Buying or Burying Dignity?

A dreadful headline yesterday:

Parents who arrived 10 minutes late for baby daughter's funeral are told: 'We've already buried her'

It speaks for itself - "Michelle Mahoney, 24, and Matthew Small, 25, were on their way when they got stuck in traffic on the way to bury their stillborn baby, who they had named Angel. When they arrived at the graveside they found a small mound of earth and realised their daughter's funeral had gone ahead without them."

The staff at the crematorium were described as being horrified and called the Vicar back to carry out a service for the dead baby, but understandably the bereaved parents remained inconsolable. 

Anyone can of course make a mistake or a bad judgement call and nothing is ever perfect. Those who work in jobs in sensitive areas such as funerals, health and social work have the additional stress of the consequences of a mistake being infinitely more serious emotionally or physically than most people risk.

Yet what struck me about this case, almost as much as the dreadful pain of the distraught parents, was the identity of the undertaker who buried their child without them being there - a contractor with the Cardiff hospital where this sad tale originated. D Caesar Jones was the funeral directors in question - nothing apparently unusual about this until it transpires that this is a mere local subsidiary of a national funeral business, the ironically titled DIGNITY PLC .

Dignity PLC proclaims itself as the "ultimate funeral professionals". It offers advance planning schemes, offers a find a funeral director to steer you to its franchisees, links to the Samaritans and sets out pictures of smiling people to ease you on the way to their bank account. It even provides templates for sympathy letters - so you need never be at a loss for words writing to the bereaved thanks to this Microsoft of the Afterlife.

All very thoughtful - and very worthwhile for their owners as they chalked up a profit of £26 millions in 2009.

I do not know anything about the motives of their shareholders, but it is, with many others of its type, big business making money out of people's most basic needs - in this instance for a dignified exit from life, for time and space to mourn a lost love one.

"DIGNITY" and  "PLC" - can these two monikers logically sit side by side? PLCs are "public limited companies". Under corporate governance law, including after New Labour's botched reforms in the middle of the last decade, PLC's have one sole objective - to maximise the financial return for their shareholders. Any deviation from this by their Officers potentially breaks the law. That is why corporate social responsibility initiatives are never more than revenue-seeking PR campaigns - if they were actually about CSR, those running them would be liable to be fired and even prosecuted for wasting their companies' resources, reducing profits and breaking the law. The UK Government's Business Link encourages businesses to look at CSR because "it can be good for your bottom line" (I.e., profit).

In his book and film, "The Corporation", Joel  Bakan explores the legal fiction, common to most of the western world, that allows PLC's to claim the same legal status as human beings - a PLC is an artificial or legal personality. This ludicrous state of affairs provides all manner of protection for the entity, including being able to claim the right to privacy in its dealings. It also shelters the actual real humans who own shares and benefit from its profits and dividends from any adverse legal and financial consequences from its actions. If it does not pay its suppliers, they are personally immune from its liabilities. If it commits ecocide or manslaughter as a result of bad practices and is sued, they are not financially accountable if it cannot pay its damages. If its officers, driven relentlessly to maximise financial returns for their shareholders, break the law in doing so, it is they who face prosecution, not the often faceless shareholders whom they serve.

Consequently, Bakan characterises the Corporate Personality as essentially psychopathic in its essence - it operates in a totally egocentric, self-interested fashion without conscience or regard for the impact of its actions on individuals, communities, other species or the environment. Beyond those it needs to satisfy its insatiable demand for profits, it has no care for its staff and discards them as soon as they are surplus to requirements.

By contrast, the dictionary definition of dignity , from the Latin root dignus, refers to: "The quality or state of being worthy of esteem or respect; Inherent nobility and worth: the dignity of honest labour."

I pass no judgement on the particular company cited in the story. They are far from alone in seeking to combine an apparent concern for others in their services with maximising the amount of money they make for shareholders who may or may not have any interest or even awareness in what they do - indeed, many shareholders are now other large, faceless PLCs. Consequently, it can be difficult to trace the human identity of many of those who own these fictitious corporate personas - something which may frustrate the efforts of an American woman who, with the assistance of the Green Party of the USA, has taken the law at its word and is now seeking to find a corporate suitor to woo and marry.

In this context, using names like "Dignity" or "Care" or "Kindness" is simply one tool to attract business and harvest money. The people working in such operations may be perfectly decent and caring on an individual basis, and, as Bakan describes, may finish their day going lovingly home to their families and friends, but as corporate entities, such benevolent behaviours would be quite inimical to their purpose.

So the tragic story from Cardiff is sad indeed. But Governments of all hues are committed to nothing but window-dressing when it comes to any reform of our corporate laws, and totally beholden to the market system which has led steadily to larger and larger conglomerates swallowing each other up. Consequently, they have become increasingly remote from those they provide services to, and it is little surprise that such an appalling incident can occur.

Dignity is defined by the Royal College of Nursing as "concerned with how people feel, think and behave in relation to the worth or value of themselves and others." And money can't buy that. Not ever.

BP: "Beyond Petroleum" and its Broken Promises

 Design by: Ross Robinson

Oil men are hardly known for their humility. Ever since the black stuff began to be exploited on a mass-industrial scale at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, gradually usurping coal as the carbon fuel of choice, they have blustered and battered their way to economic and political supremacy across the globe. They have happily undermined democratic governments and movements, sponsored corrupt governments of the most odious kind, such as the House of Ibn Saud in the Arabian peninsula, and happily drilled the environment into oblivion. They have worked without regard to the consequences for both people and planet - witness the Ogoni's travails with the Shell oil company and the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria. In addition, by frustrating anything that threatened this supremacy, such as fuel efficient cars using (potentially) clean energy, the oil industry has shown its moral bankruptcy, just as its profits have soared to record levels.

Of course, with massive funds ploughed into public relations and political lobbying, they have been adept at ensuring that they appear to be on the side of "ordinary people". In the UK, both in 2002 and again now, consumer anger resulting from price rises driven mainly by the oil companies themselves is being deflected onto the Government's fuel duties, rather than on oil companies' soaring profit margins. And likewise, in the USA, any attempts by progressive politicians to restrain the carbon economy, including preventing dangerous exploration such as the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf, have been met with the most outrageous responses likening them to national enemies and traitors. It is little surprise to find that, just weeks after the Gulf disaster, Sarah Palin and her Tea Party allies like Rand Paul were happily dissimulating their way to electoral victory on the back of substantial funding from, among other oil conglomerates, BP, owners of the stricken oil rig.

And there could be no finer example of politics firmly in the pockets of Big Oil than this chillingly bizarre tirade from the 2008 Republican Party Convention.

BP, previously known as British Petroleum, but now in effect a large multinational well above the scope of control of any national government, has a dreadful record on so many counts. For example, in its original guise as the (entirely British owned) Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in 1953, it persuaded then British Premier Winston Churchill and the American Government to sponsor a coup d'etat to overthrow the democratic government of Iran and impose the brutal dictatorship of the Shah. Why? Simply because the elected Premier planned to nationalise the oil industry after nearly fifty years during which Anglo-Persian had been despoiling his country of its biggest asset with barely any payment made to Iran itself.

Later, in the early 2000s, as fears of global warming increased and demands for curbs on the runaway carbon economy grew, BP came up with a new wheeze. Oil would not last forever, they admitted. And so "BP" no longer stood for British Petroleum, but rather "Beyond Petroleum". They were not an oil company at all: no, rather, they were an energy company. And so they announced investment in alternative energy technology development, from carbon capture to solar power and biomass. Why, had we not noticed that even their company logo had always been green coloured - how could we possibly doubt them?

http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2010/06/bp-beyond-petroleum-or-broken-promise.html

Except that the proportion of investment into new technologies was and remains utterly tiny compared to that for oil and gas, as evidenced in 2008 when new CEO Tony Hayward effectively restated the fundamental commitment to oil. Unsurprisingly, if anything, this commitment has increased. In the face of the growing evidence that we are now around the moment of "Peak Oil", BP and others have sought more and more ways of extracting oil from terrain which previously would have been uneconomic for them to do so. Deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has been joined by similar projects all over the world - among many other places, off the west coast of Africa, off Indonesia, and off the north-west coast of Scotland. Now, just a few days ago, BP have sold a 5% stake in their ownership to Russian oil company, Rosneft, in order to begin drilling in the previously unspoiled Arctic.

Deepwater drilling anywhere is exceedingly dangerous - the weather can overwhelm the most sophisticated of human technology; or, as with the Deepwater Horizon, human error, driven by cost-cutting and profit-seeking, can lead to accidents with devastating consequences. Although technology has improved in recent years, as the Gulf disaster has shown, remedying faults at phenomenal depths is difficult in the extreme. In the Arctic, it may well be impossible.

Yet, clapping their hands in delight at the retreat of the northern iceshelf as global warming grips, the oil companies are relentlessly pursuing projects to extract oil and gas in more difficult and more sensitive environments. Product demand is surging with the rise of the emergent BRIC* economies, and as supplies from our normal sources get tighter (we use around 30 times more oil than we discover each year now), the consequent rise in price makes drilling in such difficult conditions more affordable for profit-maximising companies.

Drilling gets into deeper and deeper water

However, it is no less dangerous to their workers, to local communities or the ecology of the surrounding regions. And of course the ultimate irony is that as ice-melt caused by man-made global warming makes drilling in the Arctic feasible, the response of the so called Beyond Petroleum BP is not to anxiously see this seminal environmental disaster as a spur to urgent investment in alternative, clean technologies. Rather, it is viewed as a golden opportunity to grab a bigger share of the oil market.

We cannot prevent runaway global warming and preserve our human civilisation by depending on the goodwill and foresight of the oil industry. Time and again, they have shown their interest is solely in shareholder profit and managerial bonuses. After some desultory handwringing over disasters like Deepwater Horizon, the Prudhoe Bay spill, the Exxon Valdez disaster  and Amoco Cadiz, they have carried on as before. They have colluded in suppressing protest and human rights, involved us in wars like Iraq, employed mercenaries to attack trade unions and local communities, and used sophisticated political lobbying to ensure they remain unconstrained in their activities. Governments may talk of regulation, but any they enact are normally little more than window dressing - the magnates remain untamed.

Multinationals and the market will not deliver the change we need - as oil becomes scarcer, it will become more and more profitable to sell. Developing renewable energy will not be in the interests of these companies because their sole raison d'etre is to maximise their short to medium term profits. The dictates of capitalism incredibly mean that their objective is not even to ensure their own long term success - few of them have strategic plans stretching beyond the next five or ten years. So for the action we need to curtail the carbon economy and invest seriously in cleaner, renewable energy, we need to turn to governments and politics - new, green politics. Only then, will we ever rid ourselves of our carbon addiction and really get beyond petroleum. 

* BRIC = Brazil, Russia, India and China
"My Well came in big and there ain't a dang thing you gonna do about it!"

Thanks to Ross Robinson for permission to use his imaginative logo at the start of the blog. You can get the tee-shirt (or stickers) here:  http://www.redbubble.com/people/rossman72/t-shirts/5196179-2-beyond-petroleum

Never glad confident morning again: Oldham East & The Liberal Zombies

Just after 2 a.m. on Friday, 14th January, returning officer Charlie Parker announced the result of the parliamentary by-election for Oldham East & Saddleworth constituency. Labour's Debbie Abrahams was declared elected, her majority over her Liberal Democrat opponent increased by a factor of over 35 times since the General Election last May and in percentage terms up from less than a quarter of one per cent to a far more comfortable 10.2% - the largest majority in the constituency for any party since its creation.

The Lib Dem vote increased very slightly in per centage terms - by 0.3%, while the big shift of the night was a substantial decline in the Conservative vote - down by over 13% to just 12.8% The right wing UK Independence Party was slightly up while the more extreme right BNP slid to lose its deposit. The Green Party, standing for the first time and with just two weeks of campaigning, but also with an impressive candidate, picked up 530 votes - while four others drew rather fewer between them.

The by-election is worthy of note for a couple of reasons - for one, it was called because the Labour MP who won the seat in May 2010 was ejected by an election court for lying about his Lib Dem opponent, the first instance of this in over a century. Secondly, it was the first significant vote on the Con-Lib Dem Coalition since the general election. It was also, untypically, a three-way marginal in 2010 - Labour were barely a hundred votes ahead of the Lib Dems, with the Conservatives just over two thousand behind. All three had something to play for.

But of course, the story was always going to be what happened to the Lib Dems - it was their complaint that triggered the election; and as it had been a target seat for them, after going into coalition with the Conservatives, backtracking on many of their election pledges and seeing their national opinion poll support slide from 24% to just 7% in some surveys, the big question was whether or not they stood a chance here. Would they win, or could they even be relegated to third place?

In the end, neither happened - their vote share stayed steady and they began and ended in second place. And, of course, their leader and his apparatchiks hastened to hail this as a "strong result" proving they remain a viable force, the third place Tories being the ones with something to worry about. This was a perfectly predictable response - somewhat less so has been the adoption of this rose-tinted analysis those Lib Dems who had previously expressed doubts about the Coalition. From former leader Menzies Campbell and former Party President Simon Hughes, to current President Tim Farron and Lib Dem activists and bloggers, the outcome has been portrayed not as a relief, but nearly as a triumph in these tough times. Full steam ahead for the Coalition these former, alleged doubters and dissidents now appear to be saying.

A 2 horse race, will one nag be off to the glue factory soon?

If sustained, this is a rush of incredibly bad judgement on their part - because, in line with the Lib Dems' desperate efforts to win over Conservative voters with their "it's a two horse race" literature (complete with standard LD misleading bar chart), a tactic nudged gently along by the Conservative leadership to help their flailing Coalition partners, several thousand Conservatives clearly defected to the Lib Dem candidate in a tactical vote. That was enough to shore up the Lib Dem vote share, but in absolute terms their vote total was down by three thousand, while Labour's vote share rose by 10% and smaller parties by 3%. Take away the very substantial but essentially tactical Tory vote, which the Lib Dems worked so hard for -  getting volunteers from all over the UK to phone voters in the constituency and laying on free travel from as far away as Edinburgh to lure activists to the seat - and the real story is the huge collapse of the real Lib Dem vote.

This is no surprise to most people - and frankly, who cares about the fate of the Lib Dems anyway? But for the country, the Lib-Dems-in-denial factor is worrying in that it removes what tiny chance there was that some of them just might constrain the worst of their leadership's toadying up to the right wing Conservative regime that, paradoxically, needs their support to survive.

Not that you would know the Tories need the Lib Dems to stay in Office - there is no distinctive Lib Dem narrative running through the Government. It is in effect a Conservative Government with Lib Dem support, not a Coalition. The Lib Dems of course insist they did not win the General Election - surely, but neither did the Conservatives. Yet what we see being implemented is pretty unalloyed Toryism. The tragedy of Oldham East is that Clegg seems now to be being given the green light from his party to push through yet more of the neoliberalism that has marked their first months in power - on spending cuts in education, health and social welfare, all wrapped up in rank monetarism. Vulnerable people will suffer badly under these essentially ideological initiatives, some of them greatly and terribly.

May Hell mend these wil o' the wisps. They truly are fair weather progressives - puffing up their alleged dissident principles when the polls look bad; delighted to feverishly shed them and hail their glorious leader at every faint glimmer of hope, however transient or delusional. If these last few gasps of opposition to untrammelled Conservative rule give up, it will mean the final extinction of the tattered remnants of a century and a half of social liberalism. They may hope that, if somehow the economic situation improves and people have short enough memories, their fortunes will rise again. Yet logic dictates otherwise - a recovery will benefit the Conservatives alone; a prolonged recession will benefit the progressive opposition. For the Lib Dems, bizarrely neutered by finally being in power, it will be more a long wait for the omnibus to oblivion, a zombie-like existence as their electoral base and local support shrivels and dies around their beleaguered parliamentary party.

Just as Hitler grasped at every last straw as his Bunker was surrounded, imagining ghost armies into existence, so Oldham represents for this party of chancers not so much light at the end of the tunnel as the dawn of the politically dead.

Liberal Zombies - Dying Here!

Will No One Rid Us of These Meddlesome Messiahs?

Henry Plantagenet, King of England and Normandy in the tumultuous second half of the 12^th century, brooked little dissent. Imprisoning even his own sons and his wife when he suspected them of plotting against him, the only real opposition he faced came from his former friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket.  He had originally appointed him as his placeman, but Becket soon proved far from compliant and Henry was infamously heard to mutter "Is there no one who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"

Taking him at his word, four knights rode to Canterbury and dramatically slaughtered the Archbishop at the altar of his cathedral . Henry duly professed his horror and did his penance, even submitting to being scourged by the Pope’s representatives. How could they possibly have thought he meant what he said?

Echoing down through the centuries, the story of Henry and Becket seems very relevant to the last fortnight with first the assassination of Pakistani politician Salman Taseer and then the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, which claimed the lives of six bystanders. Although thousands of miles apart, the two stories have many similarities, not least the atmosphere of fear and loathing in contemporary politics in both increasingly religiously fundamentalist countries.

In Pakistan, Salman Taseer, governor of Punjab province was shot dead by one of his bodyguards who had taken umbrage at his campaign to repeal Pakistan's blasphemy laws. These make any criticism of the Prophet Mohamed an offence punishable by death - leading to a number of exceedingly spurious cases where people have been accused of blasphemy for totally unrelated reasons. In one recent case, a low caste Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who offered water to  higher caste Muslim women was charged with insulting the Prophet and is currently under sentence of death. Taseer took up her case, among others, and has paid for it with his life.

Salman Taseer

His opponents have equivocated - not endorsing the gunman, but not exactly condemning him either. Taseer should have been more careful about what he said, should have considered people's feelings, they suggest. It might be terrible that he had been shot, but, the implication is, perhaps he really brought it on himself. Indeed, the assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, has been lauded by many as a hero, standing up for traditional values and Taseer's friends have been warned not to mourn him.

Thousands of miles away in Arizona, a lone gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, loaded himself up with ammo and strolled down to a local "open day" for the public to meet their elected representatives. Targeting Democrat Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, he shot her in the head and sprayed his bullets into the crowd. He killed six people, including a 9 year old girl, and wounded 14 more before being overpowered. Remarkably, although a bullet traversed the length of her brain, surgeons hold out the prospect of a good recovery for Gabrielle Giffords. But the health of American politics is another matter entirely.

Angry America: Tea Party protesting for traditional values

The would-be assassin has turned out to be a loner, but one steeped in the Internet rage of the US Rightwing. Recently coalesced around the informal (but well funded) Tea Party movement headed by former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the far Right in the States has a large and growing coalition of the angry. Since the laws on bias in news reporting were removed by the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, the sensationalist rightwing "shock jocks" of American radio and cable TV, like Glenn Beck, have surged both in popularity and in brazen lies. They have, among other tactics, demonised swathes of the population - Hispanics, blacks and Muslims especially to tarnish them somehow as un-American fifth columnists. They have insinuated that both Bill and Hilary Clinton were involved in murder and extortion on their rise to the Whitehouse. Apoplexy reigned when Obama won the Presidency in spite of their best efforts to throw everything at him from not being a true American citizen (giving rise to the Birther Movement), to being a secret Muslim and organising concentration camps for imprisoning conservatives.

The bankrupt ignorance of their cause peaked during the health debate with ludicrous monikers used to describe Obama such as "Communist Nazi". Sadly, their strategy worked and in November last year the Republicans won a significant victory in the House of Representatives, though not the landslide some had anticipated.

Palin's cross hairs target map

But worst of all has been Palin and her acolytes - like many on the radical right using a collection of pseudo-religious and military rhetoric to describe the alleged threats to their country and the response they desire. While often not indulging herslef, she has done nothing to temper or rein in her acolytes and associaes as they rail on about "Armageddon America", the End of Days, 30,000 guillotines purchased to behead Obama's opponents, the New World Order Conspiracy, the sinister Black Helicopters, all of course underpinned by Islam's alleged desire to destroy the USA. Breathtakingly, Trent Humphries, one of the Arizona Tea Party's founders, has even described their movement as a co-victim of the shootings, shamefully disrespecting the deaths and injuries of the real victims.

And the response they prescribe? Time to go on crusade; time to fight; time to target opponents, as in the now infamous cross-hair campaign map published by Palin with Giffords' name shown as a through a rifle-sight. And Giffords own local opponent had encouraged voters to join him in firing machine guns to show their determination to "take back" their state:  "Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly”.

"Satan" Obama

The BBC in is quaintly impartial way has struggled to emphasise that both sides of the political debate in America are increasingly divided from each other and strident in their rhetoric. Maybe; but there is no doubt that it is the radical right wingers who are taking this to the extreme, cranking up rhetoric and undermining both rational debate and encouraging violence. Again and again, it is the radical Right who are found with people in their ranks with obsessions with guns and a propensity to violence. Even in the UK, while hundreds of thousands of pounds of police money are wasted funding agents provocateurs to spy on climate demonstrators and students, it is extreme right wing BNP members and sympathisers who are letting off nail bombs to kill blacks and gay people, or pouring petrol through letter boxes to burn out asylum seekers. I can't recall the last time a liberal was convicted for shooting an opponent, burning property or planning explosions in public places. 

The Arizona gunman almost certainly worked alone and may indeed have mental health problems - but can his ramblings about the American Government and his violence really be divorced from a political atmosphere where it is acceptable to denigrate the President as a traitor because he wants to extend healthcare to poor people? Was he somehow immune to a culture which stigmatises those who do not agree with Palin and her acolytes as conspirators against the Nation under God? Not only Communist - but blasphemers and heretics to boot?

Henry may have genuinely regretted Becket's death, but it was the atmosphere of violence around his Court, created by him, that made it happen. Similarly, Palin and the Tea Party may equally regret the Arizona massacre, but they too need to reflect on their words and actions, and how these have fostered a bellicose zeitgeist where the bullet is as valid as the ballot. They aspire to lead a movement, and consequently they must shoulder responsibility for it too. Likewise, the leaders of Pakistan's teetering democracy need to make clear that violence has no place in their politics. Clauswitz described war as "the continuation of politics by other means". In the hysterical, conflict-charged culture of contemporary politics, we must not allow those with sinister agendas to turn politics into war by other means.

So how far have we come since Henry's knights rode like Sauron's Orcs to do their Master's dirty deed for him in Canterbury Cathedral that dark evening in 1170?  And in such an atmosphere where well-funded, well-organised populists see democracy as just one of several tools to gain and keep power, how long will it be before they saddle up and once again ride out to do their Masters' (or Mistresses') unholy bidding?

RIP Pete Postlethwaite, 7 February 1946 – 2 January 2011

The actor and environmental activist Pete Postlethwaite has died of cancer at just 64 years of age. His film career was rich and varied and whether watching "Brassed Off" with its wrath (and his passionate speech at the end) directed at the closure of the pits by an uncaring government, or his sinister turn in "The Usual Suspects", or his role as the custodian of humanity's decline in "Age of Stupid", he was always engaging and fascinating. His work was realistic without ever being mundane, often thought-provoking but still often entertaining. He navigated both the mainstream with appearances in movies like "Jurassic Park", "James & The Giant Peach" and TV series like "The Professionals" and "Sharpe", and the more specialist genres, such as "The Constant Gardener" with its anti-corporate theme and "In The Name of the Father" with its exposition of British involvement in Northern Ireland. He was in last year's blockbuster, "Inception". Outside films, he was also an accomplished stage actor, including recently as King Lear.

Suffice to say, having passed away all too early, he will be sadly missed by people from many walks of life. His activism was deep and genuine, void of courting the personal publicity that some thespians and other performers self-servingly seek about their "charity and campaigning" work. His "Age of Stupid", where he plays a custodian of the history of humanity looking back at our inability to save ourselves from self-destruction, will undoubtedly stand as a monument to both his acting and activism.

He will be missed, but not forgotten. And we have a chance still to look forward to enjoying a new performance from him one final time in April, in the film "Killing Bono".

The Stuff of Christmas

In the 1936 film, "Things to Come", based on the H.G. Wells novel "The Shape of Things to Come", an elderly man watches his grandchildren excitedly opening their Christmas presents and reflects a little sadly on how complex their playthings have become, pondering "I wonder sometimes if all these new toys aren't a bit much."

It is perhaps a little passe to lament that "Christmas has lost its meaning" as some are wont to do every Christmas, because the Christmas we know - of yule trees and Santa Claus and presents - is a relatively new phenomenon, driven almost entirely by commercial considerations. The Victorians were first, using it to showcase the gains of Empire when the emergent middle classes sought to keep up with their neighbours in a social arms race. As developing technology permits ever greater mass production, this trend has continued ever since. Even Santa himself, based on a 4th century Bishop who lived as a pauper and gave all his wealth to the poor, has been appropriated, his red and white uniform consolidated (though not, as myth claims, actually invented) by the Coca Cola multinational for their mass marketing in the inter-war years.

Santa Cola

Until we reach this sad pass: perhaps the first time some approving parents have posted on Youtube the reaction of disgust of a toddler when his present of a book is not sophisticated enough to match his expectations: "Books for Christmas...what the heck is that?" What would 1936's grandpa make of it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv4Hpz-GI3g&feature=player_embedded

Of course, Christmas is simply an extreme manifestation of the commercial society we live in, of the mantra that says our value is not within ourselves or our actions, but rather contained in the financial cost of our possessions. An advert currently running  shows a woman and her partner admiring their new cooker and units in their amazingly over sized kitchen, worryingly more than a little excited by their acquisition. "That will get the neighbours talking!" the voiceover proclaims smugly as a (woman) visitor appears in the doorway, similarly keen to see the shiny new cookery. "Look!" the voiceover continues, "they're here already!"

Perhaps they needed "a new kitchen", but the message is nothing to do with real need. It is about status. And, driven on by the gurus of marketing, this is what sets the pace of our society and our lives, regardless of how miserable deep down it makes us feel. The message is simple: you do not yet have enough; once you have some more, a bigger car, a wider TV, a larger house, a shinier bathroom, then, you will be happy. 

Except of course you won't. Because in a world where products are made with a deliberately inbuilt obsolescence, sooner or later you will have to replace what you have got. That's of course if you haven't already replaced it because your next door neighbour has a more expensive one. With satisfaction forever elusive, endless gratification is all that remains.

 

All this comes at a price to the environment as we gobble up more and more resources as foretold in Hardin's 1968 masterpiece, "Tragedy of the Commons". With emergent economies such as Brazil, India and China creating between them billions of more consumers keen to clamber up the same frenetic ladder of acquisition and consumption as the West has already ascended, there is no sign of a let up. Chillingly, if they reach the same level as the western economies, we will need four more planet Earths to sustain the unsustainable.

Just take the pills

But personally, it is not desirable either. There is a plethora of evidence that beyond a level of reasonable sufficiency (one UK survey suggests an annual income of around £30,000/$46,000, a US one £48,000/£$75,000), happiness does not increase with income - indeed, there is some indication of an actual decline. Except of course, the message of the market society is that you can buy more happiness, if you just work a little harder, longer, earn that bit extra...keep going...satisfaction is just around the corner. And if you fail, if you fall into unpayable debt or fall off the greasy pole, then it is your failure, your inability to work hard or smart enough. Your are fated not to be a Master of the Universe, as some international traders style themselves. Should you get depressed about that, of course, there's money in that for someone else too.

In a survey of British and American employees on what motivates them most, managers identified pay, benefits and promotion but by contrast, the staff identified security, fairness and control of their own work. However, society works on the basis of the first group of perceptions - capitalism sets us all up, ultimately, in competition with each other over resources and rewards - within our organisations, between them, between countries and cultures.

Social simians

Yet humans are striking not on account of our competitiveness; rather we are marked by our co-operative spirit, our community and our shared humanity. It is not without good reason that when we talk of the humane, we mean the compassionate, the caring, the empathic, the sharing. These qualities are at the heart of our development and progress on this planet - they were core to our origins as evidenced by the social nature of the apes that are our closest relatives. And these traits, too, have been central to the rise of societies of people, interacting and working with each other, caring for one another infinitely more frequently than being in conflict.

This is the true, eternal Human Spirit. The economic system we exist under, by contrast, is alien to our innate Nature and the root of much of our unhappiness and struggle with ourselves and with others. For nearly all of our existence, we have worked to different aims and values than profit maximisation and individual self-interest. Not all of these were laudable, but many were predicated on community and shared resources, and a common fate.

There is much wrong in our world. But our hopes, and the hopes for the many species whose survival now depends on what we choose to do, lie with our own intrinsic instincts of mutuality and selfless sustainability. For aeons, humans lived with our planet, nurturing its resources for future generations and for times they would not personally live to see. If, perhaps at Christmas, or New Year, or whatever moment of transition is important to each of us, we reflect on what has been, we can still, even now, make a new beginning for us all.

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” (Neil Armstrong)

The Gulf Stream: does the Government know it has stopped?

Is there a fundamental shift taking place in our winter climate in northern Europe, and Britain in particular? What does the Government know that it is not quite ready to tell us lesser mortals?

British Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, has been talking in the Commons today about how the transport network has been struggling in the freezing temperatures and heavy snow of the last few weeks. As footage repeated over and over by the media shows, with huge numbers of people seeking to travel in the days leading up to Christmas, nearly every form of transport is under strain. Hammond insists that, with temperatures well below freezing for days on end and a full 5C lower than normal for this time of year, many services have struggled but just about coped. Yet, crucially, he pondered if this cost-cutting Government should now invest in the equipment necessary to counter the impact of regularly severe winter weather as he felt it right to question" if there is a step change happening to our winters." The Chief Scientist is to be asked to comment.

Slipped as an aside into a parliamentary announcement on transport, this is on the one hand a startling statement by a Minister of the mainstream parties, but equally not news to those who have been warning about the consequences of climate change for many years. As world temperatures increase thanks to man-made greenhouse gas emissions - and this year has, in spite of the last few days, been the warmest in recent history - global warming is not just about constant heating up. It is also about disruption to and destruction of all sorts of local or regional micro-climates.

North-western Europe has benefited for thousands of years from the warming effect of the Gulf Stream, a channel of warm water known as the conveyor (and above it the warm air of the Jet Stream) from the Mexican Gulf and Caribbean that flows across the Atlantic to bring mild weather all year round to the European seaboard. Britain and Ireland especially benefit, greatly assisting our agriculture and reducing our energy costs. Glasgow, for example, is on the same latitude as the Russian capital Moscow, but has enjoyed a much warmer climate. As far up the western Scottish coast as places like Inverary, parallel to icy cities like Estonian Riga, the temperate climate can be seen in the flora and fauna, with even (imported) palm trees thriving.

But for years, environmentalists and greens have been warning that global temperature increases could bring the Stream shuddering to a halt. Indeed, in 2003, even the Pentagon postulated the possibility of a shutdown of the conveyor by 2010. The theory holds that, as melting ice from Greenland and the Arctic flows south into the Atlantic, this disrupts the flow of warm weather from the Gulf. The inflow of cold water onto warm increases storms and begins to slow and  eventually switch off the Gulf Stream permanently. This in turn leads to what Mr Hammond so matter-of-factly mentioned this afternoon in between the latest on flights from Heathrow and lack of de-icer at Brussels airport - substantially lower temperatures in Britain andn the rest of north-western Europe, ironically as the rest of the world warms. Especially severe winters have been predicted as a result.

Hammond made no mention of the cause of this possible step change, so why has he postulated it at all now? We have had two bad winters in a row, but as any climatologist will tell you, that is still weather, not climate. The Minister was silent, but there is very worrying evidence that the Gulf Stream has in fact stopped reaching north European shores in recent months.

Some scientists, such as Dr. Gianluigi Zangari of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy, who has been part of a team monitoring the Gulf Stream for the last decade, have concluded that on 12 June this year, it effectively stopped. It no longer reaches as far as Ireland. Since the late summer and early autumn, he and others have been warning of an early and severe winter in north-western Europe, and this now seems borne out by events. It may be too early to be certain that is has ceased permanently, but it has changed enough to have a very significant impact on people's lives - including ending many of them through fuel poverty, hypothermia and related effects.

Perhaps Mr Hammond and his colleagues already know this and are trying to soften us up for the bad news. More likely, it may be that they do not see the significance of all this, but in their ignorant nonchalance, our political masters betray the future. We need to act now, not in another decade or two, to stop climate disruption escalating exponentially. And that will mean some significant changes to how we live.

The Big Chill - get used to it?

As just one example, yes, it is a shame to see tens of thousands of people crammed into airport terminals, sleeping on the floor and wondering if they will make it home for Christmas. But on a normal day at Heathrow Airport, an aeroplane arrives or takes off every forty seconds: and that is just one airport of thousands round the world. Just how realistic is it to think that we can continue like this? How sustainable does anyone seriously think the level of international travel, global trade and cheap flights really is? Anyone with any knowledge of carbon fuels will tell you we are now passing Peak Oil production - we consume almost forty times more oil each year than we discover and so reserves are depleting rapidly.

We need to develop new ways of communicating - the technology is there, but it is seen as complementing travel rather than replacing it - and begin to adjust our expectations. "Local" needs to be the future - for work, for production and distribution, for leisure and relaxation. It does not mean an end to international trade and travel completely, but our desires and the possibilities have to become far more realistic and sustainable, for all our sakes.

The only alternative is to carry on partying into chaos.

It would be better to have a Government that plans for and encourages that sort of step change rather than looks, so predictably, at new style snow ploughs and de-icing chemicals as the sticking plaster response to this paradigm shift in the way we need to live.

The Failure of Kyoto: why Cancun will not save us

World leaders are hailing the agreement at Cancun as a qualified success. With the exception of Bolivia, delegates have signed up to a new commitment to reach agreement on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions within the next two years. Alongside this, they undertook to provide $100 billion in aid by 2020 and support measures to protect tropical forests and new ways to share new clean energy technologies - a restatement of an earlier, unfulfilled pledge.

Cancun is seen as a halfway house to a reviewed/renewed Kyoto Protocol, and the agreement essentially is little more than a commitment to do something unspecified by 2012, when the current, largely unimplemented treaty is due to expire. Any hard decisions have been delayed to the next round of talks in Bonn - the reason for Bolivia's resistance to the half-hearted agreement.

The Kyoto Protocol was drawn up in 1997 and sought pledges from the international community to cut greenhouse gases -carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride, and two groups of gases, hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons- by 5.2% against their 1990 levels by 2012. But many of the worst polluters - the USA, China and Australia in particular, either dragged their feet over ratification or refused to sign completely. While some countries did make some progress - the UK under the last Labour Government did take some bold if rather incomplete steps - this was in some cases a result of reduced energy use because of economic recession rather than developing new, sustainable alternative sources such as solar or wind power. In other cases, the Protocol's controversial permitting of carbon trading as a means of reducing emissions on paper (mainly by rich countries purchasing quotas from poor countries that were never going to use their quotas in any case) allowed some to claim reductions when in fact the opposite had happened.

Business as usual on Planet Earth

In many parts of the world, "business as usual" means that industrialisation has continued apace, with voodoo solutions such as biofuels, carbon capture and seeding the seas with various minerals touted as miraculous answers to the emerging climate crisis. The consequence has been that, as of the end of 2009, rather than effecting a 5.2% reduction in gases, the world's output had increased by 41% since 1991.

Of course, with the world in recession following the banking crisis, cynics and fair weather environmentalists contend that climate action will need to wait. It is written off as a luxury we cannot afford. In the UK, the right wing point to the recent cold weather as apparent proof that global warming is a sham, invented by a conspiracy of scientists to gain government grants for their work.

But 2010 has been the warmest year on record. More and more evidence shows we are close to a tipping point such as one where warming melts the Siberian tundra to an extent that massive quantities of methane are released into the atmosphere, exponentially increasing the rate by which the planet heats up and in turn triggering more and more feedback points where increases in gases in the air lead to more and more rapid warming. Even conservative estimates accept that it is now impossible to contain global warming to 2C in the next century and far higher increases are likely.

A 5C increase is a distinct possibility in the decades ahead. Nice enough if you have that for a few weeks in the summer in the UK, but apply it worldwide on a permanent basis all year round and global catastrophe results - massive crop failures will induce mass starvation across the planet; hundreds of millions, even billions of climate refugees will result; social conflict and resource wars will burgeon; whole states will fail and some, like the Maldives, will disappear under the rising sea levels. Water scarcities will plague many places, while others will face severe flooding. Humanity's ability to survive at any civilised level will be seriously tested. And this will not be in two or three centuries time - rather much of the disruption will begin in the next few years, and many alive now will likely face the worst consequences of our collective failure to act in time.

So tackling global warming is no luxury, able to be set aside for a few years while the bankers replenish their coffers. We face the greatest threat in history not to the planet - we are arrogant to use phrases like save the planet; Earth does not need us and will long outlive our kind. The real threat is to our own species, the human race, and the time for action is now.

The Party Is Over

As I write, a Facebook group is holding the Liberal Democrats' Funeral in cyberspace. This follows on from yesterday's debate on tuition fees when the Lib Dem MPs split three ways over the proposed trebling of charges on students' attending English universities (devolution means different arrangements apply in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland).

The press today (once it got over the attack on the Prince of Wales car by students chanting "Off with your heads!") has been full of speculation about the implications for the party. Some have suggested the split - roughly between the "Orange Book" free market liberals under party leader Nick Clegg, and more progressive social liberals - is damaging but, now that the debate is over, can be put behind them. Others have suggested that the divide shows that the "real" Liberal Democrats, 70% of whom feel they are left-of-centre progressives in sharp contrast to the decidedly right wing agenda of the Coalition Government, have stood up and will begin to assert some degree of independence or at least a clearer identity for their party.

Clegg - full steam ahead to oblivion

Yet the real damage to the Lib Dems is not that they split - bad though that looks. Rather, the damage is that the proposed changes got through and the Government is unaffected in its further drive to dismantle not only education, but the NHS as we know it and the wider Welfare State, with punitive measures being introduced against disabled people and the long term unemployed. Clegg has suggested that now that tuition fees are dealt with, there are no outstanding disagreements within the Lib Dems and the Coalition will progress with its full programme - cynically, Lib Dem strategists believe that the public will have forgotten all about the tuition fee debacle by the election due in spring 2015.

So what we witness now is the real, truly strange death of the Lib Dems as a progressive force in British politics. Those who voted against the tuition fees (or perhaps even worse, the worm tongues who abstained) did so in the full knowledge that the measures would almost certainly pass. Their opposition therefore was a self-serving luxury - so they can insist to students that "it wasn't me guv" while continuing to support one of the most ideologically right wing governments in British history. Lib Dems are now at the heart of a project which is dismantling the legacy of great Liberal reformers like Keynes and Beveridge, and even Lloyd George, who played such seminal roles in establishing the Welfare State that has served Britain so well for the last sixty five years.

It is because the Coalition has survived that the Lib Dems should be afraid. Had it collapsed or been transformed into a less cohesive project, they may have been able to reassert some degree of their independence from the Conservatives, to re-establish something distinct about their contribution to the government. As it is, they are now forever sucked deep into the Clegg-Cameron programme, where they provide useful human shields for the worst Conservative reforms, cravenly defending them on dubious grounds of economic necessity. Clegg insists the Lib Dems did not win the election and so have to submit to not getting their policies adopted by the Government. Fair enough, but with barely 35% of the vote and no majority in the Commons, the Tories did not win either - so why do the Lib Dems yield again and again to policies which clearly have a deep blue imprimatur? On a whole slate of issues, they are driving through extreme liberatrian policies which even the Thatcher Government did not attempt back in the 1980s - and increasingly they are not even deploying their previous pleas of financial need. Rather, they simply do what they ideologically want to do.

The reason for this adoption of what in American terms would be seen as a pretty neo-liberal stance is straightforward - the Lib Dems are not in essence a progressive force. There are progressives in their ranks, no doubt, but as a party they have long since shed any progressive core in their thinking. Pragmatism in their coalitions and pacts at local level over local issues has perhaps infected them so badly that it has led them to both abandon all principles and attract people to join them who are essentially apolitical. To many Lib Dems politics are viewed as either a career choice or a part-time hobby rather than a belief or set of values about how society should function. For the ambitious, it is an alternative to banking; for the more casual, it can be a toss up between Focus leafleting and the local amateur drama society. Politics is largely absent from their activities or thinking.

And so, now that they are no longer in the position of being able to oppose everything, they are like rabbits in headlights, startled and overwhelmed by the choices and responsibilities facing them, clinging to Cameron's coat-tails to give them some sense of direction, however perverse that is set against their claimed progressive identity.

Freefalling to 8% support in the latest poll - barely a third of what they achieved at the election in May, a Lib Dem funeral is wholly appropriate. The party is unlikely to disappear completely, but it clearly faces massive losses in elections for the foreseeable future as well as a decline in membership and financial support. The fantasy peddled by Clegg's faction that they will be strong enough to have a further Coalition with the Tories after 2015 will remain just that - unless, as happened in the 1930s and 1940s, the Conservatives give a few favoured Lib Dems a free run in some constituencies in order to project themselves as part of a wider movement than the Tories alone.

But more than ever the question that will be most relevant about the Lib Dems will be : "What are they for?"

And answer there will be none.



Let's hope that at least it's a Co-op funeral - it might salvage a little social credibility for them at the very end; and there should be a cracking Afternoon Tea afterwards...

The Lib Dem Funeral 

"Say Goodbye To Broken Promises" - probably the most ironic and cynical party broadcast in history.

From the Cradle of Humanity to the Heart of Darkness: Africa's Bitter Legacy

The election in Ivory Coast in western Africa last week has descended into a dangerous stand off between the supporters of the incumbent President, Laurent Gbagbo, who nearly all international monitors as well as the national electoral commission agree has lost, and his challenger, Alassane Ouattara. A political crisis threatens to develop into something much more violent - this after a campaign seen as the country's best chance in years of healing itself of its deep divisions. These had been suppressed for nearly three decades since independence, but the ousting of a dictatorship in 1999 unleashed the inherent tensions between the Muslim north and Christian south and they have featured prominently in Ivorian politics ever since.

It is a common theme across much of northern-central Africa - the faultline between the Muslim and Christian polities that skirts the northern zones of places like Ivory Coast, Nigeria and, most notably, Sudan. Much as these and other tensions have plagued similarly invented countries, such as Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland and Iraq, African states have frequently struggled to overcome their internal divisions, much to the mirth of western racists and apologists for colonialism who snort that it never happened under us.

And yet, if anything is a legacy of colonialism in Africa, even more than in most other places in the world, it is the ludicrous system of states that were left behind by the retreating European powers after 1945. If the winds of change were blowing, they didn't blow quite hard enough to change the borders of what were European imposed administrative divisions into the genuine geographical boundaries of nation states. Consider Zimbabwe - there, Shona were shoe-horned into a state with the Ndebele, even although the latter had much more in common with the people of Botswana to the west. Left to their own devices, a very different map would have emerged.

A Colonial Convenience - A Continent's artifical borders

Nigeria, scene of the dreadful Biafran war, was similarly an artificial entity, created from at least three major and many smaller ethnic groups - the Muslim Hausa-Fulani in the north; the Christian Yoruba and Ibos in the south. Different cultures, different languages, different histories - their sole commonality was to have the same former Colonial Master, Britain, who had found it useful to lump them together into "Nigeria".

The Sudan was forged by British militarists, hellbent during the European "Scramble for Africa" at the end of the 19th century, to create a Red Corridor from the Suez to the Cape, so that you could travel from the north to the south of the Continent without leaving British territory. By bloody violence and conquest, they succeeded and for over five decades the Union Flag flew over the largest area of Africa, followed not far behind by the French Tricolour and the personal flag of the King of Belgium in the Congo (setting of Conrad's appropriately titled novel, "The Heart of Darkness").

When the Europeans bowed to the growing demands for independence in the 1950s and 1960s, they left behind poorly educated populations - when Belgium left the Congo, for example, in 1961, there were just 6 graduates in the entire country - hamstrung by the continued ownership of much of their land and most of their natural resources, especially minerals, by private companies from their colonial Mother Countries. With interference by these companies and their governments to ensure local regimes remained friendly, democratic institutions soon collapsed as military regimes took power and years of instability and corruption followed. Men like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (formerly Congo), the endless succession of military regimes in Nigeria and latterly the corruption of the Mugabe administration in Zimbabwe conspired to ensure that Africans in whole swathes of the Continent were denied justice and freedom or the ability to develop their potential. The white supremacy in apartheid South Africa prolonged this, sponsoring terrorist movements like the UNITA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, undermining left wing governments that, on the whole, sought African solutions to their problems.

Mobutu of Zaire - corrupt murderer and friend of the West

Indeed, in the last 15 years, democracy has swept Africa much as it had previously swept South America. It would be wrong to imply that good governance exists everywhere - the African Union itself has called for the development of far stronger institutions and much better behaviour by political leaders. But democratic rule is asserted now in the vast majority of African countries and Ivory Coast is as notable for its crisis being political in its nature as it is unusual now for an incumbent regime to refuse a transfer of power following a vote by the people.

But the tensions alluded to earlier remain - most African states would not have developed naturally into their current guises. That none of them has ever seized any territory from their neighbours is a testimony to their inherent common sense and restraint. Sudan, now embarking on a popular referendum which is likely to see it divided into two new states - a Muslim north and Christian south - may be showing a peaceful way forward. For just as it should be hoped that different ethnicities can and should learn to live together in peace and co-operation, this can only be achieved willingly and over time. It cannot be borne from the bitter, violent and rapacious legacy of Colonialism.

Europe's tribal wars killed tens of millions

And for those in the West who might sneer, let them consider a few things - our own struggle to make something of a multi-national, multi-cultural institution, the EU, is stuttering towards collapse amidst the current economic crisis. As for bloody tribal wars, surely the worst wars of all were the two that plagued Europe's tribes in 1914-18 and 1939-45? Just imagine, had some African Colonial Power lumped the south of England in with the north of France, and eastern France with western Germany and told them to live together as new, independent states - would they have lasted a week, never mind the fifty years that many African states have now existed for?

Africa was the cradle of humanity - in the final analysis, every human walking this planet is of African origins. All the more appalling then that this, our beautiful Mother Continent, and its inhabitants have been ravaged by slavers, "explorers" and armies with total disregard for any spark of humanity. Since independence, neo-colonialist covert operations, bribery and big business have continued the exploitation and through no fault of its own, Africa is now on the frontline of the climate change crisis.

Europe has no right to lecture Africa. No right to feel superior. We have only a duty and responsibility - to apologise and make reparations for the mess we made.