At a press conference in May 2010, Cameron flanked by his then minister for climate change, Chris Huhne, announced to great media fanfare that the incoming coalition would be the “greenest government ever”. The adoption of a green agenda had been one of the ways Cameron would detoxify the Conservative “brand” in the run up to the 2010 election. This involved a number of media stunts, including being photographed with husky dogs in the Arctic, and cycling to work in parliament (never mind the fact that a motorised escort following closely behind). The stunts aside, the government had committed to opposing airport expansion in the south east. In particular, they had promised to oppose the outgoing Labour government’s support for a third runway at Heathrow. The coalition had also committed Whitehall to participating in the 10:10 campaign aiming a 10% reduction in carbon emissions from participating businesses. Cameron also stated that the coalition would be committed to a new green economy in the UK.
Yet only two years later Cameron would commit one of the most abrupt political U-turns. 2012 marks the year when government policy on the environment in general, and climate change in particular, changed radically. Following the reshuffle key ministers opposing airport expansion at the Department for Transport were replaced; John Hayes a vocal critic of wind farms was made energy minister; Owen Patterson, an opponent of wind farms and supporter of fracking is made an environment minister; and the former Thatcherite minister and climate denialist, Peter Lilley, was appointed to the parliamentary select committee on energy and climate change. In November it is revealed that Osbourne’s “dash for gas” will quadruple the amount of “unabated” gas generating capacity, a commitment copper-fastened with tax subsidies, as well as major tax concessions to fracking industry. Also in November, it is revealed that Cameron takes the highly unusual step of blocking the appointment of a key civil servant at DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change) who is seen as being too committed to tackling climate change. And again in November the government announces a commission headed by the disgraced former director of the LSE, Howard Davies, a one time policy advisor to ex Chancellor, Nigel Lawson (who now runs the climate denialist lobby group the Global Warming Policy foundation). Although the recommendation will not be delivered until after the next election, there can be little doubt it will favour continued airport expansion at Heathrow. Then to top it all, the government gives the green light to over fourty “zombie” road schemes, which had been successfully resisted by the direct action movement of the nineties and by local campaigns, such as the Combe Valley, Hasting bypass.
The austerity unleashed by the Coalition has failed to restore growth rates as numerous critical economic commentators had argued. Robert Skidelsky has pointed out that the 2010 forecast of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was projected at 2.6% growth in 2011 and at 2.8% growth in 2012; in fact, the UK economy grew by 0.9% in 2011 and flat-lined in 2012. The abrupt U-turn on the environment, far from representing a break from austerity, represents an intensification of plan A, that is, continuing with more austerity; it is a response mediated by the Coalition’s neoliberal ideology, which subordinates all other concerns to the economic interests of the 1%. It needs to be understood in the context of the failure of Osborne's austerity policies to restore growth rates in the UK economy. This has left the government scrambling around for short-term fixes to restore growth. One of the quickest, cheapest, and needless to say, dirtiest, ways of doing this is by “externalising”, as economists put it, more of the costs of production. Industry achieves this by loading the cost of economic growth on the environment and society, such as reducing workers’ health and safety, or relaxing pollution regulations, creating for example, an increased workload for the NHS. So the government's new planning laws will make it easier for business to concrete over swathes the countryside; and Vince Cable's “bonfire of red tape” will worsen working conditions by removing strict liability on employers who breach health and safety regulations. Whether these policies will actually restore growth rates, or is even desirable is a moot point. David Harvey has pointed out that while neoliberalism has failed to restore growth rates it has created new forms of dispossession and has always increased inequality
There is also the question of the political power of the fossil fuel industry to consider. There is a huge amount of capital tied up in the existing fossil fuel economy whether it be gas pipelines, power stations or oil refineries. And as Bill McKibben has noted, the stock valuations of oil and gas companies is tied to the exploitable reserves of fossil fuel in their asset portfolios. This concentration of fossil fuel capital creates its own centre of political power. This power is manifested in many different ways, in the media via public public relations, through the “revolving door” between Whitehall and the industry and directly in Parliament itself through lobbying. Other branches of industry have their own centres of power and their own political lobbies to represent their interests, whether it be the airline industry lobbying for airport expansion, or the food industry lobbying to water down food labeling laws. George Osborne is one of the most influential defenders of the fossil fuel lobby in government. And other branches of industry have their own centres of power and their own political lobby’s to represent their interests. The renewable energy industry, because it is newer and smaller, does not enjoy the same political influence as the fossil fuel lobby. So for instance, the hostility of many backbench Tory MPs to wind farms should not be understood as concerns due to their aesthetic impact on the English countryside but the playing out of the interest of the fossil fuel lobby. Their concerns for the English countryside seem to evaporate when the question is new roads schemes in their constituency. It will be interesting to observe how many of those MPs opposing wind schemes on “aesthetic” grounds will also oppose fracking rigs in their constituencies.
The government’s new “growth” agenda threatens to undo every progressive gain made by environmental movements and campaigns over the last thirty years. For instance, it was one of the gains of the direct action anti-road movement of the 90s to make the government accept that it could not solve the country's transport problems by building more roads. It is clear the Osborne would like to tear up the Climate Act as he seeks to undermine it with major gas expansion. Insufficient as it is, the Climate Act is still a major gain, which would not have got into the statute book without the mobilisation of the climate campaigns of the last decade.
This assault on the environment can and must be resisted. The mass direct action movement unleashed by groups such as Reclaims the Streets in the 90s was an essential element which blocked the Major government’s road building plans. Likewise, Climate Camp and Plane Stupid derailed the last government’s expansion plans for new coal at Kingsnorth and forced the then opposition to oppose new runways in the South East - at least for this term. Sadly until we fundamentally change our political and economic system these victories will always be partial and limited.
But that does not mean we should give up. In 2013 we should renew our commitment to rebuild a movement focussed on social and environmental justice. The emergence of the global Occupy movement following the movements in Spain and Greece and the revolts in the Middle East gives us an opportunity to build a deeper, broader and more interconnected movement. We need to point there are alternatives to the neoliberal lunacy being imposed in this country and throughout Europe.
George Osborne's dash for gas will not only undermine the Climate Act but lock the UK either into expensive gas imports, or highly polluting fracked gas, or most likely, both. It will mean less renewable energy. As the Committee on Climate Change has noted, relying on gas could add £600 onto domestic energy bills. At a time the number of households in the UK in fuel poverty is rising, we need to point out that there are alternatives. And it is building more roads and while announcing rail fare rises at twice the rate of inflation. We can afford to heat our homes, protect the climate and create sustainable jobs which cut carbon emissions. In the summer of 2012 the One Million Climate Jobs Now! campaign launched a caravan tour which brought this message up and down the country. Groups such as Fuel Poverty Action are pointing out that rising energy prices are not caused by renewable energy but the rising price of gas. On October 20th, the Climate Block was formed linking the issue of climate justice and austerity on the TUC March in London. And on 29th October, No Dash for Gas occupied a new build gas plant at West Burton for over a week.
These are all small and laudable initiatives. In 2013 we need to continue to build these links, but also launch a new mass movement which embraces mass direct action. The potential is there to build something on a greater scale than before, which is better rooted in our society, with links to workers, the unemployed, students and pensioners. What we now need is courage, imagination, and above all determination to build this movement.
Monday 31 December 2012
Sunday 14 October 2012
Occupy: one year after
Our immediate inspiration came from the Indignados and Occupy Wall street, above all, the tents of Tahrir Square to organise to Occupy the London Stock Exchange, or at least the public square in front of it on a sunny Saturday afternoon on October 15th. Of course, we arrived to discover Paternoster Square already occupied. Immediately we discover one thing about our city. Like inspector Borlu, in the novel, The City and The City, we arrive at a crime scene and discover a corpse. And like in the novel, all is not what it seems. Our “public” space is not so public after all. The neoliberal city had made a corpse of our commonwealth. The global elite and the 99.99% exist in two different cities occupying the same space. These parallel worlds must never be allowed to cross: the world as imagined by the tiny elite who control the fate of millions in their glass fronted offices and the lived reality of the rest of us. It is the breach caused by this movement, puncturing this partition, designed by the global elites to isolate themselves from the consequences of their actions. A separation which the corporate and government controlled media find increasingly difficult to maintain, which has been one of the principal subjects occupying the news headlines around the world this year.
If the struggle of man and woman against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting then it is important to remember what came before us. The elites would say to us,”You partook in this binge, and now the bar is closing it’s time to pay the tab”. We must remind them there were movements that came before us to challenge the dogmas of neoliberalism. In January 1994, in protest against the introduction of North America Free Trade Agreement, the Zapatistas occupied the capital of Chiapas state in Mexico and issued their famous declaration from the Lacandon Jungle. Like ours it inspired a global movement. And like our movements it used the internet to coordinate global days of action. Of course, this was in the days before Twitter and Facebook. But it was, arguably, better organised and far more intellectually coherent than our own. It organised global days of action, such as J18, which shut down major financial centres, such as the City of London, involving 40,000 people. It was instrumental in organising the protests, which shut down the WTO in Seattle in 1999, which in turn inspired the great counter-summit protests, the largest and most dramatic of which was Genoa in 2001. Our great advantage over these precedents is one of timing. That we are part of a global movement with antecedents was something that was at times easy to forget in the daily struggle to remain warm, dry, and deal with the other distractions we faced at St Pauls Churchyard.
One year on we are both excited about the protest movements Kicking Off Everywhere, but also angry about the human misery caused by austerity. And frightened, as in the case of Golden Dawn in Greece, of some of the sinister forces being unleashed by this chaos.
We have made it one our tasks to fill history with the presence of the now. In putting together the New Putney debates we, as Walter Benjamin might have put it, blast out of the continuum of history inspirational moments, filling them with contemporary relevance.
So surveying the scene one year on what do we find? We have seen, and indeed are continuing to see, a year of protest and resistance. Across Europe we have seen a year of occupations, mass demonstrations and general strikes. And across the Atlantic, on opposing sides of the hemisphere the Chilean and Quebec student protests show that it is possible to resist both the privatisation of, and the privatised, higher education system. And in the case of Quebec to bring down a government as well. But we must admit there is a certain asymmetry to the situation. The scale of the attack is nowhere equalled by the scale of the resistance to it. I think this is certainly true in Europe - even in Greece. I am writing this piece from Madrid where only yesterday there were marches in fifty cities in Spain with a clear message to the government that it has no mandate for its assault on the welfare system and the unions are promising a general strike if this assault is continues without the assent of the people. But if anything, the pace of the attack is accelerating as austerity bites into the economy. In Portugal, the government’s assault on social security has been halted for now, but nowhere has this assault been rolled back. And most of the time, the elites are able to use the coercive power of the state to impose their will and frustrate us. While our lack organisational maturity means we are not able to concentrate our energies and forces in a strategic way to overcome this.
But it is particularly the open and direct democracy of the Occupy and 15M movement, which the state finds the most threatening thing about us. Our global movement can only realise itself through the appropriation and re-appropriation of public space. For a real democracy can only emerge from the ground we occupy, from the space we need, both figuratively and literally, to create and develop our form of direct democracy. That space is not just in the streets, but in every office, school or public building faced with closure. The occupation at Barnet Library shows in a small, but important way, how our movement develops by giving an added relevance to occupation and purpose to the organising of public assemblies.
There is no clear way out of this crisis for those who rule over us. Mervyn King sees no end to a Euro crisis which could trigger a global depression. Years, if not decades, of stagnation and austerity lie before us if we allow it. For what we are living through is not so much an economic crisis but an environmental and a political crisis to which the economic crisis is wholly subordinate. We have a political system which is constrained to appease the bond markets and impose the same austerity policies whoever is in power. And the economic crisis has served to distract us from the only true existential crisis facing humanity: climate change. Only by changing the current political system can we build an economic system that serves the interests of humanity and the environment.
If we see both triumph and disaster as impostors even if we celebrate our victories and cry over our setbacks it is because we expect to see plenty of both in the coming years. But in the in the end there is only one victory that counts: the one that brings an end to a system, which is sending humanity towards an environmental and social abyss.
A long term perspective is important. The crisis we are living through is going to be with us for years if not decades. And the scale of the resistance we will have the privilege of witnessing will dwarf in scale anything we have witnessed in our lives. Walter Benjamin wrote that each generation is imbued with a weak messianic power. We should feel like we are at the beginning of a epic journey and we have only just started to climb the first foothills of a mountain range. And we are entering massive mountain range. Our journey will have many ups and downs and we are prepared for both.
If the struggle of man and woman against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting then it is important to remember what came before us. The elites would say to us,”You partook in this binge, and now the bar is closing it’s time to pay the tab”. We must remind them there were movements that came before us to challenge the dogmas of neoliberalism. In January 1994, in protest against the introduction of North America Free Trade Agreement, the Zapatistas occupied the capital of Chiapas state in Mexico and issued their famous declaration from the Lacandon Jungle. Like ours it inspired a global movement. And like our movements it used the internet to coordinate global days of action. Of course, this was in the days before Twitter and Facebook. But it was, arguably, better organised and far more intellectually coherent than our own. It organised global days of action, such as J18, which shut down major financial centres, such as the City of London, involving 40,000 people. It was instrumental in organising the protests, which shut down the WTO in Seattle in 1999, which in turn inspired the great counter-summit protests, the largest and most dramatic of which was Genoa in 2001. Our great advantage over these precedents is one of timing. That we are part of a global movement with antecedents was something that was at times easy to forget in the daily struggle to remain warm, dry, and deal with the other distractions we faced at St Pauls Churchyard.
One year on we are both excited about the protest movements Kicking Off Everywhere, but also angry about the human misery caused by austerity. And frightened, as in the case of Golden Dawn in Greece, of some of the sinister forces being unleashed by this chaos.
We have made it one our tasks to fill history with the presence of the now. In putting together the New Putney debates we, as Walter Benjamin might have put it, blast out of the continuum of history inspirational moments, filling them with contemporary relevance.
So surveying the scene one year on what do we find? We have seen, and indeed are continuing to see, a year of protest and resistance. Across Europe we have seen a year of occupations, mass demonstrations and general strikes. And across the Atlantic, on opposing sides of the hemisphere the Chilean and Quebec student protests show that it is possible to resist both the privatisation of, and the privatised, higher education system. And in the case of Quebec to bring down a government as well. But we must admit there is a certain asymmetry to the situation. The scale of the attack is nowhere equalled by the scale of the resistance to it. I think this is certainly true in Europe - even in Greece. I am writing this piece from Madrid where only yesterday there were marches in fifty cities in Spain with a clear message to the government that it has no mandate for its assault on the welfare system and the unions are promising a general strike if this assault is continues without the assent of the people. But if anything, the pace of the attack is accelerating as austerity bites into the economy. In Portugal, the government’s assault on social security has been halted for now, but nowhere has this assault been rolled back. And most of the time, the elites are able to use the coercive power of the state to impose their will and frustrate us. While our lack organisational maturity means we are not able to concentrate our energies and forces in a strategic way to overcome this.
But it is particularly the open and direct democracy of the Occupy and 15M movement, which the state finds the most threatening thing about us. Our global movement can only realise itself through the appropriation and re-appropriation of public space. For a real democracy can only emerge from the ground we occupy, from the space we need, both figuratively and literally, to create and develop our form of direct democracy. That space is not just in the streets, but in every office, school or public building faced with closure. The occupation at Barnet Library shows in a small, but important way, how our movement develops by giving an added relevance to occupation and purpose to the organising of public assemblies.
There is no clear way out of this crisis for those who rule over us. Mervyn King sees no end to a Euro crisis which could trigger a global depression. Years, if not decades, of stagnation and austerity lie before us if we allow it. For what we are living through is not so much an economic crisis but an environmental and a political crisis to which the economic crisis is wholly subordinate. We have a political system which is constrained to appease the bond markets and impose the same austerity policies whoever is in power. And the economic crisis has served to distract us from the only true existential crisis facing humanity: climate change. Only by changing the current political system can we build an economic system that serves the interests of humanity and the environment.
If we see both triumph and disaster as impostors even if we celebrate our victories and cry over our setbacks it is because we expect to see plenty of both in the coming years. But in the in the end there is only one victory that counts: the one that brings an end to a system, which is sending humanity towards an environmental and social abyss.
A long term perspective is important. The crisis we are living through is going to be with us for years if not decades. And the scale of the resistance we will have the privilege of witnessing will dwarf in scale anything we have witnessed in our lives. Walter Benjamin wrote that each generation is imbued with a weak messianic power. We should feel like we are at the beginning of a epic journey and we have only just started to climb the first foothills of a mountain range. And we are entering massive mountain range. Our journey will have many ups and downs and we are prepared for both.
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