vital.

The oil and gas industry is extremely volatile but extraordinarily profitable, particularly when prices are high, as they are at present. ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron have made almost $2tn in profits in the past three decades, while recent price rises led BP’s boss to describe the company as a “cash machine”.

The lure of colossal payouts in the years to come appears to be irresistible to the oil companies, despite the world’s climate scientists stating in February that further delay in cutting fossil fuel use would mean missing our last chance “to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”. As the UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned world leaders in April: “Our addiction to fossil fuels is killing us.”

Details of the projects being planned are not easily accessible but an investigation published in the Guardian shows:

• The fossil fuel industry’s short-term expansion plans involve the start of oil and gas projects that will produce greenhouse gases equivalent to a decade of CO2 emissions from China, the world’s biggest polluter.
• These plans include 195 carbon bombs, gigantic oil and gas projects that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes, in total equivalent to about 18 years of current global CO2 emissions. About 60% of these have already started pumping.
• The dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend $103m a day for the rest of the decade exploiting new fields of oil and gas that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well under 2C.
• The Middle East and Russia often attract the most attention in relation to future oil and gas production but the US, Canada and Australia are among the countries with the biggest expansion plans and the highest number of carbon bombs. The US, Canada and Australia also give some of the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per capita.

The dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend every day for the rest of the decade

$103m

At the UN’s Cop26 climate summit in November, after a quarter-century of annual negotiations that as yet have failed to deliver a fall in global emissions, countries around the world finally included the word “coal” in their concluding decision.

Even this belated mention of the dirtiest fossil fuel was fraught, leaving a “deeply sorry” Cop president, Alok Sharma, fighting back tears on the podium after India announced a last-minute softening of the need to “phase out coal” to “phase down coal”.

Nonetheless, the world agreed coal power was history – the question now was how quickly cheaper renewables could replace it, and how fair the transition would be for the small number of developing countries that still relied on it.

But there was no mention of oil and gas in the Cop26 final deal, despite these being responsible for almost 60% of fossil fuel emissions.

Furthermore, many of the rich countries, such as the US, that dominate international climate diplomacy and positioned themselves as climate leaders at the conference, are big players in new oil and gas projects. But unlike India, they avoided criticism.

That lack of scrutiny prompted the Guardian to spend the months since Cop26 piecing together the clearest picture possible of forthcoming oil and gas exploration and production.

Code red

The world’s scientists agree the planet is in deep trouble. In August, Guterres reacted strongly to a stark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science. “[This report] is a code red for humanity,” he said.

The IPCC states carbon emissions must fall by half by 2030 to preserve the chance of a liveable future, yet they show no sign of declining.

Experts have been warning since at least 2011 that most of the world’s fossil fuel reserves could not be burned without causing catastrophic global heating.

In 2015, a high-profile analysis found that to limit global temperature below 2C, half of known oil reserves and a third of gas had to stay in the ground, along with 80% of coal.

Today, the problem is even more acute. A better understanding of the devastating impacts of the climate crisis has led to the internationally agreed limit for global heating being lowered to 1.5C, to cut the risks of extreme heatwaves, droughts, and floods.

In May 2021, a report from the International Energy Agency, previously seen as a conservative body, concluded there could be no new oil or gas fields or coalmines if the world was to reach net zero by 2050.

More warnings soon followed. An updated scientific analysis found the proportion of fossil fuel reserves that would need to stay in the ground for 1.5C jumped to 60% for oil and gas and 90% for coal, while the UN warned that planned fossil fuel production “vastly exceeds” the limit needed for 1.5C.

In April, shocked by the latest IPCC report that said it was “now or never” to start slashing emissions, Guterres launched an outspoken attack on companies and governments whose climate actions did not match their words.

“Simply put, they are lying, and the results will be catastrophic,” he said. “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.

“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”

The reaction to Russia’s war in Ukraine has pushed oil and gas prices even higher, further incentivising bets on new fields and infrastructure that would last decades.

The failure of countries to “build back greener” after the Covid-19 pandemic or the 2008 financial crash was not a good omen, and Guterres said: “Fossil fuel interests are now cynically using the war in Ukraine to lock in a high-carbon future.”

Assessing future oil and gas developments is challenging: the sector is complex and often secretive, public information is scarce and hard to find and assess. But a global team of Guardian environment reporters has worked with leading thinktanks, analysts and academics across the world over the past five months and now we can answer a series of questions that reveal the scale of the sector’s plans.

First, how much production is due to come from the projects that are likely to start drilling before the end of this crucial decade?

Next, where exactly are the biggest projects around the world, the so-called carbon bombs that would explode the climate?

We also followed the money: how much is going to be spent on oil and gas that cannot be burned safely, rather than invested in clean energy? And who benefits most from the fossil fuel subsidies that hide the true damage they cause?

The answers to these key questions lead to an inescapable conclusion: if the projects go ahead, they will blow the world’s rapidly shrinking cap on emissions that must be kept to enable a liveable future – known as the carbon budget.

For all the promises made by many oil companies, the data shows they remain committed to their core business despite the consequences.

Plans to expand

The short-term expansion plans of oil and gas companies, such as ExxonMobil and Gazprom, are colossal. The Guardian’s investigation has found that in the next seven or so years, they are likely to start producing oil and gas from projects that would ultimately deliver 192bn barrels, the equivalent of a decade of today’s emissions from China.

This estimate was provided by analysts at Urgewald, who used data from Rystad Energy, the industry standard source but not publicly available.

Their Gogel database includes 887 companies that explore for and produce oil and gas, and covers 97% of short-term expansion plans.

The companies have made a final financial commitment to projects that will deliver 116bn barrels, more than half of the 192bn barrel total.

They have also invested heavily in the rest, including final development, engineering and operation plans. Such investment makes these projects likely to go ahead, barring drastic government action, Urgewald says.

Companies have already made their final financial commitment to projects that will deliver 116bn barrels of oil

116bn

A third of the short-term expansion plans of oil and gas would come from “unconventional” and riskier sources. These include fracking and ultra-deep offshore drilling, which are inherently more dangerous – as the oil and gas companies drill deeper, the number of spills, injuries and blowouts increase.

The 192bn barrels are split roughly 50:50 between liquids, including crude oil, and gas. Burning this would produce 73bn tonnes of CO2. But methane routinely leaks from gas operations and is a powerful greenhouse gas, trapping 86 times more heat than CO2 over 20 years. Including this impact, at a standard supply-chain leak rate of 2.3%, means the equivalent of 97bn tonnes of CO2 added to the atmosphere and driving us faster towards climate hell.

State oil companies lead the Urgewald short-term expansion list, with Qatar Energy, Russia’s Gazprom and Saudi Aramco the top three. Half of Gazprom’s projected expansion is in the fragile Arctic, though the long-term implications of Russia’s war in Ukraine on its fossil fuel plans remain to be seen.

The listed oil majors ExxonMobil, Total, Chevron, Shell and BP are all in the top 10. Unconventional and risky oil and gas production accounts for about 70% of the US majors’ totals, while the proportion of fracking and ultra-deep water ranges from 30% to 60% for the European companies.

“Most oil and gas companies are just proceeding with business as usual,” Nils Bartsch at Urgewald said. “Some just do not care. Some do not see their responsibility because governments around the world let them proceed, although of course these governments are often influenced by the industry.”

Two-thirds of the 116bn barrels of oil and gas projects companies are financially committed to are in the Middle East, Russia and North America, according to data provided by Rystad Energy.

Australia is anticipated to be a big contributor with 3.4bn barrels, more than from the whole of Europe, where fields are relatively depleted.

A separate analysis for the Guardian by Urgewald on the average annual investment in oil and gas exploration over the past three years shows that, along with Shell, three large but rarely scrutinised Chinese companies occupy the top four slots: PetroChina, China National Offshore Oil Corporation, and Sinopec. Seven of the top 10 of these explorers are relying on fracking, ultra-deep water Arctic and tar sands developments for more than half of their expansion.

Carbon bombs

Daniel Ribeiro has been fighting plans for a massive offshore pipeline and liquefied natural gas plant in Cabo Delgado province, Mozambique, since it was mooted more than 15 years ago.

The scheme, which would lead to a huge increase in carbon emissions in one of the poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries, is backed by more than £1bn from the UK government and has some of the biggest oil and gas corporations circling, scenting another huge payday.

“It is already creating a massive amount of disruption for the local fishing and subsistence farmers who are being moved off their land,” said Ribeiro, from the local Justiça Ambiental campaign group. “But if it goes ahead and countries like Mozambique are set off on a fossil fuel track, it will be a global disaster. We can forget tackling the climate crisis … we will all suffer.”

Research shared exclusively with the Guardian has identified the Cabo Delgado development as one of 195 carbon bombs, which – unless stopped – will drive catastrophic climate breakdown around the world.

The term carbon bomb has been widely used in climate circles for the past decade to describe large fossil fuel projects or other big sources of carbon. The new research sets a specific definition: projects capable of pumping at least 1bn tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes.

Projects identified include the new drilling wells springing up in the Canadian wilderness as part of the vast Montney Play oil and gas development, and the huge North Field gas fields in Qatar – named in the study as the biggest new oil and gas carbon bomb in the world.

The study, led by Kjell Kühne from the University of Leeds in the UK and published in the journal Energy Policy, found that just a few months after many of the world’s politicians positioned themselves as climate leaders during the Cop26 conference in Glasgow, they were giving the green light to a massive global expansion of oil and gas production that scientists warn would push civilisation to the brink.

Asad Rehman, a leading climate justice activist in the UK who was at the forefront of a global network of indigenous activists and civil society campaigners in Glasgow, accused the US, Canada and Australia of “rank hypocrisy”.

“These countries are single-handedly undermining efforts to curtail global emissions and ignoring their responsibility to phase out fossil fuels rapidly and justly.” He said it was the poorest and most vulnerable who were suffering.

Together these projects would produce 646 GtCO2 emissions, swallowing up the world’s entire carbon budget

646Gt

“Only the colonial mindset of political leaders in rich countries can make the brutal calculation that the interest of fossil fuel giants and their billions in profit is more important than the lives of people who are overwhelmingly black, brown and poor.”

Together these projects would produce 646bn tonnes of CO2 emissions, the study says, swallowing the world’s entire carbon budget. More than 60% of these schemes are already operating.

Kühne, the director of the Leave it in the Ground Initiative, said in the first instance, the 40% of projects that had not yet started production must be stopped if the world was to avoid sliding ever more quickly towards catastrophe, adding they should be a prominent focus of the global climate protest movement in the months and years ahead.

“The oil and gas industry is continuing to plan these huge projects, even in the face of a burning planet. The ambitious targets of the Paris agreement were apparently not enough to make them question their business case. These carbon bombs are the single biggest indicator that we are not trying hard enough.”

The study is based on data from Rystad Energy but, rather than focusing on total barrels, it identifies the mega projects potentially responsible for the biggest emissions.

According to the research, the US is the leading source of potential emissions. Its 22 carbon bombs include conventional drilling and fracking, and span the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the foothills of the Front Range in Colorado to the Permian basin. Together they have the potential to emit 140bn tonnes of CO2, almost four times more than the entire world emits each year.

Saudi Arabia is the second biggest potential emitter after the US, with 107bn tonnes, followed by Russia, Qatar, Iraq, Canada, China and Brazil.

Australia, widely condemned by international leaders as a laggard in addressing the climate crisis, ranks 16th.

Robyn Churnside, a Ngarluma elder on the Burrup peninsula in remote north-west Australia, has been fighting fossil fuel and mining developments since the 1970s. She is part of a campaign trying to stop Woodside’s US$12bn Scarborough gas project, one of the biggest fossil fuel developments in the country in a decade.

Churnside said dissenting Indigenous voices were too often ignored when decisions were made about new oil and gas infrastructure that could lock in emissions for decades and desecrate culturally significant sites, which in some cases had stood for tens of thousands of years.

“It’s about time the world listened to First Nations people because we have been here a long, long time,” she said. “Our spirit in this land will never rest. It needs protection.”

Prof Kevin Anderson, from the Tyndall Centre of Climate Research, University of Manchester and Uppsala University, Sweden, said the scale of planned production in the face of all the evidence suggested big oil and its political supporters either did not believe the climate science or thought their extreme wealth could somehow protect them and their children from the devastating consequences.

“Either the scientists have spent 30 years working on this issue and have got it all wrong – the big oil CEOs know better – or, behind a veil of concern, they have complete disregard for the more climate vulnerable communities, typically poor, people of colour and far away from their lives. Equally worrying, they are disinterested in their own children’s future.”

The money

When BP reported its quarterly earnings in a presentation to financial institutions in February, one analyst said he “really enjoyed the camaraderie and the positivity that you’re generating”, before asking about the company’s cash position.

“We’ve given you a lovely little chart,” said Murray Auchincloss, BP’s chief financial officer. “Certainly, it’s possible that we’re getting more cash than we know what to do with. For now, I’m going to be conservative and manage the company as if it’s $40 [a barrel] oil. Anything we could get above that just helps, obviously.” At the time, the oil price exceeded $90; today it is $106.

The oil industry is awash with cash. The money companies have belongs to shareholders, including pension funds, or in the case of national oil companies, to governments and, in theory at least, citizens. But the investment plans of the biggest oil companies are sharply at odds with the goal of halting the climate crisis.

Data obtained by the Guardian from the thinktank Carbon Tracker shows a dozen of the world’s biggest companies are on track to commit a collective $387m dollars a day of capital expenditure to exploiting oil and gas fields through to 2030.

A significant portion of this is for maintaining production at existing projects - some oil and gas will still be needed as the world weans itself off fossil fuels – but the exact amount is not publicly available. Nonetheless, it is clear that at least a quarter of this investment – $103m a day – is for oil and gas that cannot be burned if the worst impacts of the climate crisis are to be avoided, money that could instead be spent ramping up clean energy.

Even more worryingly, the companies have developed further project options that might lead them to spend an additional $84m a day that would not even be compatible with a devastating 2.7C of global heating.

The world’s governments agreed in the Paris climate accord to limit global heating to well below 2C, and pursue efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5C. For the latter, stricter goal, no new oil and gas projects are possible.

The Carbon Tracker data, compiled in September, uses a temperature of 1.65C to represent the well below 2C target and finds that 27% of the companies’ projected investments are incompatible with this.

ExxonMobil has the largest of these climate-busting investment plans at $21m a day through to 2030, followed by Petrobras ($15m), Chevron and ConocoPhillips (both $12m), and Shell ($8m).

In terms of the most dangerous investments – those that could help drive temperatures beyond 2.7C – Gazprom accounts for $17m a day of this, ExxonMobil $12m, Shell $11m and PetroChina $9m.

If governments act on the scientific advice to rapidly reduce carbon emissions by boosting clean energy and cutting fossil fuel burning, the companies would have to write off these colossal sums as losses, hitting shareholders, pension funds and public finances. If governments do not act, the companies could cash in as the world burns.

Overall, the international oil companies are making the biggest bets, with almost 40% of their projected investments incompatible with 1.65C. ExxonMobil is particularly high, at 56%. The national oil company average is 17%, although 56% of Petrobras’s planned capital expenditure is incompatible with 1.65C.

“Companies that continue to develop projects based on business-as-usual demand are betting on the failure of policy action on climate and underestimating the disruptive potential of new technologies, such as renewables and battery storage,” said Mike Coffin at Carbon Tracker. “Such projects are either not needed or they lead to warming well in excess of Paris goals.”

A separate recent analysis based on Rystad Energy data from April, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, found that 20 of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies remained on course to spend huge sums – $932bn – by the end of 2030 developing new oil and gas fields.

Freeing the world from the grip of fossil fuels is made far harder by huge ongoing subsidies for the fuels, making them far cheaper than their true cost when the damage they cause is included – especially air pollution, which kills 7 million people a year. The G20 group of leading economies pledged in 2009 to phase out the subsidies but little has been achieved.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in direct financial support is received by the producers and consumers of fossil fuels every year – but they benefit from far larger subsidies by not paying for the harm burning fossil fuels causes. When the damage from the climate crisis and air pollution is accounted for, the fossil fuel subsidies reach $6tn a year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Guardian analysis shows this is equivalent to $11m a minute globally, $4m a minute in China and more than $1m in the US.

Guardian analysis of more detailed IMF data shows drivers in the US, Canada and Australia, along with Saudi Arabia, are the world’s biggest beneficiaries of subsidies for road fuels, with some governments under pressure to increase these during the current energy crisis.

The per capita subsidy for petrol and diesel across the population of Saudi Arabia was more than $1,000 a year in 2020. In the US, the road fuel subsidy per capita is $644 and about $500 in both Canada and Australia.

Japan and Germany also appear in the top 10 of the road fuel analysis, which focused on the 54 large countries with more than 25 million people and that account for 90% of global population and subsidies. The UK per capita subsidy for road fuels was only $10 a year, indicating taxes on petrol and diesel in 2020 were close to the level of the damage burning the fuels causes.

The US is also high on the list of the biggest per capita subsidies for all fossil fuels with $2,000 a year, behind only Saudi Arabia ($4,550) and Russia ($3,560). After these countries, only Iran ($1815) is ahead of Australia ($1730) and Canada ($1690).

“Taking the Paris agreement seriously requires a rapid shift away from fossil fuels,” said Simon Black, a climate economist at the IMF. “Getting fossil fuel prices right will help enormously in accelerating this transition.”

The transition

The shift from burning oil and gas cannot happen overnight, and a declining amount will still need to be burned during the transition to a net zero emissions global economy in 2050. The question is whether companies and governments are moving fast enough.

The Guardian wrote to the oil and gas companies named in its analysis and asked for their response.

“Under the IEA net zero emissions scenario, and all Paris-aligned scenarios, all energy sources remain important through 2050, and oil and natural gas remain essential components of the energy mix,” said a spokesperson for ExxonMobil.

However, the role of oil and gas would be vastly reduced in 2050, and the IEA said: “Beyond projects already committed as of 2021, there are no new oil and gas fields approved for development [in our net zero scenario].”

ExxonMobil planned to invest more than $15bn on initiatives to lower greenhouse gas emissions over the next six years, the spokesperson said, including carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and biofuels. The company aimed to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 but only from its own operations, not the fuels it sold, therefore covering only a small fraction of the emissions from the oil and gas it sells.

A spokesperson for Shell cited recent company statements: “As a result of [our] planned level of capital investment, we expect a gradual decline of about 1-2% a year in total oil production through to 2030, including divestments.”

“By 2025, Shell expects its expenditure on [low and zero-carbon] products and services across its businesses will have increased to around 50% of its total expenditure,” a recent report by the firm states. In 2022, the proportion is expected to be more than 35%. In 2021, “Shell achieved its annual investment targets in renewables and energy solutions of $2bn-3bn”, the report says.

ConocoPhillips also cited a recently published net zero emissions plan: “Our goal is to support an orderly transition that matches supply to demand and focuses on returns on, and of, capital while safely and responsibly delivering affordable energy.”

The document states that profits from oil and gas projects are significantly higher than from investments in renewable energy.

ConocoPhillips has allocated $200m in 2022 to reduce emissions from its operations. To reduce emissions from the burning of the fossil fuels it supplies, the company advocates an “economy-wide price on carbon that would help shift consumer demand from high-carbon to low-carbon energy sources”.

“Petrobras plans its investments considering that the Paris agreement will be successful and global temperature will be kept below 2°C,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Oil will remain important in the coming decades, even in accelerated transition scenarios.”

The spokesperson said the IEA’s scenario for 1.65C indicated some investment in upstream projects was needed. “We are planning for highly resilient assets competitive in scenarios aligned with Paris due to their low production cost and low emissions. Petrobras is following its strategy of maximising the value of its portfolio, [with 99% of the investment on exploration] focusing on deepwater and ultra-deepwater assets.”

TotalEnergies pointed to its recent sustainability report, which it said “showed our stakeholders that we are already on the right track”. The company has a target of a 30% cut in emissions from oil and gas sales by 2030 and to increase the proportion of its energy sales that are renewable from 9% in 2021 to 20% in 2030.

Saudi Aramco and Eni responded to the Guardian but declined to comment. The other companies did not respond to the Guardian’s request.

Race against time

The Guardian’s investigation has provided an answer to the question of how great a danger the plans of oil and gas companies pose to the climate.

But there is another set of questions, those for politicians and governments, that will ultimately affect the course of the climate emergency.

Will the world’s governments act to close the book on the oil companies’ giant climate gamble? Will richer countries, historically most responsible for emissions, support a just transition for developing countries on the frontline of the escalating crisis?

Would strong, immediate action lead to a financial crash, as billions of dollars are wiped off the value of some of the world’s biggest companies? Or will more steady but concerted action wean us off fossil fuels rapidly, close the oil companies’ cash machine and lead us into a clean energy future with a liveable climate? Only time will tell. But, unlike oil and gas, time is in very short supply.

“The world is in a race against time,” said Guterres. “It is time to end fossil fuel subsidies and stop the expansion of oil and gas exploration.”

Reflecting on the war in Ukraine, he said: “Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil fuel use. This is madness. Addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.”

Additional reporting by Jillian Ambrose, Adam Morton, Nina Lakhani, Oliver Milman and Chris McGreal.

Meanwhile . . .

Nina Lakhani reporting for the Guardian in New York (Wed 25 May 2022) writes: 

Indigenous activists and lawyers who took on transnational corporations and their own governments to force climate action are among the 2022 winners of the world’s pre-eminent environmental award.

Indigenous activists among Goldman environmental prize winners

Recipients from around world demonstrate power of unified community action

Taking on powerful vested interests is a risky business, and the recipients of this year’s Goldman prize demonstrate the power of unified community action, perseverance and the courts in the battle to save the planet from environmental collapse.

The winners include a former fossil fuel insider turned climate entrepreneur who harnessed public participation and a pioneering legal strategy to successfully sue the Dutch government for failing to protect its citizens from the climate crisis. The historic victory led by 55-year-old Marjan Minnesma obliged the Netherlands to start slashing greenhouse gas emissions, triggering similar lawsuits across the world.

The African winner, an environmental lawyer from Nigeria, also has a Dutch connection. It took almost two decades for Chima Williams, 52, to secure a ruling in The Hague that finally holds Royal Dutch Shell accountable for oil spills by its subsidiary that caused widespread ecological, social and economic damage in the Niger Delta.

None of the winners succeeded alone. Rather they worked with those affected, neighbours, and colleagues to defend their communities, and in doing so created legal precedents and policies that go some way to shielding citizens from corporate greed and political failures.

In Latin America, the joint winners are Alex Lucitante, 29 and Alexandra Narváez, 30, who spearheaded an Indigenous movement to protect the Cofán people’s ancestral territory from goldmining. This grassroots campaign resulted in a legal victory in October 2018 when Ecuador’s courts cancelled 52 goldmining concessions that had been granted illegally without the community’s consent – saving 32,000 hectares (79,000 acres) of pristine, biodiverse rainforest considered sacred by the Cofán.

The case relied on evidence gathered by forest patrols, camera traps, GIS tools and drones organised by the community and their allies. Narváez was the first woman to join La Guardia, the territorial forest patrol, a move that challenged traditional patriarchal beliefs and inspired other women to take an active role in the struggle.

“As women we have to defend Mother Earth, to speak out for the future of our children and defend our way of life in spite of the machismo and being afraid. It’s been beautiful to be part of this struggle with other women from my community,” Narvarez said.

The victory set a precedent in Ecuador, where the constitutional court is using the case as an example of how to respect the rights of Indigenous peoples and guarantee free, prior and informed consent.

Latin America is the most dangerous place in the world for defending land and environmental rights, as governments systematically violate Indigenous people’s right to be consulted – a right laid out in the legally binding Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention.

The 2015 Goldman prize winner Berta Cáceres, an indigenous Lenca leader from Honduras, was murdered less than a year later for leading a campaign to stop an internationally financed hydroelectric dam illegally sanctioned without consultation.

The other Goldman winners include a retired teacher from Thailand who empowered fishers and farmers to stop a Chinese-led canal project that threatened Asia’s most biodiverse river, and an American student whose campaign to shut down toxic urban drilling led to Los Angeles banning all new oil projects and committing to phasing out existing sites by 2030.

Niwat Roykaew helped turn villagers who depend on the Mekong river for food, medicine, irrigation and spiritual nourishment into citizen scientists and citizen journalists to alert the world to the threats posed by the canal blasting project. It forced the Thai government to cancel a major deal, a rare win in the region where environmentally destructive megaprojects are hard to stop.

“The Mekong is like a mother to us, she gives us everything we need,” said Roykaew, who is in his early 60s. “It’s important to inform and empower the powerless so they know as citizens they have the right to ask questions and oppose multimillion-dollar projects by big countries.”

As fossil fuel companies continue to bet against climate action and boast of record profits, the community-led victory in Los Angeles, one of America’s most oil-friendly polluted cities, shows what’s possible.

Nalleli Cobo joined the community’s fight to shut down an oilwell when she was just nine years old after she and other children started falling sick. With her mother, Cobo knocked on doors, filed complaints, attended rallies and testified at town hall meetings about the chronic headaches, nosebleeds, and body spasms she suffered.

In 2015 she co-founded the South Central Youth Leadership Coalition, which successfully sued the city for environmental racism – specifically for disproportionately permitting oil drilling in Latino and Black communities. As a result, city officials last year voted to phase out existing oil projects. This was seen as a huge victory, as about 580,000 residents currently live within a quarter of a mile of an active well.

Cobo, who has survived gruelling surgery and chemotherapy since being diagnosed with cancer aged 19, said: “I kept fighting because no child should be denied the right to play outside or open windows like I was. It’s powerful to know that we, an invisible community, made this change.”

Cobo, now 21, is studying political science at university, and plans to run for US president in 2036.

The Goldman prize was founded in 1989, since when 213 grassroots environmental activists from 93 nations have been honoured. 

Save Our Songlines

This image headlined another Guardian feature on Carbon bombs by Eleanor de Jong in Karratha and Adam Morton (Wed 11 May 2022): 

‘Our ancestors are in the rocks’: Australian gas project threatens ancient carvings – and emissions blowout

This is Raelene Cooper, a Mardudhunera woman who is campaigning for an end to industrial development near the Murujuga rock art ancestral places.

Songlines? "Singing the Stones" helps explain: 

This was a BBC Radio 4 production, released on 07 Mar 2019:

Kirsti Melville hears from indigenous people about the importance of the ancient rock carvings and songlines in Murujuga or the Dampier Archipelago in Australia.

The Dampier Archipelago is a group of 42 islands near the town of Dampier in Pilbara, Western Australia, and well within the LODE Zone Line, close as it is to Port Hedland where one of the 26 LODE Cargos was created in 1992.

The archipelago is made up of reefs, shoals, channels and straits and is the traditional home of five Aboriginal language groups. It was formed 7000 years ago when rising sea levels flooded what were once coastal plains. The Yinidbarndi, Yaburara, Mardudhunera, and Woon-goo-tt-oo peoples have lived in the area for approximately 50,000 years, and have passed down the memory of this flooding in the forms created in oral cultures of considerable significance.

The underlying rocks are among the oldest on earth, formed in the Archaean period more than 2400 million years ago.

Murujuga been described as "the largest outdoor art gallery on the planet". The rock carvings here on the Dampier Archipelago tell the story of fifty thousand years of human existence - of how the Yaburara people who created the art lived and how the world changed around them. Kirsti discovers how the carvings act as the "score" for one of the earliest songlines, starting here in Murujuga – the indigenous people's name for the Dampier Archipelago and Burrup Peninsula - and travelling right through to Uluru, the heart of Australia.

The Yaburara people carved more than a million drawings into the red rocks. They give a detailed record of both sacred and secular life. There are flightless birds, fish and turtles, giant kangaroos, creation spirits, complex human figures and the, now extinct, thylacine. The rock art is profoundly connected to beliefs and ceremonies still practiced today.

But, over the past fifty years, this immense site of human history has been threatened by massive industry. Within a stone’s throw of this ancient rock art there are petrochemical plants, a giant gas hub and one of Australia’s busiest ports.

Now, after years of lobbying, Aboriginal traditional custodians, archaeologists and government are, for the first time, working together to push for World Heritage listing. Will this sacred site finally receive the protection it deserves?

Eleanor de Jong in Karratha and Adam Morton (Wed 11 May 2022) report on how the custodians of petroglyphs in remote north-west say Woodside’s $12bn ‘carbon bomb’ spells disaster for their culture and the climate: 

As the last of the sun’s rays curl away from the coast in Australia’s remote north-west, Josie Alec opens her arms and sings in traditional language to a mass of ochre-coloured rocks along Hearson’s Cove. But her voice competes with the low rumble of a gas production plant less than a kilometre away, its flared emissions lightly hazing the sky above the beach.

This is the duality of what First Nations people refer to as Murujuga country, home to one of the world’s largest and oldest collections of rock carvings as well as one of the largest new fossil fuel developments in Australia in a decade.

Taking in the Burrup peninsula and the nearby Dampier archipelago, the culturally rich area has an estimated 1m ancient petroglyphs. Some of the images, including illustrations of long-extinct species such as the thylacine and flat-tailed kangaroo, are believed to date back nearly 50,000 years.

Traditional custodians such as Alec and Mardudhunera woman Raelene Cooper come to Hearson’s Cove to connect with nature, and the thousands of generations of their people who lived in the country before them, through song.

“You feel them in your heart and your soul, our ancestors in the rocks,” Alec says. “We have to wake them up, sing them we’re here, sing them we’re still protecting them. Then you hear the wisdom that they have for the past and the future. And it’s time for listening.”

But just who is listening – and who is being listened to – is a live question in Murujuga. While the historical and cultural significance of the art is uncontested, and the subject of a Unesco world heritage bid, it sits uneasily alongside the industrial city of Karratha, a settlement of about 23,000 that is about to double down on fossil fuel extraction.

Production in the region is expected to expand significantly after Woodside Energy, an Australian petroleum company, announced in November that it would proceed with a US$12bn liquified natural gas (LNG) development.

The scale of Woodside’s proposal is vast. It would open an untapped gas field nearly 250 miles (400km) off the Australian coast and connect it to the mainland via a pipeline through an area rich in marine biodiversity, while expanding its existing Pluto LNG processing plant near Karratha to more than double its current capacity.

Opponents say the Scarborough-to-Pluto project could lock in new polluting infrastructure expected to run beyond 2050. Researchers at Climate Analytics estimate it could lead to 1.37bn tonnes of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere across its lifetime – roughly three times the total annual emissions of Australia or the UK.

Woodside and the conservative Australian government claim the Scarborough development would be good for the country and the planet. Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, told business leaders that when he heard Woodside had made a final decision to invest in Scarborough he celebrated with “a bit of a jig”. “I could not be more thrilled about that,” he said.

This is broadly a bipartisan view. The Labor opposition, narrowly favoured to win a national election on 21 May, also supports gas industry expansion. The Western Australian Labor state government declared it would change the law to ensure Scarborough could proceed if a legal challenge by conservationists was successful.

Australia has done little to cut greenhouse gas emissions since the government was elected in 2013. Its 2030 reduction target is less than half that set by the UK and EU, and it has committed about A$1bn in public funding to a “gas-fired recovery” from the Covid crisis.

Under pressure, Morrison set a net zero emissions goal shortly before the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow in November – but his plan requires no emissions reductions and Australia was widely condemned by international leaders as a laggard in addressing the climate crisis.

Opposition to the Scarborough project has come from environmental groups and a small but determined section of the local Indigenous community. They argue it is a “carbon bomb” that would be disastrous for the climate, that construction would destroy unique local marine life and acidic pollution from the production facility would damage the irreplaceable rock art.

“Across the board, Scarborough is just a terrible project,” says Maggie Wood, the acting executive director of the Conservation Council of Western Australia. “But I would say the likelihood of it going ahead is high. The state and federal governments argue continual expansion of fossil fuels is a job creator, but we know that is fundamentally untrue – it doesn’t bring in much money from taxes and royalties, it doesn’t create that many jobs and the gas is mostly going to be exported. The reality is that fossil fuel companies have a hold over Australian politics.”

Part of the problem, Wood and others argue, is that the cumulative impact of the Scarborough development had not been properly assessed before it was approved by national and state authorities. Instead it was broken up and submitted piecemeal for approval.

The project is a continuation of the dramatic expansion of the Australian gas export industry across the continent’s north over the past decade. LNG exports have quadrupled in volume over that time to reach about 80m tonnes, with sales forecast to top US$50bn this year, twice that of the thermal coal industry. Australia now runs neck-and-neck with Qatar in the race to be the world’s biggest gas exporter.

Scarborough is the most advanced of several proposals to expand that further. All are at odds with a warning last year from the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, that no new gas or oilfields should be opened if the slim prospect of limiting global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels was to survive.

The impact of gas expansion is clearly visible in Karratha. The city is saturated in fossil fuel money that helps pay for upmarket coffee shops and wine bars, large modern homes for gas and iron ore mining families and well-kept four-lane highways to production facilities.

Many Indigenous families who have lived in the region for generations largely reside in older, comparatively rundown satellite towns such as Roebourne, a half-hour drive from Karratha’s air-conditioned shopping malls. Most residents in the region, including a significant proportion of the Indigenous community, strongly support continued expansion of the fossil fuel sector that keeps the area afloat.

But the gas industry is also having an impact on the region’s cultural heritage. In some places, rocks have been disturbed to make way for infrastructure, and a recent peer-reviewed study found evidence that industrial pollution was “actively degrading” Murujuga rock art.

Carmen Lawrence, a former Labor state premier and ex-chair of the Australian Heritage Council, said it was clear that gas processing was having a significant effect on petroglyphs and further expansion would only increase the duration and severity of the impact.

She likened the management of the risk to the mistakes that two years ago resulted in the miner Rio Tinto’s catastrophic destruction of an Aboriginal heritage site in an explosion at nearby Juukan Gorge.

Cooper, a former chair of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, describes the rocks at Hearson’s Cove as “our church, our parliament house”. She says damage is already visible, and believes world heritage status for the region is the best hope for protection.

“There is no price you can put on this place,” she says. “People see the rock as just a rock with some artwork on it but, to us, they speak. They tell a story. They are alive.”

Woodside disputes suggestions its expansion on the Burrup poses a risk to the petroglyphs. A spokesperson said research had not demonstrated that its operations had any impact, and it was supporting a “world-best-practice programme to monitor and protect the rock art” that was co-managed by the local Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation and government officials.

“It is Woodside’s view that traditional custodians must be central to the management of their heritage,” the spokesperson said, adding the company had consulted with them and responded to requests for environmental monitoring, archaeological and ethnographic surveys and access to independent expert advice.

In response to the claim the project would not create many jobs, the spokesperson said Scarborough would create 3,200 positions during construction and 300 ongoing jobs in Western Australia, including an expected 70 in Karratha.

The company hopes Scarborough will be the start of a new wave of fossil fuel development in the country’s north-west. In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Woodside’s chief executive, Meg O’Neill, said she hoped the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would allow it to kickstart consideration of two other gas mega-projects that had stalled during the pandemic – the Sunrise gas reservoir in the Timor Sea and the Browse development off Western Australia.

The latter had been written off by many analysts and campaigners as commercially unviable and would be significantly more carbon-intensive than Scarborough.

Woodside’s fossil fuel footprint is expected to expand even more dramatically next month if its shareholders rubber-stamp a deal in which it would merge its petroleum assets with those of the global miner BHP. It would allow BHP to shed a massive decommissioning liability for its oil assets and overnight make Woodside a global top 10 oil and gas company with investments in the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, Algeria and Australia.

The company argues this is consistent with climate commitments that it says are aligned with the goals of the Paris agreement. It has a target of cutting its scope 1 and 2 emissions – those on site and from the electricity it uses – by 30% by 2030, and an “aspiration” to reach net zero emissions “by 2050 or sooner”.

It says avoiding and reducing emissions is its “first priority” but the use of carbon offsets – cuts in emissions elsewhere to allow it to pollute – and the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which is not yet used at any scale, will be important.

It aims to help reduce its scope 3 emissions – those released by its customers when they eventually burn the gas – by investing in “new energy products” such as hydrogen, ammonia and CCS. It has set a US$5bn investment target in these plans by 2030, less than half the expected cost of the Scarborough development.

Analysts argue that Woodside’s claims on emissions are full of holes. Bill Hare, the chief executive of Climate Analytics and a recent appointee to the UN secretary general’s expert group looking at the best way for non-state actors to reach net zero emissions, says Woodside “does not have a scientific leg to stand on” on emissions reduction.

“I don’t really like the term greenwashing but there’s no other word for it. Woodside is engaged in extreme greenwashing,” he says. “It has no real net zero plan. It is all about using offsets to make it look like it is acting when it is not.”

Hare says the annual emissions from Scarborough gas would be globally significant, with a conservative analysis suggesting they would be enough to, in effect, wipe out the emissions reduction from all the rooftop solar panels installed in Australia twice over. Roughly one in three Australian homes have solar systems.

On the BHP deal, Hare says Woodside may come to regret the scale of the gargantuan rehabilitation costs the company will inherit for relatively short-term gain. “I really don’t see this is working out very well.”

Woodside is unlikely to hear the same messages from the Australian political system. Its board includes former cabinet ministers from the Liberal and Labor parties, and it has successfully lobbied governments. For example, it was part of a campaign that persuaded the state government to shelve a proposal that would have required new large fossil fuel developments to offset all emissions.

Scarborough still faces a legal challenge over whether the carbon dioxide emitted during production should be considered a pollutant, but even if successful it would probably lead only to a change in the conditions under which it could be developed.

It leaves little reason for hope for the traditional custodians of Hearson’s Cove – but still they are here. As dusk wears on, Alec and Cooper are joined by Robyn Churnside, a Ngarluma elder who has been fighting fossil fuel and mining developments since the 1970s. She says her family is used to being minority voices of dissent and will persist.

“It’s about time the world listened to First Nations people, because we’ve been here long, long time,” she says. “Our spirit in this land will never rest. It needs protection.”

Meanwhile . . .

. . . history repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce".

This quotation originates in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (German: Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon), an essay written by Karl Marx between December 1851 and March 1852, and originally published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City. 

The essay discusses the French coup of 1851 in which Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon) assumed dictatorial powers. In the preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx stated that the purpose of this essay was to "demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part."  

The opening lines of the book are the source of one of Marx's most quoted and misquoted statements, that historical entities appear two times, "the first as tragedy, then as farce" (das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce), referring respectively to Napoleon I and to his nephew Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III):

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Marx's sentiment echoed an observation made by Friedrich Engels at exactly the same time Marx began work on this book. In a letter to Marx of 3 December 1851, Engels wrote from Manchester:

.... it really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce, Caussidière for Danton, L. Blanc for Robespierre, Barthélemy for Saint-Just, Flocon for Carnot, and the moon-calf together with the first available dozen debt-encumbered lieutenants for the little corporal and his band of marshals. Thus the 18th Brumaire would already be upon us.

This essay also contains the most famous formulation of Marx's view of the role of the individual in history, often translated as: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." 

This story of "grotesque mediocrity", covered by Patrick Wintour for the Guardian (Tue 24 May 2022) is one among many that belong to what Rudyard Kipling called "The Great Game" in his masterpiece novel "Kim". 

Patrick Wintour reports under the headline and subheading: 

Top official at Foreign Office called upon to resign over Kabul withdrawal

Sir Philip Barton castigated along with Dominic Raab in damning report by MPs into UK’s chaotic exit

The senior civil servant in charge of the Foreign Office should consider his position after presiding over a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that betrayed UK allies, put lives in danger, showed a total absence of planning and was chaotically managed, MPs have concluded in a damning report.

The report from the foreign affairs select committee said the absence of leadership – both ministerial and official, including the permanent secretary, Sir Philip Barton – when Kabul fell was inexcusable and a grave indictment on those supposedly in charge. It added that Barton failed to give candid evidence to the committee, and says as a result it had lost confidence in him. The committee also accused him of covering up political interference in the fast-tracking of some individuals out of Afghanistan.

The committee said that while junior officials at the Foreign Office (FCDO) demonstrated courage and integrity, chaotic and arbitrary decision-making marked the planning and execution of the evacuation. “Sadly, it may have cost many people the chance to leave Afghanistan, putting lives in danger,” the report said.

It also found that senior officials were intentionally evasive and often deliberately misleading to parliament, noting: “The integrity of the civil service depends on those leading these organisations showing the courage to tell the truth to the British people.”

The report, one of the most damning to be issued by a select committee under the Conservative government, also extends criticism to the then foreign secretary, Dominic Raab. “It might be convenient to blame FCDO officials or military intelligence for these failures, but ministers should have been driving this policy,” it said.

“The fact that the Foreign Office’s senior leaders were on holiday when Kabul fell marks a fundamental lack of seriousness, grip or leadership at a time of national emergency. At several key stages in the evacuation there seemed to be no clear line of command within the political leadership of the government, as decisions were made on the basis of untraceable and unaccountable political interventions.”

The report found there was a “total absence of a plan for evacuating Afghans who had supported the UK mission, without being directly employed by the UK government, despite knowing 18 months before the collapse of Afghanistan that an evacuation might be necessary”. It added: “The hasty effort to select those eligible for evacuation was poorly devised, managed and staffed; and the department failed to perform the most basic crisis-management functions.

“The lack of clarity led to confusion and false hope among our Afghan partners who were desperate for rescue. They, and the many civil servants and soldiers working hard on the evacuation, were utterly let down by deep failures of leadership in government.”

The all-party committee, which is chaired by the Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, said answers given by senior officials were “at best intentionally evasive, and often deliberately misleading”. It said: “Those who lead the department should be ashamed that civil servants of great integrity felt compelled to risk their careers to bring to light the appalling mismanagement of the crisis, and the misleading statements to parliament that followed.”

Two whistleblowers who worked in the FCDO resigned their posts to give scathing written evidence about the handling of the evacuation.

The report also found there was an optimism bias inside the Foreign Office that the Biden administration would change the planned US withdrawal date from Afghanistan, and that when this proved incorrect, the UK revealed a lack of influence by failing to make Washington change its plans.

Raab did next to nothing to engage with regional partners before the fall of Kabul, the report said. In a sign of the chaos, it found: “In the rush, staff failed to remove sensitive documents identifying Afghan job applicants, leaving them to fall into the Taliban’s hands. An internal review of the incident concluded that the FCDO cannot be certain that all other physical and electronic documents containing personal data were removed.”

The report said the Foreign Office acted too late, largely after the fall of Kabul in August, in trying to devise a special category of people for evacuation such as journalists, judges and others who had helped the British government but had not been directly employed.

The committee found that, as a result, the government “failed to deliver the bare minimum that we owed them: a well-considered plan for who would be prioritised for extraction, and clear communications to those seeking help. The lack of clarity led to confusion and false hope, hindering individuals from making the best decision for themselves based on a realistic understanding of their situation.”

Singling out Barton, the committee found: “The fact that the department’s top civil servant did not return until the civilian evacuation was over, while staff across the department struggled to implement a poorly planned evacuation process under intense pressure, is difficult to understand and impossible to excuse.”

Barton has already apologised for what he regards as an error, but he has so far refused to resign. The report criticised the department for failing to “perform the most basic crisis-management functions, such as rostering an adequate number of staff to key teams”. It said: “The political leadership on offer vacillated so much that no clear priorities were set for who should be evacuated and in what order, giving many thousands of vulnerable people, to whom we owed a debt, a hope that could never be met.”

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “Our staff worked tirelessly to evacuate over 15,000 people from Afghanistan within a fortnight. This was the biggest UK mission of its kind in generations and followed months of intensive planning and collaboration between UK government departments.”

Ben Jennings on the Foreign Office handling of the fall of Afghanistan – cartoon in the Guardian Tue 7 Dec 2021

Lessons from history? 

Joint Task Force-Crisis Response personnel carrying the remains of fellow service members killed in the Kabul Airport attack, 27 August 2021 

The history of the withdrawal of foreign armed forces, politicians and diplomats from Afghanistan includes many instances exemplifying Karl Marx's contention that historical entities often appear twice, "the first as tragedy, then as farce".

The withdrawal of NATO forces in 2021 was governed by political expediencies that originated in the United States, so the British government's response was conducted in the wake of US policy decisions. However, the history of British withdrawals from Afghanistan brings with it the potential to understand the geopolitical reasons for the many civil wars, incursions and withdrawals that have taken place since the formation of the modern state of Afghanistan which began with the Durrani dynasty in the 18th century. The Durrani Empire led conquests in which, at its peak, encompassed land that spanned from eastern Iran to northern India

Following the Durrani Empire's decline and the death of Ahmad Shah Durrani and Timur Shah, Afghanistan was divided into multiple smaller independent kingdoms, including but not limited to Herat, Kandahar and Kabul. Afghanistan would be reunited in the 19th century after seven decades of civil war from 1793 to 1863, with wars of unification led by Dost Mohammad Khan from 1823 to 1863, where he conquered the independent principalities of Afghanistan under the Emirate of Kabul. Dost Mohammad died in 1863, days after his last campaign to unite Afghanistan, and Afghanistan was consequently thrown back into civil war with fighting amongst his successors.

It was during this time that Afghanistan became a buffer state in the Great Game between the British Empire (in British-ruled India) and the Russian Empire. 

Russia - the true enemy?

Though wars with Germany would become a central issue for Britain for much of the first half of the 20th century, few Britons anticipated that before 1900. 

Historically, it was France which was the traditional enemy of England and Britain, from the Hundred Years' War until the Napoleonic Wars. William Le Queux published The Great War in England, raising the spectre of a French surprise invasion of England, reaching London – with Germany cast as Britain's loyal ally, rushing to help and in the nick of time saving England from the evil French; as evident from the great success of this book when published in 1894, the British public at that time took seriously the idea of a French threat and a German ally. But Emperor Wilhelm II's policy of building up the German Navy and challenging British sea power effected a change in the actual power relations - reflected in the specific literary genre of invasion novels and the identity assigned to the possible invader of British soil. 

The "Great Game" or fantasy diplomacy?

The complex diplomatic pathways that led to the Great War of 1914-18 remains a relatively obscured geopolitical history, buried, unfortunately, under the heaps of succeeding propaganda efforts of the eventual conflict of the Great War itself and its aftermath. While France may have remained a traditional enemy as far as outlandish stories are concerned, the real or imagined threat to British global interests, especially British interests in India, came from Russia rather than Germany. For most of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century there had been a political and diplomatic confrontation between the British Empire and the Russian Empire over Afghanistan and neighbouring territories in Central and South Asia, and having direct consequences in Persia and British India. 

The LODE project and its LODE Zone Line, determined by the nodal positions that governed the project, the two maritime cities of Liverpool and Hull, leads the work of understanding the NOW across the globe and through these territories; modern Ukraine; the Russian Federation; Kazakhstan; Uzbekistan; Turkmenistan; Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This great power rivalry became known in the early twentieth century as the Great Game largely as a result of the novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling, considered by many to be his literary masterpiece. Kim was first published serially in McClure's Magazine from December 1900 to October 1901 as well as in Cassell's Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901.  

Retrospectively the "Great Game" referred to the British fear that Russia planned to invade India and that this was the goal of Russia's expansion in Central Asia, while Russia feared the expansion of British interests in Central Asia. As a result, there was a deep atmosphere of distrust and talk of war between these two major European empires. Britain made it a high priority to protect all the approaches to India, while Russia continued its conquest of Central Asia. Some historians of Russia have concluded that after 1801, Russia had minimal intentions or plans involving India and that it was mostly a matter of British suspicions. 

According to one major view, the Great Game began on 12 January 1830, when Lord Ellenborough, the president of the Board of Control for India, tasked Lord William Bentinck, the governor-general, with establishing a new trade route to the Emirate of Bukhara. Britain intended to gain control over the Emirate of Afghanistan and make it a protectorate, and to use the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Khanate of Khiva, and the Emirate of Bukhara as buffer states blocking Russian expansion. This would protect India and also key British sea trade routes by stopping Russia from gaining a port on the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. In contrast to this expansionist British policy Russia proposed that Afghanistan would be seen as a neutral zone. 

The First Anglo-Afghan War was fought between the British Empire and the Emirate of Kabul from 1838 to 1842. The British initially successfully invaded the country taking sides in a succession dispute between emir Dost Mohammad (Barakzai) and former emir Shah Shujah (Durrani), whom they reinstalled upon occupying Kabul in August 1839. The main British Indian force occupied Kabul and endured harsh winters. 

However, the force and its camp followers were almost completely massacred during the 1842 retreat from Kabul. 

The first withdrawal of British forces from Kabul

The last stand of the 44th Foot, during the so-called Massacre of Elphinstone's Army

Following the initial invasion the majority of the British troops returned to India, leaving 8,000 in Afghanistan, but it soon became clear that Shuja's rule could only be maintained with the presence of a stronger British force. The Afghans resented the British presence and the rule of Shah Shuja. As the occupation dragged on, the East India Company's first political officer William Hay Macnaghten allowed his soldiers to bring their families to Afghanistan to improve morale; this further infuriated the Afghans, as it appeared the British were setting up a permanent occupation. Macnaghten purchased a mansion in Kabul, where he installed his wife, crystal chandelier, a fine selection of French wines, and hundreds of servants from India, making himself completely at home. Macnaghten, who had once been a judge in a small town in Ulster before deciding he wanted to be much more than a small town judge in Ireland, was known for his arrogant, imperious manner, and was simply called "the Envoy" by both the Afghans and the British. The wife of one British officer, Lady Florentia Sale created an English style garden at her house in Kabul, which was much admired and in August 1841 her daughter Alexadrina was married at her Kabul home to Lieutenant John Sturt of the Royal Engineers. The British officers staged horse races, played cricket and in winter ice skating over the frozen local ponds, which astonished the Afghans who had never seen this before.

Afghanistan had no army, and instead had a feudal system under which the chiefs would maintain a certain number of armed retainers, principally cavalry together with a number of tribesmen who could be called upon to fight in a time of war; when the Emir went to war, he would call upon his chiefs to bring out their men to fight for him. In 1840, the British strongly pressured Shuja to replace the feudal system with a standing army, which threatened to do away with the power of the chiefs, and which the Emir rejected under the grounds that Afghanistan lacked the financial ability to fund a standing army.

Upper Bala Hissar from west Kabul in 1879 

In the early 1840's, the British had vacated the Kabul fortress of Bala Hissar and relocated to a cantonment built to the northeast of Kabul. The chosen location was indefensible, being low and swampy with hills on every side. To make matters worse, the cantonment was too large for the number of troops camped in it and had a defensive perimeter almost two miles long. In addition, the stores and supplies were in a separate fort, 300 yards from the main cantonment. The British commander, Major-General George Keith Ephinstone who arrived in April 1841 was bed-ridden most of the time with gout and rheumatism. 

Between April and October 1841, disaffected Afghan tribes were flocking to support resistance against the British in Bamiyan and other areas north of the Hindu Kush mountains. They were organised into an effective resistance by chiefs such as Mir Masjidi Khan and others. In September 1841, Macnaghten reduced the subsidies paid out to Ghilzai tribal chiefs in exchange for accepting Shuja as Emir and to keep the passes open, which immediately led to the Ghazis rebelling and a jihad being proclaimed. The monthly subsidies, which were effectively bribes for the Ghazi chiefs to stay loyal, was reduced from 80,000 to 40,000 rupees at a time of rampant inflation, and as the chiefs' loyalty had been entirely financial, the call of jihad proved stronger. Macnaghten did not take the threat seriously at first, writing to Henry Rawlinson in Kandahar on 7 October 1841: "The Eastern Ghilzyes are kicking up a row about some deductions which have been made from their pay. The rascals have completely succeeded in cutting communications for the time being, which is very provoking to me at this time; but they will be well trounced for their pains. One down, t'other come on, is the principle of these vagabonds".

Macnaghten ordered an expedition, but on 10 October 1841, the Ghazis in a night raid defeated the Thirty-fifth Native Infantry. They were defeated the next day by the Thirteenth Light Infantry which led to the rebels fleeing to the mountains. Macnaghten overplayed his hand by demanding that the chiefs who rebelled now send their children to Shuja's court as hostages to prevent another rebellion. As Shuja had a habit of mutilating people who displeased him in the slightest, Macnaghten's demand that the children of the chiefs go to the Emir's court was received with horror, which led the Ghazi chiefs to vow to fight on. Macnaghten, who had only just been appointed as the governor of Bombay was now torn between a desire to leave Afghanistan on a high note with the country settled and peaceful, or give in to a desire to crush the Ghazis. At one moment he was threatening the harshest reprisals and the next moment abandoning his demand for hostages. Macnaghten's flip flop alternating policy of confrontation and compromise was seen as a weakness and encouraged the chiefs around Kabul to start a full blown resistance. By this time Shuja was so unpopular that many of his ministers and the Durrani clan joined the rebellion.

On the night of 1 November 1841, a group of Afghan chiefs met at the Kabul house of one of their number to plan the uprising, which began in the morning of the next day. In a flammable situation, the spark was provided unintentionally by the East India Company's second political officer, Sir Alexander 'Sekundar' Burnes. A Kashmiri slave girl who belonged to a Pashtun chief Abdullah Khan Achakzai living in Kabul ran away to Burne's house. When Ackakzai sent his retainers to retrieve her, it was discovered that Burnes had taken the slave girl to his bed, and he had one of Azkakzai's men beaten. A secret jirga (council) of Pashtun chiefs was held to discuss this violation of pashtunwali, where Ackakzai holding a Koran in one hand stated: "Now we are justified in throwing this English yoke; they stretch the hand of tyranny to dishonour private citizens great and small: fucking a slave girl isn't worth the ritual bath that follows it: but we have to put a stop right here and now, otherwise these English will ride the donkey of their desires into the field of stupidity, to the point of having all of us arrested and deported to a foreign field". At the end of his speech, all of the chiefs shouted "Jihad". The following day, November 2, 1841 fell on 17 Ramadan, the anniversary date for The Battle of Badr, so the Afghans decided to strike on this auspicious date of. The call to jihad was given on the morning of 2 November from the Pul-i-khisti mosque in Kabul.

Lady Sale wrote in her diary on 2 November 1841: "This morning early, all was in commotion in Kabul. The shops were plundered and the people all fighting."  

That same day, a mob "thirsting for blood" appeared outside of the house of the East India Company's second political officer, Sir Alexander 'Sekundar' Burnes, where Burnes ordered his sepoy guards not to fire while he stood outside haranguing the mob in Pashto, attempting unconvincingly to persuade the assembled men that he did not bed their daughters and sisters. Captain William Broadfoot who was with Burnes saw the mob march forward, leading him to open fire with another officer writing in his diary that he "killed five or six men with his own hand before he was shot down". The mob smashed in to Burnes's house, where he, his brother Charles, their wives and children, several aides and the sepoys were all torn to pieces. 

The mob then attacked the home of the paymaster Johnston who was not present, leading him to later write that when he surveyed the remains of his house that they had "gained possession of my treasury by undermining the wall...They murdered the whole of the guard (one officer and 28 sepoys), all my servants (male, female, and children), plundered the treasury...burnt all my office records...and possessed themselves of all my private property". 

Meanwhile, the British forces took no action in response to these atrocities, despite being only five minutes march away, thereby encouraging further insurrection. The only person who took action that day was Shuja who ordered out one of his regiments from the Bala Hissar, commanded by a Scots mercenary named Campbell, to crush the riot. However, the old city of Kabul with its narrow, twisting streets favoured the defenders, with Campbell's men coming under fire from rebels in upper storeys of the surrounding houses. After losing about 200 men killed, Campbell retreated back to the Bala Hissar. After hearing of the defeat of his regiment, Shuja descended into "a pitiable state of dejection and alarm", sinking into a deep state of depression as it finally dawned on him that his people hated him and wanted to see him dead. 

Captain Sturt was sent to the Bala Hissar by Elphinstone to see if it were possible to recover control of the city later that afternoon, where his mother-in-law Lady Sale noted in her diary: "Just as he entered the precincts of the palace, he was stabbed in three places by a young man well dressed, who escaped into a building close-by, where he was protected by the gates being shut."  

Sturt was sent home to be cared for by Lady Sale and his wife with the former noting: "He was covered with blood issuing from his mouth and was unable to articulate. He could not lie down, from the blood choking him", only being capable hours later to utter one word: "bet-ter". Lady Sale was highly critical of Elphinstone's leadership, writing: "General Elphinstone vacillates on every point. His own judgement appears to be good, but he is swayed by the last speaker", criticising him for "...a very strange circumstance that troops were not immediately sent into the city to quell the affair in the commencement, but we seem to sit quietly with our hands folded, and look on".."  

Despite both being in the cantonment, Elphinstone preferred to write letters to Macnaghten, with one letter on 2 November saying "I have been considering what can done tomorrow" (he decided to do nothing that day), stating "our dilemma is a difficult one", and finally concluding "We must see what the morning brings". The British situation soon deteriorated when Afghans stormed the poorly defended supply fort inside Kabul on 9 November.  

In the following weeks, the British commanders tried to negotiate with Akbar Khan. Macnaghten secretly offered to make Akbar Afghanistan's vizier in exchange for allowing the British to stay, while simultaneously disbursing large sums of money to have him assassinated, which was reported to Akbar Khan. A meeting for direct negotiations between Macnaghten and Akbar was held near the cantonment on 23 December, but Macnaghten and the three officers accompanying him were seized and slain by Akbar Khan. Macnaghten's body was dragged through the streets of Kabul and displayed in the bazaar. By this time Elphinstone's authority was badly damaged and was beginning to loose command of his troops.

On 1 January 1842, following some "unusual thinking" by Elphinstone (which may have had something to do with the poor defensibility of the cantonment), an agreement was reached that provided for the safe exodus of the British garrison and its dependents from Afghanistan. 

Five days later, the withdrawal began. The departing British contingent numbered around 16,500, of which about 4,500 were military personnel, and over 12,000 were camp followers. 

Lieutenant Vincent Eyre commented about the camp followers that "These proved from the very first mile a serious clog on our movements". Lady Sale brought with her 40 servants, none of whom she named in her diary while Eyre's son was saved by a female Afghan servant, who rode through an ambush with the boy on her back, but he never gave her name. The American author James M. Perry noted: "Reading the old diaries and journals, it is almost as if these twelve thousand native servants and sepoy wives and children didn't exist individually. In a way, they really didn't. They would die, all of them - shot, stabbed, frozen to death - in these mountain passes, and no one bothered to write down the name of even one of them". The military force consisted mostly of Indian units and one British battalion, the 44th Regiment of Foot.

They were attacked by Ghilzai warriors as they struggled through the snowbound passes. On the first day, the retreating force made only five miles and as Lady Sale wrote concerning their arrival at a village called Begramee: "There were no tents, save two or three small palls that arrived. Everyone scraped away the snow as best they might, to make a place to lie down. The evening and night were intensely cold; no food for man or beast procurable, except a few handfuls of bhoosay [chopped stew], for which we had to pay five to ten rupees". As the night fell so did the temperature, dropping to well below freezing. 

The retreating force then learned of the loss of their entire supply of food and all their baggage. On the second day all of the men of the Royal Afghan Army's 6th regiment deserted, heading back to Kabul, marking the end of the first attempt to give Afghanistan a national army. 

For several months afterwards, what had once been Shuja's army was reduced to begging on the streets of Kabul as Akbar had of all of Shuja's mercenaries mutilated before throwing them on the streets to beg. 

Despite Akbar Khan's promise of safe conduct, the Anglo-Indian force was repeatedly attacked by the Ghilzais, with one especially fierce Afghan attack being beaten off with a spirited bayonet charge by the 44th Foot.

While trying to cross the Koord-Kabual pass in the Hindu Kush that was described as five miles long and "so narrow and so shut in on either side that the wintry sun rarely penetrates its gloomy recesses", the Anglo-Indian force was ambushed by the Ghilzai tribesmen. Johnson described "murderous fire" that forced the British to abandon all baggage while camp followers regardless of sex and age were cut down with swords. Lady Sale wrote: "Bullets kept whizzing by us", while some of the artillerymen smashed open the regimental store of brandy to get drunk amid the Afghan attacks. Lady Sale wrote she drank a tumbler of sherry "which at any other time would have made me very unlady-like, but now merely warmed me." Lady Sale took a bullet in her wrist while she had to watch as her son-in-law Sturt had "...his horse was shot out from him and before he could rise from the ground he received a severe wound in the abdomen". With his wife and mother-in-law by his side in the snow, Sturt bled to death over the course of the night. The incompetent, naive and gullible Elphinstone continued to believe that Akbar Khan was his "ally", and believed his promise that he would send out the captured supplies if he stopped the retreat on 8 January, but adding to the misery of the British, that night a ferocious blizzard blew in, causing hundreds to freeze to death.

On 9 January 1842, Akbar sent out a messenger saying he was willing to take all of the British women as hostages, giving his word that they would not be harmed, and said that otherwise his tribesmen would show no mercy and kill all the women and children. One of the British officers sent to negotiate with Akbar heard him say to his tribesmen in Dari (Afghan Farsi) – a language spoken by many British officers – to "spare" the British while saying in Pashto, which most British officers did not speak, to "slay them all". Lady Sale, her pregnant daughter Alexandria and the rest of British women and children accepted Akbar's offer of safe conduct back to Kabul. As the East India Company would not pay a ransom for Indian women and children, Akbar refused to accept them, and so the Indian women and children died with the rest of the force in the Hindu Kush. The camp followers captured by the Afghans were stripped of all their clothing and left to freeze to death in the snow. Lady Sale wrote that as she was taken back to Kabul she noticed: "The road was covered with awful mangled bodies, all naked".

In the early morning of 10 January, the column resumed its march, with everyone tired, hungry, and cold. Most of the sepoys by this time had lost a finger or two to frostbite, and could not fire their guns. At the narrow pass of Tunghee Tareekee, which was 50 yards long, and only 4 yards wide, the Ghizye tribesmen ambushed the column, killing without mercy all of the camp followers. The Anglo-Indian soldiers fought their way over the corpses of the camp followers with heavy losses to themselves. From a hill, Akbar Khan and his chiefs watched the slaughter while sitting on their horses, being apparently very much amused by the carnage. Captain Shelton and a few soldiers from the 44th regiment held the rear of the column and fought off successive Afghan attacks, despite being outnumbered. Johnson described Shelton as fighting like a "bulldog" with his sword, cutting down any Afghan who tried to take him on so efficiently that by the end of the day no Afghan would challenge him. On the evening of 11 January 1842, General Elphinstone, Captain Shelton, the paymaster Johnston, and Captain Skinner met with Akbar Khan to ask him to stop his attacks on the column. Akbar Khan provided them with warm tea and a fine meal before telling them that they were all now his hostages as he reckoned the East India Company would pay good ransoms for their freedom, and when Captain Skinner tried to resist, he was shot in the face. Command now fell to Brigadier Thomas Anquetil.

The evacuees were killed in huge numbers as they made their way down the 30 miles (48 km) of treacherous gorges and passes lying along the Kabul River between Kabul and Gandamak, and were massacred at the Gandamak pass before a survivor reached the besieged garrison at Jalalabad. At Gandamak, some 20 officers and 45 other ranks of the 44th Foot regiment, together with some artillerymen and sepoys, armed with some 20 muskets and two rounds of ammunition to every man, found themselves at dawn surrounded by Afghan tribesmen. The force had been reduced to fewer than forty men by a withdrawal from Kabul that had become, towards the end, a running battle through two feet of snow. The ground was frozen, the men had no shelter and had little food for weeks. Of the weapons remaining to the survivors at Gandamak, there were approximately a dozen working muskets, the officers' pistols, and a few swords. The British formed a square and defeated the first couple of the Afghan attacks, "driving the Afghans several times down the hill" before running out of ammunition. They then fought on with their bayonets and swords before being overwhelmed. The Afghans took only 9 prisoners and killed the rest. The remnants of the 44th were all killed except Captain James Souter, Sergeant Fair, and seven soldiers who were taken prisoner. The only soldier to reach Jalalabad was Dr. William Brydon and several sepoys over the following nights.

"Remnants of an Army" by Elizabeth Butler depicting the arrival of assistant surgeon, William Brydon, at Jalalabad on 13 January 1842

Other accounts claim that over one hundred British were taken prisoner. One British NCO fled from Gandamak to Gujrat India on foot according to a source cited from The Times of 2 March 1843 by Farrukh Husain who writes: "The oddest account of escape from Gundamuck concerns that of a dark-skinned faqir who appeared in India in rags but was in fact a Scottish non commissioned officer who fled all the way to a British army Camp Deesa in Gujrat India, "This morning a strange man came into camp, covered with hair, and almost naked his face burnt very much; he turned out to be Lance-Sergeant Philip Edwards of the Queen's 44th Regiment who escaped the general slaughter at Gundamuch, Afghanistan, and after travelling 15 months in a southerly direction by the sun, he found his way into camp here, not knowing where he was.""

Many of the women and children were taken captive by the Afghan warring tribes; some of these women married their captors, mostly Afghan and Indian camp followers who were wives of British officers. Children taken from the battlefield at the time who were later identified in the early part of the 20th century to be those of the fallen soldiers were brought up by Afghan families as their own children. 

Afghanistan crisis August 2021

Desperate locals cling to side of US Air Force plane taking off from Kabul Aug 16, 2021 #GlobalNews

Meanwhile . . . 

. . . did the evacuation of animals come before rescuing people? While being interviewed in the hills above Conwy, along the LODE Zone Line in North Wales, Boris Johnson was asked about this matter and said it's "total rhubarb"!

A few weeks later . . . 

. . . Boris Johnson did prioritise animal charity for Afghan evacuation, MPs told 

Aubrey Allegretti Political correspondent for the Guardian reported (Mon 21 Mar 2022) that:

Second whistleblower suggests to committee that top civil servants lied to cover up episode

He writes: 

A second whistleblower has gone public to say it was “widespread knowledge” in government that Boris Johnson ordered the prioritisation of an animal charity based in Afghanistan for evacuation during the Taliban takeover last summer.

Josie Stewart, who worked in the Foreign Office for seven years, including a stint in the Kabul embassy, suggested senior civil servants in the department had lied to cover up the embarrassing episode.

She told parliament’s foreign affairs select committee that the direction from the prime minister was evidenced in multiple messages on Teams, on emails, and in conversations around the crisis centre, which was set up to try to help the tens of thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee.

Johnson has denied that he had anything to do with the decision for the animal charity, Nowzad, to be allowed to evacuate staff and animals through Kabul airport.

But after a Foreign Office insider came forward in December to reveal the chaos and confusion at the heart of the crisis response, Stewart, who worked on the evacuation, corroborated the claims by revealing further “systemic failures”.

She told MPs that the decision to approve Nowzad’s staff for evacuation “was not in line with policy, as there was no reason to believe these people should be prioritised under the agreed criteria”.

“It was widespread ‘knowledge’ in the FCDO crisis centre that the decision on Nowzad’s Afghan staff came from the prime minister,” Stewart said in newly released testimony.

“I saw messages to this effect on Microsoft Teams, I heard it discussed in the crisis centre including by senior civil servants, and I was copied on numerous emails which clearly suggested this and which no one, including Nigel Casey [the government’s special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan] acting as ‘Crisis Gold’, challenged.”

In the aftermath of the evacuation, the Foreign Office’s permanent secretary, Philip Barton, claimed civil servants had included Nowzad in the “potential cohorts to be considered for evacuation”.

Stewart said: “While factually accurate, from what I heard and saw, Nowzad staff were included as a late addition only in response to this ‘PM decision’. This occurred against the previous judgment of officials.”

She told the committee she was sent an email from Casey that said the national security adviser was speaking to No 10 about the possibility of evacuating Nowzad.

Stewart told the committee it appeared Barton and Casey may have “intentionally lied”. After Casey claimed he had searched his emails and found nothing of relevance to the issue, Stewart suggested he had either not looked for the simple terms “PM” and “Nowzad”, deleted messages or found the correspondence but decided they were unimportant.

Casey blamed the rumour about Johnson ordering Nowzad’s evacuation on a senior official, whom he claimed mistakenly believed that signoff by the national security adviser meant it had come from No 10.

“That was based on an assumption which should not have been made - but was,” Casey said. “It was made in good faith, and I don’t want to attribute any blame.”

Casey admitted the Nowzad evacuation “took up far more official time than it deserved to”, adding: “The people involved from the organisation … behaved pretty disgracefully in their lobbying.”

After Stewart admitted she was prepared to lose her job to call out senior managers for being more “focused on managing reputational risk and political fallout rather than the actual crisis and associated human tragedy”, Barton refused to comment on whether she would be sacked.

David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, said the revelation was “further confirmation that the prime minister put the lives of animals ahead of humans on a personal whim and then lied about doing so”.

The Lib Dems also called for a public inquiry into Johnson’s interventions on behalf of Nowzad.

A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said all its evidence submitted to the committee was provided “in good faith, on the basis of the evidence available to us at the time”.

They added: “We are rightly proud of our staff who worked tirelessly to evacuate more than 15,000 people from Afghanistan within a fortnight … As is the case after all crises, the FCDO is committed to learning lessons and using its experience to improve the way the organisation responds to crisis overseas. We have incorporated many of the lessons into our response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Dominic Dyer, an animal rights activist with ties to Nowzad, tweeted on Monday that Johnson “did intervene directly to get Nowzad staff and families on evacuation list”.

So, "total rhubarb" in this context turns out, in translation, to mean "the truth"! 

Guardian Opinion cartoon - Martin Rowson on the UK’s retreat from Afghanistan Mon 30 Aug 2021

Meanwhile . . . 

. . . Russian troops pound Donbas as Ukraine war enters 100th day

Jon Henley in Paris reports for the Guardian (Fri 3 Jun 2022) as: Moscow has seized about a fifth of Ukrainian territory since its invasion and vows to continue ‘until all goals are achieved’ 

Ukraine will fight off Russia’s invasion, its president has said, while the Kremlin pledged to persist until “all our goals have been achieved” as Moscow’s war entered its 100th day with Russian troops pounding the Donbas region.

“Victory shall be ours,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video featuring the same key ministers and advisers who appeared with him in a defiant broadcast on 24 February, the day his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, launched his unprovoked assault.

“Our team is much bigger,” Zelenskiy declared on Friday. “The armed forces of Ukraine are here. Most importantly, our people, the people of our country, are here. We have been defending Ukraine for 100 days already … Glory to Ukraine.”

In Moscow, the Kremlin’s official spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, insisted that “certain results have been achieved” by Russia’s “military operation”, pointing to what he called the “liberation” of some areas from the “pro-Nazi armed forces of Ukraine”.

Tens of thousands have been killed, millions sent fleeing and whole towns reduced to rubble since the start of the invasion, with Russia’s forces – repelled from around the capital, Kyiv, by fierce Ukrainian resistance – now focused on capturing the east.

Moscow has seized about a fifth of Ukrainian territory, tripling the land under its occupation since 2014 when it seized Crimea and parts of Donbas, where some of the fiercest fighting is centred on the industrial city of Sieverodonetsk.

“This war has and will have no winner,” said Amin Awad, the UN’s assistant secretary-general and crisis coordinator for Ukraine. “Rather, we have witnessed for 100 days what is lost: lives, homes, jobs and prospects.”

Zelenskiy’s office said fierce fighting continued in the city centre on Friday, with the invading forces “shelling civilian infrastructure and Ukrainian military”. The Luhansk regional governor, Serhiy Gaidai, said Russian troops were “levelling everything”.

Accusing Moscow’s forces of destroying hospitals, schools and roads, he said the resistance was confined now to about a fifth of the city, with Ukrainian troops still holding a sprawling steel and chemical works in an industrial zone, Gaidai said.

The situation in Lysychansk, Severodonetsk’s twin city across the river Donets, also looked bad, with about 60% of infrastructure and housing destroyed and internet, mobile phone and gas services all out of operation, Oleksandr Zaika, head of the city’s military-civil administration, said.

Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleskiy Reznikov, said Ukrainian forces had some success in Sievierodonetsk overnight, adding that artillery crews were already training on new Himars and MLRS rocket systems pledged earlier this week by the US and Britain.

Washington had said this week it expected around three weeks of training would be needed before Ukraine can begin using the rockets, which could target Russian rear supply lines and help negate Russia’s artillery fire-power advantage at the front. 

Russia’s recent massive assault in the east has been one of the deadliest phases of the war for both sides, with Moscow making slow but steady progress, squeezing the defenders inside a pocket in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions that make up Donbas.

A man walks next to heavily damaged buildings and destroyed cars in Bakhmut, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine. 

Amid rising fears of a global food crisis, the head of the African Union, Senegalese president, Macky Sall, met Putin in the Black Sea port of Sochi to raise concerns about the war’s consequences for the continent.

Russia and Ukraine account for nearly a third of global wheat supplies, while Russia is also a big fertiliser exporter, and Ukraine is a major exporter of corn and sunflower oil. Ukrainian exports have been halted by a Russian blockade of the country’s ports, while western sanctions have cut off access to Russian output.

Sall asked Putin to “be aware that our countries, even if they are far from the theatre, are victims on an economic level” of the conflict. “That is really creating serious threats to the food security of the continent,” Sall said.

Putin did not mention grain supplies to reporters but said Russia was “always on Africa’s side” and was now keen to improve cooperation. “We place great importance on our relations with African counties,” he said.

Turkey said it expected progress on a plan to unlock grain exports from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports when Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, visits the country next week. Both Moscow and Kyiv want a solution to the crisis, a Turkish official said.

Though hurdles remain – such as payment mechanisms for the agricultural products, and mines floating in the Black Sea – the official said Moscow could “take further positive steps” after it said on Thursday it was open to the plan.

Turkey has already said it is ready to take on a role within an “observation mechanism” if a deal is reached, potentially involving a Turkish naval escort for tankers leaving Ukraine. The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, hosts his Russian counterpart for talks on the plan on 8 June.

Belarus was ready to allow the transit of Ukraine’s grain to Baltic Sea ports if it is also allowed to ship Belarusian goods from those ports, the country’s leader, Alexander Lukashenko, was quoted as saying. Exports from Ukraine via Belarus have been one of the options in discussions led by the UN.

In a phone call with UN secretary-general António Guterres on Friday, Lukashenko said Belarus was ready to free up needed capacity on its railway for Ukraine’s grain, and proposed organising talks between Belarus, Ukraine and other countries ready to provide access to their ports.

On the defence and security front, Turkey said progress on Finland and Sweden’s applications to join Nato – which Ankara is blocking – before an alliance summit in Madrid later this month would depend on their response to Turkey’s demands.

Turkey accuses the two Nordic countries of supporting and harbouring Kurdish militants and other groups it deems terrorists, and says it has not yet received a satisfactory response from Stockholm or Helsinki.

“Nato is not a tourism or economic alliance; it is a security alliance, which means that it must provide security to all its members equally and fairly,” said Ibrahim Kalin, spokesperson and chief foreign policy adviser to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

First the "tragedy", followed by the "farce", and ultimately leading to a war in Ukraine! 

British Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace said the US put Britain in a "very difficult position" following the withdrawal, though they subsequently followed suit. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan had a negative impact on United Kingdom–United States relations, with the British government briefing media against the American government. The fall of Afghanistan also had a negative impact on United States–European Union relations. Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, condemned the US withdrawal, stating that the US' decision to leave was "political" rather than "strategic". In an article on the website of Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, he wrote, "The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours." Blair further accused Biden of being "in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’," and warned that “The world is now uncertain of where the West stands because it is so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by grand strategy but by politics."

In August 2021, Putin's national security adviser Nikolai Patrushev came to the conclusion that "the United States would abandon its allies in Ukraine, just as it abandoned its allies in Afghanistan."

Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council of Russia, told the Izvestia newspaper that the United States abandoned its Afghan allies, saying that the reason for the military victory of the Taliban was the incompetent work of the intelligence services of the United States, Britain and other NATO countries and the typical misplaced belief of the West in the rightness of its decisions. He predicted that the United States would also abandon its allies in Ukraine, saying that "...Kyiv is obsequiously serving the interests of its overseas patrons, striving to get into NATO. But was the ousted pro-American regime in Kabul saved by the fact that Afghanistan had the status of a principal U.S. ally outside NATO? (No). A similar situation awaits supporters of the American choice in Ukraine."

Meanwhile . . . 

. . . Boris Johnson booed as he arrives at St Paul’s for platinum jubilee event

Prime minister greeted with whistles and jeers by crowd waiting at cathedral for Queen’s thanksgiving service

Aubrey Allegretti, Political correspondent for the Guardian, reports on yesterday's incident (Fri 3 Jun 2022): 

Boris Johnson was greeted by a chorus of boos as he arrived at the Queen’s platinum jubilee thanksgiving service on Friday morning.

Stepping out of his car when it pulled up at St Paul’s Cathedral in London with his wife, Carrie, the prime minister was met with boos and whistles by frustrated spectators.

During an awkward 15-second walk up the stairs where senior royals, dignitaries and politicians were marking the second day of celebrations to honour the Queen’s 70-year reign, Johnson appeared unfazed as he smiled and nodded.

A handful of people in the crowds behind him could be seen clapping and there were some high-pitched cheers.

When the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, arrived minutes later, the crowd remained quiet.

Other senior politicians who attended the service, which the Queen missed after suffering discomfort on Thursday evening, included the home secretary, Priti Patel, and foreign secretary, Liz Truss. Former prime ministers were also there to pay tribute to the Queen.

During the thanksgiving service, Johnson gave a reading from Philippians 4 of the New Testament, which says: 

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure … think about such things.”

Afterwards, he was greeted by a small group of supporters cheering, some of whom chanted: “Boris, Boris, Boris.”

The initial greeting was reminiscent of the then chancellor, George Osborne, being booed during the 2012 Paralympic Games in London.

Johnson was heckled on the campaign trail in the run-up to the 2019 election, but still won an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons.

However, being booed by the crowd that gathered outside St Paul’s, made up of royalists who had camped for a front-row spot for hours, could be an ominous sign for Johnson.

A Labour source said: “I don’t know if a Tory PM has ever been booed by a crowd of dedicated royalists before, but it feels a lot like he’s lost the dressing room.”

Dozens of Tory MPs have questioned his leadership or called on him to quit in the aftermath of a damning report into Partygate, which found that parties in Downing Street lasted until 4am, with vomiting and wine spilled up walls.

More than 120 people were penalised by police over the gatherings, and while Johnson has apologised, he has continued to insist he thought he was attending work events and that it was important to keep staff’s morale high throughout the pandemic.

Earlier, the head of the Grassroots Conservatives organisation, which represents rank-and-file Tory members, called on Johnson to quit.

Ed Costello told the Daily Telegraph: “I’ve come to the conclusion that he probably should resign, and if he had any sense he would resign before he was pushed.

“He needs to go before the next election, because some of what he has done will put off voters. He just hasn’t been wholly honest about what went on, and it would have been better if he ’fessed up and it would all have been over.”

Costello said recent tax rises were “silly” given the cost of living crisis and spiralling inflation, adding: “The tax rise is going to hit people at a time when they’re already being hit, and the cut in benefits was a foolish thing to do.”

However, Johnson has been defended by several cabinet ministers in recent days. Jacob Rees-Mogg said this week that the prime minister remained “an enormous electoral asset”.

He added: “I think the idea that a change of leader would help the Conservatives is for the birds. It would be the most divisive thing that the party could do. It’s an exceptionally silly thing to want to try and open the door to Sir Keir Starmer, assuming he manages to survive.”

Patel also called the attempt by Tory MPs to oust Johnson a “sideshow” and told rebels to “forget it”.

Boris Johnson as Johnny Rotten – cartoon for tomorrow's Observer by Chris Riddell (Sat 4 Jun 2022)

God save the Queen, The Fascist regime . . .

The Sex Pistols signed to A&M Records at a March 1977 press ceremony held outside Buckingham Palace. Afterwards, intoxicated, they made their way to the A&M offices, where Sid Vicious reportedly broke a toilet bowl and Johnny Rotten verbally abused members of the label's staff. A couple of days later, the Pistols got into a fight with another band at a club; one of Rotten's pals threatened the life of a friend of A&M's English director; A&M broke their contract with the Pistols on the 16 March. Although twenty-five thousand copies of the "God Save the Queen" single had already been pressed, virtually all were destroyed.

In May, the band signed with Virgin Records, their third new label in little more than half a year. Virgin was more than ready to release "God Save the Queen", but new obstacles arose. Workers at the pressing plant laid down their tools in protest at the song's content.

Jamie Reid's now famous cover, showing Queen Elizabeth II with her features obscured by the song and band names in cutout letters, offended the sleeve's plate makers. The record was finally released on 27 May.

The scabrous lyrics — "God save the queen/She ain't no human being/And there's no future/In England's dreaming" — prompted widespread outcry. Several major chains refused to stock the single. It was banned not only by the BBC but also by every independent radio station, making it the "most heavily censored record in British history". Rotten boasted, "We're the only honest band that's hit this planet in about two thousand million years." 

The Virgin release had been timed to coincide with the height of Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee celebrations. By Jubilee weekend, a week and a half after the record's release, it had sold more than 150,000 copies. On 7 June, McLaren and the record label arranged to charter a private boat and have the Sex Pistols perform while sailing down the River Thames, passing Westminster Pier and the Houses of Parliament.

The event, a mockery of the Queen's river procession planned for two days later, ended in chaos. Police launches forced the boat to dock, and constabulary surrounded the gangplanks at the pier. While the band members and their equipment were hustled down a side stairwell, McLaren, Westwood, and many of the band's entourage were arrested. According to critic Sean O'Hagan's, the Sex Pistols had set off the "last and greatest outbreak of pop-based moral pandemonium".

With the official UK record chart for Jubilee week about to be released, the Daily Mirror predicted that "God Save the Queen" would be number one. As it turned out, the record placed second, behind the Rod Stewart single "I Don't Want to Talk About It" in its fourth week at the top. Many believed that the record had actually qualified for the top spot, but that the chart had been rigged to prevent a spectacular further controversy. 

McLaren later claimed that CBS Records, which was distributing both singles, told him that the Sex Pistols were actually outselling Stewart two to one. There is evidence that an exceptional directive was issued by the British Phonographic Institute, which oversaw the chart-compiling bureau, to exclude sales from record-company operated shops such as Virgin's for that particular week.

The society of the spectacle! 

Today, the Queen's platinum celebrations were a spectacular triumph of organisation over substance. 

Paddington Bear takes tea – and marmalade – with Queen in jubilee video

This pre-recorded segment features the Queen acting opposite the CGI bear, voiced by Ben Whishaw that segues into Queen's performance of "We Will Rock You". 

Ben Beaumont-Thomas reports on this memorable moment for the Guardian (Sat 4 Jun 2022)

Paddington Bear was the secret special guest for the Queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations on Saturday night, appearing alongside the monarch in a sweet-natured video segment.

Just as she did at the 2012 London Olympics, when she appeared with Daniel Craig’s James Bond in a pre-recorded video, the Queen proved a good sport as she acted alongside the CGI bear, voiced by Ben Whishaw, who joined her at Buckingham Palace for afternoon tea.

After patiently tolerating a tea-slurping Paddington, who in typical slapstick fashion covers a footman in cream from a pastry, the Queen reveals that she has stashed a marmalade sandwich in the royal handbag: “I keep mine in here, for later,” she confides to Paddington.

After his appearance, Paddington tweeted:

The video introduced the Platinum Party at the Palace, a showpiece event in the platinum jubilee celebrations.

In a neat segue with the Queen and Paddington clinking out its martial drum beat with teaspoons, Queen – the rock band – opened the show with We Will Rock You, with Brian May playing a guitar solo in front of a statue of Queen Victoria, teeing up performances by Diana Ross, Rod Stewart and more.

Meanwhile . . . 

. . . here's some of the news coverage in Australia. 

The Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II has been an international celebration marking the 70th anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II on 6 February 1952. This is the first time that any monarch in British history has celebrated a platinum jubilee.

At the age of 96 the Queen is physically increasingly frail, but the odds are she will outlast Boris Johnson's premiership. 

So, how long has Boris got as PM?