Scotland Yard admits race discrimination in deal to end boycott

  

• Vikram Dodd
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 January 2010 19.52 GMT
•   

Metropolitan police deputy commissioner Tim Godwin will take personal responsibility for driving out discrimination. Photograph: Anna Gordon

 
Scotland Yard bosses have admitted discrimination still exists among its officers as part of a deal to end a race row that plagued
 
Britain's biggest force for 16 months, the Guardian has learned.

 

A boycott of the force by the Black Police Association, which began in October 2008, will be ended tomorrow.

 
It follows months of secret talks and as part of the settlement Scotland Yard deputy commissioner Tim Godwin has vowed to "address issues of race and discrimination in the organisation" and in how London is policed, according to a letter seen by the Guardian.
 
Scotland Yard has also privately accepted that discrimination is part of the reason ethnic minority officers are less likely to get promoted and more likely to be disciplined.

 

Last February Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, publicly declared that the force was no longer "institutionally racist".

 
The Metropolitan police section of the BPA began its boycott after a vicious race row at the top of Scotland Yard that rocked the force for months.
 
In September 2008 Tarique Ghaffur, third in charge of the Met and Britain's most senior officer from an ethnic minority, was suspended after calling his boss, Sir Ian Blair, a racist and suing the force for discrimination. He later left the Met.
 
One of Ghaffur's closest advisers, Commander Ali Dizaei, was suspended after misconduct allegations and was later charged with misconduct in public office and intending to pervert the course of justice. He goes on trial next week.
 
The BPA responded by urging ethnic minority Britons not to join the force. Community groups said the boycott was effective and had damaged the Met's efforts to recruit ethnic minority officers.
 
In his letter to the Met BPA, Godwin said: "I am writing to set out how I see the Met BPA working with other … colleagues to address issues of race and discrimination in the organisation and in the delivery of policing services to the people of London.
"In particular I want to ensure that the concerns you have raised about disproportionality in our discipline processes and in the progression of staff through the organisation are effectively addressed."
 
The deputy commissioner's letter continues: "It is accepted that we have more to do if we are to be confident that these processes give everyone the same opportunities and it is important that the Met BPA is fully involved in that work. We do of course want to see the same outcome – the very best quality of policing for all the communities of London."
As part of the deal the Met has set up reviews headed by senior officers into why ethnic minority officers find it harder than white ones to gain promotion and why they are more likely to face disciplinary action.
 
The deputy commissioner will take personal charge of driving out discrimination from the ranks, with senior Met bosses placed in charge of overseeing the work.
 
According to a source with close knowledge of Scotland Yard's thinking: "We wanted to get rid of the sense that we and the BPA were at loggerheads.
 
"They will keep an eye on us – if nothing comes of this, we will end up in an unproductive relationship."
The senior source added the force would not make any high-profile public apology: "There is no intention to stand in front of the television cameras and say 'Woe is us'."
 
The deal was only finalised in the week before Christmas after negotiations beginning last summer.

 

Ever since the 1999 Macpherson inquiry report found the Met institutionally racist after the bungled Stephen Lawrence murder investigation, Scotland Yard has struggled to convince its own ethnic minority officers that it is taking eradicating its own discrimination seriously.

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Economic Growth and Well Being

 

Consumerism has, as Huxley feared, changed all of us – we'd rather hop to a brave new world than rein in our spending

 

• George Monbiot
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 January 2010 20.30 GMT

 

Who said this? "All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness." Was it a) the boss of Greenpeace, b) the director of the New Economics Foundation, or c) an anarchist planning the next climate camp? None of the above: d) the former head of the Confederation of British Industry, who currently runs the Financial Services Authority. In an interview broadcast last Friday, Lord Turner brought the consumer society's most subversive observation into the mainstream.
 
In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it were not. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country's most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.
 
As the Guardian revealed today, the British government is now split over product placement in television programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers, and advertisements will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won't make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year.

 

Though we know they aren't the same, we can't help conflating growth and wellbeing. Last week, for instance, the Guardian carried the headline "UK standard of living drops below 2005 level". But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as "bleak" and "gloomy". High sales are always "good news", low sales are always "bad news", even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it's time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.

 
Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption by the wealthy improves the lot of the world's poor. Perhaps, but it's a very clumsy and inefficient instrument. After some 60 years of this feast, 800 million people remain permanently hungry. Full employment is a less likely prospect than it was before the frenzy began.

 

In a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure to be as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.

 
Most important, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for instance, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures that seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations.

 

You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution. But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the "I'm not a plastic bag", which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or like the lucrative new books on how to live without money.

 

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other in part by greed. Huxley's nightmare has come closer to realisation. In the nurseries of the Brave New World, "the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. 'I do love flying,' they whispered, 'I do love flying, I do love having new clothes … old clothes are beastly … We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending'". Underconsumption was considered "positively a crime against society". But there was no need to punish it. At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to opt out, but that didn't work. Instead they used "the slower but infinitely surer methods" of conditioning: immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood. A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.

 
Let me give you an example of how far this self-enforcement has progressed. In a recent comment thread, a poster expressed an idea that I have now heard a few times. "We need to get off this tiny little world and out into the wider universe … if it takes the resources of the planet to get us out there, so be it. However we use them, however we utilise the energy of the sun and the mineral wealth of this world and the others of our planetary system, either we do use them to expand and explore other worlds, and become something greater than a mud-grubbing semi-sentient animal, or we die as a species."

 

This is the consumer society taken to its logical extreme: the Earth itself becomes disposable. This idea appears to be more acceptable in some circles than any restraint on pointless spending. That we might hop, like the aliens in the film Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.

 
So how do we break this system? How do we pursue happiness and wellbeing rather than growth? I came back from the Copenhagen climate talks depressed for several reasons, but above all because, listening to the discussions at the citizens' summit, it struck me that we no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own visions adopted. We might come together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. Consumerism has changed all of us. Our challenge is now to fight a system we have internalised.

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Beyond ecological imperialism

The row over climate change isn't just a battle between rich and poor, it illustrates the futility of obsession with economic growth


Jayati Ghosh guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009 12.30 GMT

So the Copenhagen summit did not deliver any hope of substantive change, or even any indication that the world's leaders are sufficiently aware of the vastness and urgency of the problem. But is that such a surprise? Nothing in the much-hyped runup to the summit suggested that the organisers and participants had genuine ambitions to change course and stop or reverse a process of clearly unsustainable growth.

Part of the problem is that the issue of climate change is increasingly portrayed as that of competing interests between countries. Thus, the summit has been interpreted variously as a fight between the "two largest culprits" – the US and China – or between a small group of developed countries and a small group of newly emerging countries (the group of four – China, India, Brazil and South Africa), or at best between rich and poor countries.

The historical legacy of past growth in the rich countries that has a current adverse impact is certainly keenly felt in the developing world. It is not just the past: current per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world are still many multiples of that in any developing country, including China. So the attempts by northern commentators to lay blame on some countries for derailing the result by pointing to this discrepancy are seen in most developing countries as further evidence of an essentially colonial outlook.

But describing this as a fight between countries misses the essential point: that the issue is really linked to an economic system – capitalism – that is crucially dependent upon rapid growth as its driving force, even if this "growth" does not deliver better lives for the people. So there is no questioning of the supposition that rich countries with declining populations must keep on growing in terms of GDP, rather than finding different ways of creating and distributing output to generate better quality of life. There is no debating of the pattern of growth in "successful" developing countries, which has in many cases come at the cost of increased inequality, greater material insecurity for a significant section of the population and massive damage to the environment.

Since such questions were not even at the table at the Copenhagen summit – even a "successful" outcome with some sort of common statement would hardly have been a sign of the kind of change that is required. But this does not mean that the problem has gone away; in fact, it is more pressing than ever.

Optimists believe that the problem can be solved in a win-win outcome that is based on "green" growth and new technologies that provide "dematerialised" output, so that growth has decreasing impact on the environment. But such a hope is also limited by the Jevons paradox (after the 19th century English economist William Stanley Jevons), which states that the expansion of output typically overwhelms all increases in efficiency in throughput of materials and energy.

This is forcefully elucidated in an important new book by John Bellamy Foster. Foster argues that a rational reorganisation of the metabolism between nature and society needs to be directed not simply at climate change but also at a whole host of other environmental problems. "The immense danger now facing the human species ... is not due principally to the constraints of the natural environment, but arises from a deranged social system wheeling out of control, and more specifically US imperialism." (p 105)

How does imperialism enter into this? "Capital ... is running up against ecological barriers at a biospheric level that cannot be overcome, as was the case previously, through the 'spatial fix' of geographical expansion and exploitation. Ecological imperialism – the growth of the centre of the system at unsustainable rates, through the more thorough-going ecological degradation of the periphery – is now generating a planetary-scale set of ecological contradictions, imperilling the entire biosphere." (p 249)

This does not mean that the interests of people in the centre are inevitably opposed to those of people in the periphery, since both are now adversely affected by the results of such ecological imbalances. Instead, it means that it is now in all of our interests to shift from an obsession on growth that is primarily directed to increasing capitalist profits, to a more rational organisation of society and of the relation between humanity and nature.

So there is indeed a win-win solution, but one that cannot be based on the existing economic paradigm. The good news is that more humane and democratic alternatives are also likely to be more environmentally sustainable.

How to solve climate change

By Chan Akya


"Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?"
- Groucho Marx
I am neither surprised nor happy about the failure of the Copenhagen summit on climate change. The mutual finger-pointing that has been unleashed, particularly between the United States and European Union on the one end and China, India and other developing countries on the other, is merely a result of human beings acting to their narrow self (national) interests rather than those of humanity in general.

Groucho Marx captured the sentiment many decades ago, as my opening quote shows; mankind is all about living for the now, damn the consequences.

I blame the following factors for the failure of Copenhagen:
1. A poor negotiating framework where unimportant countries such as Venezuela effectively got to block the efforts of bigger carbon emitters to make good.
2. An extraordinary focus on national carbon emission targets, as against a focus on reducing per capita emissions globally.
3. Asymmetry between rich countries that are producing most of the world's carbon emissions but are in demographic decline against poor countries that produce the least carbon emissions but are in demographic ascent.
4. Unsavory discussions, particularly from the Europeans, on who would foot the bill for reducing the effects of climate change.

As a late convert to the science of global warming, or more accurately climate change - and no, it wasn't Al Gore's movie (An Inconvenient Truth) that did the trick - perhaps I am among the last people who should actually write anything on this subject. Then again, it is our world after all, so here goes. In December 2007, I wrote an article titled How central banks could save the world for Asia Times Online. This article dealt with the failed economic logic behind the movement to save the world from itself. Here is a part of the article that should ring with readers, especially seeing as it is over two years old now:
... Going back to the current account deficit though, it represents the "dream" target of any Green. In actual carbon terms, the import of Asian products, for example, represents the carbon emissions of Asian countries as well as those of the global shipping industry. All told, various publications cite different figures but it would not be hazardous to assign some 30% of global emissions to the US current account deficit.

This is what the Greens miss completely - they count the emissions of China and India in the same league of the US and Europe, and that is wrong because a substantial portion of Asian emissions goes to the manufacture of goods consumed in the US.

In turn, what gets consumed in the US is also financed by Asia because Americans stopped saving from the time [president Jimmy] Carter stepped down. This is the billions of dollars in Asian central banks devoted to the purchase of US treasury bonds, as well as various "highly rated" securities. I have written often enough about how much money will be lost in Asia because of these bonds, and there is no need to repeat my arguments here.

To a large extent, the twin forces of a disingenuous Fed (euphemism for outright liars) and harmony-seeking Asian central banks (euphemism for dumb no-gooders who wouldn't get a job flipping burgers if their uncles hadn't made them the governors of the PBOC or BoJ or whatever) allow this circle of deficit-financed consumption to persist.

At the moment, with the US consumers' loans looking very risky indeed - this week for example reports showed sharply increased delinquency rates on auto loans in addition to the continued defaults on housing loans - Asian bankers are panicking about what to do with the billions of US securities on their books.

They have urged the US Fed to become more aggressive on interest rate cuts, to help the US economy recover, in effect helping to perpetuate the cycle of global warming described above. In the face of rampant inflation, it makes sense for the US Fed to hike rates now and engineer a hard landing for the US economy. A few million Americans will be thrown out of work, but so what - they weren't necessarily working on anything except selling each other inflated housing anyway.

A hard landing for the US economy will help cut global carbon emissions, by a factor of over 10%, so why not engineer it? This will also force Asian central banks to abandon their US dollar pegs (which is the main reason their incompetence can never be seen by the public) and actually try to manage inflation and growth in their own countries.

With a bulk of the world's manufacturing now in Asia, a shift in consumption to the region would not be a bad thing, and anyway overall shipping emissions will decline because goods will be consumed closer to the point of manufacture.
Moving forward from here requires every level of Group of 20 (G-20) government to buy into the following guiding principles:
1. It isn't the total emissions of any country that matter but rather the per capita figure: a human life in Cambodia is no less valuable than one in Germany.
2. Per capita emissions should be adjusted for trade, ie add emissions from imports and reduce those from exports.
3. The cure of carbon capture (specifically CO2 capture) is more effective than any preventive steps that can be taken from here on.
4. Developed countries should bear most of the cost.

A huge swathe of carbon emissions today are tied to the category of wasteful consumption: from plastic packaging to paper towels, items of daily use for the middle classes of Europe and the United States represent the most substantial burden on the rest of humanity. On the other end of the spectrum, the basic quality of life in much of Asia including China and India, as well as most of Africa, remains fairly challenging. Asian cities have improved dramatically, particularly in China, for the past two decades, but the countryside remains a place for making further improvements to the human condition. Thus, Asia and Africa have very little room to reduce aggregate emissions.

An alternate approach
After reading my previous article in its entirety as well as a follow up article, my suggestion would be for the following framework to be adopted by G-20 immediately:

Firstly, all central banks will push interest rates up to a level of 5% real - that is, the difference between nominal interest rates and inflation in those countries will be at least 5%

Secondly, the global average per capita CO2 emission will be targeted for reduction - the laws of statistics are that the best way to achieve this would be to cut the emissions of those producing significantly above this average, that is, the United States and Europe and certain countries in the Middle East such as Qatar (the world's highest per capita emitter).

Thirdly, negative economic goods will see their prices shoot up dramatically, for example fuel costs will have to be increased in order to push people towards alternate sources of energy.

Fourthly, only countries that sign up to these rules would be eligible for free trade; punitive duties will be imposed on trade with any country that doesn't sign up.

Lastly, all global summits including those of the United Nations, G-20 and climate meetings will be held in hot, under-developed countries such as in sub-Saharan Africa rather than in comfortable and cozy tourist spots.

Look at the benefits:

By raising interest rates to a comfortable real level, all manners of wasteful consumption will be immediately curtailed. The notion of buying a "McMansion", thereby requiring imports of Canadian timber, Brazilian hardwood, Chinese appliances et al will have to be economically sustainable; that isn't necessarily comfortable in a 5% real interest rate environment.

Targeting a reduction in global per capita emissions means that an economic contraction will have to take place in G-20; otherwise rich countries will have to invest substantially in carbon capture to meet their obligations. Either way, the planet wins.

Tripling the price of oil at the pump and gas for heating would be a good start for the United States. In Europe, with its substantial duties and taxes, a doubling would suffice. This move would push Americans and Europeans to invest in more sustainable energy sources including nuclear, solar and wind.

As I wrote at the beginning of this article, the Copenhagen summit failed because there was no penalty for not agreeing to a deal. Instead, countries adopting these principles could effectively erect trade barriers against any holdouts. By increasing the cost of saying "no", the chances of a "yes" are increased dramatically. Simple game theory, really.

My last point isn't meant as a throwaway. I have a deeply held suspicion that people in rich countries who start waving their hands and pointing fingers at these climate-change pulpits have no real understanding of the real economic issues confronting the developing world. If you were to stick French President Nicholas Sarkozy in the middle of a Tanzanian drought-hit flatland, his propensity to talk up the need for rich countries to "share" with poor countries would, I suspect, actually reverse from his current position.

Plus it would be good fun to watch all these idiot politicians actually sweat towards a deal, for a change.

The truths Copenhagen ignored

Johann Hari
 
The politicians have chosen low taxes and oil money today over survival tomorrow

 

So that's it. The world's worst polluters - the people who are drastically altering the climate - gathered here in Copenhagen to announce they were going to carry on cooking, in defiance of all the scientific warnings.
 
They didn't seal the deal; they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers, its North Pole, and millions of lives.
Those of us who watched this conference with open eyes aren't surprised. Every day, practical, intelligent solutions that would cut our emissions of warming gases have been offered by scientists, developing countries and protesters - and they have been systematically vetoed by the governments of North America and Europe.
 
It's worth recounting a few of the ideas that were summarily dismissed - because when the world finally resolves to find a real solution, we will have to revive them.
 
Discarded Idea One: The International Environmental Court. Any cuts that leaders claim they would like as a result of Copenhagen will be purely voluntary. If a government decides not to follow them, nothing will happen, except a mild blush, and disastrous warming. Canada signed up to cut its emissions at Kyoto, and then increased them by 26 per cent - and there were no consequences. Copenhagen could unleash a hundred Canadas.
 
The brave, articulate Bolivian delegates - who have seen their glaciers melt at a terrifying pace - objected. They said if countries are serious about reducing emissions, their cuts need to be policed by an International Environmental Court that has the power to punish people. This is hardly impractical. When our leaders and their corporate lobbies really care about an issue - say, on trade - they pool their sovereignty this way in a second. The World Trade Organisation fines and sanctions nations severely if (say) they don't follow strict copyright laws. Is a safe climate less important than a trademark?
 
Discarded Idea Two: Leave the fossil fuels in the ground. At meetings here, an extraordinary piece of hypocrisy has been pointed out by the new international chair of Friends of the Earth, Nnimmo Bassey, and the environmental writer George Monbiot. The governments of the world say they want drastically to cut their use of fossil fuels, yet at the same time they are enthusiastically digging up any fossil fuels they can find, and hunting for more. They are holding a fire extinguisher in one hand and a flame-thrower in the other.
 
Only one of these instincts can prevail. A study published earlier this year in the journal Nature showed that we can use only - at an absolute maximum - 60 per cent of all the oil, coal and gas we have already discovered if we are going to stay the right side of catastrophic runaway warming. So the first step in any rational climate deal would be an immediate moratorium on searching for more fossil fuels, and fair plans for how to decide which of the existing stock we will leave unused. As Bassey put it: "Keep the coal in the hole. Keep the oil in the soil. Keep the tar sand in the land." This option wasn't even discussed by our leaders.
 
Discarded Idea Three: Climate debt. The rich world has been responsible for 70 per cent of the warming gases in the atmosphere - yet 70 per cent of the effects are being felt in the developing world. Holland can build vast dykes to prevent its land flooding; Bangladesh can only drown. There is a cruel inverse relationship between cause and effect: the polluter doesn't pay.
So we have racked up a climate debt. We broke it; they paid. At this summit, for the first time, the poor countries rose in disgust. Their chief negotiator pointed out that the compensation offered "won't even pay for the coffins". The cliché that environmentalism is a rich person's ideology just gasped its final CO2-rich breath. As Naomi Klein put it: "At this summit, the pole of environmentalism has moved south."
 
When we are dividing up who has the right to emit the few remaining warming gases that the atmosphere can absorb, we need to realise that we are badly overdrawn. We have used up our share of warming gases, and then some. Yet the US and EU have dismissed the idea of climate debt out of hand. How can we get a lasting deal that every country agrees to if we ignore this basic principle of justice? Why should the poorest restrain themselves when the rich refuse to?
 
A deal based on these real ideas would actually cool the atmosphere. The alternatives championed at Copenhagen by the rich world - carbon offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture - won't. They are a global placebo. The critics who say the real solutions are "unrealistic" don't seem to realise that their alternative is more implausible still: civilisation continuing merrily on a planet whose natural processes are rapidly breaking down.
 
Throughout the negotiations here, the world's low-lying island states have clung to the real ideas as a life raft, because they are the only way to save their countries from a swelling sea. It has been extraordinary to watch their representatives - quiet, sombre people with sad eyes - as they were forced to plead for their own existence. They tried persuasion and hard science and lyrical hymns of love for their lands, and all were ignored.
 
These discarded ideas - and dozens more like them - show once again that man-made global warming can be stopped. The intellectual blueprints exist just as surely as the technological blueprints. There would be sacrifices, yes - but they are considerably less than the sacrifices made by our grandparents in their greatest fight.
 
We will have to pay higher taxes and fly less to make the leap to a renewably powered world - but we will still be able to live an abundant life where we are warm and free and well fed. The only real losers will be the fossil fuel corporations and the petro-dictatorships.
 
But our politicians have not chosen this sane path. No: they have chosen inertia and low taxes and oil money today over survival tomorrow. The true face of our current system - and of Copenhagen - can be seen in the life-saving ideas it has so casually tossed into the bin.

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Better to have no deal at Copenhagen than one that spells catastrophe

 

 

The only offer on the table in Copenhagen would condemn the developing world to poverty and suffering in perpetuity

• Naomi Klein
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 December 2009 19.00 GMT 

 

On the ninth day of the Copenhagen climate summit, Africa was sacrificed. The position of the G77 negotiating bloc, including African states, had been clear: a 2C increase in average global temperatures translates into a 3–3.5C increase in Africa. That means, according to the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, "an additional 55 million people could be at risk from hunger", and "water stress could affect between 350 and 600 million more people".

 
Archbishop Desmond Tutu puts it like this: "We are facing impending disaster on a monstrous scale … A global goal of about 2C is to condemn Africa to incineration and no modern development."

 

And yet that is precisely what Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, proposed to do when he stopped off in Paris on his way to Copenhagen: standing with President Nicolas Sarkozy, and claiming to speak on behalf of all of Africa (he is the head of the African climate-negotiating group), he unveiled a plan that includes the dreaded 2C increase and offers developing countries just $10bn a year to help pay for everything climate related, from sea walls to malaria treatment to fighting deforestation.

 

It's hard to believe this is the same man who only three months ago was saying this: "We will use our numbers to delegitimise any agreement that is not consistent with our minimal position … If need be, we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent … What we are not prepared to live with is global warming above the minimum avoidable level."And this: "We will participate in the upcoming negotiations not as supplicants pleading for our case but as negotiators defending our views and interests."

 

We don't yet know what Zenawi got in exchange for so radically changing his tune or how, exactly, you go from a position calling for $400bn a year in financing (the Africa group's position) to a mere $10bn. Similarly, we do not know what happened when secretary of state Hillary Clinton met Philippine president Gloria Arroyo just weeks before the summit and all of a sudden the toughest Filipino negotiators were kicked off their delegation and the country, which had been demanding deep cuts from the rich world, suddenly fell in line.

 

We do know, from witnessing a series of these jarring about-faces, that the G8 powers are willing to do just about anything to get a deal in Copenhagen. The urgency does not flow from a burning desire to avert cataclysmic climate change, since the negotiators know full well that the paltry emissions cuts they are proposing are a guarantee that temperatures will rise a "Dantesque" 3.9C, as Bill McKibben puts it.

 

Matthew Stilwell of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development – one of the most influential advisers in these talks – says the negotiations are not really about averting climate change but are a pitched battle over a profoundly valuable resource: the right to the sky. There is a limited amount of carbon that can be emitted into the atmosphere. If the rich countries fail to radically cut their emissions, then they are actively gobbling up the already insufficient share available to the south. What is at stake, Stilwell argues, is nothing less than "the importance of sharing the sky".

 
Europe, he says, fully understands how much money will be made from carbon trading, since it has been using the mechanism for years. Developing countries, on the other hand, have never dealt with carbon restrictions, so many governments don't really grasp what they are losing. Contrasting the value of the carbon market – $1.2 trillion a year, according to leading British economist Nicholas Stern – with the paltry $10bn on the table for developing countries for the next three years, Stilwell says that rich countries are trying to exchange "beads and blankets for Manhattan". He adds: "This is a colonial moment. That's why no stone has been left unturned in getting heads of state here to sign off on this kind of deal … Then there's no going back. You've carved up the last remaining unowned resource and allocated it to the wealthy."
 
For months now NGOs have got behind a message that the goal of Copenhagen is to "seal the deal". Everywhere we look in the Bella Centre, clocks are ticking. But any old deal isn't good enough, especially because the only deal on offer won't solve the climate crisis and might make things much worse, taking current inequalities between north and south and locking them in indefinitely.
 
Augustine Njamnshi of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance puts the 2C proposal in harsh terms: "You cannot say you are proposing a 'solution' to climate change if your solution will see millions of Africans die and if the poor not the polluters keep paying for climate change."
 
Stilwell says that the wrong kind of deal would "lock in the wrong approach all the way to 2020" – well past the deadline for peak emissions. But he insists that it's not too late to avert this worst-case scenario. "I'd rather wait six months or a year and get it right because the science is growing, the political will is growing, the understanding of civil society and affected communities is growing, and they'll be ready to hold their leaders to account to the right kind of a deal."
 
At the start of these negotiations the mere notion of delay was environmental heresy. But now many are seeing the value of slowing down and getting it right. Most significant, after describing what 2C would mean for Africa, Archbishop Tutu pronounced that it is "better to have no deal than to have a bad deal". That may well be the best we can hope for in Copenhagen. It would be a political disaster for some heads of state – but it could be one last chance to avert the real disaster for everyone else.

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Myths about Immigration #4 - "Britain is overpopulated"

 

By Barry Curtis in the Independent

 

December 16th, 22:31

This is the fourth in my series questioning myths about immigration. The first three challenging "Britain is a soft touch", "British jobs for British workers", and "Immigrants are a burden to the economy" can be accessed here, here, and here. Now I am concerned with the pervasive myth that Britain is, or is becoming, overpopulated.

The view of Britain as overpopulated is held by the Optimum Population Trust - an influential group of pessimistic academics, right wing cranks like the British National Party, various House of Lords peers, green activists, and government leaders. The 'Balanced Migration' parliamentary group set up in 2008 believes in a one-in, one-out policy to stop Britain become more populous. Balanced Migration is chaired by Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, Labour and Tory respectively, and supported by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, and by the Muslim Labour peer, Lord Ahmed. But how believable is this idea?

The idea that Britain is overpopulated can seem plausible if you live in a tower block in the middle of a city. However not all of Britain is like this. In fact there are over 60 million acres in Britain - enough for one acre per person. If you are a member of a family of four, that means your household could have 4 acres. Furthermore only 8% of the land in Britain is actually settled. 46% is used in agriculture. This suggests the population could nearly double without pressing too hard on the boundaries of what is currently 'sustainable'.

Like all resources, land use is distributed by the market and enforced by the state rather than according to a conscious plan. Thus although there is enough land for each individual to have an acre, or half an acre if the population doubled, in fact a family of four is very lucky if it has one acre between them. Meanwhile the Duke of Buccleuch owns 270,900 acres. 69% of the UK's acreage is owned by 0.6% of the population. So what might initially appear as a lack of land per head, is really a social issue regarding how it is allocated. Britain is not overpopulated but it does have a social system that favours the few over the majority.

So if Britain is not overpopulated with regard to the amount of land available, what about with regard to public services? Might not public services all crumble if there was more pressure on them from an expanding population? Again, the problem is not too many people, but a political culture that lacks the vision to solve problems. If a public service such as a hospital or a railway appears to be overburdened, this is a political problem that could be solved by finding ways to increase capacity in each instance. To blame 'too many people' is to recast a political problem as a natural problem. This is a dangerous mistake because it prevents the search for humanistic alternatives to the political mistake and leads to draconian social policy against people - immigration controls are an example of this, healthcare rationing is another example.

Some might argue that Britain is overpopulated because we are reaching the end of 'finite resources'. But this too is an error. What becomes a resource depends very much on technological development - for most of human history, for example, uranium was useless. It was used 2,000 years ago to make glass more yellow, but that was it. Now the stuff can power whole cities. Coal was of prime importance 200 years ago but is now fading away in terms of importance to Britons. Oceans were once a barrier to man, but now can be mined for oil. In appropriate locations, the wind and the waves can be exploited for energy generation when in the past they were merely facts of life. Perhaps in a few hundred years, people will be mining the asteroid belt for new resources. And if nuclear fusion becomes a reality, the amount of energy anyone can use will become infinite, and therefore dirt cheap.

The notion that expanding populations use up all the resources and therefore indirectly kill themselves goes back to right-wing country parson Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). Today the argument is hysterically used by groups like the BNP to say Britain is dying under the weight of immigration, but in Malthus' time the argument was new. Malthus thought the increasing population (which he thought was attributable to the masses having too much sex) would become so large that there wouldn't be enough food to go around, and therefore people would starve, thus bringing the population size down again. But Malthus was refuted by history. What happened instead was that industrialised society created more and more food. The population could keep on expanding because humans were creative ingenious types, not mere devourers of resources.

In 1967, Malthus' basic argument was rehashed by Paul Ehrlich who wrote "The battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also thought there would be a generalised materials and goods famine by the mid 1980s. In fact food production outstripped household demand, as raw materials did industrial demand. The basic lesson we should learn from this is that Malthusians are always wrong because they never factor human ingenuity into their equations. And because economic migrants are often very enterprising people, it makes sense to abandon immigration controls in order that their talents might be used to benefit Britain's increasing population.

Arguing that there are too many people only comes to the fore in the context of an absence of a sense of common purpose. For example, at the Glastonbury music festival there is a highly concentrated population, just as there was on the 2003 anti-Iraq war marches. But the crowds add to the atmosphere because you're there for the same reason. Thus you don't think of Glastonbury or a big demo as 'overpopulated'. Individuals in society need to realise they have common goals if the myth of overpopulation is to wither away. And one such worthy goal could be to do battle with all the Malthusian arguments currently being thrown about.

To conclude, Britain is not overpopulated in any sense of the term.  Birth rates in the UK and across Europe are in decline - there were 1,014,700 births in Britain in 1964, compared to 716,000 forty years later. Britain's population is ageing. We need more immigrants to help make Britain bigger and better. Open the borders now!

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