Natalie Bennett: We have to ban zero-hours contracts

The Green Party’s leader put forward her views on education, pay and the NHS in a live debate with young voters

Last night Green Party leader Natalie Bennett was the first politician to appear on Leaders Live, a new debate series that gives young people the chance to put questions directly to leaders.

Broadcast live on YouTube, the series is created by Bite the Ballot, an organisation that empowers young people to make informed voting decisions.

Bennett’s appearance was significant as she has been omitted from the BBC’s scheduled debates that will mark the run up to the general election.

You can watch the full debate here.

The questions that the audience asked Bennett showed that jobs and education are at the top of their list of worries.

When asked who she proposed would cover the cost of the free higher education the Greens have promised, Bennett pointed to rich individuals and multinational companies who do not pay their taxes.

She stressed that there is a need for society to be “rebalanced” and that multinationals need to take responsibility for contributing towards society.

The issue of equality also informs the Greens’ policy on drugs.

Bennett was adamant that drugs “should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue”, and said that the amount of discretion given to police means that more people from minority backgrounds are arrested for drug misuse than people from other backgrounds.

This, she said, is despite the fact that more privileged people are no less likely to be using drugs.
Bennett also pledged to end zero-hours contracts, and stated that her party was “absolutely opposed” to unpaid internships. Alongside workers who currently receive a minimum wage, interns, she said, should be paid the Living Wage as a minimum.

The NHS was also a key issue in the debate. Bennett warned that the UK is ‘racing towards’ an American style privatised health system, and criticised the private finance initiatives (PFI) which are holding the NHS hostage with huge interest rates and service charges.

Campaign group Drop the NHS Debt estimate that by 2020-21, the annual costs of the 118 NHS PFIs will be £2.14bn. Saving 46 per cent of that would release about £1bn a year.

As part of the Greens’ plans for the NHS, Bennett promised that more detail on mental healthcare would be added to their manifesto. She criticised the way that mental health problems are regarded as less urgent than physical ones, and pledged parity of esteem for people with mental illness.

On education, Bennett said that no school run by a faith group should receive government money. She predicted that in the event of this becoming legislation, many faith schools would choose to come into the secular system rather than become private.

The school system also face criticism from the Green leader over its competitive nature. Bennett said that the system should be based on cooperation, and shold include a more practical curriculum covering things like relationships, health and nutrition, in order to give pupils an “education for life”.

Ruby Stockham is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter and first published here

No More Deaths From Fuel Poverty

This Friday 28^th November pensioners will lead a march from Charing Cross to Energy UK- the Big Six energy company’s lobby body  under the banner ‘No More Deaths from Fuel Poverty: Energy Rights Now!’

Why? Because this is the day that the Office of National Statistics will also be releasing the numbers of ‘Excess Winter Deaths’ in winter 2013/2014- and it’s estimated that at least 30% of these deaths caused by the impacts of living in a cold home. Shockingly, in winter 2012/2013 there were more than 10,000 deaths in the UK from cold homes (with 31,100 Excess Winter Deaths recorded in total) whilst in the same year the Big Six energy companies- British Gas, E.On, EDF Energy, npower, Scottish Power and SSE- made £3.7billion in pure profit.

Fuel Poverty Action, the Greater London Pensioners’ Association and Reclaim the Power are inviting everyone angry about fuel poverty, deaths from cold homes, Big Six polluting and profiteering, lack of government action on badly needed home insulation , home break-ins by energy companies, benefit cuts and more to come and join the march and ‘powerful and creative’ action outside Energy UK.

We are also inviting you to attend the end of the protest where there will be n ‘Energy Rights teach-in’ – where we will learn, collectively, how to negotiate if you’re in debt to your energy supplier or steps that you can take if you can’t afford your bill. We will also read out Fuel Poverty Action’s ‘Energy Bill of Rights’ which recently had a rowdy launch in Parliament- a Bill of Rights that asserts our right to access affordable, sustainable and democratic energy as well as decent housing that doesn’t waste heat. We think that until we make real demands about our Energy Rights we will continue to be at the whim of the profiteering companies and couldn’t-care-less government.

Join us to express sadness, anger, solidarity and to point fingers at some of those responsible for outrageous cold home deaths. Take action with us this Friday 28^th November.
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1486809398267145/?ref=ts&fref=ts

-A Pensioner? Join the Pensioner Bloc meeting at 11am at Charing Cross Station
https://www.facebook.com/events/1486809398267145/?ref=ts&fref=ts#!/events/708554315906912/?fref=ts

-A student? Join the SOAS Student Bloc, meeting 10.45am https://www.facebook.com/events/1486809398267145/?ref=ts&fref=ts#!/events/732599153496936/
-Join the main protest gathering outside the Institute of Directors, Pall Mall at 11.30am

Can’t come?

Tweet support using the hashtags

#HeatNotGreed and #EnergyRightsNow

From Fuel Poverty Action published at UK Uncut

The Climate Crisis is Capitalism

Much Western discourse around environmental crisis reiterates the self-serving frame that ‘the world,’ rich and poor, global North and South, capitalist and communist, produced global warming. The assertion is posed as pragmatic, as avoiding the Cold War oppositions that tend to shut down discussion of important issues. If ‘we all’ are responsible for this or that catastrophe then we all have a responsibility to solve it. But what if, in terms of facts and history, a very specific and well defined form of political economy contains the guiding principles, modes of social organization, necessary technocratic skills, motive and two hundred years of easily assignable history of environmental destruction, can be blamed?

The question of whether or not capitalism is responsible for climate crisis is more pragmatic than ideological. A first step to solving a problem is to understand what is causing it. Capitalism as a form of political and economic organization— political economy premised on guiding principles about human ‘being’ and a ‘science’ of economic organization tied to a specific idea of economic ‘efficiency,’ arose in its early industrial form in mid-eighteenth century Britain. From the birth of capitalism to the rapid growth of industrialization beginning around 1850 to the growing dominance of state capitalism in China today, the carbon emissions responsible for global warming have followed the spread of capitalism.



Graph (1) above: atmospheric CO2 levels from burning fossil fuels to power industrial production began to rise dramatically around 1850. The widespread use of automobiles and other fossil fuel powered transportation began in the early twentieth century. Framed by Western economists as ‘consumption,’ transportation is necessary to get to and from work in much of the West because of decisions around economic organization made by self-interested industrialists. Note the drop in CO2 emissions in the 1930s, the Great Depression. While the data in the graph ends in 1960 to avoid outsourced production that misrepresents national CO2 emissions, total emissions doubled again between 1970 and 2011. Units are MtCO2. Source CAIT.

The residual Cold War ‘competition of ideologies’ behind reluctance to address capitalism relies on the Western conceit that ideology determines history rather than evolves with it. Capitalism became ossified as ideology when it served the political and economic interests of its proponents to ossify it, usually in the context of engineered crisis like the ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s. As an effort at historical explanation, the idea of capitalism ‘competing’ with other ideologies makes sense only through deference to factual political economy. Colonial history, sequential devastating wars, different ‘endowments’ in terms of unifying social tendencies and natural resources and different ‘starting’ times have been flattened to ‘equivalence’ in improbable opposition.

This is to make the point that capitalism in its facts neither implies nor requires ideological opposition— the facts are what they are without any. Capitalist theory, a/k/a Western economics, has been used to organize and motivate these facts. The profit motive pays capitalists for environmental destruction. This destruction is a ‘cost’ of production absorbed by ‘the world’ to the benefit of the capitalist. This same profit motive provides the imperative to mechanize and automate to lower costs. From about 1850 forward this mechanization became increasingly reliant on fossil fuels as the energy source that powers it. And the burning of fossil fuels is the major source of carbon emissions over the history of capitalist production.



Graph (2) above: from the large scale industrialization of the second ‘industrial revolution’ to the most recent waves of globalization the overwhelming preponderance of CO2 emissions were directly tied to capitalist production. In the 110 years between 1850 – 1960 ‘ the West,’ the U.S., U.K. and Germany, put over ten times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as the far more populous combined Russia and China. China didn’t evolve into the world’s largest emitter of CO2 until the U.S. and Europe began outsourcing dirty production there in the 1990s. Units are MtCO2. Source: CAIT

Western economics is capitalist economics in dimensions that appear largely invisible its practitioners. These dimensions include the relation of ‘civil’ government to capitalist production and the relation of ‘consumers’ to the ‘system’ of capitalism. From the integrated state-capitalism of mercantilist Britain to the military-financial-industrial state capitalism of the U.S., and more recently China, distinguishing state from economic actors is the product of an improbable theoretical overlay over integrated political economy. And the high-capitalist conceit that consumer demand drives economic production faces the facts that modern ‘consumers’ were born into developed economic contexts where ‘consumption’ could reasonably be framed as production.

Both of these conceits are a function of the theoretical time-space that is the basis of Western economics. The separation of ‘economics’ from political economy is the product of deductive theories of ‘economy’ and economic ‘system’ that have no place for ‘the political.’ This leaves the theoretical and methodological constraints used to define the realm of the ‘economic’ inferred back as social description. It is deduced imposition, simple assertion put forward as ‘fact.’ Today this maneuver finds a broad swath of Western economists incredulous that Wall Street bailouts, guarantees and subsidies; subsidies and wars for military and oil and gas interests and the public-private surveillance state are evidence of class interests driving corporate-state policies.



Graph (3) above: a favorite conceit of Western economists, that ‘we are all in this economy together,’ is placed in context when CO2 emissions are considered. North America— overwhelmingly the U.S., emits roughly 2X more CO2 per capita (per person) than Europe and more than 4X as much as Asia as of 2011. While total CO2 emissions are the relevant metric for resolving global warming, per capita emissions point to who benefits and who pays for capitalist production. Even per capita emissions understate the disproportionate benefit received by the capitalist West because dirty production from the U.S. and Europe has been outsourced to China. Units are MtCO2 per person. Source: CAIT.

The concept of ‘consumer-driven’ economic production is an artifact of this same theoretical time-space. The Western economists’ separation of consumption from production places the housing, clothing, food and transportation necessary to work as consumption when work can’t be done without them. Economic ‘freedom’ in this context is the choice between competing products, not the choice of form of economic organization. The ‘environmental’ choice between a hybrid car and a gas guzzler has little bearing on the social organization that makes driving a car necessary to economic existence. Placing ‘responsibility’ on consumers for environmental resolution arbitrarily conflates consumption with production and it places the locus of social resolution with an improbable ‘individual.’

Additionally, this conflation ‘naturalizes’ consumer culture when it is demonstrably a creation of technocrats in the service of capitalist plutocrats. Modern consumer culture required about a century of capitalist propaganda, a/k/a advertising, to evolve to its current state. ‘Public relations,’ efforts at public suasion through appeals to psychology, was straightforwardly tied to ‘propaganda,’ the use of psychology for political suasion, until the Nazis gave it a bad name in WWII. Advertising is premised on psychological suasion, on appeals to ‘buried’ understanding. The Western economists’ concept of ‘consumer choice’ excludes psychological suasion because appeals to ‘buried’ understanding, psychology, challenge the idea of ‘free’ choice. Adding irony is the billions that capitalist enterprises pay to advertise.



Graph (4) above: the blue line across the bottom of the graph represents the wealth of the bottom 90% of U.S. households. The red line represents the wealth of the richest 0.1%. With environmental destruction, including CO2 emissions, being the detritus of capitalist production— costs shoved onto ‘the world’ that show up as profits to capitalists and corporate executives, the differences in wealth are rough measure of this economic taking. The American aversion to discussion of class warfare is well earned. The benefits of environmental destruction are so narrowly distributed while the costs are so widely distributed that class warfare launched from above is the only viable conclusion. Units are constant 2010 dollars. Source: Emmanuel Saez

Given the historical, geographical and direct physical ties of capitalist production to environmental destruction, including potentially catastrophic global warming, the contention that capitalism can continue without its unwanted consequences requires implausible parsing. The problem isn’t just global warming per se; it is the swath of environmental destruction that is the product of the approach to the world that is capitalism. With industrial fishing as fact and metaphor, capitalist ‘competition’ takes until there is nothing left to take— the seas are being systematically emptied of fish. And half or more of the sea life slaughtered in industrial fishing is thrown back into the ocean as garbage. This is capitalism.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) provides an analysis of global warming suggesting that large scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions must begin immediately and go far beyond proposals currently under consideration for catastrophe to be averted. As illustrated by per capita CO2 emissions, the geopolitical tension is that the West has the wealth from two hundred years of economic exploitation of the environment in the pockets of a few thousand astonishingly wealthy people while the associated environmental destruction is distributed around the globe. Convincing the Chinese people to forgo economic development for environmental resolution while Americans produce four times as much CO2 per capita seems unlikely.

Ideas like taxing the profits of oil and gas companies to fund programs of environmental resolution assume that these programs exist; are plausible and won’t result in unintended environmental and social destruction in other dimensions. In the 2000s the production of ‘green’ solar panels and wind turbines was outsourced to China and the result was environmental catastrophe estimated to be 4X more expensive than cleaner Western production when environmental costs were considered. They also assume that the governments of the West held captive by business interests for the last four decades will suddenly become responsive without a full-scale revolution.

The base social tension of environmental resolution is illustrated in the graphs above. Resistance to changing the status quo begins with the very rich in the West who have the most to lose from change. From there resistance comes from high per capita CO2 emissions countries— the ratio is direct evidence of the benefit received versus the cost not (yet) borne. Within rich countries the ‘external’ division of global class interests also exists internally. Cynical plutocrats like the Koch brothers have ‘invested’ heavily to frame class division in the mythology of economic ‘freedom.’ But the ‘freedom’ of some to destroy the world creates a clear division.

Reluctance to address capitalism directly might be pragmatic if there were any evidence that it is effective. The ‘better than nothing’ incrementalism of Western economists proceeds from the premise that ‘no one knows’ what needs to be done when the IPCC analysis is a decent place to start. A ‘rational’ plan of resolution might turn the report into programmatic action. But a ‘rational’ plan, one where peoples and governments work together, assumes a unity of interests that capitalism assures will never arise. And the cautionary chide that ‘we’ move slowly to minimize social dislocations runs up against the past, present and future dislocations of two hundred years of capitalist environmental exploitation.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is forthcoming.

This was first published at CounterPunch

Rochester and Strood By-Election Result

Mark Reckless (UKIP) 16,867 (42.10%)

Kelly Tolhurst (Conservative) 13,947 (34.81%)

Naushabah Khan (Labour) 6,713 (16.76%)

Clive Gregory (Green) 1,692 (4.22%)

Geoff Juby (Lib Dem) 349 (0.87%)

Hairy Knorm Davidson (Official Monster Raving Loony Party) 151 (0.38%)

I left off the minor parties and independents who got less than 100 votes. I only include the Loonies to give context to the Lib Dem vote.

So, UKIP won its second seat in Parliament with a majority of 2,920 on a turnout of 50.67%. Of course by-election results can be deceptive, and voters behave differently at general elections, but this result will do nothing to settle the nerves of Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem supporters.

The Conservatives put a great deal of effort into defending the seat after the defection to UKIP of Mark Reckless MP, and they have been managing expectations down all week, to such an extent that they now claim the result is better than predicted. There is some truth in this, but I suspect that Labour and Lib Dem voters backed the Tories to some extent, as the best placed anti UKIP party. Such is the perversity of our First Past The Post electoral system.

But behind the spin this is a terrible result for the Tories just six months before a general election. It is also a personal humiliation for the Prime Minister, who made five visits to the constituency during the election campaign. If they want to win the general election next year, then this is just the sort seat they need to retain, and a seven point deficit to UKIP is nothing short of a disaster.

The only thing that will have cheered the Tories, is that once again Labour stole the show and deflected attention onto Emily Thornberry’s ill-judged tweet mocking white man van and his flag draped house. This was a Labour seat up until 2010, so to finish such a poor third doesn’t suggest Labour will do better at the general election either.

But for complete and total humiliation, we once again must look to the Lib Dems. To gain only 349 votes and 0.87% of the total cast, is risible really.  This is the eleventh time this Parliament that they have lost their deposit in a by-election and represents the worst result in their history (including when they the Liberals) and worst for any party of government in a by-election. Oblivion beckons, and over on the LibDem Voice site, some are calling for Nick Clegg’s head.    

As for the Green candidate, 4.2% is not spectacular, but this is a pretty no hope seat for us, and normally I expect only about 1 or 2%, but we are of course not in normal times. If this continues, we should at least save many deposits in the general election, and where we are stronger, deliver some MPs too.  

Left Unity Minority in Support for ISIS

Apparently the motion below was submitted to the Left Unity conference last weekend, but LU people on Facebook say it was defeated. I find it astonishing that anyone, even a small minority in LU can support these murderers, rapists and thugs, particularly as they besiege Kobane where a fledgling ecosocialist type grouping of Kurds are desperately holding out against them.

What a disgrace!

“The call for the Caliphate, however vague and malleable the concept is, reflects a strong internationalism among Muslims, reinforced and reproduced for hundreds of millions each year by the Haj (Pilgrimage to Mecca), which breaks down and demotes any attachments to nation states of origin. At bottom the caliphate means one government for all Muslims, in which non-Muslims who accept its authority are also welcome.”

“To show solidarity with the people of the Middle East by supporting the end of the structure of the divided nation states imposed by the Versailles settlement and their replacement by a Caliphatetype polity in which diversity and autonomy are protected and nurtured and the mass of people can effectively control executive authority’. Left Unity distances itself specifically from the use of intemperate, inaccurate and moralist language such as ‘terrorism’, ‘evil’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘viciously reactionary’, ‘murderous’, genocidal’, etc in discussion about the Middle East; these terms are deployed by people and forces seeking not to understand or analyse, but to demonise in order to dominate, and they have no place within socialist discourse. Left Unity Resolution.

“We also distance ourselves from the Eurocentric brand of secularism that believes that the peoples of the Middle East must accept western terms of reference by consigning their religious faith to a separate part of their lives from their political aspirations, if they are to develop progressive societies.”

Seven things everyone should know about the Private Finance Initiative

The Private Finance Initiative is a big part of the privatisation that's killing the NHS, so why aren’t any of the main parties opposed to it?

1. What is PFI?

Rather than Central Government directly funding infrastructure works like schools or hospitals, Private Finance Initiative (PFI)  means a consortium of private sector banks and construction firms finance, own, operate and lease them back to the UK taxpayer, over a period of 30-35 years.

PFI financing of public infrastructure is now in use across the NHS, as well as the Departments for Education, Local Government, Defence, Transport, and Justice.

2. How much PFI debt do we owe?

UK taxpayers now owe £305 billion in PFI repayments across 700+ projects for the next 30 years. 

3. Do PFI deals provide value for money?

PFI deals have been universally criticised as horrendous value for taxpayers, likened to “paying for a hospital on your credit card” by BBC Panorama.

PFI is significantly more expensive than Government funded projects with the cost of borrowing at least two times higher than Government financed works according to a 2011 HM Treasury Report.

PFI rewires the relationship between the citizen and the state, so that our public services are no longer owned by, or directly accountable to us. 

4. Who is to blame for PFI?

Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes were introduced to the UK under the John Major Government in the 1990s, with the first PFI project [Skye Bridge] tested in Scotland. 

Tony Blair’s New Labour Government significantly expanded PFI as a convenient way of funding public infrastructure “off balance sheet.”

Despite frequently calling for an end to "Labours flawed PFI program" whilst in opposition, in 2011 Chancellor George Osborne rebranded and continued the PFI gravy train under the "PFI 2" banner.

5. What impact is PFI having on the NHS?

NHS Trusts owe £80bn in PFI loan repayments and “unitary charges,” the technical term describing the extortionate ongoing running costs of maintainingPFI hospitals via PFI - where private contractors are granted 30-year monopoly rights to deliver maintenance and services.

Next year alone, NHS Trusts will make some £2bn in PFI repayments - but the issue was conveniently ignored by the NHS England 5 year plan.

The number of NHS Trusts in financial trouble has doubled in the last financial year.

6. What can we do about PFI?

A public movement is building to fight back against the PFI scam.

At The People vs PFI Conference this month at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, activists, professionals and academics came together to call for an end to the madness of PFI. 

Practical examples abounded. Dexter Whitfield discussed the PFI project across Europe and highlighted the need for movement building to oppose it. David Price set out the sorry history of PFI in the NHS, and Stuart Hodkinson explained why PFI is no answer to housing problems in Lambeth and Islington. 

Ann Pettifor set out how solutions must also address the issue of money creation and capital controls. Nick Hildyard explained how PFI (also known as PPP) is a key tool of neoliberal capitalism, being used globally to extract finance, and Ashley Seagar highlighted how PFI damages ‘intergenerational fairness’.

The conference also focused on finding ways of organising locally to demand solutions to PFI.

Participants heard how to get stories into the media, research the dodgy deals, follow the money and build a movement, with workshops led by experts from Focus E15 mums, UK Uncut, Spinwatch, World Development Movement and others.

Check out the Storify and follow us on Twitter for more - @PplVsPFI and #PplVsPFI . 

7. Who is listening on PFI?

The question remains, who within our political establishment is listening? 

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls said this weekend that ‘only Labour can save the NHS and deliver a recovery that works for all’. Labour have also pledged to solve the affordable housing crisis.

But in his Labour Party conference speech this year, Balls promised:  “no proposals for any new spending paid for by additional borrowing".

So where’s finance for investment in hospitals, housing and other infrastructure to come from? If not from traditional government borrowing, the suspicion must be that the Labour party, under Ed Balls economic stewardship, would instead continue to spend via the taxpayer-funded, off balance sheet, rip-off PFI credit card.

People vs PFI called up Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham for clarification on the Labour party line ahead of our PFI conference a couple of weeks back.

Would Burnham commit to no new PFI deals in the NHS, we asked?

His spokesperson  responded: “PFI policy is for HM Treasury to determine.”

So People vs PFI called up Ed Balls.

His office declined to even comment.

Hardly the stuff that inspires confidence in Labour’s commitment to saving the NHS!

Continuing PFI costs the taxpayer much more over the long term. It allows private financiers and construction firms to make a killing out of public infrastructure, privately owned via offshore tax havens. It captures fewer benefits captured locally in the form of tax receipts and wage growth. And it ensures our public services are non-transparent, unaccountable to local citizens, and set up to fail for future full privatisation.

It’s absurd for the Labour party to claim fiscal responsibility with one hand, and to propose more PFI with the other. 

Ed Balls should make a radical departure from Labour’s failed PFI experiment, and admit publicly that Government financing of infrastructure is always cheaper than private sector finance.

Like this piece? Please donate to OurNHS here to help keep us producing the NHS stories that matter. Thank you. 

Written by Joel Benjamin and first published at Our Kingdom

What is Ecosocialism? – Part 2

In the first part of this exploration of ecosocialism, we looked at the theory. In part two we turn to some practical approaches that we can take in the here and now.

If the cause of our ecological problems is the capitalist system, and because we as humans are part of the planet’s ecosystem, it is bad for the people too, then it follows that ecosocialists must work towards toppling this system and replacing it with something which is better. The changes that are needed would make capitalism so unrecognisable, that it would not really be capitalism anymore. We must reject the false notion of eco-capitalism or eco-liberalism as at best piecemeal or at worst greenwash.

This is a daunting challenge though. Capitalism has an extremely strong ‘force-field’ so much so that most people can’t even imagine the world without it. But things can change. In my lifetime, I never imagined I would see the fall of the Berlin Wall or Nelson Mandela become president of South Africa, so we mustn’t be overawed or despondent. Social change, when it happens, can be very swift indeed. Time, of course is not on our side with things like climate change, but capitalism has regular bouts of crisis, as at present, which will always afford us the opportunity to bring about its demise.

There are a few things we can do now. The slogan of Green Left is ‘organise, educate, agitate’, and this provides an outline guide of how we should begin to bring about the transformation that is so badly needed.

One of the weaknesses with the anti-capitalist movement of recent years is that it is negative by its very nature. It is fine to be ‘anti’ things, and we should certainly support this movement, but we should also say what we are for, and with some credibility, so we can’t be just dismissed as dreamers. 

One such way, is to form what are known as pre-figurative ensembles. These ensembles are a snap shot of what a future ecosocialist society would look like. There are plenty vehicles already around where this can be pursued, like Occupy, UK Uncut, People’s Assembly, as well as many other social movements. Also, we should involve ourselves in things like local food, energy and transport co-operatives. There must be thousands of ‘islands’ of ecosocialism all over the world, and the aim is to form these into a great archipelago of ecosocialism which can have real influence.

Trotsky was no ecococialist, although there is a bit of Trot in my thinking, so these pre-figurations can also be seen as ‘transitional demands’ or as I prefer to call them, ‘transformative demands’. We should always oppose privatisation of our public services in favour of social and community ownership. Other organisations such as trade unions, political parties and resident’s associations can be used to press our demands too. Unions are moving in an eco direction with some appointing environment reps and resident’s associations will campaign against things like fracking and for other environmental causes, which we can use to spread our philosophy, but I’m going to concentrate here on political parties.

There are, in the UK, a few small parties that claim to be ecosocialist. The Alliance for Green Socialism (AGS), have their roots in Militant Tendency who were expelled from the Labour party in the 1980s but are only a presence in parts of Yorkshire. I have my doubts about them being truly ecosocialist. The recently formed Left Unity (LU) say they are ecosocialist, as do at least two of their party affiliates, Socialist Resistance (SR) and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21^st Century (RS21). RS21 were formed recently after the implosion of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Then of course there is the Green party, which is much bigger and includes Green Left which is ecosocialist, if the party as a whole is not quite there yet. I chose this route because the potential here is much larger than the tiny sects already mentioned, but the task is similar with whichever party you choose. That is, greening the red parties and reddening the Green party, all of which is a work in progress. This blog, in part, is an attempt to do this.

It should be stated that ecosocialists do not subscribe to the Leninist ‘vanguard party’ approach. No, we think that we have to bring the people with us, every step of the way, or we will be unsuccessful.This is where the social movements and pre-figurative ensembles mentioned above come into play.

Ecosocialism must also be internationalist, given the challenges of contemporary global capitalism. There are ecosocialist currents all around the world, and an Ecosocialist International has been formed, and you can see the third version of the Ecosocialist Manifesto which was recently agreed here at the a meeting in Peru.

In South America ecosocialism has made its most influential contribution to government of anywhere in the world. In Peru, Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela and especially in Bolivia, ecosocialist movements of mainly indigenous peoples have managed to elect eco-friendly socialist governments. This offers an alternative to neo-liberal orthodoxy, to which we can point as evidence, to the prevailing ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) as Margaret Thatcher used to say, mantra of the ring wing media.

There was once, an open Ecosocialist International email list, which was great for sharing our experiences around the world. I found out from this list there are three ecosocialist parties in the Greek SYRIZA movement. The internet and social media make it easier for us to communicate with the like minded of the world and I would like to see this reinstated. (I think it was hacked and was closed down). There is a forum on the Ecosocialist Unite site, but you need to register and it doesn’t have many members.

So, cautious cause for optimism then, but I am in no doubt that replacing capitalism with ecosocialism, will require a revolution. It should be made clear however, that this will be a peaceful revolution, although I am not so naïve as to think that the powers that be will give up without a fight. But we have seen violent revolutions lead to tyranny from a new group of rulers once ensconced in power. I’m with Emma Goldman when she said, ‘If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution’.

So, there you have it. We have just skimmed the surface here really, but I hope this gives you some idea of the philosophy and a little hope for the future.