ALB
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Four of the gang of eight were Lab & Coop MP’s but I don’t think that represents any ideological commitment merely that their election campaigns were financed by the Cooperative Party. Like all Labour MPs what they wanted was a “better capitalism.” And still do of course.
I don’t know where that party gets its money from, not from me as a member of the co-op I hope.
I wonder how that fits in with May’s statement to parliament last Wednesday that part of her withdrawal deal is a commitment to continue to match, after Brexit, the EU’s environmental protection regulations:
As well as changes to the backstop, we are also working across a number of other areas to build support for the Withdrawal Agreement and to give the House confidence in the future relationship that the UK and EU will go on to negotiate. This includes ensuring that leaving the EU will not lead to any lowering of standards in relation to workers’ rights, environmental protections or health and safety.
I wasn’t going to bother to read this but thought I had better since he’s a local MP in the area where our Head Office and we have a collection of his leaflets. These show what a hypocrite he must have been when he was the Labour MP. Here’s what the Socialist Standard had to say about him in May 2015.
Since he never disguised the fact that he stood for a “better capitalism” I don’t know why felt out of place in the Labour Party:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/06/chuka-umunnas-speech-better-capitalism-full-text
That report is not saying anything different than I am trying to say.
We know definitely that, unless the rate of emission of CO2 is stabilised, average global temperature is going to continue to rise and that this will affect sea levels, the weather, and regional agricultural and ecological conditions. (In fact it will continue to rise for a while even if emissions were stabilised tomorrow, as an effect of past emissions). The question is by how much and to what extent. This is where the speculation begins.
Not, however, wild speculation but speculation based on certain assumptions. In drawing up scenarios of what might happen in the future, scientists have to make two basic assumptions. First, about the link between a rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and the rise in average global temperature. Second, about what humans do, or do not, to reduce or compensate for CO2 emissions.
As to the first, nobody knows with certainty what it is. The standard that scientists have chosen is an estimate of by how much the global average temperature would rise if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled. This is not easy to calculate as there are feedbacks. Once these have been taken into account, the figure they come up with is anything between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, variously described as ‘the best estimate’, ‘most likely’, or even ‘the best guess’. It is in fact a ‘guestimate’, albeit an informed one.
Polar ice-core records show that in the pre-industrial past the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was for centuries 280 ppm. Today it is 410 ppm. If present trends continue it will reach 560 ppm, i.e., double, by 2050. In that case, in the period after that date until the end of the century average global temperature would gradually rise to 1.5°C or by 4.5°C above pre-industrial levels or by anything in between. As average global temperature has already gone up by about 1 °C since pre-industrial times we are talking about a possible further rise by the end of the century of between 0.5°C and 3.5°C. That’s as accurate as you can get.
The trouble is that there would be a huge difference in effects between the lower and the higher figure. All we can safely say is that if CO2 emissions continue to increase, so global average temperature will go up and so the effects of this will be felt. Since most of these effects will be negative CO2 emissions should be reduced in any event.
No need to exaggerate.
Macpherson was an old fool who wanted to make it a crime to express racist comments in your own home.
Meanwhile the UN has gone “anti-Semitic”:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-47399541
Sounds as if the ex-Labour MP for Peterborough just released from prison for telling a lie would make a worthy member of this new band of discredited and discreditable professional politicians. In fact, compared with the other ex-Labourites in it, she’s almost a saint.
The author seems to have been carried away a bit. Of course the BBC carries out propaganda (for British capitalist interests just as RT does for Russian) but propaganda that pushes “human extinction”? The author seems to forget that Sir David Attenborough never seems to be off BBC2. Or maybe they’re just a bit writer, e.g they should have put a colon not a comma after “Western ‘intervention'”.
A study by the University of British Columbia compared the economic and environmental impact of holding the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as agreed in Paris in 2015, versus the current 3.5 degrees warming scenario.
I’m not sure it is entirely accurate to talk of “the current 3.5 degrees warming scenario”. This is the IPCC’s worst case scenario, based on the assumption that nothing is done to counter global warming. But something, however inadequate, is being done, so “current” is not the right word. “Currently” the world would seem to be on course for something less than 3.5 degrees but well above 1.5 degrees. NB these are figures for the increase above pre-industrial levels, but as there’s already been an increase of about 1 degree since then, we’re talking about a further potential increase before the end of the century of 0.5 degree and 2.5 degrees.
Maybe his Brexit Party will copy our policy and ask its supporters to write “BREKSHIT” across the ballot paper. Come to think of it that might not be a bad idea. A lot of people might do this anyway.
A comrade has drawn attention to this blistering attack on MMT in the Jacobin magazine. Some extracts:
“its main selling point is that governments need not tax or borrow in order to spend — they can just create money out of thin air. A few computer keystrokes and everyone gets health insurance, student debt disappears, and we can save the climate too, without all that messy class conflict. That’s a bit of a caricature, but as we’ll see, not an outlandish one.”
“You might be wondering where income earned on the job fits into all of this, but the world of production doesn’t play a large role in the theory.”
“MMTers show a strange lack of interest in the specificity of capitalism — how production and distribution are organized, how demand for credit arises in the course of commerce, how people earn their living and under what conditions.”
“It would be sad to see the socialist left, which looks stronger than it has in decades, fall for this snake oil. It’s a phantasm, a late-imperial fever dream, not a serious economic policy.”
The trouble is that the author’s alternative is the failed reformist policy of taxing the rich to provide better services for the poor. But at least he’s not a monetary crank like them.
Farage’s view is now being widely reported in the media, as here. This is grist to our mill in that it adds credibility to the political position of not voting where what you want is not on offer. When Farage says he wouldn’t vote in a May deal v Remain referendum “because it wouldn’t offer me Brexit“, he is applying the same logic we do with regard to socialism..
Looks as if Nigel Farage has anticipated our position:
Nigel Farage has threatened to boycott a second referendum, saying he would “rather go on holiday” than vote if the choice was between Theresa May’s deal and remaining in the EU.
Oh dear, what have we done wrong.
Today’s papers are reporting on a study, based on data for the period 2005 to 2015, which shows that “CO2 emissions are falling in 18 countries“.
One of the reasons for this was the slump in production during the Great Recession that followed the Crash of 2008:
the decrease in energy use was partly explained by lower economic growth reducing the demand for energy following the global financial crisis of 2008-2009.
Since capitalism is bound to have 4 or 5 recessions before the end of the century this would help keep global warming down below the worst case scenarios. But what a wasteful way to do it. But then capitalism is not a rational system from the point of view of meeting people’s needs or solving the problems humanity faces.
Just noticed the attack on “delegate democracy” as Leninist in the editorial in today’s Times:
“The alternative notion that officials are mere delegates does have a philosophical lineage. It is to be found in Lenin’s The State and Revolution. This revolutionary blueprint was a guarantee that Russia would become a totalitarian state, for it had no concept of how to mediate between incommensurate values and competing interests [whatever that means].”
Two points here. First, it wasn’t Lenin who thought up this. Second, he might have preached it but he didn’t practice it.
Lenin did indeed write of “all officials, without exception, elected and subject to recall at any time” (his emphasis) but he was expanding on Marx’s description of the Paris Commune of 1871 in his The Civil War in France:
“The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms.”
Marx recommended that this is what the working class should bring about immediately on winning control of political power. The Communards weren’t socialists but radical democrats and what they did was already practised in Switzerland and in some of the states of the USA where the “right of recall” still exists in their constitutions. Indeed, this sort of thing is reflected in the US Constitution which lays down that the House of Representatives shall be re-elected every two years (the British MPs who have betrayed their mandate can sit for a further 3 years; in the US they’d be out in less than 2 years).
It’s a simple, basic radical democratic demand — which of course Lenin never implemented or had any intention of implementing. Power in Bolshevik Russia was in the hands of the unelected Bolshevik Party whose officials were not elected by universal suffrage nor subject to recall (at least not by the electorate though they were by the Party hierarchy as were non-party state officials). And of course one of the first things the Bolsheviks did was to abolish the Constituent Assembly that had been elected by universal suffrage. No attempt was made to organise the state in Russia along the lines of the Paris Commune.
So, whoever wrote the editorial in the Times is either ignorant or dishonest or both.
There is in fact a provision in UK law to recall an MP. Under the Recall of MPs Act 2015, if an MP has committed a series breach of parliamentary rules or is given a prison sentence of less than a year (more than a year then you are out automatically), a petition signed by 10% of the registered electorate and drawn up within six weeks can provoke a by-election. This has only been attempted once, in the case of the Reverend Inane Paisley’s son who had done something wrong (taken bribes, I think, without declaring them). It nearly succeeded but didn’t reach the 10% in the six weeks. Another attempt may be made to provoke such a by-election, in Peterborough, whose Labour MP is in prison for a few months for lying about a motoring offence.
There is nothing in our Rulebook about recall (but there doesn’t need to be specifically as a minimum number of branches can call a Party Poll to do this).
Re elections, our Rulebook says that a Socialist MP or councillors would be answerable to the EC or the local branch which could, presumably, deselect them. I am not sure this is perfect from a democratic point of view since, more logically, this ought to be in the hands of those who elected them, i.e. including non-members who had voted for socialism, but how? Nor is it clear how it could be enforced if the offending MP refused to resign, though my union at work used to insist that its candidates for the staff committee sign and undated letter of resignation. I don’t think that would work either. Leaving deselection as the only way.
