A Global Threat MultiplierUKWatch.net - 23 Mar 2008A European Union study on the problems of global climate change, leaked to the press four days before its official launch on 14 March 2008, contained the sobering assessment that a failure to take radical action now to address global warming would create the likelihood of severe conflict over resources in the decades ahead. Two days later, on 16 March, data from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) reveals that the rate of shrinking of glaciers across the world – a key marker of climate change – has accelerated; this more than doubled between 2006 and 2007, and the 2007 figure was five times the average for the 1980-99 period. These two documents, taken together, present governments and citizens in the leading emissions-producing countries in particular with an unavoidable test. UNEP’s data – included in its report Meltdown in the Mountains, based on research conducted by the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) – is significant for two quite different reasons. The first is that in a number of key parts of the world, glaciers are essential parts of the crop-support system. Winter snow and ice locked up in massive glaciers in mountain ranges (the Andes, the Karakorams and especially the Himalayas, for example) store water which is slowly released during the spring and early summer, providing water for irrigation as much as a 1,600 kilometres away from the glaciers themselves. If the glaciers melt more quickly, or if what would normally be late winter snow falls as rain, then the rivers flowing off the mountain ranges will no longer provide water for crops during the growing season. The second reason why the Unep study is important is that it provides one more indication that climate change is speeding up and therefore more evidence for the argument that decisive policy-shifts are urgently needed to address the crisis. Yet the spread of such is not yet having the impact on government policy that it should; too many influential people and interest groups (including the governments of many oil-producing states and some transnational oil-and-gas companies) still reject the evidence and block progress. Moreover, as the problems intensify the scale of measures needed to address them also expand. The evidence that existing carbon emissions will have their severest impact over at least the next three decades mean that plans for a 50% cut in global carbon output by 2050 – which, it is true, go beyond what was proposed barely five years ago – have already become woefully inadequate. Analysts may differ on the details of what is really required, but a consensus is beginning to emerge that 80% cuts are needed a long time before 2050 – including deep cuts by 2012-15, i.e. in the next five to seven years. A global focus It is in this context – of an unfolding emergency – that the European Union document – Climate Change and International Security – is so interesting. It must also be read in relation to three specific aspects of climate change (see ?Climate change: a window to act?, 22 November 2007): positive-feedback processes, including summer melting of polar sea-ice, and methane release from melting permafrost, mean climate change is likely to intensify climate change will (against projections common in the early 1990s) affect many of the poorest parts of the world, mainly through severe droughts global climate-change estimates are necessarily consensus documents, intended to keep climate specialists from scores of countries on board; they are inevitably and naturally conservative in their assessments. The EU report – prepared for the European commission by Javier Solana (the union?s lead foreign-policy coordinator) and Benita Ferrero-Waldner (its commissioner for external relations), and presented to the European council?s climate-change summit on 13-14 March 2008 – reflects these features, yet it also has a sense of urgency that is largely lacking from the equivalent documents or reports produced by its own member-states or other national governments. Indeed, one of its most compelling arguments concerns the impact of climate change on weaker states beyond the global north: “Climate change is best viewed as a threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability. The core challenge is that climate change threatens to overburden states and regions which are already fragile and conflict prone.” The document anticipates a number of severe outcomes if this challenge is not properly met: conflict over food and water resources as rainfall diminishes; risks to the infrastructure of coastal cities and fertile river deltas; strains from environmentally-induced migration and to radicalisation as marginalised peoples react to their exclusion. It also cites the potential for conflict over energy resources inside some of the world?s most energy-rich regions, as they too experience physical and social stresses due to climate change. The tone of the entire report is downbeat, with an unusual (in such official products) awareness of the inescapable immediacy of what lies ahead. Its main emphasis is on the consequences of climate change and how Europe might best address them – especially by cutting carbon emissions. It also recommends putting far more research effort into understanding the regional effects of climate change, and more development resources into countering these (see ?Climate change: threat and promise?, 2 November 2006). An elite lens For all its value and importance, however, there is a problem with the report: it is unable to transcend what is essentially a Eurocentric view. In this sense, it has much in common with the report published in January 2008 by five former defence chiefs from the United States, France, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands (see “The New Atlantic Century?“, 24 January 2008). This document – Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership – is straightforward and unashamed in seeing global threats in terms of a north Atlantic dimension. The authors? concern is with the lands from Finland to Alaska; they insist on the need for a revitalised and strengthened Nato in parallel with far closer collaboration between north America and the European Union than at present. The report?s imaginary ?other? is the new adversary of an unstable and uncertain world whose millions of inhabitants are metaphorically gathering outside the walls of civilised Europe, Canada and the United States. This view of the world is essentially about protecting the status quo, making climate change a security problem for the elite states rather than an issue for the whole global community. As such, it fails and is bound to fail: since it embodies no recognition that climate change is part of the much wider issue of a deeply and increasingly divided world. This division is both socio-economic and (again) imaginary: for improvements in education, literacy and technology produce the consequence that what remains essentially the marginalised majority of the world’s people are – from the ?other? side – far more knowledgeable of that very condition than ever before. The logic of the “climate-change-as-threat” paradigm is, at heart, to create the need for more forms of physical security: that since Europe’s biggest problem is likely to come from “militant migration” (especially from north Africa and the middle east), the land borders in southeast Europe must be controlled and the Mediterranean seen as a barrier, with the necessary military forces constructed and deployed to help keep Europe safe. The reality of an interconnected, globalised, technologically distributed world in which small groups of determined people can (for example) use civil aircraft to attack New York skyscrapers and the world’s largest military headquarters armed only with parcel knives makes this outlook – to say the least – self-defeating. Europeans will be as little able to align the Mediterranean as the moat for their 21st-century castle as will the Israelis to build a wall high enough to exclude those determined to breach it. True, the European Union report at least does see things in more than purely security terms; it addresses the need to support affected countries outside Europe in surviving the impacts of climate change, and it recognises that there is a link between socio-economic divisions and environmental constraints. What it is unable to do is to follow comprehensively the implications of that link. European action to avoid a dysfunctional global condition requires an unprecedented commitment to prevent climate change and ameliorate those effects that cannot now be avoided, especially in poorer countries. It will also require a greatly heightened commitment to development, not least in terms of trade reform, debt cancellation and direct international assistance targeted at sustainable and gendered development (see ?Wanted: a new global paradigm?, 8 November 2007). Dystopia and optimism Thirty-five years ago, the economic geographer Edwin Brooks evoked the risk of ?(a) crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate people in the global ghettoes” (see Edwin Brooks, “The Implications of Ecological Limits to Growth in Terms of Expectations and Aspirations in Developed and Less Developed Countries”, in Anthony Vann & Paul Rogers (eds), Human Ecology and World Development [Plenum Press, 1974]). An integrated response to climate change and the wealth-poverty divide is both essential and urgent. The Europeans have the capacity to provide leadership and the resources to take action, and their new – as yet officially unreleased – report begins to open up the issue in the systematic manner needed (see Mats Engstrm, ?Europe?s green power?, 25 March 2007). If the analysis could be extended to a global understanding, and if the sheer urgency of the issue could be recognised, then there will be cause – even at this late stage – for optimism. All this, however, demands the biggest step-change of all: imagination. If it is not forthcoming, Brooks’s dystopic prediction – already reality in too many places – is the most likely outcome. Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England.
Has Society Turned its Back on Itself?UKWatch.net - 23 Mar 2008Initially, it was a little hard to figure out what lay behind the BBC decision to commission The White Season. But when taking on board the subsequent general air of BBC defensiveness, it is probably fair to assume it hasn?t worked out exactly as planned. A common ? and commonsense – complaint was that in prefixing ?white? to working class, the BBC had needlessly, deceitfully and divisively racialised the social, economic and political issue of working class disaffection.
When confronted along these lines by IWCA representative Gary O?Shea on BBC London?s Dotun Adebayo programme, BBC commissioning editor for the season Robert Klein struggled to articulate a coherent reply to what the presenter described as ?a damning? critique. According to Klein, a survey commissioned by the BBC found that the white working class ?group? were not only alienated on immigration but on a myriad of other subjects, including housing, education, crime and so on. As columnist Seumas Milne commented: ?it wasn’t immigration that ripped the guts out of working-class Britain, white and non-white. It was the closure of whole industries, the rundown of manufacturing and council housing, the assault on trade unions, the huge transfer of resources to the wealthy, the deregulation of the labour market, and the unconstrained impact of neoliberal globalisation under both Tories and New Labour. Almost none of that has had a look-in so far in The White Season.? (‘Either Labour represents its core voters – or others will’) So why then not devote a season to addressing and reflecting all of these concerns, seeing as how they affect the working class as a whole? Whether the working class ?formed a majority or not was neither here nor there,? Klein insisted, and then went on to assert that ?white working class? was how in everyday parlance the majority described themselves and accordingly no fault could be found with the BBC in describing them thus. In reality the racial denomination is entirely a creation of a multicultural strategy, but even today the notion that people talk of themselves in the terms described is absurd. What remained of his credibility evaporated with his repeated insistence that the high point for the Far Right in terms of popular support was with the NF back in 1979, even though the NF never had a single councillor and the BNP have amassed far greater totals in European elections since then. Challenged on this and a number of other assertions by both Gary O?Shea and the presenter he opted to bluster his way through. Afterwards, he phoned the producer of the program bitterly complaining of his treatment. The back story to The White Season is that BBC supremo Roly Keating supposedly woke up one morning quite overcome with ?embarrassment? at the corporation?s previous neglect of this ?group? (as if we all resided at the edge of some increasingly intricate patchwork quilt and the omission of serious political consideration of the condition of the working class for the best part of two decades had been little more than an oversight). ?Has Britain turned its back on the white working class?? Radio Five Live asked its audience in kicking off the debate. But such a title hardly makes sense if columnist Seamus Milne is right in claiming that the working class – manual and clerical – makes up ?getting on for two thirds? of contemporary society. The 2007 British Social Attitudes Survey found that 57% of the population identify themselves as working class. (British Social Attitudes Survey,) And if these claims are anywhere near accurate, the far more challenging question to ask (particularly in light of Margaret Thatcher?s infamous declaration that ?there is no such thing as society?) might have been ?Has Britain turned its back on itself??. But that of course is not anywhere near how the ruling elite likes to look at things. A recent study of the topic that took four years to complete, The East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict concluded that one of the specific ways in which the multicultural strategy is employed, ?is to make the working class feel they are just a minority themselves? the better to dampen down the expectations of the host community. A fine example of this type of thinking can be found in an article By Richard Klein in the Daily Mail on the White season. It was headlined: “White and working class… the one ethnic group the BBC has ignored”. The key word here of course is ‘ethnic’: race, not class, the very essence of multiculturalism. (‘ White and working class… the one ethnic group the BBC has ignored’) On top of this, The East End report continues, ?a swathe of political measures and institutions which consolidate the rights of minorities while multiplying the sanctions against indigenous whites who object to this? have been promoted in order to increase ?the moral authority of the British administrative elite?, while at the same time creating a black middle class (at the expense, note, of the black working class) to buttress the existing white middle class. Journalist Nick Cohen sums it up like this: ?Andrea Callender, BBC’s head of diversity?is not only concerned with colour prejudice, but she also promises to tackle an apparently definitive list of bigotries about ‘age, gender, race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, marital status, sexual orientation and number of dependents?. Yet she does not mention the most glaring inequality in modern Britain, although she must encounter it every day?[this] pseudo-egalitarian style dominates every public institution. Human-resources managers make good money out of a career in leftism as long as they never talk about the old left’s central concern: class?. (‘The prejudice that still shames the nation’,) Now it is true that the The White Season did talk about class. But this was neither a well-meaning or inadvertent deviation from the norm. From the outset it was done in a thoroughly back-handed way. In both the programme on the working men?s club ?Last Orders? set in Beasley and the ?All white in Barking? production, the views aired were almost exclusively from pensioners or those heading that way. One former Barking resident accurately described the potrayal as almost ?Dickensian?. The inference being that the working class was a relic: spent, decrepit and dying out and, more than anything, defeated. It also meant that the contributions on race and immigration would not have been out of place in the 1960?s. That real racial integration only really happens within the working class was, as usual, conveniently side-stepped. The hypocrisy here is particularly striking for, as journalist Andrew Anthony observed rather bitterly, the liberal community, including ?the hideously white BBC?, for all its eloquence on anti-racism, ?is far more inclined to retreat to private schools and affluent enclaves, the better to maintain a homogenous culture while pronouncing on the benefits of diversity.? (‘How Britain turned its back on the white working class’,) Middle class sanctimony is never of course the entire preserve of the BBC. On all sorts of levels middle class two-faceedness on the issue is inescapable. Consider this contribution from the Oxford Mail: What has got members of Oxford Independent Working Class Association all excited recently? After numerous occasions when opposition councillors at Oxford City Council sighed heavily whenever an IWCA member got up to speak in the council chamber, the BBC has launched its White season of TV programmes. The corporation has devoted huge resources to asking whether Britain’s white working class has become invisible. It’s a question that Stuart Craft, the IWCA leader, has been asking for years. (The Oxford Mail) As the Oxford Mail knows all too well, the actual question the IWCA has been asking for years, both within and without the council chamber, is why so many of your heart on your sleeves type ‘anti-racists’ vigorously applaud the type of policies that encourage the working class to fight it out on ethnic lines among themselves, when it is painfully obvious that the primary beneficiaries of the in-fighting will be the ?separate but equal? BNP? Now that would be a BBC ?season? worth watching. Over to you, Roly! As well as fulfilling the invitation to appear on the Doton Adeyabo programme on BBC London on Sunday March 16, IWCA rep Gary O?Shea made these points and others in interviews on Radio Five Live, BBC 24 on March 7, and ?You and Yours? on Radio Four on March 11. Here are a couple of samples: (IWCA on Radio 5 Live-edited)
(IWCA on Radio 5 Live-unedited)
(IWCA on Radio 4 – You and yours -edited)
(IWCA on Radio 4 – You and yours -unedited)
