Barry Gardiner joins Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet

Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent North, was reportedly booed by fellow Labour MPs yesterday evening when he had the temerity to speak up in defence of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. Corbyn has now appointed him shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary.

Gardiner is my member of parliament and I have clashed with him many times, as well as agreed with him on some issues, such as the Prevent Strategy. I stood against him in the General Election before last as the Green Party candidate.

We share a concern about the environment and climate change and although our specific policies, not least on the major question of whether our current economic system based as it is on continuing economic growth is compatible with tackling climate change, may differ, I welcome his appointment as strengthening the Labour Party's approach to the issue.

This is what he had to say in a recently updated Huffington Politics LINK article that demonstrates his ability to analyse the political implications of resource competition.:

Exactly one week before the Queen’s Speech President Obama gave a speech - not in London, but in New London, Connecticut - to the United States Coast Guard Academy. He said: “I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country... And so we need to act - and we need to act now.”

He said that climate change would shape how every one of America’s services plan, operate, train, equip and protect their infrastructure, because climate change poses risks to national security, resulting in humanitarian crises, and “potentially increasing refugee flows and exacerbating conflicts over basic resources like food and water.”

Last summer I was critical in this House of the government’s decision not to provide financial support to the Italian government’s coast guard operation to rescue refugees from Libya. The Government’s responded to me then that such rescue operations acted as a “pull factor” and were only increasing the number of attempts. I thought it an obscene argument then and in the intervening months we have seen that it was not only obscene, but wrong. The numbers have increased. This Saturday the Italian Coast Guard announced that more than 4,000 migrants had been rescued off Libya’s coast in 22 separate operations in just one day.

We need to look deeper into why those migrants are coming in the first place. It would be convenient for me to point to the British and French air strikes, not to mention the failure to prepare a post-Gadhafi strategy that left that country in chaos. But I want to look deeper still into why the civil war started in the first place. It was part of a much wider pattern of regional upheavals that we called the Arab Spring that began in Egypt in 2010 with the uprisings in Tahrir Square.

If we track back those disturbances we come inexorably to the 2010 drought in Russia’s wheatbelt. It was the longest and most severe drought in Russia in over 50 years. The country lost 25% of its crop and it led Russia to impose an export ban on wheat that it had traditionally exported to Egypt. The food crisis in Egypt was the pre-curser to the Arab Spring. It was the same in Tunisia and the rest of the Arab world.

On the 9th September 2010 when the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that Syria’s drought was affecting food security and had pushed 2-3 million people into “extreme poverty” few people took any notice. In fact Syria had suffered four successive years of drought: the longest and deepest failure since records began in 1900. The losses from these repeated droughts were particularly significant for the population in the northeastern part of the country, in Al-Hasakeh, Deir Ezzor and Al-Raqqa.

Small-scale farmers were worst affected — many of them not able to cultivate enough food or earn enough money to feed their families. Herders also lost 80-85 percent of their livestock. Thousands left the northeast and migrated to informal camps close to Damascus. Experts warned at the time, that the true figure of those living in “extreme poverty” was higher than the official 2-3 million estimate. What is astonishing in military terms is that nobody predicted in September 2010 that such a tinder box might give rise to civil unrest and civil war only six months later.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies is very clear on the impact of resource shortages. In 2011 they published a report claiming that climate change “will increase the risks of resource shortages, mass migration and civil conflict” and the MoD has said that it will shift “the tipping point at which conflict occurs”.

The degradation of natural resources such as forests and freshwater has removed much of the resilience that societies formerly enjoyed. And what is perhaps equally disturbing is that we are beginning to see evidence that efforts to mitigate or adapt to climate change by some countries can actually shift increased risk onto others.

Climate change brings pressures that will influence resource competition between nations and place additional burdens on economies, societies and governance institutions around the globe. These effects are threat multipliers. They will aggravate those things that lead to conflict: poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social tension. If Britain is to play a positive role in the world then this must be understood by our military and we must adapt.

We as politicians have to understand that the greatest threats to our security are no longer conventional military ones. You cannot nuke a famine. You cannot send battleships in to stop the destruction of a rainforest. But you can spend money on clean technology transfer that enables countries to bring their people out of poverty without polluting their future. You can invest in adaptation measures that will protect communities from the effects of climate change that are already placing their societies under stress.

LGA set out proposals on local government budgets and powers ahead of the Budget

The Local Government Association have issued the statement below which makes interesting reading in the light of discussion about how communities should resist local government cuts..

 

Councils could boost housebuilding, increase the number of school places and reduce unemployment if they are handed extra powers to run local services in this week’s Budget, town hall leaders say today.

The Local Government Association has set out a range of proposals for the Chancellor to consider as part of the Budget which would not only improve people’s lives and protect the local services valued by residents but would also deliver sustainable savings to the public purse.

The Chancellor has recently suggested further public sector spending cuts might be needed towards the end of the decade to combat slower than expected economic growth and to meet the Government’s manifesto pledge to achieve a surplus by 2020.

More than half of all day-to-day departmental spending by government – health, schools, defence and overseas aid – is currently protected. If this continues, other unprotected areas – including local government – could be hit once again as a result, the LGA said.

Councils face significant reductions to government grants over the next four years. Local government leaders are also warning George Osborne not to exacerbate these funding challenges by deepening planned cuts as part of his Budget this week.

Council funding cuts in recent years have had a knock-on effect on other parts of the public sector, such as the NHS, which are being left to pick up the pieces leading to a number of false economies. As a result, the LGA insists that ring-fencing certain budgets no longer makes any sense and could put the very services being protected at risk.

Lord Porter, LGA Chairman, said:

“Councils have more than played their part in trying to balance the nation’s books in recent years and all councils will have to continue to find substantial savings from local services to plug funding gaps over the next four years. Extra council tax powers and transitional funding will help some but won’t be enough to completely offset the full impact of funding pressures.

“Giving councils the option to fix longer-term funding settlements has been an important step and rightly recognised by government as being essential to give councils the financial certainty they need to protect local services. It would be perverse to then undermine this with further cuts handed down just one month later.

“Cutting local government to prop up other departments is a false economy. The Government should carefully consider the effect council funding cuts have on other parts of the public sector and whether to tear down the ring-fence around health and education spending.

“Pumping money into the NHS while councils receive less social care and public health funding is a false economy. A properly funded social care system is essential to alleviate the pressure on the NHS while schools and councils also need to be able to pool resources to ensure children are school ready, reduce drop-out rates and improve children’s physical and mental health.

“The Government should use our submission as the blueprint for empowering local government to play a leading role in balancing the nation’s books while improving public services and local economies.”

Despite Corbyn the impossibility of tackling climate change within capitalism remains the key issue for eco-socialists

The old politics is crumbling, not just in Britain but across our continent. We now have the chance to embrace a movement based not on greed or fear, but on resilient local communities, people working together and a stable economy that works for generations to come. I truly hope you win the contest on 12 September – and I look forward to continuing to work with you to bring about the progressive politics that has inspired us both for so many years...

Caroline Lucas' open letter to Jeremy Corbyn published in the Independent LINK  has created a lot of discussion and comment, not all of it complimentary.

When members of the Labour Party have asked me to join the party I have often replied, only half-jokingly, 'I can't. I'm a socialist!'

Now it looks as if that is what the Labour Party itself is saying to some of those who have joined recently as a result of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership campaign.

I haven't because I am committed to eco-socialism and a member of  Green Left. This is what we said in 2006:

 “Activists in the Green Party have founded Green Left because many Greens believe the only path to an ecological, economically and socially just and peaceful society has to be based on an anti-capitalist political agenda.”

You can read more about Green Left's political position HERE but for me a key issue is that climate change as a result of human activity is such a threat that we have to change that activity. We cannot continue expanding industrial production without limit as the processes involved will accelerate climate change and eventually threaten humankind and other species.

To change to a sustainable economy requires separating wants from needs, ending the artificial creation of demand through advertising,  stopping the plundering of the earth's finite resources, and creating an economic system based on cooperation rather than competition and exploitation.

This is the opposite of neoliberalism which monetises everything from education to water and has no regard for the damage it causes to people and planet.

Corbyn's campaign although sharing many of the Green Party's policies does not address this fundamental issue at the heart of the planetary crisis.  The Labour Party he will inherit as leader, if elected, is still committed to the neoliberal agenda, albeit a slightly softer version than the Tory one, and it will be a huge battle to change that commitment as the reaction of the Blairites, the bulk of the media, and the Establishment have shown.

The Labour leadership campaign has highlighted one issue for me regarding democratic policy making. All the candidates seem to be putting forward policies as individuals, reflecting the party's move away from the sovereignty of conference when members can put forward motions about vital issues and principles, debate and vote on them - it is now a top-down process.  The leadership campaign, rather like a General Election, gives rank and file members just one chance to vote on policy through choosing one of the candidates rather than a say in formulating policy.

The Green Party  still makes policy democratically at its two Conferences a year with a process that includes pre-agenda discussions, pre-conference prioritisation, conference workshops culminating a debate on the floor of the Conference. The leader has no more say in these debates than rank and file members.  The Autumn Conference will be after the winner of the Labour contest is announced and any alliances or pacts will be subject to Conference debate and decision making.

The process means that our leaders cannot make up major policy on the hoof without it first having been decided by the membership. This probably led to some of the difficulties experienced by Natalie Bennett during the General Election campaign when the media expected her to have the same freedom to make policy as other party leaders.

These differences in the process of policy making will present some difficulties if a Corbyn led Labour Party and the Greens set up some kind of 'progressive' alliance ('progressive' is a vague label claimed by many often conflicting groups - anti-austerity or socialist alliance may be better as a guide to action in this parliament).

The undemocratic structures of the Labour Party, the dominance of the far from radical Parliamentary Labour Party, the behind the scenes machinations of the Establishment and intelligence services (cf my previous article on Harold Wilson and my prediction of dirty tricks over Corbyn's support for Palestine LINK) and media hostility all lead me to fear that Andy Burnham will end up as Labour Party leader but, along with Caroline Lucas, I wish Corbyn well.

Brent Council Risk Register reveals potential impact of the cuts

The Corporate Risk Register is an important document that highlights the risks of Council services not being delivered effectively and the actions taken to overcome that risk.

As the budget is reduced and cuts in staffing take place, as well as out-sourcing of services, it is important to keep an eye on the Register which flags up potential issues.

The full document is available HERE but below I have set out some of the main areas. The wording is from the original, except for the correction of some typos and spelling mistakes, with my comments in red.

Under each heading the risk is set out, the impact, and (in italics)  the most recent action undertaken to reduce the risk: