How Tory neglect flooded Britain's rivers with sewage

From The Guardian 

As the election campaign rolls on in the UK, our colleagues have been producing a bunch of great data-driven reporting.

This feature traces pollution along the Thames, and reports that for voters, including many in Tory heartlands, the polluting of Britain’s rivers is among the most egregious legacies of 14 years of Conservative rule.

There’s also some great visualisations on which high-profile Conservatives might lose their seats, and how the Lib Dems might double their seats despite fewer votes.

Some of these stories also feature a lovely approach of hand-designed collages, which you can read about here.

The Conservative Party (The Tories, from the Irish word tóraidhe, modern Irish tóraí, meaning "outlaw", "robber") privatised the publicly-owned water authorities, with the consequences we see today.

Brexit is doomed

 From Truth to Power

Only 1 in 7 of 18-24 year olds supports Brexit.  And only 1 in 10 of 25-45 year olds supports it.  The rest want to return to the EU. 

UK GDP is 4 to 5 percent lower than it should have been.  Average family incomes in Bulgaria and Poland are on the brink of exceeding those in Britain.  

Brexit has been a massive failure.

14 years of Tory austerity

 A video summing up an in-depth article by The New Yorker about 14 years of Tory rule in the UK ---  the last toxic convulsion in the death-throes of neo-liberalism.    Yet, like communists in the 1950s, who, when it was pointed out to them that communist economies weren't working, answered that that was because they weren't communist enough, conservatives say that if only they were even more conservative, the economy would improve. 

Britons now blame Brexit for everything

 I think the Conservative Party deserves a lot of blame too.  Austerity, neo-liberalism, cutbacks, tax cuts for the rich:  none of these has worked.  Brexit was a supremely silly idea, but the far-right ideologues who loved it wouldn't listen to anyone else.  They knew better.  Except they were hopelessly wrong.  The same is true of neo-liberalism.  40 years of experience has showed that it has failed.

Politicians will sell out the planet to the dirtiest bidders

From The Guardian

To understand this moment, we have to recognise that there is an existential struggle on both sides. While environmental scientists and activists fight for the very survival of the habitable planet, the fossil fuel, meat and internal combustion industries are fighting for their economic survival. Either they are regulated out of existence or human society across much of the world will fail. We cannot all win: either these industries survive or we do. But we can all lose, because, eventually, they will go down with the rest of us.

But “eventually” counts for nothing in their spreadsheets and annual reports. “Eventually” has no effect on share prices and dividends. “Eventually” has little traction in a four- or five-year political cycle. So, as the evidence of climate breakdown becomes undeniable to all but the most deluded, the pollutocrats must fight as never before. There was once a widespread belief (which some of us cautioned against) that governments would step up when – and only when – disaster struck. But it is precisely because disaster has struck, visibly and undeniably, that they are stepping down.


To buy himself a few more months of political survival, Rishi Sunak, representing a party that has recently taken £3.5m from major polluters and climate deniers, is threatening the welfare of the human species. He has switched, over the past fortnight, from doing a grand total of nothing to prevent climate chaos to actively sabotaging both the climate programmes he inherited and the efforts of other public bodies.

How can you tell when a politician is doing the work of the oil and gas companies? When they start promoting carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS has been the magic fix for climate breakdown promised by successive UK governments for 20 years – and never delivered. Most of the very few projects brought to fruition around the world have been abject failures.

The sole purpose of CCS is to justify the granting of more oil and gas licences, on the grounds that one day someone might be able to capture and bury the CO2 they produce. It’s no coincidence that Sunak announced both policies – more licences and CCS – in the same statement. It would be wrong to say the technology doesn’t work. It works precisely as intended, even if it never materialises: it is a highly successful method of buying more time for the fossil fuel industry.

But the worst thing Sunak has done is something few people have noticed. Underpinning the UK’s climate programme, weak and contradictory as it has always been, was the carbon market. The promise of successive governments, in and out of the EU, was that, by putting a price on carbon pollution, they would ensure that industries had no option but to switch to greener technologies. A further promise by the Conservatives was that, after Brexit, there would be no decline in environmental standards. But Sunak’s government has quietly been flooding the UK market with pollution permits, triggering a collapse in the price of carbon. While the carbon price in the EU emissions trading scheme stands at €88 (£75) a tonne, in the UK it has fallen to £47.

In the US, Donald Trump’s team plans to go much further. A programme devised for him by fossil fuel-funded junktanks intends to rip down just about every effective law and agency protecting the living world. If he gets in again, it seems as if he doesn’t intend to leave.

Sunak, Trump and others know what they are doing. They cannot be unaware of the heat domes and fires, the sea surface temperature anomalies and the shocking news from Antarctica. Their economic and security advisers must have briefed them about the likely civilisational risks presented by the closing of the human climate niche. In response, they double down on their support for the forces causing this destruction.

People seem mystified by this apparent perversity. But it’s a clear manifestation of the pollution paradox, which I see as essential to understanding modern politics. The most damaging companies have the greatest incentive to invest money in politics (by making donations to political parties, funding lobbyists and junktanks, hiring troll farms and microtargeters and all the other overt or covert techniques). So politics, in our money-driven system, comes to be dominated by the most damaging companies.

Sunak, Trump and many others like them are not just desperate politicians who will try anything to retain or regain power (though they are that). Nor are they simply representatives of capital. They are representatives of the dirtiest, most destructive varieties of capital, the varieties engaged in a war against humanity. In the conflict between the two existential crises, they know which side they’re on.

‘More oil and gas licences are justified on the grounds that one day someone might be able to capture and bury the CO2 they produce.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Tory water privatisation scam

 Dunno who created this.  Kudos to them.

And the Right wonder why socialism is once again respectable, and why young people are moving Left.

The light-weight

 By Graeme Keyes

Trussonomics

By Martyn Turner

 

 

The FT's trenchant Brexit video

Long time readers of this blog will know that I have always thought that Brexit was a disastrously stupid policy.  This trenchant video by the FT (Financial Times -- not known for its far-left nature) demonstrates just how bad it has been for the UK economy.  Britain is poorer because of Brexit.  As the video says, "it's like a slow leak from a tyre".  Then the neo-liberal ideologues in the Conservative (Tory) Party produced a budget which suddenly led to the tyre blowing out.  Disastrous.  And since no one can admit just how bad it is, it's hard to see how it can be fixed.  Ideology has triumphed over pragmatism, leading to the UK going backward.

Britain's Brexit bubble bursts

From The Guardian

Hard to believe now, when we’re in the middle of the maelstrom, but one day this too will be the past. And when it is, when we’re out of the hourly psychodrama – no longer staring at the screen, watching Kwasi Kwarteng’s plane do an actual U-turn in the sky en route to his being fired on touchdown, for the crime of doing what his boss wanted him to do – it may not look all that complicated.

Historians will look back and see a point of origin to the current madness, one that explains how a new prime minister could see her administration fall apart in a matter of weeks, even if we struggle to name that cause out loud right now. When the textbooks of the future come to the chapter we are living through, in the autumn of 2022, they will start with the summer of 2016: Brexit and the specific delusion that drove it.

They will point to the obvious impact of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, and the role that played in upending a country once renowned for its stability. They might begin with the basics. Exit, they will write, shrank the UK economy thanks to a 5.2% fall in GDP, a 13.7% fall in investment and a similar drop in the trade in goods. That self-inflicted contraction helps explain why Britain felt international shocks – surging inflation, for example – harder than most. If your economy is smaller, you either have to tax people more to pay for the services they expect, or you cut those services, or you borrow. There are no other ways out.

Unless you resort to magical thinking. Which brings us to the second causal connection between the craziness of now and the turning point of 2016. Brexit broke the link between governance and reason, between policy and evidence. Until Brexit, politicians only rarely got away with defying the empirical facts or elementary logic. But in 2016 they pretended that a country could weaken its trading ties to its nearest neighbours and get richer, which is like saying you can step in a bath of ice and get warmer. Once the taboo on magical thinking was broken, once fantasy became a Conservative habit, Trussonomics became inevitable – smilingly insisting that you could cut taxes for the richest, make “absolutely” no cuts to public services and control borrowing, all at the same time.

But there is a less obvious way in which Brexit made the current great unravelling a political death foretold. It turns on the idea that powered the urge to leave the EU more than any other: call it the sovereignty delusion.

The leavers’ slogan, “Take back control”, urged Britons to shake off the constraints of Brussels and become a proud, sovereign nation once more – a nation that, alone, would decide its fate. After Brexit, they promised, Britain would be the sole master of its destiny, unburdened by the need to consult or even accommodate anyone else.

The three weeks since Kwarteng delivered his mini-budget have seen the shattering of that delusion. For Truss and her now ex-chancellor were given the rudest of reminders that in our interdependent world there is no such thing as pure, untrammelled sovereignty. No government can do what the hell it likes, heedless of others. In this case, the restraint on sovereignty was not the EU: it was the money markets. But their verdict was as binding as any Brussels edict; in fact it was more so. They ordered the removal of a chancellor after just 38 days in office and the cancellation of the government’s economic strategy. It is the financial markets that have taken back control.

None of these events should be a surprise. There were plenty who warned this would happen, not least Truss’s summer opponent, Rishi Sunak. But Truss and Kwarteng went ahead anyway, issuing their proclamations as if they were the sole actors on the stage, oblivious to the fact that you can’t just announce £43bn of unfunded tax cuts without those whom you expect to lend you the money expressing a view – in this case by triggering an instant spike in the cost of borrowing. You cannot simply bypass the official spending scrutineer, the Office for Budget Responsibility, without the markets concluding that you’ve become unpredictable and, therefore unreliable, a bad risk.

As remainers were mocked for pointing out six long years ago, there is no such thing as unfettered sovereignty in the 21st century: every country has to accommodate its neighbours, the global economy, reality. But the leavers, and their zealous convert Truss, refused to hear it. When Sunak tried to spell out these rudimentary facts, Conservative party members thought he was being a spoilsport. The Treasury permanent secretary, Tom Scholar, was seen as the embodiment of such boring, reality-based thinking, and so Truss fired him.

This week Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist of Deutsche Bank, told a Commons committee that Britain was facing a unique form of trade shock: “We haven’t seen this kind of trade deficit since 1955, since national account records began.” It was odd, because I too had been thinking about the mid-1950s, specifically the Suez crisis of 1956. The failure of that military adventure is now seen as the moment when a bucket of cold reality was thrown into Britain’s face, a humiliation that stripped the country of its imperial delusions, forcing it to accept that it was no longer a global superpower that could act alone. For a while, Britain learned that lesson: just five years after Suez, the country was knocking on Europe’s door, asking to join the club.

But some, especially in the Conservative party, never shook off the old delusion. By 2016, it was back, the Tories high on Brexit talk of a global Britain once again sailing the world’s oceans, free of the constraining hand of the EU, ready to return to its rightful grandeur. The Tories have been breathing those fumes for six years, and the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget was the result: the Suez of economic policy, a disastrous act of imagined imperial sovereignty.

As several economists have noted, Truss was acting as if Britain were the US, issuer of the world’s reserve currency, with markets falling over themselves to lend it money. Like Anthony Eden before her, she could not accept that Britain’s place is not what it was: it can never be sovereign like a king in a fairytale, able to bend the world to his will. That kind of sovereignty was always a fantasy, one that both fed Brexit and was fed by it.

Now she has had to make a concession to reality, laying down the political life of her friend and abandoning what had been a signature policy. She is not in charge of events; she is not even in charge of her own government. Jeremy Hunt was an appointment forced on her. Her demeanour in her afternoon press conference on Friday – shell-shocked, brittle – suggested she has not absorbed the full meaning of what has just happened.

She is finished, a hollow husk of a prime minister. But this is bigger than that. The Brexit bubble has burst. The country has seen that the Tory hallucination of an island able to command the tides was no more than a fever dream, and a dangerous one at that. We can pronounce Trussonomics dead. Bring on the day we can say the same of the delusion that spawned it.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Cartoon by Tom Janssen, a Dutch cartoonist,

The Queen's governments

 By Martyn Turner