A Europe for People, Not Profit

On Monday, the British Parliament will debate and vote on a motion sponsored by eurosceptic Conservative MPs to hold a referendum on whether or not to leave the European Union. In the midst of the Eurozone crisis, while David Cameron has insisted on a three line whip to keep his fractious right-wingers in line and the Lib Dems will vote against, even although their leader proposed an in-or-out referendum in 2008. But with as many as 85 Conservatives predicted to be ready to break that line, the Coalition will almost certainly need - and get - Labour Party support to vote the proposal down.

And so it is very unlikely that the British people will get a referendum - even although most of them want one. So much for democracy and so much for the three parties that dominate our political world continue to disconnect further and further from the electorate they govern.

The European project was born in the aftermath of the two world wars that dominated the Continent during the first part of the 20th century. The worst conflicts in human history originated in her heartlands. From that perspective, for now at any rate, the EU has played a positive role - with the dreadful exception of the former Yugoslavia, the hot air of Presidents, Prime Ministers and bureaucrats has replaced the guns of Krupps and the Birmingham Small Arms Company.

Yet the absence of war cannot in itself justify the failures of the behemoth that the European Union has become - while its bureaucracy is not quite the bloated gravy train so beloved of the British tabloid writers, the Eurozone project has brought misery to millions of ordinary people as the European Central Bank, like banks everywhere, continues to put the interests of international finance ahead of the needs of European citizens. In other respects too, EU policy focus is very much on encouraging and protecting big business and its decision-making processes are remote and unaccountable to ordinary citizens.

Of course, listening to the Tory and UKIP eurosceptics railing about Europe taking over Britian, including  blatantly lying about straight bananas (why does no one ever wonder where these are?), their reasons for wanting a referendum soon become clear. They accept that Europe is a vital trade partner for Britain, plus perhaps they worry about having to accommodate the half a million or so angry British pensioners who would lose their right of abode in Spain, plus the 200,000 Britons in France who would be heading back to our shores.

Euromyths - according to legend, all our bananas should look like this.

So what do they want instead? A renegotiated relationship - some of them argue for a sort of club class membership, while others want to be completely outside but with special privileges of access.

What these people object to are the regulations that ensure some degree of common social protection and health and safety rules around Europe, so that one country can't undercut another by paying its workers miniscule wages and forcing them to work in dangerous conditions. The EU has for two decades been the main proponent of new safety legislation in the workplace - if it wasn't for the EU, British workers would have no entitlement to a 20 minute unpaid break after six hours of working; pregnant women would not be entitled to protective arrangements for using computer screens; and employers would not have to consult their workers before moving their jobs out of the UK. Small protections and far from ideal, but better than nothing. This is what the right-wingers in the Tories and UKIP are really fretting about - the impact on capitalists profit margins of the marginal improvements in workers conditions through European legislation.

But these motives aside, it is time to have a proper debate on the EU and vote on whether Britain remains in it. It is welcome that the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas MP, has put forward an amendment to the referendum proposal calling for a national vote on whether the EU should become more democratically accountable and economic powers be devolved back to nation states. By default, this should mean the ending of the ludicrous straight-jacket that is the Euro - if Greece still had the drachma, the current financial crisis would have far less impact.

We need multinational institutions like the EU to be able to tackle the global crisis of climate change - no one country can fight that alone. And in a globalised world where so many international corporations operate above and beyond the writ of any national governments, it is only international public and democratically accountable bodies that will ever have any hope of taming the damage they are doing. But in parallel, the Union needs to focus on the needs of its member societies rather than the desires of  international capital.

The European Economic Community emerged from the gound breaking coal and steel community forged between the former enemies France and Germany just months after Hitler's demise. If its founding purpose of ensuring that European will never again fight European is to be secured, the Union must be one for the people of our Continent and the wider world. If it is run instead for the rich, for the owners of the multinationals, then there will be no social peace and in the absence of a democratic, social Europe, as competition over increasingly scarce resources becomes ever fiercer, the gun factories may soon be taking new orders once more.

Europe past, or Europe future?

For Whom The Bell Tolls

WPC Yvonne Fletcher, killed outside the Libyan embassy in London,  1984, aged 25

Lt-Col Moammer al-Gaddafi, killed Sirte, 2011, aged 69

“Any (one's) death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

John Donne, 1572 to 1631

Death of a Dictator

Moammer al-Gaddafi is dead. Trapped near his hometown of Sirte by a combination of NATO drones and Libyan NTC fighters, a storm drain was his final refuge as his bodyguards fought to the death around him. Then, filmed as ever these days by mobile phone cameras, he was dragged to a truck, pleading for his life and brutalised to death. His bloodied corpse was then dragged around, still filmed, before being taken to a hospital in Misrata for crowds to come and stare, and photograph a bit more.

The photographs and video footage have been transmitted around the world already - shown on websites, TV channels, newspapers and even described in some detail on the radio. And as the world has gawped and Libyans celebrated, western leaders like Obama, Cameron and Clinton have hailed the moment, declaring their pride.

Gaddafi's regime was a harsh one, no doubt, although many others are worse and to the end the Leader clearly retained the loyalty of many of his compatriots. Thousands died or were tortured in his prisons; his agents killed his opponents at home and abroad (although it remains exceedingly unlikely that he had anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing); and he was one of the few African leaders to launch an invasion of a neighbouring state - attacking Chad four times in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He showed little mercy for sure.

And yet, in these final moments, bloodied and humiliated, pleading for his life in front of the cameras, the overwhelming sense was that here was a small, frightened and helpless old man, a human being like all the rest of us, deluded perhaps by his long years in power, but flesh and blood still. In the hands of his captors, he was no longer a threat to anyone. In the frenzy of the moment, after years of persecution, it is perhaps unsurprising that those who seized him killed him. But it does not make it right - and it certainly is nothing for David Cameron to feel proud about, or for Hilary Clinton to breathe a sigh of relief as she claims she did.

No international pariah after all...

These are the same people who happily did business with Gadaffi right up until the uprising against him began., who bought his oil and sold him his weapons and, in Britain's case, trained his security services. While it does seem to stretch incredulity given today's heated incidents to suggest any conspiracy to kill Gadaffi, Clinton's relief may well be as much to do with being spared the embarrassment of a trial and the evidence that would have come out about the West's involvement with the old regime as anything to do with an end to the fighting.

And, yet again, the western media have outdone themselves in lurid excess - the graphic pictures of Gadaffi's final minutes should make any vaguely compassionate person retch: and while in a country as inured to state propaganda as Libya has been, showing his body may serve some purpose in convincing the population that he really is gone, it raises yet more questions about how the international media use the now so readily available means of recording and transmitting the most gruesome and humiliating images to sell copy.

When Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were killed by Italian partisans in April 1945, most newspapers did not print the now infamous photograph of their dead bodies hanging upside down at a petrol station in Milan - that Il Duce's trousers were firmly buckled on and Petacci's skirt carefully pinned up was surrealistically tasteful in comparison to today's Saharan gore-fest. Even as late as 1989, when Ceaucescu was executed by a hastily organised firing squad as he tried to flee Romania, the cameras turned away as he and his wife were shot. But perhaps it was Saddam Hussein's execution in 2006 that showed at once the power of mobile technology - an initial, official video of him walking to the scaffold in apparent calm was soon superseded by several mobile captures of a baying mob remonstrating with him as he tried to pray, and then more of his body falling through the trap door and then his corpse in the hospital. of course, the media just couldn't resist...

That things went even further today with Gaddafi should perhaps be no surprise and it would without question be wrong to ban footage - but the use of frame by frame images of his treatment by his captors on tabloid websites is little more than publishing torture porn to gain an audience. Saw 7 or 8 would struggle to compete with the Daily Mail's series of snuff photos.

More will mourn Gaddafi's passing than the West will ever admit to: his regime was violent and repressive, but it was not without its supporters and in the context of the Maghreb, his government led the way in provision of free health and education services, massively reducing illiteracy rates, and greatly improved the position of women and black Africans in a traditionally patriarchal, Arab society. Many Libyans were sent to the West for their higher education - I recall meeting several at both Glasgow University and Bradford University, all of them proud of their nation's achievements and complimentary of their Leader even in situations where they had no need to be. That, in time, Gaddafi so perverted the dreams of his popular revolution that he brutalised his nation is the truly enduring tragedy for Libya - because today, the violent men who have replaced him, including their western sponsors, by their eager celebration of his killing augur no better future at all for the people of Gaddafi's battered nation.

No page has been turned, no new chapter begun. There is nothing to be proud of - no refreshing rain falls on the deserts of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica tonight; only spilled blood mixes in the Saharan sands, a legacy of the hubris that has been and an omen of the hubris still to come.

In better times: the Libyan Leader with the G8 Heads of State, including his nemesis, President Sarkozy of France

Adolf Hitler's Day Out At Dale Farm

Today has seen the violent eviction of some 80 Irish Traveler families from their homes on the unapproved portion of the Dale Farm settlement. Police and bailiffs used tasers and riot batons to force their way through barricades to seize the site from the people who have lived there for over ten years. Basildon's Tory Council, carefully stewarding council taxpayers money to avoid any waste of public finance, have spent over £18 millions pursuing their "final solution" (their words) of evicting people and leaving them with nowhere to go.

A wide range of political, rights and faith groups had campaigned to keep the site, but the Conservative Council with the aid of the baying right wing media have hounded them out. Children attending local schools who lived there will not be able to complete their education; sick people have to leave their homes, while one family with a baby barely a fortnight old are tonight on the road...to nowhere.

Why has this been done? What on earth has possessed this Council to expend so much time, money and effort on removing people from half the site? Why has it been so important for them to reclaim what they have decided to be "greenbelt" land, but was in fact previously a scrapyard filled with rusting metal car wrecks, a site greatly improved by the travellers who made it their home? Indeed, why have the Council been prepared to risk the people they evict ending up in far less suitable locations across their district, rather than let them be where they were? Why, when half the site is fully legal and will remain in place, has it been so necessary to remove these families? When 90% of retrospective planning permission applications in National Park areas are approved and the Conservative Government has just proposed new planning laws which automatically presume in favour of development of greenbelt, why has it been so important to reclaim the Dale Farm scrapyard?

How to get retrospective planning permission in Basildon

The Council and the local MP vehemently deny that anti-traveller feelings or incipient racism were anything to do with it. On the BBC news Channel this evening, local MP John Baron (Conservative, of course) spluttered that in Basildon, they are "used to living with travelers" - indeed, they have almost 120 legal pitches for caravans (perhaps, at a push, 450 people out of Basildon's population of 175,000!), ignoring the fact that over half of these are in the legal part of Dale Farm. The Travellers would be welcome to live anywhere legally, he declared (ignoring the refusal of the Council to grant permission to a new site although one had been identified and would have been fully funded at no cost to local people). Pressed as to where they might go, he proposed Liverpool, at the other side of the country.

Dale Farm Scrapyard - the "greenbelt" in 1998

Take one look at that doyen of right-wing raving prejudice, the Daily Mail, and you soon see the true reason for this and who the Tories are trying to appeal to as the economy reels from the impact of the recession - read the frothing readers' comments under the article about today's evictions and you see how truly skin-thin civilised attitudes and values are among some of our compatriots, and how totally ostracised as "The Other" Travelers are in the eyes of "middle England" (the spelling mistakes are the Mail readers', not mine by the way!) :


I thought the definition of Romany is to roam ? ..Not pitch for 10 yrs ........ Fancy a nice drop of Tarmac on that there drive ?

- hank, Milton Keynes, 19/10/2011 22:10

I am recording all the news articles on this story and when these unwanted people are finally removed and there is no sign that they were ever there I am going to sit down with a nice bottle of my favourite malt and watch these news reports with a contented smile on my face.....Ahhhhh. Heaven. - Bob, Barnsley, 19/10/2011 14:12..

If you need someone to open the gate....

- middle_class_warrior, Durham City, 19/10/2011 7:28

Good and about time too. Whilst they are at it perhaps the police could provide an escort all the way to the nearest ferry docks, help them load their possessions and wave goodbye to them as they depart for their houses in the Irish Republic.

- Saundra, Herts, 19/10/2011 10:47
About time... there right belong to travelling and some how they havnt travelled.. so travel on back to Irealnd and the other places where you seem to sponge from

- Graham L, UK, 19/10/2011 8:31

At last the stupidity of the courts has ended and we can fnally put the rubbish out, funny that we have still not seen the men of Dale Farm fighting for their alleged rights, leaving it to their big mouthed wives as usual? As for the activists stick them 10 to a cell as they like being with each other so much, bunch of half wits with no jobs fighting lost causes and using state benefits to fund their actions.

- None too tightly wrapped, Somewhere in debt ridden UK, 19/10/2011 9:10

I must express my indignation at the police brutality at DaleFarm. There just isn't anywhere near enough being dished out...........

- Paddy Field, Belfast, 19/10/2011 11:48

Dale Farm before yesterday - home to 80 families

And so on...These are the most popular comments of over 1,500 posted in just the last few hours, nearly all dripping leaden poison about people most of them have never met but about whom the loaded prejudice of journals like the Mail and the Sun have legitimised as targets of stereotypical hatred.  The violent evictions at Dale Farm also come just days after the Conservative Mayor of Prestatyn in North Wales told a council meeting that Adolf Hitler's Nazis, who exterminated over 1,500,000 Romanies in the Holocaust, "had the right idea about how to deal with gypsies." 

Prejudice? More than a little evident. Racism? Absolutely. Justice? Absent. Basildon Council's insensitive (though perhaps revealing) reference to a final solution for Dale Farm may not involve the utter horror of Nazi Europe, but in truth how far removed from the sentiments of that time are the motives of many of those behind the eviction? And how important indeed it is for progressives and decent people of all hues to stand against such appalling bigotry and inhumane prejudice as has been unleashed by the removal of people from an old metal scrapyard which they had tidied up and turned into their home.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me.

Pastor Martin Niemoller, 1937     

Murder On The Cheap - America's B-Movie "Bomb Plot" Plot

"It reads like the pages of a Hollywood script," FBI Director Robert Mueller conceded yesterday as his officials outlined what is fast becoming a widely debunked and ludicrous set of claims that the Iranian Government was involved in a plot to hire Mexican drug runners to bomb a Washington, DC restaurant and kill the Saudi ambassador to the USA, along with a very precise 100 bystanders.

The handler of this plot, the alleged deep-sleeper (comatose, it appears, for the last 30 years), is Manssour Arbabsiar, an American-Iranian car salesman from Texas, who was allegedly given $100,000 by Iran to set up the plot, the idea being that if Mexicans carried out the attack, no one supposedly would point a finger at the Middle East, let alone Iran.  The Quds Force, a unit within the Iranian military that has been involved in military activities in neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan, has been accused of planning the operation - except that commentators around the world have quickly pointed out that the amateurish nature of the plot and the high risk step of involving Mexican drug dealers would be totally out of character for this highly professional organisation.

It would be out of character, too, for Quds Force or indeed Iran itself to be involved in any terrorist activities against the USA. Quds, set up during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s (when Saddam Hussein was the West's favoured belligerent), has a history of involvement beyond Iran's borders - but only just. It has been active in Kurdistan, Lebanon and Yemen. Its main focus over the years has actually been in its troubled neighbour, Afghanistan, where Iran long opposed the Taliban regime, and actively supported the American invasion of 2001. Indeed, Quds operatives fought alongside the Americans in the attack on Herat, a key point in the ousting of the Taliban regime. Of course, as blogged last year, America was quick to turn on Iran in spite of then President Khatemi's repeated attempts at reconciliation.

With many in the international diplomatic community sceptical of the US claims, which Tehran hotly denies, the story may begin to unravel, though today President Obama appears to be clinging, Bush-like (or Bush-lite) to the ludicrous claims about a bomb plot. Not only would Mexican drug runners appear to be a strange choice of operative for Quds, the alleged price of the deal, $100,000, frankly seems a bit on the cheap side for such an important operation. On the other hand, it might have sounded like quite a large amount to the drug dealer the FBI co-opted to sting the car dealer in return for immunity from prosecution. That said, he turns out to have been a drug dealer with a heart - worrying about bystanders being killed, to which the wild-eyed crazy car salesman reportedly told him “They want that guy [the Ambassador] done [killed], if the hundred go with him f**k ‘em.” 

Iran claims the whole thing is a plot by Obama to distract Americans' attention from the Wall Street protests and bad economic news. While this may well be a side-effect the White House will eagerly wish for, it seems unlikely. The truth may lie somewhat closer to Iran's borders, with the beleaguered Saudi kingdom. The Sunni regime in Riyadh has been nervous of growing restlessness among Shia Muslims in the Gulf states, not least in Bahrain where earlier this year they sent their military to crush the pro-democracy protests. With America very gradually courting other regional powers, the House of Ibn Saud has increasingly needed a perceived Iranian threat to provide the counter-balance and keep America on side with the Saudi regime. And so, if we discount the car dealer simply being an affluent fantasist, we are left with the real possibility that sabre rattling Saudi Arabia, which Wikileaks showed has repeatedly lobbied the USA to go to war with Iran, has been doing a spot of conjuring. President Obama might want to reflect on who his bedfellows are before killing any Persians.

It is possible some rogue individuals, possibly Arbabasiar and associates, have planned something on their own initiative, but Iran itself would have nothing to gain from the alleged plot other than to be confirmed as the bogeyman the American media and political establishment repeatedly portray it as being. Again and again, US sources vaguely imply Iranian sponsorship of terrorism. But the truth is very different - Iran does fund Hizbollah in the Lebanon, but the nature of its support is as often in the form of funding for building reconstruction (especially after the pulverising of tens of thousands of civilian homes by Israel during its 2006 invasion) and health services as any military support. Hizbollah itself, while maintaining a lot of fiery anti-Israeli rhetoric, is now in effect a relatively normalised political party, elected as part of a multi-faith coalition, the March 8 Alliance,  including Catholic and Maronite Christians and Druze, in the Beirut Parliament and part of the governing coalition since January this year.

By contrast, repeatedly under-reported in the west is the ongoing terror campaign against Iran, and especially against its scientific community, by Israel with at least the tacit support of the USA. This "decapitation" strategy was launched in 2009 in the dying days of the Bush Presidency, when Dubbya's hopes of attacking Iran were stymmied by a CIA report that declared Iran was not developing nuclear weapons. Reported in the UK Daily Telegraph, the Israeli Government then sanctioned the use of hitmen to kill Iranian scientists and academics involved in the country's development of nuclear energy.

Since then, they have been busy. Three top Iranian scientists have been bombed to death - the last just a month ago - and a fourth narrowly escaped assassination along with his wife. Claims that the Israeli secret service, Mossad, is behind this have met with silence from Tel Aviv. Given the heavy funding and support the USA provides Israel, paying for nearly its entire armed services (a cost of $8.2 millions of US taxpayers' money every single day) and funding a huge chunk of its economy, there is no possibility that any such activity would go on unless Washington approved. So who, then, are the terrorists?

We are in difficult days: the neocons in America have long hankered for a military assault on Iran, which is still one of the world's largest oil producers and which sits starkly independently of the USA compared to the Saudi kleptocracy and the fiefdoms of the Emirates. As you can hear in the video below, people like John Bolton, who was Bush's ambassador to the UN, keenly want to provoke confrontation, expressing disappointment at Iran's relatively moderate tone in reply to western sanctions. (It seems Bolton was actively hoping Iran would leave the nuclear non-prolilferation treaty (NPT) to make it easier to garner support for action against Iran).

Somewhere, the scriptwriters are hard at work on coming up with the plot twists and turns (the more bizarre it seems the better) to begin production of the biggest disaster movie yet.

The Trials of Doctor Fox

Tories in trouble - always a time to celebrate

More - click here

So Conservative Secretary of State for Defence, Liam Fox, has a tangled web of arrangements and business dealings with a range of Conservative Party donors who just might be seeking Government contracts, brokered by a pal who is/was a business partner in a company that had other Tory MPs as shareholders and was involved in lobbying for big business clients.

Yes, it all stinks to high heaven. But tell us something we didn't already know.

From The Wall to Wall Street: Learning to Say "No"

(Note - Spoiler)



I've already posted on Rise of the Planet of the Apes; but, as a self-confessed and unashamed  Apes addict since the age of 12, having seen it a second time, I was moved to post this scene. It is one of the most powerful moments in the film, when the lead character's awakening self-consciousness (and his larynx!) reaches a fear-driven crescendo as he faces yet more cruelty from his captors. And once the genie is out the bottle...

The Power of NO - pretty clear in the clip above; but one of the hardest things people often find to say, usually for some fear of consequence. As a result, all manner of injustices and wrongs are tolerated beyond reason and the Powerful know this. Education, media and authority are combined sometimes incredibly subtly to create a zeitgeist where dissent does not (always) need to be physically crushed - rather it is simply isolated and neutralised. A phony consent is manufactured where the status quo is accepted because anything else seems ridiculously impossible.

Just as the Soviets used to treat their dissidents in mental hospitals for failing to evolve obligingly into homo sovieticus, so capitalist societies drive people to the belief that the work ethic in the service of profit-seeking corporations is not only their preference, but indeed the only sane or feasible choice - in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Say otherwise and at best you are a hopeless dreamer, and at worst a potential terrorist poised to wipe out civilisation as we know it (hence the police targeting of completely peaceful environmentalists via use of the anti-terror laws).

The Arab Spring, especially in Tunisia and Egypt, has shown the world some of the potential when people, no matter how oppressed, decide to refuse the dictates of their rulers. Their bravery has shown that, ultimately, those in power depend on the unspoken compliance of those they govern - no matter how pervasive or brutal a system is, it is operated by humans, ultimately as vulnerable as those they oppress, whether by the terror of the Cairo police, or by the restrictions of the US Patriot Act. From the taking of the Bastille to fall of the Berlin Wall to the thousands of Americans currently camping at Wall Street and in the financial sector of Boston to protest against the power of the bankers, ordinary people can make a difference when they finally refuse to accept the threats, lies and abuses of the Establishment, whose power ultimately is no greater than that which we collectively grant it.

So whether the trailblazing Bryant & May strikers of the 19th century, or Spartacus the Slave or even Caesar the Ape, the act of saying "No", while learned with great difficulty and often requiring great bravery and even supreme sacrifice, can be one of the most positive things any sentient being can do.

"A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble." 
                                                                                     - Gandhi

Caesar as Che

Into the abyss? - from The Morning Star

From last weekend's Morning Star, a perceptive and timely article by Andrew Murray.

"Stare into the abyss, the philosopher Nietzsche advised, and the abyss stares into you.

Society has been staring into the abyss of capitalist crisis for three years now, and the view just gets more impenetrably gloomy.

And the abyss stares right back - what are you going to do about it? Do you have a plan or are you part of the void?

The time for accounting is impending.

By every measure the crisis is deepening and there is a sense that a really big wave is going to break sometime soon."

Link to the full article here:

Into the abyss? / Features / Home - Morning Star

Blowing Away Nuclear?

Has a major technological breakthrough in Japan created a new generation of wind turbines that finally destroy the claims by the nuclear lobby that renewables can't match their dangerous and dirty radioactive power? Martin O'Beirne of THE ECOSOCIALIST ponders on what it could mean...

Major Wind Turbine Breakthrough! 3 times the output. The End of Nuclear and Fossil?

The designers of this new wind turbine, based in Japan's Kyushu University claim output, the amount of electricity produced is up to 3 times greater than a conventional turbine. 

The first question is...What major design breakthrough could possibly be responsible? Some super light material allowing the turbine to spin faster? Some inexplicable method of increasing wind itself...eh? No that would be silly, why did you say it, but not far off, see the video.

They have had the amazing idea of ...Wait for it......Putting a ring around the outside...Oh....So we have to be a little guarded before we get too excited. If it was that easy, surely it would have been done before now, right? Let's wait for some independent research and so on, and I mean independent because the fossil fuel and nuclear industries will be falling over themselves to rubbish it. 

The other caveat (ironically) is that the anti-nuclear movement in the wake of Fukushima are making progress.  The energy agency plans to earmark up to 20 billion yen ($261 million) for offshore wind farms. This has displeased the local fisheries. At the end of this video the commentator suggests the wind farms could be used for fishing, which is a little hard to buy. But hey I don't want to play sceptic here! 

IF the designers are right, the implications are immense. If we were to be conservative and say that all it does is double the output this really could be the end of any of those arguments about the cost of nuclear actually being cheaper than renewables (Ask the workers and local people at Fukushima how they define cost) Wind generation would be closer to those claims we heard all those years ago about nuclear (that it would be too cheap to meter). In the video below a single offshore wind farm using the turbines would be equivalent to an entire nuclear plant. Think of the 8 new nuclear power plants planned for the UK replaced by 8 offshore windfarms with the benefit of no nuclear waste to bury or plants to decommission.
 
In addition there is no great paradigm shift involved if we were to propose that the very expensive tar sands extraction and fracking would not get a look in. Just a quiet woosh of spinning turbines. 

But the real deal is how the argument stands up for capitalism. This could be divisive, major fossil and nuclear companies with their dirty fingers in all the pies, could not compete with companies pushing the new wind farms, they would either have to embrace it themselves or suffer the consequences, but either way the Military-Industrial (Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, War) Complex (as David Schwartzman calls it) that sustains capitalism would wither. Perhaps an example of how the market  (for a change) could work in our favour. 

Wouldn't it be something if nature herself destroyed capitalism before it destroyed her. 


original article, plus video HERE

Updates - Continuing Bad Weather

Over the last year, I've posted on a number of incidents and issues that in many instances continue to be in the news, but here is a short round up of some of the stories and issues that were either less prominent to begin with or which faded from news coverage (often in spite of their importance), and what has happened since the original post.

Good news on the story of Rania Abdechakour. Rania was the little 5 year old Algerian girl with cerebral palsy who had been living with her aunt and uncle in Lancashire for several years. Back in May, the British Government decided to expel her, in spite of the lack of medical facilities or a secure home for her back in Algeria. After a lot of hard work by her aunt and uncle and others, she was granted the right to remain in late August and they are now formally adopting her.

The "Ground Zero Mosque" - remember the fuss about something that was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero? For weeks the media was filled with protests and reams of commentary about how the proposed Muslim cultural centre in New York was an affront to the people who had died in the Twin Towers, dreadfully conflating all Muslims with the handful of men who led the attacks on 9/11. Since last year, the centre has progressed slowly in terms of development - planning obstacles have slowly been overcome and designs for the front of the building which incorporate the Jewish Star of David and the Christian Cross suggest that its intention remains what its sponsors have all along insisted - a centre for faith reconciliation, not some victory monument. Given that some 70 innocent Muslims died in the carnage of the Towers (and tens of thousands in the wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan since), why in any case should there be no Islamic content to marking the losses of that day?

An ice free North Pole may now be barely 5 years away...

Not so good news on climate change....Britain had its most severe winter in decades last year amidst speculation that the warming "Atlantic conveyor", which brings the mild climate from the Mexican Gulf, had slowed down or even stopped. After millenia of Britain enjoying a much warmer climate than its latitude warrants, at least one expert in the field believed the Gulf Stream, as it is called, had turned off, at least temporarily. Without confirming anything, the Government did acknowledge that the weather was much worse than normal for the second year in a row and decided to ask the Chief Scientist if there had been a "step change" in our climate. He has yet to report, but Britain's summer has now been cooler than normal in spite of a continuing global rise in temperatures - and more and more extreme weather events around the planet as man-made carbon emissions continue to rise faster than ever. Climate change does not simply mean constantly warmer weather everywhere - although the longterm trend is upwards. The impact of global warming could mean cooler temperatures in Britain and western Europe for a time if polar ice melts and the cooler water from the Arctic melts into and diverts the flow of warmer water from the south-west. The latest prognosis from the Arctic is bad - summer ice melt has reached record levels this year and is proceeding at roughly double the anticipated rate, with an ice-free North Pole anticipated during the summer by sometime as early as 2016 rather than the 2030s as previously predicted.

Meanwhile, in the USA, climate activist Tim DeChristopher continues to languish in jail under a two year sentence of imprisonment for disrupting an auction of land to the oil and gas industry by falsely bidding. At his trial, he argued that he had been forced to choose the lesser of two evils - acquiesce to the land auction going ahead and the damage the resulting oil and gas exploration would cause; or commit a crime by bidding falsely in order the disrupt the land sale. He has lodged an appeal against his conviction, but for now remains in prison for a crime that harmed no one and no organisation - in fact, the auction itself turned out to be an invalid process because of procedural irregularities, so Tim has been imprisoned without technically committing any crime at all.

But better news for bees: in the UK at any rate, the general consensus seems to be that it has been a good year for our stripey pollinating friends. Colony Collapse Disorder has decreased and there is now some evidence to support a diagnosis that agrochemicals are responsible for their recent, often mysterious declines. Even the bad winter didn't deter them and there has been a bumper honey crop this year as a relatively mild spring let them get busy. However, with no consensus on how to tackle CCD and the chemical industry keeping a close involvement in the beekeeping world in defence of its own interests, bees are still in longterm decline - the number of UK bee species has fallen by 50% in the last sixty years; so our little friends are not out of the woods and into the flowery meadows yet.

In spite of all the violence of the Arab Spring and the apparent shaming of Britain and other western states over their longterm association with Arab dictators and kelptocrats, our Government's lust for profit from blood remains undiminished. UK Premier David Cameron behaved appallingly when he took a group of British arms merchants on a tour of Cairo's Tahrir Square where people had died protesting against a regime funded by America and supplied by the British arms industry. But just days later, we were at it again, with a big UK delegation out in the Gulf at the IDEX Arms Fayre in Abu Dhabi which took place hours after the Bahrain Government machine-gunned protestors on the streets of its capital. 

Cameron later welcomed the Crown Prince of Bahrain to Downing Street, while it was with clear reluctance that the British Royal Family cancelled the King of Bahrain's invite to the Royal Wedding at the end of April. In September, in spite of their mealy mouthed condemnation of dictatorships and the embarrassment caused when Libyan rebels found evidence that the Con Dem Government had been selling sniper rifles to the Gaddafi regime right up to the start of the civil war,  Ministers supported the huge Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition in London - where one company was exposed by Amnesty International to be selling illegal leg irons. Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, tabled an early day motion in the Commons condemning the exhibition and calling for an end to arms sales to regimes with poor human rights records.

And mention of the Royal Wedding brings back memories of perhaps the most confused newspaper page of the year, if not longer. Clinging on to the last of the big wedding story of the year but wanting to move onto the big breaking news story, the Daily Telegraph's international edition ended up with one of the most bizarrely tasteless front pages in newspaper history...

In June, Greenpeace used Star Wars as a theme to attack Volkswagen car company for its lobbying against reductions in carbon emissions in spite of its advertising promoting it as an allegedly environmentally aware company. Stung by being likened to Darth Vader's planet-destroying Death Star, VW  deployed its employees in a counter-demonstration when Greenpeace unfurled one of their signature banners at a car show: the result can be seen here, but you do have to look closely to see the staff holding up their blue placards.

And lastly, back in May, I blogged on how police had very brutally arrested and carted off a film maker and a handful of others who were silently dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. They were held under anti-terror laws, a ludicrous over-reaction by the authorities to a perfectly harmless activity - all of it filmed here.

The following week, in a challenge to authoritarianism's assault on peaceful activity, hundreds of people turned up to dance, though a little less silently...

The Fat Cat Who Won't Feed His Own...

Our political masters love to make out that they are just normal folk in special jobs. So, when they are not siring kids like the Blairs and Camerons have done while in Downing Street with great PR flourish, they go for the next best thing in terms of image - pets; especially rescue pets.

Long ago, then Vice-President Nixon had trouble over his puppy, allegedly a bribe, but deftly swiped the issue away by appearing on-screen with the mutt demonstrating its cloying affection for Tricky Dicky. Later, across the Atlantic, the urbane Harold Wilson had his Labrador Paddy. Thatcher made up for an absence of  animal pets by having her Cabinet, but subsequently John Major adopted a stray cat (which his successor Tony Blair was at one point forced to prove he hadn't killed), while in the White House Clinton had Socks the cat, even Butcher Bush kept dogs and Obama adopted a rescue dog for his kids.

Keeping up with tradition, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced on taking office that a rescue cat, Larry, would be coming to live in Downing Street. The poor animal duly arrived in a cat cage to be feted by the press (one of whom Larry animatedly scratched) and he was pictured on the Cabinet table with a Union Jack collar patriotically attached. Milking the idea of being a fun-loving guy, Cameron even had himself photographed with an assistant holding Larry out to a visiting President Obama.

The significance of the Obama photocall should not be underplayed - the US president, at his folksy best, is all smiles as he pats the cat, while the assistant looks genuinely pleased with the animal. Safely a few feet back, Cameron smiles but, with his hands firmly on his hips, he sort of gazes at the cat with a mild disdain. A bit like a Victorian father with his kids, he'll try to look interested if he has to, but for God's sake, don't ask him to actually touch the creature himself and no - do not, under any circumstances, expect him to hold it.

And now the truth is out. Fat Cat Cameron, multi-millionaire, happy to portray himself as an animal lover, does not even pay to feed the cat. His own cat. In spite of his cash, in spite of milking the publicity shots, he won't stump up for even a can of kat-o-meat or a box of biscuits. No, this rich man makes his staff pay for his cat. And now he has ostentatiously agreed that they can hold a quiz evening to raise money for poor Larry's upkeep. Dependent on the random vicissitudes of charity, poor Larry needs to remember the words of an old Labour leader, "That if the Tories win...I warn you...do not fall sick..."  Who, after all, will meet the vet fees?

Quite unsurprisingly, just like his past wheeze of trying to be seen as a keen environmentalist by cycling to work while a large car drove behind him carrying his briefcase, Cameron's attempt to pose as a lover of fur (living and domesticated as opposed to the creatures he likes to hunt and shoot), now stands exposed as just another tawdry publicity stunt. As if we hadn't guessed...

So spare a thought for Larry as he contemplates an uncertain future. He was originally obtained to help catch rats that were to be found living in Downing Street. Clearly, his work is not yet done...

The Last American

"Science fiction is when the improbable becomes probable..." 

This is the definition of the sci fi genre emblazoned in the entrance to an imaginative (free) exhibition currently on at the British Library in London, Out of this World. It sets out the history of the imagining of new or different worlds by authors from the earliest to the most current - I was delighted to discover that the first trip to outer space was described in The True History by the second century Greek-Syrian author Lucian, regarded as the father (or maybe great-great- grandfather many times removed) of this type of escapism.

Though escapism may be more than a slight misnomer - because while sci fi can provide entertaining stories, it has also long been a vital repository of comment on the societies and conditions observed and experienced by those who write it. Whilst pure yarns feature aplenty, credible science fiction requires some degree of possibility, however remote, to avoid slipping into pure fantasy (where, according the exhibition, the impossible becomes possible). Whether a reflection of contemporary progress - such as dreams of rocket flights to the Moon or Mars and speculation on what alien wonders might be found in stories such as HG Wells First Men on the Moon - or gloomier prognoses such as the post-apocalyptic On The Beach, which covered the nuclear threat of the Cold War era - science fiction should tell us something about ourselves as much as about the imagined alternate realities it postulates.

In some cases, this can be positive - Star Trek and Dr Who have long mixed teatime family entertainment with real physics, even if highly theoretical or somewhat warped (no pun intended). And of course, Dr McCoy's non-invasive hypodermic pressure syringe is now a medical fact. But in other cases, a more negative picture can be drawn, usually as a warning by the author of the possible consequences of some contemporary ill.

One such tale is a book among the exhibition called "The Last American" by John Ames Mitchell, published in 1889. This recounts the story of an expedition in the year 2951 by the Muslim Persian Admiral Khan-Li to rediscover the long lost land of Merikha, a thousand years after the contemporary world has been destroyed by runaway climate change.

Mitchell's novel is short - the original publication ran to less than 80 pages but with lots of very imaginative, colourful illustrations; it is available for free download (text only) from Project Guttenberg. And on reading it, there are a striking number of passages that cover the materialism and greed which Ames Mitchell saw as representing American society in his day, even although at that time it was an emergent power, its global reach still several decades in the future. These passages remain strikingly relevant today, not only to America but increasingly to our entire globalised world.

As the Persians of a millennium from now climb through the overgrown ruins of New York and Washington DC, postulating on the use of buildings and the purpose of ancient objects (a satirical view of the archaeology that was becoming so popular in spite of its wildly speculative methods at the time of the novel's writing), the expedition's historian is delighted to discover the ruins of what he considers to have been the cause of the Merikhans downfall:

He stopped speaking, his eyes fixed upon an inscription over a doorway, partly hidden by one of the branches of the oak.

Turning suddenly upon me with a look of triumph, he exclaimed:

"It is ours!"

"What is ours?" I asked.

"The knowledge we sought;" and he pointed to the inscription,

NEW YORK STOCK EXC….

He was tremulous with joy. "Thou hast heard of Nhu-Yok, O my Prince?"

I answered that I had read of it at school.

He continues a little later with an explanation:

"They were great only in numbers and too weak to endure success. At the beginning of the twentieth century—as they counted time—huge fortunes were amassed in a day, and the Mehrikans became drunk with money."

Whereupon I exclaimed, "O Land of Delight! For much money is cheering."

But the old man shook his head. "Very true, O Prince; but the effect was woful. These vast fortunes soon dominated all things, even the seat of government and the courts of Justice. Tricks of finance brought fabulous gains. Young men became demoralized. For sober industry with its moderate profits was ridiculed."

"Verily, that would be natural!" I said. "But in a land where all were rich who was found to cook and scrub, to fetch and carry and to till the soil? For none will shovel earth when his pockets are stuffed with gold."

"All were not rich. And when the poor also became greedy they became hostile. Then began social upheavals with bloodshed and havoc."

Several other passages cover the materialism of the fallen society - shopping and bargain seeking were its people's highest objectives - and the expedition is at once astounded by the size of its originally powerful cities and by the totality of its collapse. The explorers are delighted when they find a well preserved Persian rug among the ruins, commenting that although the least decayed item they found, it is older than the degraded items surrounding it, such was their transient and disposable design. Without spoiling the conclusion, the denouement has reference to yet another contemporary ill Ames Mitchell saw in his pleasure-seeking contemporaries.

The tale is well written, the crumbling ruins and emptiness of the deserted citadels hauntingly conjured, and you can trace to here the origins of scenes and themes picked up, deliberately or not, by authors and screenplays in science fiction throughout the 20th century. But the most striking aspect is how prescient his observations were of the future of his own society at a time when it was still in transition from an essentially agricultural society to a fully industrialised, commercially obsessed one. 

Although New York and other large cities were well established and as terrifyingly cramped, dirty and crowded as any in the world, most Americans still lived in rural settings. Ames Mitchell's imaginative projection of the processes underway at his time is science fiction at its best - and arguably its most accurate: he was predicting man-made climate change nearly a century and a quarter ago.

Intentionally or otherwise, it is also ironic that he should have picked the country he did for the home of his intrepid explorers - in spite of their comic names (the ship's pilot is called Griptillah and the historian is Nhofhul), as they gather their artefacts for the Museum of Teheran, Islamic Iran has evidently survived the climate disaster and outlived doomed America by at least one thousand years.
 

Out of this World runs at the British Library, until 25th September.

Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou....

I am returning to blogging a little earlier than planned in part because since my last post at the end of August, the Total Politics magazine and website has announced its blog awards for 2011. These are voted for by its readers and set out in a wide range of different political categories.

After just one year of proper blogging, I am chuffed and more than a little surprised that Viridis Lumen has done really well:

 -  3rd Place in Top Green Blogs category
 - 15th Place in Top Green Bloggers category
                                                       - 33rd Place in Top Leftwing Blogs category
                                                       - 64th Place in Top Leftwing Bloggers category

So I wanted to give my very profuse thanks to any and all who voted in any or all categories.

It was also cheering to see other good leftwing Green blogs doing well:

Derek Wall's Another Green World came 2nd in the Green Blogs and also Green Bloggers, and 27th in Leftwing Blogs; while Martin O'Beirne's The Ecosocialist came 13th in the Green Blogs and Martin himself came 49th in the top Leftwing Bloggers. Other left Greens like Jane Wilkinson also did well, while Bright Green Scotland and its writers featured across several categories.

Geographically closer to home for me, Kirklees Green Council Group leader Cllr Andrew Cooper saw his Greening Kirklees jump up a good few places (symbolised in his blog by a certain brand of soft drink): Andrew is one of a growing but still relatively small band of Greens who have exercised executive power in local government, having been a successful Cabinet member for housing. His blog is well worth a look at for its posts about a range of topics but with a focus on his work on Kirklees Council - where his efforts have been instrumental in implementing a number of practical and effective green initiatives, copied and claimed by others near and far - imitation is indeed the best form of flattery.

So thanks again to anyone who has voted, and thanks for reading. If you've not visited some of the other blogs listed above or in the right side panel, please take a look when you've some time - they give a wide range of progressive and green perspectives on politics, the world and life in general.

As for me...onwards... :)