Ecosocialist Front for COP26 Starts to take Shape

Green Left’s invitation to form a United Ecosocialist Front for the United Nations COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, in November this year, has  started to materialise. In the UK, two ecosocialist political parties, Left Unity and Socialist Resistance have agreed in principle, to participate with Green Left in this venture.

Socialist Resistance are trying to form a broader ecosocialist organisation called the Anti Capitalist Resistance, with a founding conference on 31 January. Green Left and Left Unity have submitted a joint application for a workshop at the From the Ground Up conference in March this year.

If accepted, the workshop will be entitled ‘Just Transition, Pandemic and Poverty.’ This is the first tangible example of cooperation between separate ecosocialist organisations in this initiative. The symbolism is important as a genuine gesture of solidarity and goodwill. Thank you to Left Unity for their offer.

We hope that other organisations will also join with us in the coming weeks and months.

Many individuals in the UK have also expressed an interest in this initiative and likewise we hope more will follow.

The plan at this stage is to explore ideas for areas that we can cooperate on in the run up to and outside the Glasgow COP26 conference as a next step.

Internationally, we have been contacted by two organisations who have an interest in this initiative, the Global Ecosocialist Network and the Green Ecosocialist Network, an ecosocialist grouping within the US Green party. Green Left has now affiliated to the Global Ecosocialist Network, and hope to have a presence at their next on line meeting on 14 February.

Again, many individuals internationally have contacted us to express an interest. I must admit, that we hadn’t given a great deal of thought to the international dimension, but we should have done, as there is a clear potential for it here.

It would be good if people internationally, contributed some ideas on how this could work. Either in the comments section of this post or by emailing us at the contact address below. How might the local campaign in the UK link in with the global ecosocialist response? I’m sure there is some scope.

Please do share this post with any likely interested parties, groupings and individuals.

COP26 will be held in Glasgow, Scotland from 1 to 12 November, 2021.

Contact - ukgreenleft@gmail.com

UK Green Left Invitation to form a United Ecosocialist Front for COP26

Green Left, the ecosocialist grouping in the Green Party of England and Wales, has launched an initiative for a unified ecosocialist response to the COP26 United Nations climate change conference, in November, in Glasgow, later this year. All those parties, groupings and individuals who take an ecosocialist view, are welcome, and indeed encouraged to join together, and amplify our collective voice.

Under the social media radar, Green Left members have been using their contacts in the wider ecosocialist community in the UK, and internationally. Although, a message has been posted on a couple of ecococialist Facebook groups. This is a formal, public invitation to join with us.

I can report already, that several political parties in England and Scotland have been contacted, and some I know for sure are discussing our proposal. Also, many individuals from the UK and around the world have expressed an interest in supporting this initiative. It will take a little time for decisions to be taken in other parties and groupings on whether they to want participate in this, which is of course understandable. I am hopeful though, that we will come together.

I can also report that Green Left has decided to affiliate to the Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN). My understanding is that GEN are not yet planning any specific actions in the UK around the conference, but perhaps if our on the ground initiative is successful, then we might be the local arm of the international ecosocialist response to COP26?

Should our collective form, it is important to stress that any decisions on actions to be taken before and outside of the conference, will be up to those who want to take part. Green Left is just trying to get this started. I hope, at the very least, a joint press release can be agreed, setting out our position, to the public, not those taking part in the conference itself. As with all the other 25 COPs, greenwash solutions will emerge.

We reject such evasions and call for an ecosocialist approach, which is likely to include a just transition for the Global North and South, to a new, ecologically rational economic system. But this is only a suggestion, at this stage.

Come and join us in protesting for a viable plan to tackle the climate crisis. And please share this post with any likely interested parties, groups or individuals.

COP26 will be held in Glasgow, Scotland from 1 to 12 November, 2021.

Contact - ukgreenleft@gmail.com

From the Ground Up – the Climate Movement Gets in Shape for COP26

Written by Iain Bruce and first published at International Viewpoint

The surprising success of the online mobilisation, “From the Ground Up”, from 12-16 November, poses new challenges and new responsibilities for the climate movement. This “Global Gathering for Climate Justice” was organised by the COP26 Coalition to mark the time when the United Nations climate talks were meant to have taken place in Glasgow. [1] 

Lasting five days with 53 events and some 8,000 people registered, it brought together an impressive range of movements, speakers and topics. Together they sketched out key components of the response that is needed to the climate and Covid crisis – not only in the next year leading up to the postponed COP26 in Glasgow, but beyond that across the coming decade, when drastic action is needed to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

With Via Campesina and small farmers from South East Asia and South Africa to the Western Isles of Scotland, activists discussed the need to replace industrial agriculture with local, agroecological production as a way of getting food on our plates. Indigenous activists from Central America and the Amazon to Sulawesi talked about the struggle to defend their forests and lands from extractive industries, including the important issue of mining the minerals needed for electric motors.

Oil and aviation workers, from the North Sea to the South Atlantic, debated alongside public transport campaigners from Glasgow and retrofitters from Leeds the need for a just transition to climate jobs that really responds to, and is steered by, the workers concerned. Feminist and Black Lives Matter activists from North and South America talked about the overlap between their mass protests and the climate struggle.

Veronica Gago, of the Ni Una Menos movement in Argentina, said we need to go beyond solidarity, and think in terms of building bridges between the different actions we take, wherever we are. One of the main leaders of the October 2019 uprising in Ecuador, the Indigenous leader Leonidas Iza, called for the climate movement, the feminist movement and the youth movement to agree on a worldwide uprising next year in the run up to Glasgow, “because capitalism threatens the end of humanity”.

If anyone thought the pandemic had silenced the climate movement, this event should have set them straight. It showed that this movement is now a key site where concerns, anger and proposals over the combined climate, health and economic crises are coming together. The British government under Boris Johnson, reflecting the consequences of the election of Joe Biden in the US, is now seeking to relaunch its image with burnished green credentials. The movement around COP26 has the potential to become a strong counter pole to this promotion of “Green Capitalism”.

Same storm, different boats

The COP26 Coalition issued an important second political statement a day before the event which acknowledged that the fact so many governments and corporations are talking about getting rid of fossil fuels is itself a victory for the years of street protests and resistance by front line communities. [2] But the movement should not trust these elites to follow through. The statement was signed by dozens of organisations within the Coalition and stated:

The global pandemic has made clear that the multiple crises we face today – climate breakdown, ecological destruction, racism, patriarchy, hunger, poverty, the mass displacement of peoples – are all interconnected. These crises share common roots that see the earth’s resources exploited for the benefit of the few at the cost of the many, and the poor and marginalised bear the worst consequences. We may all be in the midst of the same storm, but we are patently not all in the same boat.

This was the message taken into the centre of Glasgow on the second day of the event, as activists sailed a boat, decked in banners reading “Same Storm, Different Boats”, down the River Clyde to the Scottish Events Campus where the COP will take place. [3] 

Standing next to the boat, the Coalition’s Scottish Coordinator, Quan Nguyen, said: “We need the UK and Scottish Governments to acknowledge that their targets of net zero 2045 and 2050 are not only too late, but open loopholes for fossil fuel corporations who have caused the crisis in the first place to continue polluting and burning the planet... The Governments need to hold polluters to account, shut down fossil fuel corporations and fossil fuel sites. They need to stop exporting fossil fuel technology, and start paying reparations to countries and communities in the Global South.”

A diverse, militant, internationalism movement

To some extent, the From the Ground Up event showed that the movement around the COP26 Coalition has already broken beyond the NGO framework that gave rise to it. Those taking part are mainly young, probably more women than men, and fairly diverse, although this is an area it certainly wants to develop further. The tone is militant, and the content largely anti-capitalist, even if not everyone wants to use that kind of language. And it is resolutely internationalist.

It may have been a blessing in disguise that the big figures of the environmental movement – Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein, AOC – couldn’t make it. Their absence reinforced the sensation of a broad, horizontal, mass movement, reemerging from within the lockdown.

Big challenges certainly lie ahead. Sustaining the momentum and building on it will be one of them.

In the short term, there is the governmental Climate Ambition Summit on 12 December, which the Johnson government is organising together with the UN, France, Italy and Chile, to mark five years since the conclusion of the Paris Agreement. From the Coalition and the wider climate movement, we need to make our presence felt and raise those big questions about the promises being made, and the assumptions behind them.

In March there may be another, shorter online event of the Coalition, to talk more about strategies for action. In particular, plans will have to to be developed for the kinds of protest that are needed at the G7 summit to be hosted somewhere in the UK in the summer 2021, and leading up to the COP itself in Glasgow 1-11 November 2021. The Glasgow COP will be preceded by a UN pre-summit in Milan, Italy 30 September – 2 October, and earlier preparatory talks, possibly in Bonn, Germany, at dates that are still to be decided.

So these could also become targets for protests. But even if all these meetings do become physical events, and even if social distancing is no longer a necessity by November, it is likely that the plans for the Glasgow COP will aim at decentralised activities – maybe culminating in a big event and protest in Glasgow itself in November 2021, combined with rolling protests in other parts of the world, and maybe online convergences too. The Fridays for the Future movement of schoolchildren striking for climate action has shown the possibility of wider action by workers through strike and protest action in workplaces.

Scottish politics are going to intersect with the run up to COP too. The demand for good, green jobs to build out of the pandemic will only grow, as Scotland likely becomes one of the parts of Europe worst hit by unemployment in 2021. The devolved Scottish government’s record on climate action so far has been one of the weakest points of its governing party, the Scottish National Party (SNP). But if, as seems almost certain, the SNP wins a majority in next May’s elections to the Scottish parliament or an overwhelming majority in alliance with the Scottish Green Party, the swelling support for independence and a new referendum will reach a crescendo.

That means the months leading up to COP26 could well see a full-blown constitutional crisis of the British state, pitting the official hosts, the UK government of Boris Johnson, against the de-facto local hosts in the Scottish government, Glasgow City Council and the people of the city and Scotland. On the ground, Independence will be the big political issue of the day. Many in the Scottish climate movement have already taken a position in favour of this. But how this works out in the wider British movement could be more complicated.

Some absences from the movement

There remain some absences in the COP movement that ought to be addressed. Although the strong presence of the Global South was one of the most impressive aspects of this online gathering, it was uneven. The participation from Africa was weaker. So was that from East Asia, to some extent South Asia, and the Middle East. More surprisingly perhaps, mainland European climate movements were largely absent. The questions over EU climate policy are ones that need to be taken very seriously at COP26, especially if the extreme centre around Biden seeks to team up with the EU elites to reassert their hegemony.

Another relative absence has been that of the radical left, both in Scotland and more widely across Britain. This is not so much a problem for the climate movement as it is for the left itself. Individuals of course took part. A few of the environmental campaigns have left-wing activists centrally involved.

But there was little sense of a political contribution or exchange, much less symbiosis, at least in any positive, organised way. There may be good reasons for this, historical, generational, cultural. But they ought to be addressed, sensitively, and in the first place by the left itself, with a reorientation towards an ecosocialist perspective. Fortunately, these gaps seem to exist far less, if at all, in the Global South.

“A fundamental reckoning with and transformation of our economic, social, and political systems”

In the end, the central message of this reemerging climate movement is one that is, or should be, shared by the left as a whole, and well beyond too. In the words of that Coalition statement [4]:

We are in uncharted waters. The world is on track to breach the carbon budget for 1.5oC global warming well before 2030. Our role in the run-up to COP26 must be to maintain at the forefront of public consciousness what this warming of 1.5oC means: for our lives and for our livelihoods, for the interests of all citizens globally and for the future of our planetary ecosystem. And what it would take to avoid: nothing less than a fundamental reckoning with and transformation of our economic, social, and political systems.

Footnotes

[1] See the website COP26 Coalition.

[2] See COP26 Coalition “Coalition Statement #2: We Are Not All In The Same Boat”.

[3] See COP 26 Coalition “All Hands on Deck – From the Ground Up Press Release”.

[4] See COP26 Coalition “Coalition Statement #2: We Are Not All In The Same Boat”.

Iain Bruce is a journalist and eco-socialist activist living in Glasgow. He was formerly Latin America correspondent for IVP. He is author of “The Porto Alegre Alternative: Direct Democracy in Action” (IIRE - International Institute for Research and Education).

Will COP26 Achieve anything Meaningful for the Ecological Crisis?

The next United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), delayed by the Covid 19 pandemic, will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, next year from 1 to 12 November 2021. It is the first time that the UK has hosted the conference, which will likely open against a backdrop of grim evidence that the planet’s ecology is under serious threat. Currently, the facts detail the scale of the looming disaster:

·        A global temperature increase of 0.85C against a 1951-1980 baseline, whilst being on course for global warming of an expected 4.1°C – 4.8°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.

·       Atmospheric CO2 at 412.75 parts per million, when CO2 needs to kept to no more 350 ppm to avoid drastically rising temperatures.

·       The Greenland ice mass reduced by -4040 Giga Tonnes since 1992.

·       Arctic ice cover reduced by 2 million square metres since 1979.

·       A rise in sea levels of +69.21 mm since 1992.

Figures above supplied by The Guardian.

·       90% of the global population breathes air exceeding World Health Organisation exposure targets.

·       There are now close to 500 dead marine zones covering more than 245,000 km² globally, equivalent to the surface of the United Kingdom, caused by various pollutants.

·       The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, since 1900.

These statistics point to ecocatastrophe and possibly extinction for humanity and all other species on the planet. And all of this after 25 previous world conferences on these matters, so the chances of anything positive being agreed appear to be slim in the extreme, even with the stakes being so high.

The much heralded COP21 held in Paris in 2015, which was meant reduce CO2 emissions and so keep global temperatures below 2C, was largely a fraud. The Trump administration in the US has now pulled out of the agreement, but even if the US had remained committed to the actions agreed in Paris, it would have had little effect on rising emissions.

Some of the pledges included non-existent (on any large scale) technological fixes, like carbon sequestration, which are entirely meaningless.  

A report written by climate scientists in 2019, “The Truth Behind the Paris Agreement Climate Pledges,” concluded:

“Countries need to double and triple their 2030 reduction commitments to be aligned with the Paris target,” said Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and co-author of the report that closely examined the 184 voluntary pledges under the Paris Agreement.   

The report’s analysis of the 184 pledges found that almost 75 percent were insufficient. In fact, the world’s first and fourth biggest emitters, China and India, will have higher emissions in 2030. The US is the second largest and its pledge was too low. Russia, the fifth largest emitter, hasn’t even bothered to make a pledge. The European Union is likely to exceed its pledges, but not by the margin required for it to be effective.

Given the seriousness of the situation, why is there such reluctance to take the necessary mitigating actions from the worst offenders? And secondly, why do environmental campaigners, especially the large NGOs put so much effort into these useless conferences?

The industrial capitalist states and their corporations that produce most CO2 emissions in their production processes, make a lot money out of the status quo. These processes require huge energy inputs, which mostly comes from burning fossil fuels, as it is the cheapest and most reliable source of this energy.

Fossil fuel produced energy can be produced close to where it is needed too, reducing transmission losses, unlike renewable sources, which in the main need to be produced further away from the point of use, and will lose power on the way, even if enough could be produced for the system’s ever expanding needs. The imperative to grow, or die is inherent to the capitalist system.

As for the environmental campaigners, they really can’t see the wood for the trees, if you will forgive the pun, when it comes to inadequate pledges on emissions reduction, and buy into false techno solutions and ‘market based’ solutions like carbon trading, which have failed wherever they have been tried. The 100% clean energy movement led by the US based Sierra Club with a $80 million donation by billionaire capitalist Michael Bloomberg, has created a renewable front for natural gas.

In the UK, the prime minister, Boris Johnson last week announced a plan to power all UK homes from off-shore wind farms by 2030. It is not clear whether this means replacing natural gas for heating, as well as current electrical demand, but it seems a tall order if it does. Not to mention, other buildings, transport, industry and farming power supplies. At the same time, his government has made fracking licences easier to obtain by businesses that extract shale gas.

All demand for power will grow as it does inevitably under a system that requires ever expanding markets to survive. All those new gadgets and those to come, need energy to operate them, as well that used to produce them.

The problem to a large extent is that people just can’t imagine a world run other than by capitalism. This is what Joel Kovel, the ecosocialist writer refers to as the ‘force-field’ of the system, and so all attempted solutions to climate change and other ecological ills, have to fit with capitalism. Which in turn means they will not be effective, and tend to be piecemeal or green washing fantasies.

Perhaps another recent announcement by the UK government reveals that the ruling classes are only too well aware of this. Government tells English schools not to use anti-capitalist material for teaching leaves me with the impression that they don’t want the young, who are most likely to have ecological concerns, to join up the dots and reveal the truth about how the world is run. Censorship never works, especially in these days of the world wide web. These dots will be joined, or we will have no future worth living.  

‘Green New Deal’ and ‘Green Deal’ are opposites – Scotland has to choose

Written by Robin McAlpine and first published at Source News and Analysis from Common Weal

MY PERENNIAL CRITICISM of the Left is that it manages to be correct on high-level principles but bad at actually fighting the fight. As chatter about ‘afterwards’ grows and grows, it is even more important to focus. The future is either a Green New Deal or a Green Deal. They’re opposites and lead in opposite directions. We have to choose.

The challenge for those who want fairness is first to understand the difference, and second, to fight for the one that delivers it. This is especially critical in Scotland.

So I’m begging you – don’t be fooled. Get informed and get angry.

What is a Green New Deal?

I won’t go into the history of the Green New Deal because there is loads written about it. But basically after the 2008 financial crisis a small group of London-based left economists tried to describe how financial, economic, environmental and social problems can be tackled in an integrated way.

The concept of Green New Deal has suffered a bit from that left problem of failing really to get beyond principles. I mean, I don’t disagree with them in the slightest, but without more detail they can be (and are) distorted into something else.

Fundamentally, the purpose of a Green New Deal is to accept that the environment requires the economy to change, and so that change must be done in a way that creates greater fairness and reduces the social harm of free market economics while restructuring the economy so that it can’t return to the practices which did the social and environmental harm in the first place.

It contains a degree of cynicism – because, as we will see, it is quite possible to save the environment and still create an appalling social dystopia. You can save the environment without saving people. So the Green New Deal welds them together.

The fundamental characteristic of a Green New Deal is that it is about economic and social justice and not just environmental justice.

Again, the lack of detail in most conversations about Green New Deals means how exactly this is to be done is either hard to derive or is a confusing series of options. But it should basically work by ensuring collective and democratic ownership of the sectors which are key to environmental harm (like energy) and making major public intervention in others (like housing).

Then, you use the interventions to achieve economic and social change. House-building can create different kinds of jobs, energy can include manufacturing which creates different kinds of jobs. Attached to ideas like job guarantees and greater regulation, we create a more equal and better society.

That can range from the modest (a kind of revival of the post-war Keynesian approach to development) to the radical (a form of ecosocialism). But even the modest end expects big change to come from the transition.

That’s a Green New Deal.

So what is a Green Deal?

A Green Deal is why high-level principles are such a problem. Looking at the rising demand for environmental action from the public (and especially from a younger generation), the people who are behind both climate damage and social failure (i.e. the big corporations) tried to work out how to defuse the situation.

So what they did was come up with a system for taking the ‘New’ out of a ‘Green New Deal’ – which of course they then did literally. Doing this was remarkably easy.

All they had to do was claim completely to support the climate change objectives but decouple the environmental element from the social and economic elements. Their vision is Amazon and Facebook and BP still ruling the world as a low-wage hell-hole – but with renewable energy.

In fact there is a good reason that Green Dealers obsess over carbon; it disguises the real problem. It disguises the fact that the global economy is systematically fucking all the environmental systems on which life on earth rely.

Where a Green New Deal works largely because of the mixture of labour and environmental regulation with direct government intervention and a different economic ownership pattern, a Green Deal drops the regulation part, most of the direct government intervention part and all of the economic ownership part.

It is based around ‘incentivising investment’. Green Deals are highly neoliberal and see giant and powerful investment managers, soil-destroying agrobusinesses, Big Oil, plastic polluters and strip-mining companies not as the problem but the solution.

In particular, because Green Dealers are so ideologically bound to the financial sector they have been trying to work out how to make sure that its dominant role continues. There is a strong argument that these investment funds have done more environmental damage than any other entity in history (they basically own all the oil businesses).

And yet the theory of a Green Deal is that if only you can properly ‘incentivise’ these investment funds to stop investing in the wrong things and start investing in the right things, the problem will fix itself.

It won’t – and even if it did, it will simply make worse all the other social and economic failures of the world economy. But it green-washes some of the worst players in environmental destruction and guarantees them control of the world economy for another 30 years.

If you scratch just beneath the surface of this neoliberal fantasy it starts to fall apart – I mean, in this free market model with its low regulation but high ‘incentivisation’ (give public money to the already rich), who is actually paying to install your new heating system? Because it’s going to cost you £20k. It’s a con designed to ‘sound Greta, act Trump’.

You can tell a Green Deal in a second. It involves setting targets, declaring ‘climate emergencies’ and making theatrical speeches about how much you love trees. But there is no identifiable action and when asked what is actually being done there is a lot of talk of ‘investment opportunities’. That just means yet more wealth-stripping.

Where is this battle happening?

At a global level, there is no battle. That’s because for all the rhetoric of globalization about building a better world through multilateral cooperation, at the multinational level only the super-rich get to play. In the late 1990s, the World Social Forum was created to try and balance the power of Davos. Let’s just say Davos won. There is no serious global campaign for a Green New Deal.

For the US, the battle has already been lost. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren were the only real chance; Biden is anti-Green New Deal. In the world’s most powerful economy, the battle is between subterfuge and total denial.

In Europe, we get to the heart of the problem – it is here that ‘Green Deal’ was invented. There is much more social democracy in Europe, so there is much more pressure for a proper Green New Deal.

However, hard as it is for left-minded Europhiles to admit it, the EU is a powerless parliament stuck onto a much more powerful committee of European governments – and they’re all right-wing Tories just now. It is they who originated the concept of Green Deal. It is the official EU policy.

I mean, have a look at ‘Renovation Wave’, the EU’s plan for tackling carbon emissions from the housing sector. See if you can work out who is paying the many billions this will cost. Then note how easy it is to see who’s pocket the money will end up in.

It’s barking mad. Proposing that a single street might have each of its houses properly retrofitted individually over say 15 years makes sense only to a free market evangelist. It is the definition of wasteful inefficiency and an open invitation to poor quality work. Unless there is a change (and a substantial one) in the EU, there isn’t a battle for a Green New Deal there. That happened and the Green New Deal lost.

At a UK level, I think we can safely say that a Green New Deal is off the table for the next five years. Beyond that the lead time to get one started is (conservatively) three or four years. Even a Starmer government in 2026 would mean no progress in the UK in this decade – and god knows where we’ll be by then.

So that means that, if you care in the slightest about a Green New Deal, your options start and end with Scotland. It’s not just that we’re exceptionally well placed to deliver one because of our outstanding natural resources, it’s that it would be easy to generate public support for it. So what are Scotland’s options?

Scotland’s options: a choice must be made

As I have already pointed out, Green New Deals remain a bit vague. This is a mistake; in the end they are a reform programme wrapped round a big engineering project. To get to the reform bit you need to understand the engineering bit.

So, in frustration, Common Weal undertook an enormous project next year to put the detail into a Green New Deal for Scotland. First, we committed ourselves to tackling not only climate change but all seven major environmental threats to the world. We committed not to ‘reducing’ our negative impact but taking it to zero. And we said ‘impact anywhere – not just in Scotland’ – so no dumping on the global south.

Then, we broke it down into major areas for action (buildings, heating, electricity, transport, food, land, resources and so on). Then we worked with experts to establish how, technically, it could be achieved. We then costed that and structured the spending in a way that achieved all the social goals of a Green New Deal.

We published it in November as the Common Home Plan. It is a comprehensive, costed, detailed plan for a Scottish Green New Deal. It is realistic and achievable and specific. You know exactly what you’ll get.

The other option on the table is the Scottish Government’s Green Deal. This has been heavily influenced by ‘Charlotte Street thinking’, the perpetual dominance of Edinburgh wealth managers on government policy. It involves the usual eco-theatre (‘climate emergency’ announcements, target-setting) but only one real action.

At the COP21 conference in Glasgow the wealth funds were going to be offered a very lucrative ‘green investment opportunity’ (announced personally by the First Minister). This is for global investors who are being offered “tens of billions worth of future opportunities” in energy and housing.

It is at the ‘call for projects’ stage where corporations come forward and say ‘if you give us money and the rights to your wind/land, we’ll take all that pesky energy/housing transition off your hands’. Which is a way of describing a £3 billion sell-off of Scotland’s renewable assets.

Or, to put it another way, this is the privatisation of all of Scotland’s most valuable resources – in perpetuity. It will simply repeat the same mistakes made during the oil boom of a massive public resource being handed to the already rich.

This will give pocket change to the Scottish Government to sprinkle initiatives around the country which will look like something is happening. But I call £3 billion pocket change because when the cost of a proper Green New Deal is more like £170 billion, it is.

There is no economic or social reform package attached to this , no plan for how any of the engineering supply chain will be captured by Scotland – more hand-wringing no doubt. The rich get richer, the rest of us have to spend our own money on their electricity generated by our natural resources.

And there is no way to block this in the Scottish Parliament because no-one in the SNP ranks ever rebels and so they’ll simply form yet another SNP/Tory coalition to push this through.

This is a choice to be made, not a compromise to be struck

The independence movement has been so broken by the last six years that people with ‘Bairns Not Bombs’ stickers still on their cars are asking me if there is any way we can ‘synthesise’ the Common Home Plan with the Scottish Government’s Green Deal.

No there isn’t. If the Scottish Government sells off Scotland’s remaining natural assets and all transition activity is in the corporate sector, the finances of the Common Home Plan (or any Green New Deal for Scotland) become impossible. Our plan is based on doing this collectively and through an industrial strategy which captures the economy gain of the transition for everyone.

We can finance £170 billion of spending because, doing it our way, it generates more tax revenue from expanded economic activity than it costs to finance the spending. But if the public hands over the source of that economic activity to foreign multinationals, it’s all over.

No matter how much pleading a future government does, the source of Scotland’s future prosperity will be privately owned by overseas multinationals and investment funds. The only option would then be to renationalise it, which is just enormous amounts of completely unnecessary spend which screw up the finance model leaving us trapped.

My current fear is that, given the alarming (indeed unacceptable) nature of the advisory group set up by the First Minister to produce a recovery plan, I very much fear that this renewables fire-sale might be kicking off over the summer. If you hear ‘green investment’, be very worried.

Right now, I have no further advice for you other than to be informed. With democracy in the SNP eroded and currently suspended altogether, with the media we have, with physical distancing rules preventing protest and with the option of an SNP/Tory coalition to get this through Holyrood, the virus has created an opportunity to strip Scotland of its future at its most vulnerable moment.

Right now I can’t tell you how to stop this. But I can beg you not to be fooled, and if you’re in the SNP and you care about these things, I urge you to think hard about means of challenging this which I can’t think of.

This is our collective future. If it is handed to the rich under cover of virus recovery, fury must follow.

The Lib Dems and Electoral Pacts

The Liberal Democrats are making a lot of noise in the media about electoral pacts in the almost certainly upcoming General Election. They have been forced to deny a pact in Scotland with the Tories, which would seem to be aimed at taking some seats off the SNP, in some sort of anti-independence alliance, although no talks have been mentioned with Labour in Scotland.

The new leader of the party Jo Swinson, was also forced to deny rumours of standing aside in favour of former Tory MP Rory Stewart in Penrith and the Borders, Cumbria, because of differences about leaving the European Union (EU). Recent weeks have seen a small procession of former Tory MPs, expelled from their party for voting against the government’s leaving the EU with no deal, joining the Lib Dems. Two of these MPs, Phillip Lee and Sam Gyimah, have distinctly illiberal, if not down right homophobic views, but why let principles get in the way of a good political news story?

The Lib Dems have though admitted that they are looking at a pro-Remain electoral alliance with parties, in England and Wales, who support staying in the EU, or at least want another referendum on the issue, with remain an option. Given the Labour party’s latest policy shift, towards holding a referendum on any leave deal they can negotiate with EU, with Remain the other option, the Lib Dems are not looking for any deal with Labour. Perhaps this is why they have moved to a revoke Article 50 policy, putting clear yellow water between the parties?

Swinson was on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme on Monday:

The Press Association reports, Swinson said that a pro-Remain agreement had worked well previously, including in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election last month where Jane Dodds was elected as a new MP for the party. She went on:

There was obviously success for that kind of arrangement in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election. Plaid Cymru and the Green party stood aside, stood shoulder to shoulder if you like, with the Liberal Democrats and Jane Dodds was elected to be a very unequivocal voice in parliament for remain. So, that happened already and it’s successful.

Asked whether the party would stand aside for Labour candidates, the Lib Dem leader said:

That’s a different question because Labour are not a remain party, Labour are trying to deliver a Labour Brexit. But where we agree with others on stopping Brexit, we are in those discussions.

The first thing to say about this, is that in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election, the local Green party did not endorse the Lib Dem candidate. They did not field a candidate, but they didn’t in the 2017 General Election either, judging it was not worthwhile, given the associated required spending. This has not stopped the Lib Dems propagating this untruth though, ever since the Greens decided not to stand.

Plaid Cymru did say that they had stood down in favour of a pro-Remain candidate, but they only polled about 3% in the constituency in 2017, so probably didn’t make much difference to the outcome, albeit in a narrow triumph for the Lib Dems, on a low turn out. It is possible that such arrangements will happen in some constituencies at the next General Election, but I wouldn’t expect it to be on a large scale.

It comes as no surprise that the Lib Dems will not contemplate any arrangements with the Labour party. Firstly, Labour don’t do pre-election deals with any other party anyway, and given the Lib Dem’s record on propping up David Cameron’s Tory coalition government, the Lib Dems would be the last party (apart from the Tories) they would break with their usual stance on alliances.

But it also appears to be part of the Lib Dems wider electoral strategy. Something like five million Tory voters voted Remain in the 2016 referendum, and it is these pro-Remain Tories that the Lib Dems are hoping to court. These voters are unlikely to support a party that they see in some kind of electoral alliance with the Labour party, so it fits with their strategy to attack Labour, not do deals with them.

It is also evident in the blind eye approach to defecting Tory MPs, who hold questionable views on gay people, as each Tory MP (or ex- Tory MP) provides a media story of Remain supporting Tories going over to the Lib Dems. The defecting ex Labour MPs, are seen as New Labour types who were at odds with Corbyn’s Labour, so can safely be pouched in the hope that some Labour voters who liked Tony Blair, may be persuaded to shift to the Lib Dems. This is only a minor part of the Lib Dems electoral strategy though, it is Tory Remain voters that they are really after.

Labour may decide not to try too hard in constituencies they have no hope of winning, to concentrate resources where they can win. This may help the Lib Dems, but is a side issue for Labour.

At the end of the day, electing Lib Dems, is just electing another type of Tory. The Lib Dems appear to want to resurrect a David Cameron style Tory party, and although marginally better than the head bangers running the Tory party now, it would still be Tory.

Where does all of this leave the Green party? Well, I would suggest that local parties be very careful about helping the Lib Dems, for the reasons above, and the possibility of being tarred with the same brush. 

As for helping Labour, by standing aside in some places, this should be a local decision, and taken on a case by case basis. Labour's new stance of a referendum on their deal or Remain, seems to be reasonable to me. But we should remember too, that not all Green voters will vote Labour in any case.  

The Tories are now an Exclusively English Nationalist Party

If any further evidence were needed of the direction of the contemporary Tory party, a YouGov survey of party members published last week has provided it. Sixty-three per cent of members said they would be prepared to accept Scottish independence to get Brexit, while 59 per cent said the same about a united Ireland. Just 29 and 28 per cent were opposed, respectively.

The drift towards this has been apparent for some time, with until the 2017 general election, the Tories being an endangered species in Scotland. The 2017 general election saw a recovery for the party, winning thirteen seats in Scotland. But that election was unusual in breaking the trend of the last forty years which had seen the both Labour and the Tories losing their share vote all across the UK. It looks increasing as though that election was a blip, in the trend though, rather than a sea change.

The figures quoted above are truly astonishing in many ways. The full name of the party is the Conservative and Unionist party, which refers to the union of England and Scotland, and should not to be confused with the Unionists of Northern Ireland, although these Unionists can usually be relied to support Tories, should they be needed. The union is now expendable, it seems, disregarded for their greater passion of Tory members, for Brexit.

Theresa May, the outgoing Tory prime minister, made a point of principle of not taking risks with the union with Scotland and Northern Ireland, but she is clearly in a minority in her party these days. Her stance almost certainly contributed to her downfall. The Tory party is a very different animal in 2019, to the one which May joined in the 1970s.     

Which brings us to the current bore-fest, that is the contest to replace May as leader of the party and prime minister. I have yet to hear any of the contenders express the kind of view indicated by the YouGov survey. The future of the union with Scotland and Northern Ireland has not been a topic discussed very much at all as far I can remember, especially by the most hardline Brexiteer candidates. It would be contentious of course, but the possible break-up of the union is surely a relevant issue, in contest to become the prime minister of the United Kingdom?

The contenders were trying to win support from MPs from across the party in the first stage of the election, and Tory MPs maybe not be so gung-ho about ditching the union, but this issue will not go away when a successor is chosen. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union in 2016 referendum, and that sentiment seems if anything to have strengthened. A border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, is very unpopular with both Irish neighbours, and a hardline, no deal Brexit is very unpopular in Scotland.

Looming over the Tory leadership contest is Nigel Farage and his Brexit electoral vehicle, which is not really a party in the traditional sense, with no members and no internal democracy. I doubt Farage will shy away from splitting the union in pursuit of a pure Brexit, because he has little support in Scotland or Northern Ireland. The Brexit ‘party’ is largely an English party, with even the support it has in Wales, coming from people who live in Wales, but self-identify as English.

So, the next Tory leader will, if they want to win a future general election, either have to run the risk of splitting the union or see their party replaced (as the English national party) by Farage’s Brexit party. It would likely lead to Labour winning the next election as the right would be divided, in the winner takes all electoral system in the UK. It wouldn’t entirely surprise me if there was some kind of electoral alliance between the Tories and the Brexit party at the next election, even a merger.

It would be the beginning of the end of the union though, which many in all of the nations of the UK might well welcome, but it would signal the end of the Tory party from its historical role of defenders of the union.

Who would have thought that the English Tory party would be the catalyst to an end of over 300 years of union between England and Scotland and the admittedly overdue uniting of the island of Ireland into one independent country? The arrogant English vote is all that is left for the Tories, and they only have themselves to blame.  

An Urgent Just Transition to a Sustainable World

First published at Conter

We live under an economic system which encourages consumption on an industrial scale and the consequences of climate change will be endured by future generations. What can we as activists do to affect change here in Scotland? Pete Cannell and Brian Parkin write ahead of this Saturday’s Just Transitions conference in Edinburgh about the steps we need to be taking…

We face an existential threat. Unless there’s a rapid transition to a low/no carbon economy there will be catastrophic climate change. The recent UN Climate report underlined how little time we have. In years to come, our children and grand children may ask why, when the danger was clear, there was no mass movement to drive the change that’s required.

The UN report, like government policies around the world, assumes the market will adapt to meet carbon reduction targets. However, growth in solar and wind energy production is taking place alongside a massive expansion in the use of coal. It’s now certain if we rely on market forces, driven as they are by the maximisation of profit, the targets will not be met.

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, already higher than it has been for 10 million years will continue to grow and average temperatures will continue to rise.   

But it’s also clear if we drop the reliance on the market it’s possible to make the transition to a low carbon economy in a way that will mitigate the future effects of climate change and provide immediate benefits for most of the world’s population. The Campaign Against Climate Change has developed a costed blueprint for transition at a UK level and the notion of a Just Transition is gaining traction around the world.  

Today, a one-day conference in Edinburgh will look at how we can take the urgent steps needed for a Just Transition in Scotland. We start with some real advantages and some major challenges. Scotland as a ‘region’ of the UK is a distinct geo-political entity. It has a significantly higher proportion of its adult workforce in industrial employment.

Core industrial sectors such as shipbuilding, heavy mechanical (and electrical) engineering and construction have retained a ‘critical mass’ and skill content of their workforces and have been able to keep pace with world class technological developments. Long-term involvement in North Sea oil and gas has developed the most advanced marine engineering and process systems base in the world.

This is a major technological asset with massive spin-off and diversification potential. Scotland has by far the greatest share of the UK’s potential wave and tidal stream renewable energy resources (about 75%) as well as about half of the useable onshore and offshore wind.  

It’s important that energy policy, the creation of a state run energy company and the creation of a green investment bank are on the Scottish Government agenda. However, the initial proposals for these essential components of a strategy for transition fall far short of the scale and ambition that’s required.

There also seems to be little recognition of a looming energy crisis. In terms of electrical capacity and distribution, Scotland is rapidly slipping from its pre-electricity privatisation situation (1989) of a 50% over-capacity with interconnector ‘exports’ to England and Wales and Northern Ireland, to one of sharp capacity decline and a possible import dependency by 2025.

ScotE3, the organisers of the conference argue that to build the momentum required for a Just Transition a full and democratic debate is needed to tackle hard political questions. Climate change in the abstract is terrifying. But recognition of the threat can’t be confined to committed environmental activists.

If you’re scared and feel powerless then it’s very unlikely you will join their ranks. Indeed anger at inequality and fear for the future is precisely the terrain on which the alt right is flourishing.  

The relatively small-scale initiatives to tackle climate change that are currently in place or planned will neither be effective nor will they inspire confidence. However, large scale investment that guarantees job security (and paid retraining if required) for engineering workers in the construction and defence sectors as the switch is made to climate jobs would be hugely popular in these sectors which are rife with rotten agency staffing. 

A programme of home insulation for all would stop the illness and anxiety caused by the high levels of fuel poverty that exist across Scotland but disproportionately impact old and poorer people in rural areas.

These are big steps and necessary steps. At the conference we’ll see film from REEL News showing how working class communities in the US are organising for a Just Transition and there will be speakers from Campaign Against Climate Change, the Campaign Against the Arms Trade and the defence and construction sectors.

However, the most important part of the conference will involve thinking about how we win the case for urgent and large-scale action. The manifesto or action plan produced will be shared across the labour movement and community groups as an open document for discussion and amendment.

For more information go to the ScotE3 Employment, Energy and Environment website  

Equality at Last – Civil Partnerships for Opposite Sex Couples, but Why the Delay?

Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld with the Green party’s (and Green Left’s) Peter Tatchell outside the Supreme Court after their successful case against the government

Theresa May, the prime minister, announced on Tuesday at the Tory party conference in Birmingham, that the government will legislate to allow opposite sex civil partnerships, in England and Wales. It comes in the wake of the Supreme Court judgement in June that ruled that the current prohibition breaks the Human Rights Act. No timescale has been specified as yet for the change to come into place.

The Scottish government launched a consultation last week on the possibility of extending civil partnerships to heterosexual couples, in Scotland. The option of scrapping civil partnerships altogether will apparently be considered. 

Same sex couples have been allowed to enter into civil partnerships since 2005, so this has been a glaring issue of inequality for some time. At that time, the defence of that state of affairs ran along the lines of straight people could get married, something unavailable to gay people. I never bought this argument, because it just highlighted that gay people should also be allowed to marry. The argument evaporated completely though when this situation changed in 2014, and gay marriage was legalised, (except in Northern Ireland).

There are plenty of opposite sex couples who happily live together for years, but do not wish to get married. I have to declare an interest here, as myself and my partner are of this opinion, because of the patriarchal associations surrounding marriage. But we don’t see why we should be denied the same perks in tax breaks, as married people or those in civil partnerships get.

Advantages of civil partnerships include a higher level of earnings that is non-taxable and no inheritance tax is payable in the event of one partner’s death. Even a shared home currently attracts inheritance tax for non married, co-habitees. It makes wills easier too because your legally recognised ‘next of kin’, becomes your partner. Not very romantic perhaps, but why should opposite sex couples be denied what is available to same sex couples?

This does open up a number of questions around what kind of partnership will qualify? The implication is that only people who are having sex together should qualify, but that is difficult to establish. Any two people, perhaps brother and sister should be able to have a civil partnership, if they want to. What you would do about multiple partnerships ,three siblings for example, I’m not sure, but I don’t think you can try to tie it to sexual relationships only.

It seems as though the government wants to have some kind of consultation period in England and Wales, and this may be why no timescale has yet been put on the changes coming into force. I really don’t see why though. It is largely an uncontroversial issue in Parliament and the country as a whole, so I can’t see what there is to consult about?

It could be that some Tory MPs and members will object, saying that it will discourage opposite sex couples from getting married, but even the Marriage Foundation supports extending civil partnerships to heterosexual couples, saying they are “infinitely preferable to unthinking and risky co-habitation”.

Theresa May’s announcement was definitive though, so it seems as though any consultation will be a mainly cosmetic affair, so you do have wonder what the delay is for, why can this not be introduced more or less immediately? There are pressures on the Parliamentary timetable, due to the on-going furore over Brexit, but such an uncontentious matter of basic equality, should pass into law unhindered.

France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece and Estonia all allow heterosexual civil partnerships, whilst in the US the issue is devolved to state or city level with New York and San Francisco for example permitting these unions. Some European countries, like Germany and Ireland ended the practice once gay marriages were legalised.

It looks like in England and Wales scrapping civil unions for same sex couples will not be considered, which I think is right. Why should married people get extra privileges, just because they are married? This unfair situation is not justifiable, and the government should get on with putting it right.