Environmental crisis

My response to the draconian and vindictive sentences — the longest ever handed down in the UK for non-violent protest — delivered by a British judge, Christopher Hehir, to five climate activists yesterday. Their crime? Taking part in a Zoom call to plan disruption to the M25 to highlight the climate crisis and to get the British government to commit to a ban on new oil and gas extraction in the UK. The sentences — of four and five years — are, as Michel Forst, the UN rapporteur for environmental defenders, explained, “purely punitive and repressive.” The reason Judge Hehir was empowered to deliver such punitive sentences was because of two horrendous Acts of Parliament, passed by the recently departed Conservative government, via two malignant home secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, which specifically targeted the right to protest, and essentially criminalised non-violent, mildly disruptive protest. This legislation needs to be overturned by the new Labour government, but as I explain in my article, I fear that “Keir Starmer — and Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary — fundamentally share the contempt Patel and Braverman had for any kind of protest that causes any kind of inconvenience whatsoever.” The right to engage in non-violent, mildly disruptive protest is at the heart of what separates supposed liberal democracies from autocratic regimes, and it is crucial that it is upheld in the UK, because, otherwise, those engaged in its suppression, to preserve a cosy capitalist status quo, are failing to accept that it is precisely this status quo that is killing us all, because, as I also explain, “man-made climate collapse is the greatest threat humanity has ever known, as is demonstrably true, and as is becoming ever more apparent with every passing day.”

My analysis of yesterday’s General Election in the UK, which, after 14 years, swept aside the Tories, and ushered in a Labour government under Keir Starmer, with a huge but disproportionate majority that didn’t reflect the number of votes received (less than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019), but rather the collapse of the Tories, finally undone after years of cruelty, incompetence and corruption, and facilitated by the sudden rise of Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK Party, which helpfully split the right-wing vote. Wonderful though it is to see the back of the Tories, and also to see noticeable successes for the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, and a number of independents including Jeremy Corbyn, power is now in the hands of Starmer and his cabinet, including his Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who secured victory despite having almost no policies that distinguish them from the Tories. I discuss my many concerns, criticising Labour’s adherence to neoliberalism, and urging it to be bold on re-nationalisation (especially of water), and expressing my shock that Starmer has so openly declared his opposition to any kind of rapprochement with the EU, even though Brexit has done more to damage the UK than anything else over the last eight years, wrecking trade, and leading to a disgraceful rise in racism, which, in the hands of the Tories’ parade of leaders in the years since, led to a morally repugnant fixation on making it illegal to be a refugee, and seeking to send asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda. I hope this anti-immigrant hostility will be abandoned, and I also hope that other draconian Tory innovations — in particular, an attempt to ban all meaningful protest, through the criminalisation of climate activism — will be ditched, although on this particular point I fear that Starmer, as the former Director of Public Prosecutions, has troubling authoritarian impulses that may not augur well for civil liberties. I also urge boldness — true boldness — on climate collapse, and end by expressing my fears for foreign policy under Starmer, most noticeably because of his uncritical support for Israel and its ongoing and unforgivable genocide in Gaza.

My report about ‘Restore Nature Now’, a massive march and rally in London on June 22 calling for the urgent protection of bio-diversity, which was initiated by the beloved environmentalist Chris Packham, but which, because it was family-friendly and non-confrontational, was almost completely ignored by the mainstream media, unlike the global coverage days before, when two Just Stop Oil activists sprayed harmless cornstarch-based orange paint on Stonehenge, and were compared to ISIS. Although catastrophic climate collapse is already happening — and much earlier than the warnings made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018, when we were warned that we had until 2030 to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 to keep alive the prospect of a liveable planet — climate protest is in a parlous state, either sidelined or ignored when it is peaceful, like ‘Restore Nature Now’, or subject to hysteria and hyperbolic outrage when it involves even the mildest disruptive forms of direct action, along with the almost certain prospect of arrest, and possibly prison sentences, because of draconian laws passed in recent years aimed solely at climate protestors. Reviewing the last three decades of climate protest, I conclude that direct action remains the best way to try to effect change, but I struggle to understand how it can be undertaken when it faces increasingly draconian responses from government, and continued indifference or psychopathic hostility from the media and from the bitter and twisted ‘armchair warriors’ of social media. We truly seem to be living in the most demented end times imaginable, just a few years away from major collapse, and yet still encouraged to consume like never before, not to question the insanity of our leaders’ inaction, nor to question their psychically broken response — not dealing with the threat, but instead transferring all our energies into hideous proxy wars, in Ukraine and in Gaza, while our leaders prop up a neoliberal model that is so broken that ordinary people, confused and angry, are everywhere retreating into the false comforting arms of fascists with their dangerous explanations that the blame lies entirely with “the other”: immigrants, Muslims, and, increasingly I fear, everyone on the left. This is not a comforting time to be alive, and those of us with functioning brains, and with empathy, need to start working together like never before to create genuine solidarity as our civilisations collapse and the far-right become ever more empowered.

Marking seven years since the Grenfell Tower fire in west London, in which 72 residents of a tower block of social housing died because of cost-cutting and profiteering, facilitated by central government and the local council, and in which almost the entire building industry — and especially the manufacturers of insanely flammable cladding materials — were complicit, I invite you to reflect on my conclusions seven years down the line, as, still, no one with responsibility for the safety of tenants has been held accountable for their deaths, that it represents a prime example of what I call cannibalistic capitalism, or economic terrorism, whereby our lives are, at best, secondary, and, at worst, irrelevant, to the all-consuming greed for profits of the corporations and the politicians who ought to be responsible for our safety. Examining the housing crisis in its entirety, I note how this cannibalistic capitalism is so rapacious that it also includes those who have bought into the notion of a property-owning democracy, as the cladding scandal also involves numerous private new-build projects, and I point out how it also extends to the privatised water industry, and to the greatest crisis facing all of us: the runaway climate collapse that is already happening, but which those wedded to cannibalistic capitalism (the politicians, the corporations and, for the most part, a servile media) are doing all they can to ignore or to sideline. I conclude by asking how, with a General Election just weeks away, in a broken system that can only enshrine a corrupted party in power, anyone with any sense cannot conclude that what is actually needed is a revolution.

My annual article marking the anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, 39 years ago today, when 1,400 police violently attacked and “decommissioned” a convoy of travellers heading to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. Lamenting the demise of the festival as the last great, weeks-long unlicensed autonomous gathering in the UK, and the violence of Beanfield as a significant marker in the ongoing assault on civil liberties in the UK, I also include my memories of the festival, an account of the various forms of dissent that have continued ever since, and the various ways in which successive governments have sought to suppress that dissent, and I end by noting how, despite all these efforts, dissent cannot be eliminated, especially as so many horrors currently exist that must be fought against with all our might, most noticeably, right now, Israel’s western-backed genocide in Gaza, and, of course, the unparalleled threat posed by accelerating climate collapse.

In my latest article about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I examine a little-discussed aspect of Israel’s actions — the lack of an exit strategy. With no prospect of any other countries accepting the population of the Gaza Strip as refugees, I conclude that Israel’s genocidal actions are actually a “final solution” to the Palestinian “problem”, and that President Biden, who leads the west’s largely unconditional support for Israel, also endorses this approach. Criticizing western leaders for the emptiness of their support of Israel’s “right to defend itself”, I also condemn their refusal to recognize that Israel’s two stated aims — to “destroy” Hamas and to free the hostages seized on October 7 — are either unworkable or self-defeating, and conclude my analysis by comparing how the west’s position on Israel is as dangerous and irresponsible as its failure to take climate collapse seriously, and warn that, by allowing Israel to so blatantly shred international humanitarian law, and by using fake antisemitism claims to suppress dissent and to further stifle protest, they are ensuring that, not only is nowhere in Gaza safe, but nowhere in the west is safe either — not from any external “terrorist” threat, but from our own governments.

My reflections, at the end of an unprecedented summer of catastrophic, human-induced climate chaos, about what we can do and how we can cope with ever-increasing climate collapse in the face of a persistent refusal, by politicians and the media, to respond to the gravest existential threat in all our lifetimes with anything resembling the urgency that is required.

As heatwaves of unprecedented ferocity grip much of the world, I ask why it is that the mainstream media are still unable to recognise that climate collapse is the biggest disaster in all of our lifetimes, and that they have an obligation to cover it as much as possible, particularly in the absence of any meaningful action from our political leaders.

Reflecting on the toxic orange skies that recently engulfed New York City and Washington, D.C., caused by ferocious wildfires in Canada, I ask whether they were alarming enough to effect significant political change, or whether the endless cycle of distraction in the mainstream media, and the entrenched and corrupt power of the fossil fuel companies will continue to prevent urgent action to curb their homicidal and ecocidal activities. I look at the Paris Agreement, C40 Cities (featuring the Mayors of nearly 100 cities worldwide), and the governments involved in BOGA (the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance), with particular reference to the need for all new fossil fuel extraction to be stopped, and how we might meet our commitments to cut fossil fuel emissions by 50% by 2030, and I call on the media, in particular, to start discussing the gravity of the climate crisis, educating people about what cuts are needed, and which are possible, to start the urgent national and transnational conversations that are required.

My call for England’s water companies to be re-nationalised, as the mostly foreign and largely unaccountable private companies running them (since their privatisation in 1989) have presided over persistent sewage spills, killing our rivers and polluting our beaches. This is because their purpose is to make profits for their shareholders (and their overpaid CEOs) rather than investing in their infrastructure to provide clean water and to prevent sewage spills.