Where there’s brass there’s muck
UKWatch.net - 3 Aug 2008
The environmental crisis that currently faces our planet is a matter of life or death. The potential for human suffering through environmental devastation over the coming decades is truly staggering. It is unquestionable that the time to act is now. The state and corporations would have us believe that environmentalism is a matter of personal choice. That buying energy-saving light bulbs, carbon-neutral flights or so called ?biofuels? have the potential to stall (or even stop) the coming crisis. Even those within the environmental movement will preach the virtues of ?ethical? lifestyle. They argue that it is only a matter of persuading enough consumers to ?buy into? environmentalism (with a price-tag far beyond the budget of most working people). While some of these efforts have some impact as shortterm solutions, they fail to address the very system that drives and sustains the destruction of our environment ? capitalism. Calling for increased state intervention to meet environmental targets is equally counterproductive. The state exists for the maintenance and protection of capitalism. Since targets and promises were set there has been no government that has ever reached a target it set to tackle on climate change. Creating a sustainable future for our planet is not in the interests of profit. Ecology IS a class issue. How many working class people do you know with a private jet? The ruling classes have used the corporate mass media to fight environmentalism at every turn. We live in a truly crazy world where despite scientific proof that humanity is responsible for climate change you are still able with enough money, influence and power to deny this is the case. And why? Because the bottom line is that environmental destruction equals profit. And who suffers? We already know that those countries in the developing world are likely to suffer the worst affects of Climate Change. Droughts, floods and food shortages affect millions when there is no infrastructure to protect impoverished populations. We have seen in the catastrophic events that followed hurricane Katrina the people who suffer the worst in the face of environmental destruction? the urban working poor. Last year throughout the UK there was a great deal of hardship following the floods as those in the poorest and worst affected areas lost everything when insurance companies refused to pay out. Across the world working people are poisoned by pesticides, power plants and industrial by-products. Our message is simple. If we want to great a truly free society, a truly sustainable society then it has to be one which is free from capitalism. Working people across the world have to rise up and fight the system that oppresses and alienates them every day. It?s about time we gave bosses and politicians the boot and built a better future for everyone. Camp For Climate Action Despite coal representing the most polluting of fossil fuels, the government plans to build six more atmospherecrunching power stations. Collectively these will emit around 50 million tons of C02 a year! The camp for climate action represents a radical attempt to build a mass movement against climate change through self-organisation and collective effort. The Camp for Climate Action will be taking place at Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, Kent, 3rd to 11th August. www.climatecamp.org.uk

Why David Cameron Blames the Poor
UKWatch.net - 3 Aug 2008
David Cameron’s ?blaming the poor’ speech in Glasgow may be more than just an attempt to placate the unreconstructed right of the Conservative party. It is not often recognised how far British public opinion has shifted towards a liberal individualist stance on social issues in recent years. In some ways we are more Thatcherite under New Labour than we ever were under the Conservatives. Evidence from a range of attitude surveys points in the same direction. Sympathy for the poor, growing steadily stronger through the 1980s and early 1990s, has collapsed. By 2006 the situation was almost exactly reversed. The public is roughly twice as likely to attribute poverty to laziness or lack of will power now compared with a decade ago. The numbers thinking the government should spend more on the poor has steadily declined. People are also much readier to accept the inequalities of the market. In 1997, slightly more people thought it unfair that those on high incomes could buy better health care or education than the rest of the population than took the opposite view. Now nearly twice as many think buying better health care or schooling is perfectly acceptable as don’t. Various factors contribute to explaining the shift to the right in social attitudes. Our recent qualitative work examined how people discuss fairness and government services. A strong theme across our interviews was the acceptance of inequalities. While the better off should be expected to contribute in the same way as everyone else does (and tax avoidance by the super-rich was seen as just as outrageous as benefit cheating by the poor), there was little support for redistributive taxation. Such attitudes are buttressed by a strong and widespread belief that opportunities to succeed, while not entirely equal, are open to those prepared to make the effort across society. Why fleece the better off when they pay in just as much as anyone else, and anyway we all stand a reasonable chance of getting there if only we try hard enough? Opportunity for all and tolerance of income inequalities are strong themes in political discussions and in public opinion. Turning that round, sharply progressive tax and direct interventions to help the most vulnerable become unacceptable. When it pursues such policies, the government is careful to do so by stealth. Perhaps the success of those ideas is reflected in the lurch to the right of public opinion. Cameron’s claim that ?social problems are often the consequences of the choices people make’ is the logical extension of this view.

A surprise to no-one
UKWatch.net - 3 Aug 2008
What a surprise it was to all concerned for a memo drawn up by Tony Blair last September to suddenly see the light of day during David Miliband’s leadership campaign that dares not speak its name, wasn’t it? Only to those who still believe in fairies living in their back garden is the answer. It surely beggars belief that many people prominent in the Labour Party, including a number dumped from office earlier for not being up to scratch, are engaged in a media-encouraged game to mount a palace coup. And on what basis? Nothing but image. A smiling, youthful, confident new Labourite rather than a brooding, stale, indecisive new Labourite. The major problem with this unimaginative formulation is that it ignores the real basis for the government’s inexorable electoral decline, which is the label that both men hold in common – new Labour. The label’s promise of novelty, honesty and modernisation took the day in 1997, but it is now tainted and despised. Labour jettisoned 2 million votes in 2001 and 2 million more in 2005. It lost ground in the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, English local and London mayor elections and its by-election record is dismal. Labour Party membership, which stood at over 400,000 in 1997, is now just over 150,000, with many local organisations utterly moribund. Neither electoral decline nor popular discontent set in with the coronation of Gordon Brown last summer. They were in full swing already, which is why voters and party members wanted Tony Blair out. Mr Blair’s suddenly revealed memo rewrites history by claiming that his once loved but now despised new Labour twin had “dissed our own record” – how so very roots – and “junked” the Blair government policy agenda. In reality, the new leader’s failure was to have suggested criticism and hinted at change before falling back in line and carrying out the same old tired and unpopular war and privatisation policies. The initial suggestion of an expansion of council housebuilding was dumped. The hint of withdrawal from Iraq likewise. And, in the absence of any positive policies to put before the people, the Prime Minister lost his nerve over calling the election that he had already told the trade union movement to prepare for and has since evoked the image of a dead man walking. And what is the political answer of the Miliband camp to this spectacle? Shoe-horn in Tony Blair Mark 2 and give long-time council tenants a lump sum to use as a deposit to buy private accommodation. Such poverty of imagination belittles the severity of Britain’s housing shortage and confirms new Labour’s inability to think outside the straitjacket of private-sector solutions. New Labour’s dead-end private-is-best policies ought to have been debated last year against the labour movement priorities offered by John McDonnell, whose campaign was stifled by trade union concerns to avoid a leadership contest. The fruits of that conservative approach are readily apparent now – a government that remains unpopular and refuses to consider another political direction. That remains the key. Without a new direction, Labour is sunk and deserves to be. The question is, are the unions prepared to take remedial action?