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Who Voted For This, Liz?
On 6 September, Liz Truss officially became the Prime Minister, having won the Conservative leadership election that followed Boris Johnson’s resignation. Since then, her administration has pushed through extremely radical, untested, and damaging policies that were not included in the 2019 manifesto. Truss of course did not become Prime Minister at a general election. She doesn’t have millions of supporters around the country. She won the Conservative Leadership bid with 81,326 votes. Just 81,326 in this country have cast a vote for Truss. That’s not even enough people to fill Twickenham and represents 0.12% of the population. We have to ask ourselves; who voted for this? By what authority is…
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Why Insulate Britain needs a more positive strategy
Extinction Rebellion (XR) worked. From its launch to the end of the first Rebellion in April 2019, which precipitated meetings with the Government and its subsequent climate emergency declaration, the strategy proved to be successful. Climate-consciousness in the UK was raised, permanently – there was no going back. And yet, XR also didn’t work – in the sense that our country is still emitting deadly pollution like there’s no tomorrow, with efforts to adapt to the effects of the climate crisis nowhere to be seen. An even more radical ‘radical flank’ XR was formed as a ‘radical flank’ to existing eco-organisations, but this has evidently reached a limit. So what…
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Post-Brexit Environmental Principles: Government and risky business
The UK Government recently carried out a consultation on its Statement of Environmental Principles. The Statement will have legal status through being referred to in the Environment Bill, still slowly making its way through Parliament and now in the House of Lords. This Bill is supposed to repair the damage done by Brexit pulling the UK out of the shared EU arrangements for environmental protection. One might think that the issue of risk – and particularly the risk of “low probability, high impact” events would have shot up the Government’s agenda as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Here is an event which few predicted and yet the possibility of such…
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The Politics of Paradox
Extinction Rebellion (XR) has had a permanent transformational effect on the place of climate and nature in British politics and society, and beyond. XR will continue to play an important role: radical non-violent direct action (NVDA) is effective at pressuring government and corporations, but so far the movement hasn’t mobilised masses of people as is required to force systemic change. The percentage of the population it has mobilised is far less than that recommended by social change theorist Erica Chenoweth. XR has successfully set the scene, which now needs filling by a substantially larger mobilisation. We explore here how this might be achieved. Political parties that are serious about learning…
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A new way of taking on the Murdoch empire
I’ve launched a new ‘campaign’ to double-down on the consumer boycott of Murdoch papers that many of us have been participating in ever since Wapping. I am suggesting that it isn’t enough to not buy Murdoch’s media-products. We need also, those of us to whom this is relevant, to not buy into them: i.e. we need to stop being sources for them… I’ve made this gambit initially by myself. I hope others will come on board with me. Some already have; but many more will be needed if this campaign is to win. And it’s a hard ask. Writers are afraid of being black-listed. Activists are afraid of losing even…
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Another Brexit is possible
With the Tory landslide, Brexit is bound to finally happen. Therefore what matters is making it as good, or as least bad as possible. The argument is finally settled; it will be pretty pointless to recriminate, completely pointless to try to pretend we can still Remain in the EU and (for the foreseeable future) both dangerous and pointless to fantasise about rejoining it. We need to get used to the UK ‘going its own way’ for a long time to come. This will, for a while, probably be very bad… See here and here if you need convincing on why. What this hard-Brexit hard-Right government will do is seek to…
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We must adapt to climate decline
There is no use in hiding from the bitter truth. As I’ll explain, the decisive Conservative victory means the Green Party must reassess its demands and aspirations, and make significant changes in the face of our new, darker post-election reality. Greens moved forward powerfully at this election, more by some measures than any other party did, especially in our target seats, and also elsewhere. Well done us, well done everyone for their hard work and devotion. And yet we made no gains. And we are still quite far from an actual second MP. Looking more widely, the bottom line is, of course, that we will in overwhelming likelihood have to…
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XR UK: Telling the truth through targeted disruption
It is important to re-state the truth: Our very survival as a species may now be under threat. A mass of other species have already been committed to extinction. That’s why we are in rebellion. The sixth mass extinction and climate breakdown are happening right now. The truth is that everything is not going to be OK. Even if destruction of ecosystems stopped tomorrow and greenhouse gas emissions peaked, we will still experience the consequences for a long time. People sometimes say we are hurtling toward a cliff edge, but the truth is that we’ve already breached planetary limits. We are already in the unsafe zone of the Earth-system. There…
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Sanders' Green New Deal: A Realistic Response to the Emergency That Will Define Our Lifetimes
On November 14th, the New York Times published an article which discussed the Green New Deal as proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, claiming to speak for ‘experts,’ and framing the article around what readers were led to believe were authoritative opinions. As Common Dreams reported, the Times – without input from a single climate scientist or relevant academic – instead based their article on opinions from “an adviser to South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a business professor and maxed-out Hillary Clinton donor, and a Democratic strategist who does public relations work for the chemical industry.” This assembled cast took a predictably dim view of Sanders’ massive, dual-purpose environmental and…
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One useful thing parliament could do NOW to protect us from a Trumpian trade deal
It often feels like the media have given us wall-to-wall coverage of every single aspect of Brexit. But there is a key issue which has hardly been mentioned: the Trade Bill. The Trade Bill governs arrangements for future trade deals: with the EU, USA, Japan, India, or wherever. The next big argument after Brexit itself will be around the Government’s efforts to get a trade deal with Donald Trump. Whatever is in the law on trade agreements at that point is going to be crucial. If Prorogation had gone ahead, the Trade Bill would just have been dropped. But the Supreme Court judgement opens up the possibility of continuing with…
