In case anyone needs reminding, your GP is a qualified doctor with your full medical history in front of them. Hard to think of anyone better placed to make that sort of decision. But there is one man who, without any medical training or performing any examinations, knows better than all the GPs combined.

Tory leader David Cameron said too many people were able to work, but did not.

He has plans for a radical shake-up that, er, just does what’s already being done. For most medical conditions covered by Incapacity Benefit, you must periodically fill in a form detailing the state of your condition and get a signed statement from your GP that you have been examined and are still unfit for work.

Under the Conservative plans, to be announced in full on Tuesday, all existing and new Incapacity Benefit (IB) claimants would have to attend an “in-depth assessment” to evaluate their needs and capabilities and decide if they are able to work.

This is precisely what happens already. Under the present regime, having submitted the assessment form, if you are anything like close to possibly being fit for work you are called in for an examination by a different doctor, one who sees IB claimants all day long. These people have a dark and sour reputation. Ask anyone who works at Job Centres about clearly sick people being sent back on to Job Seekers Allowance. You only stay on IB if these particularly stringent specialist doctors agree.

People with permanent disabilities which make it impossible to work would continue to receive “unconditional” support, but those with non-permanent conditions would be subject to regular checks.

This, too, is what already happens. Those with a variable condition get a new assessment form a few months later, and the whole cycle starts again.

The Tories are promising that those who have the “potential” to be able to work would be referred to specialised welfare-to-work providers who would help them prepare them for jobs and would be paid by results.

Already, those on Incapacity Benefit – including those whose condition has been affirmed by the specialist doctors – are called in for interviews at Job Centres where dedicated advisers steer them towards returning to work. Many of these people are already paid by results under the Pathways To Work scheme.

Those deemed fit to work would be taken off IB and put onto Jobseekers’ Allowance. This would mean a £20-a-week cut in benefits and a requirement to seek work immediately.

Clear implication here that IB gives the claimant more money than Job Seekers Allowance. And, superficially, it does. There’s something missing from the bare numbers, though.

People on the Long-Term rate of Incapacity Benefit get £81.35 a week, and for those who were under 45 when they became unfit for work there’s an additional £17.10, making a total of £98.45 a week.

Sounds like a lot of money compared to Job Seekers Allowance of £59.15 a week, until you realise that this higher income seriously impacts on a range of other benefits. What is given with one hand is taken away with the other.

Because people on Incapacity Benefit have a higher income, they receive less Housing Benefit than those on JSA and so have to use some of their Benefit to pay their rent.

Not only does it take away from their Housing Benefit, but it means they have to pay a substantial part of all other medical costs such as dental treatment that JSA claimants get free. Also, they don’t qualify for any help with prescriptions.

Let me say it again, because it beggars belief; the long-term sick have to pay full prescription charges.

These are people who have serious ongoing medical conditions and in many cases need a range of medicines on a permanent basis.

They are also more likely to have mobility problems meaning more transport costs, to have special dietary requirements and to need extra heating. That, along with their prescriptions, is where their extra money goes. Their actual standard of living is indistinguishable from people on JSA, carefully calculated to be the bare minimum necessary to survive.

If you want a real scandal of Incapacity claimants, and a stick to beat the present government with, that’s surely the one. As opposed to planning nothing that’s not already happening, but letting Incapacity Benefit claimants know you’ve got them in your sights and scaring genuinely sick people who know how harsh those government doctors are and fear how much worse they’ll be once a Cameron government gives them a higher strike-off target.

So, the whole proposed Conservative policy promises nothing that doesn’t already happen, yet its message is clear. Even though the government estimates tax evasion costs the exchequer around five times as much as benefit fraud (and that’s before we offset that with the billions effectively recouped in unclaimed benefits), we don’t get anything like five times the focus on the tax evaders and avoiders.

Once again we are being told not to trust the idea that anyone on benefits really deserves them. They should be working and paying taxes rather than taking money for nothing.

This from the party that promises to all but abolish Inheritance Tax, the clearest case of money for nothing imaginable.

But of course tax avoidance and evasion concerns the rich, benefits concern the poor. Not paying tax because you’ve inherited a million quid and want to keep it all is fine, not paying tax because doctors say you can’t work to earn any tax makes you fair game.

Just so you know who we’re dealing with, Spiked rose from the ashes of Living Marxism, the magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party. They had the traditional fanatical far-left party allegiance and devotion to allies right or wrong. This cost them dear when their love of Bosnian Serbs during the Balkan wars led them to fabricating a libellous story about ITN’s coverage, and LM was sued out of existence.

The party folded, the communist ideas evaporated, but that fixation with making the story fit your beliefs has endured. They always had a strong anti-environmental stance, seeing humans – and especially their technology – as capable of fixing everything with industrialisation. (Quite where the energy sources and raw materials are coming from, well, let’s just keep seeing further industrialisation as the only progress worth having and have faith it’ll all come out alright.)

This has led them to their present position of being fervently ‘pro-science’ (ie pro-corporate science) and extremely critical of environmentalism. The team donned suits and formed a number of front groups (am I the only one who always wonders why a person is presented as a plausible pundit just because they’re from something that can be called a think-tank?) with names like Global Futures and London International Research Exchange.

Living Marxism and Spiked folks were climate change deniers for as long as it was tenable and quite some distance beyond. Indeed, Martin Durkin, maker of denialist documentaries The Great Global Warming Swindle and Against Nature, as well as ones ‘proving’ that silicone breast implants are good for womens’ health and that genetic engineering is more or less the best thing ever, has strong links with the personnel and ideology of LM and Spiked.

Brendan O’Neill is Spiked’s editor. So we can expect anything he writes to be in the Durkin tradition of highly selective fact-mincing.

He’d already used his keen political intellect to lay into this summer’s Camp for Climate Action for being ‘made up of painful miserabilists, who wouldn’t know what fun was if it stamped its eco-footprint on their faces’.

But after the Climate Camp he wrote this other piece, comparing the Heathrow Climate Camp with the No Borders camp at Gatwick a month later. No Borders is an international network who work with and for migrants and asylum seekers on the issues of freedom of movement and for the freedom for people to stay in the place which they have chosen.

O’Neill talks of the contrast between the ideals of the two camps, concluding

You’re either in the Gatwick camp or the Heathrow camp. Make your choice.

All the hallmarks of LM journalism, there. Challenging, bullish, ideologically driven, and completely at odds with the facts.

The Camp for Climate Action and No Borders openly supported one another. Their websites link to one another.

As well as the day of mass action, there were several smaller bits of direct action from the Climate Camp. One was an occupation of the offices of budget airline XL. The target was chosen not only because of their cheap flights but also for their contract to deport refugees from the UK. The action was explicitly in solidarity with the No Borders camp. In the press release one of the protesters, Allannah Currie, explained

environmental refugees outnumber all other kinds combined, and climate change will make that get a lot worse. We in the wealthy countries have welfare to protect us from climate chaos, but the world’s poorest have nothing to help them except us taking responsibility. Our carbon emissions threaten to take the essentials of life from the poor of the world, it makes a mockery of our concern about aid and debt relief.

The press release went on to plug the No Borders camp and had the No Borders URL at the bottom. When protesters (except one who’d locked on to a stairwell) were removed from the building they continued outside, holding a banner saying ‘CHEAP FLIGHTS… CHEAP LIVES?!!’.

This action upped the ante considerably and led to XL pulling out of deportations within weeks.

The Climate Camp’s programme of workshops included ‘No Borders and the Harmondsworth Detention Centre’ and ‘Climate Change: Making Poverty Permanent?’. Additionally, there was one from anti-Shell campaigners in Ireland who’ve forged links with indigenous groups fighting Shell in Nigeria, and several from anti-biofuels campaigns that are largely based on the fact that oil plantations are destroying forests which is an attack not only on the ecosystems but also displacing the people that live there.

The final action from the Climate Camp was a protest at Harmondsworth Detention Centre where asylum seekers are kept in prison-like conditions. The report on Indymedia describes the protesters as being ‘from the Climate Camp, including many from No Borders’ and explains

The link between the Climate Camp and detention centres is in no way convoluted. Climate change is already producing millions of environmental refugees. These millions will become hundreds of millions in a business as usual scenario. Many of those refugees managing to flee to this country, along with many fleeing torture and war, are met not with compassion and asylum, but brutal repression and detention. The policies of UK plc with regard to climate change are hurting these people, but instead of helping them, UK plc locks them up.

If he’d, ooh I dunno, checked what the Climate Camp actually did then O’Neill would have known this. Knowing any of it – all of it easily found in obvious places – would have totally undermined his case.

If he’d gone one further and actually made contact with anyone from either camp he would have discovered all that and more too. O’Neill says of the No Borders camp ‘this time freedom-loving greens are nowhere to be seen,’ yet at No Borders many of the organisers and attendees were the very same people as the Climate Camp. They also shared infrastructure; the same marquees were used, the same bike library available for borrowing, the same vehicles delivering stuff and taking it away, you name it.

O’Neill talks about his imagined lack of solidarity between climate activism and No Borders as illuminating

the deeply anti-humanist strain in the politics of environmentalism. Because environmentalism is built on ideas about scarcity and shortage, it tends towards misanthropic solutions: demands for smaller families, harsher living conditions and restrictions on migration. Strip away the trendy gloss, and environmentalism increasingly looks like an expression of middle-class outrage against the masses and our dirty habits.

I love that, calling himself ‘the masses’.

As a rule of thumb, the richer you are the greater your personal consumption and carbon emissions, so environmentalism is pretty much an attack on people’s habits in direct proportion to the size of their income. It’s an attack on the rich and their dirty habits.

If we are to talk of global migration and global climate, we have to look at humanity globally. In those terms, the masses do not have dirty habits. Most people will never fly or own a car, indeed barely half the world’s ever made a phone call. To do any of these things says you’re actually in the rich elite.

Why do the likes of O’Neill always use ‘middle class’ as the criticism? Don’t the upper class ever offend their beliefs? But the term is not used in a strict socio-economic sense. It has other connotations, it implies a woolliness of thinking, a kind of personal and intellectual inauthenticity as a human being. It’s a nice handy catch-all dismissal, vague enough to not have to be defended.

He says that it is ‘inhumane’ to restrict immigration if climate change is going to force vast numbers of people to leave their homeland. Quite so. Indeed, at both the Climate Camp and the No Borders camp this point was made repeatedly. But might it be more humane to let people stay on their land amongst their culture rather than deprive them of the basics of life and force their migration just so the rich can jet off for weekends in Barcelona?

Such an idea as espoused by the climate campaigners left O’Neill incredulous

They were effectively calling for less choice, less freedom of movement, and for tougher taxes and restrictions on people’s ability to fly. Their argument with BAA can be summed up as follows: “We demand the freedom to protest against freedom!”

Absolutely. There are limits to freedom. Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. When climate change is already killing people in their thousands every week, the freedom to increase emissions is the freedom to throw ever more punches.

The whole principle of Contraction & Convergence is that we find the safe level of total human emissions – so nobody’s fist is hitting anyone’s nose – then we share those out equally. As opposed to the idea that whoever has money can do what they want and if it inflicts suffering and deprivation on the poor and those yet to come, well, tough shit.

In talking about the ‘masses’ yet just meaning those in the rich nations, and in talking about ‘freedom’ meaning the freedom to do what your money allows, O’Neill and Spiked reveal a deeply held sense of superiority over and contempt for those they exclude; those who do, in actuality, constitute the mass of people.

For the vision that joins up its thinking and acts responsibly out of concern for humanity at large, you need a foot in both camps.

It’s long been established that it takes more land to feed people with animal products than plant ones. An acre can feed two people for a year if it produces beef, but over fifty if it grows soya beans.

It’s pretty obvious why. Animals burn off and excrete much of what they eat; the grain we feed them is mostly lost, whereas if we ate it ourselves we’d get all the nutriment.

Not that everyone on earth should be vegan. If you live in an arid land where cultivation is hard, animals can eat the vegetation that humans can’t digest, and then the humans can eat the animals.

The kosher food laws never to mix milk and meat may well have some basis in this principle. Camel milk is a constant supply of food, but when accompanying plant sources can’t be found, it’s time to eat the nutrient-rich camel meat.

Even in most temperate areas, it’s never been that common to eat very much meat. It’s easier to hunt blackberries than bison. If we’d evolved eating a lot of meat, it wouldn’t be responsible for so much of the ill-health we see in meat-rich diets.

As people aspire to wealth, so they aspire to meat consumption. There are now more people obese than starving.

The number of people eating meat, and the amount they eat, has risen considerably. Between 1970 and 2002, annual per capita meat consumption in developing countries rose from 11 kilograms (24 lbs) to 29 kilograms (64 lbs). (In developed countries, the respective figures were 65 kilos and 80 kilos). Compounded by population increase, total meat consumption in the developing world grew nearly five-fold over that period.

But just as the move to have everyone living a life of high levels of energy consumption and mineral consumption is taking us towards environmental catastrophe, so is our meat consumption. In part, it’s because we clear forests to graze animals, and devote huge areas of land to growing fodder – around half the world’s grain harvest – for them to mostly shit out, instead of feeding that same grain to people.

A recent UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, says a third of arable land is given to livestock feed. Seventy percent of deforested Amazon is grazing land.

But more, the digestive systems of livestock produce huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas more than 20 times as potent as CO2. Add this to the deforestation, the production of fodder and the processing of animal produce (it needs constant refrigeration, remember) and the result is truly alarming.

Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent. That’s more than the emissions caused by all human transportation.

Was that clear enough? ALL our transportation emissions combined don’t equal our livestock production!

As climate change is already conservatively estimated to be killing 150,000 people a year, there’s a new meaning to the old slogan ‘meat is murder’.

Researchers at the University of Chicago recently studied five diets with the same calorific value: average American, red meat, fish, poultry and vegetarian.

The vegetarian diet was the most energy-efficient, followed by poultry then the average American diet. Fish and red meat virtually tied as the least efficient.

They found that the average American diet results in the annual production of an extra 1.5 tons of CO2-equivalent compared to a no-meat diet.

(Report is available via here, paywalled)

The UK government already knows

You will be interested to hear that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is working on a set of key environmental behaviour changes to mitigate climate change. Consumption of animal protein has been highlighted within that work. As a result the issue may start to figure in climate change communications in the future.

said the Environment Agency in an online exchange.

As it became a news story, they backpedalled (‘please not another run-in with the farmers! And let’s not piss off our mates running the supermarkets either’);

The Government is not telling people to give up meat. It isn’t the role of Government to enforce a dietary or lifestyle change on any individual.

This in the same week it was reported that

All alcoholic drinks will carry new warning labels by the end of next year under a government scheme announced yesterday.

You can also visit a website that has a large numeralled countdown of these last few days before the government’s ban on smoking in English public places comes into effect on July 1st.

Once you’ve been there, you might like to visit a big government website called Eat Well. The very name is an instruction.

Clearly the government do think it’s their role to tell people what not to eat and to enforce lifestyle changes when they’re conducive to the public good. As climate change threatens water and food shortages for people in their hundreds of millions, there’s a real public good element here.

Given that we can have a diet that’s not only nutritious, varied and interesting but also a damn sight healthier if we eat less animal products, it’s not wrong to use a word like ‘duty’ for what the government should be doing to – at the very least – encourage such a lifestyle change.

The fact that it seriously reduces our climate impact gives us not just more reason to do it but makes it imperative.

Perhaps the government might stop fearing the backlash from meat farmers so much if it were helping them to convert to lower-carbon sustainable organic vegetable farming. As opposed to subsidising meat production while fossil-fuelled ships and planes bring our organic fruit and veg in from abroad.

Whilst it seems that giving up all animal products would be better, it’s just as clear that any reduction is an improvement. Just because you’re not home-generating all your own electricity doesn’t mean you’re not making a real difference by switching things off.

As one of the Chicago researchers, Gidon Eshel, explained, ‘however close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet. It doesn’t have to be all the way to the extreme end of vegan. If you simply cut down from two burgers a week to one, you’ve already made a substantial difference’.

But now they’re ditching Steve Norris as their attempt at London Mayor. Good. People made a big deal about ‘Shagger Norris’, but in the words of Michael Franti, I don’t give a fuck who they’re screwing in private, I want to know who they’re screwing in public.

Transport is clearly London’s pressing issue. Norris, when he was MP, was the Roads Minister at the time of the Newbury Bypass. Two years later as he was leaving parliament he openly admitted that the ideas and figures used to push Newbury through were wrong, and that he knew it at the time. But, big business whore and moral bankrupt that he is, he did it anyway.

His next job was an overpaid position with the truck company lobby group the Road Haulage Association.

Ken’s carrot and stick of huge public transport investment coupled with the Congestion Charge have unquestionably pushed things in the right direction. Thank fuck Norris never got let loose on solving London’s transport crisis.

But who is the new Tory mayoral hopeful? In an attempt to get back to the gobsmacking ridiculousness of their initial choice – hardened ex-con Jeffrey Archer – they’re considering Mike Read. The smug bemulleted Nicey & Smashey 1980s Radio 1 DJ, the man who refused to play Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood essentially because it contained the word ‘come’.

Ken Livingstone’s taken a swipe already.

“No one in London would have been concerned about whether some pop lyrics were a bit racy,” Livingstone tells GQ Style. “Busting a gut to try to stop a slightly saucy song doesn’t suggest you’re going to be fond of tolerance and diversity.” Read, who wants to stand for the Tories next year, insists he was made a scapegoat for the incident by the BBC. “Is that the best he can come up with? Ken should get his facts straight”

I actually agree with Read, this is an irrelevance. Just like the way we’ve got to ignore Norris’ sexual adventures and concentrate on his public deeds, so we’ve got ignore Read’s prudishness at pederastic pop and focus on what he’s done for London.

The Relax incident pales next to the great crimes Read’s directly committed against huge swathes of the capital’s population. Worse than anything to be found in the murky depths of Archer’s literary output, Read wrote a Cliff Richard musical – inventively titled Cliff! – and thousands of Londoners were subjected to it.

He then inflicted Oh Puck!, a rewrite of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a musical set to hits of the 1980s. I’m not making it up.

As if this wasn’t enough to warrant him being strung up from a lamp-post by his conkers, he came back with a show he wrote, directed and starred in. Oscar Wilde: The Musical, I shit you not.

Fortunately, Londoners seem to be a canny bunch it closed after just one perfomance.

The Daily Telegraph said the play made it ‘hard to feel anything other than incredulous contempt’.

The Guardian’s no-star review suggested that the sketchy sound in the theatre may be because ‘the sound system is being affected by the hefty rumbling of Oscar Wilde turning in his grave’.

The cast later sued Read for non-payment of wages, as he’d not paid them for not perfoming on the cancelled nights.

None of this dented his kevlar ego in the least and he reacted by comparing himself to Dickens.

A man on an Archerian lifelong runaway train of ego and stupidity, jaw-droppingly unaware of how unaware he is, so ludicrous and twattish that if he didn’t exist you’d dismiss a description of him as too heavy-handed to be plausible or funny; the Livingstone office must be delighted.

Whereas in fact we’d be better off just giving them their dole and leaving them alone.

Yesterday’s main story was headlined ‘THE GREEN DIVIDE: Times poll shows the gulf between words and action on the environment’.

It shows nothing of the sort. The table that, ahem, proves it uses reasoning that could be easily unravelled by a brain damaged gerbil reading the newspaper in the dark.

On reading the article, I’ve got to wonder what form of revenge the journalists wish to exact upon the subeditor who came up with the headline, subheader and table. The article and poll tell a story with an opposite message.

The body of the piece informs us that a majority of Britons think that people who don’t recycle everything they can should be fined by their council. A majority would ‘personally be willing to pay significantly higher petrol prices, car tax and air fares as part of efforts to cut back on carbon emisisons’.

Let’s look at the supposed discrepancies between word and deed.

WHAT BRITONS SAY… AND DO
65% buy only energy-saving light bulbs
Less than 20% of bulbs are energy-saving
Energy-saving bulbs last about fifteen times longer than incandescents. So, people who buy incandescents buy more bulbs.

54% make a conscious effort to take fewer flights
The number of passengers was higher last year than in 2000
As popular awareness of aviation’s contribution to climate change has happened a lot more recently than 2000, this comparison is meaningless. Also, the number of passengers does not properly compare to the number of people taking flights; the big increase in aviation is wealthier people flying more times rather than more people flying. So if 54% take fewer flights but the rest take a lot more we have more passengers.

80% do not leave their television on standby
8% of all domestic electricity is wasted by use of the standby facility
The TV is the one people are most likely to turn off; they commonly still leave their microwave, computer, DVD player, computer monitor or other appliances on standby. Also, as with the flights thing, the drive to switch off has massively increased recently; the Times poll is more recent than the DTI figure that ‘disproves’ it.

76% recycle everything in the household that they can
Only 22.5% of household waste is recycled in Britain
The key word is ‘can’. Much of what we throw away cannot be recycled; either we have no facilities to recycle it, or it is made of mixed materials. Also, as with the flights, they confuse quantity of consumption with quantity of people. As the survey confirms, unskilled workers are more likely to recycle. If those who generate the most waste are the least likely to recycle, we end up with a lot of people doing it but a low quantity of waste recycled.

56% try to use public transport wherever possible
The number of bus journeys outside London fell last year by 4%
This time the key word is ‘possible'; if the transport facilites aren’t there, it is not possible to use them. It’s interesting they want to factor out London; that’s because London’s put investment into running buses as a proper public service. As a result, people use them more. Also, as with the TV on standby thing, the refutation doesn’t compare like with like; just as not all standby appliances are TVs, so not all public transport is buses.

75% try to avoid unnecessary car journeys
63% of all journeys are by car
That thing I just said about poor availability of public transport? See how it applies to making people have to travel by car.

There may be a real story along these lines to be had (people always tell a questioner they’re better than they really are; fast food corporations found that out by responding to consumer demand for more healthy salady type stuff only to find nobody actually buys it and they all do want the triple decker burgers after all).

But if such a story does exist, it’s not the one in the Times. The article doesn’t suggest it, and the stuff in big print is a laughably flimsy cynical attempt to cobble it out of nothing.

The fact that the aforementioned gerbil could rubbish every one of the points without trying means this isn’t some little slip, it’s a wilful twisting of the story. It deliberately undermines the text that follows.

Certainly we can presume that people aspire to do more than they presently achieve and, contrary to the Times’ sneering tone, that’s no bad thing. Our action comes after we’ve decided to take it, not before. Aspiration is the first part of improvement. If you don’t fall short of your standards once in a while then you’ve probably not set them high enough.

The article says that most people are prepared to change their lives and take responsibility for their carbon emissions. It is encouraging. The presentation, in contrast, is discouraging.

In contrast to what it knows to be true, its message is; you know those people who say they’re being environmentally responsible? They’re not really. Don’t let them prick your conscience at all, they’re just lying and trying to make you feel bad. There is no groundswell of people taking personal action on their environmental impact. Honest. Nobody else is doing it, so there’s no point in you starting.

Next month, the Camp for Climate Action plans to kickstart a campaign of radical protest on climate change with direct action against Drax power station (which, hilariously and aptly, has a namesake in Marvel Comics’ Drax The Destroyer).

Drax produces over 20 million tonnes of CO2 a year. There are more than 100 countries that produce less.

Knowing there is no way they can defend their position positively, Drax try to downplay it. They say they ‘take our environmental responsibilities very seriously’, explaining how they are a clean and efficient coal-burner.

Coal generates far more CO2 per unit of electricity than any other fuel; proudly being the least polluting coal power station is like proudly being the least murderous serial killer. This might sound like overstating the case, but as climate change extends deserts, submerges or dries up fertile lands and provides new opportunities for epidemics, wilful climate change is indeed akin to mass murder.

Drax burns 13 million tons of coal a year. There’s nothing ‘clean’ about that. Burning coal has no place in a society that wants to avoid catastrophic climate change.

They trumpet their mixing coal with biomass fuels to cut down on their emissions. What they don’t mention is that their use of biofuels peaked at a mere 2.5%. Despite saying Drax uses biomass as part of ‘continually looking for ways to improve its business and environmental performance’, in March 2006 they slashed their biomass use by 90%. So it’s now 99.75% coal. Cutting your green fuel in favour of the most CO2-intensive is not improving your environmental perfomance.

More to the point, there isn’t enough land to replace coal with biofuels. As oil and gas become more expensive, so the agri-chemicals they provide become uneconomical for many farmers. This decreases the yields whilst the global population rises.

Furthermore, climate change is already affecting irrigation for farmland, and this is set to get far worse. If we are to feed everyone then we can’t afford to set aside vast areas for plants for electricity on the scale Western society currently requires. We’re already losing tropical forests to plantations for supposedly green biofuels. That has to stop. Rather than seeking such inequitable and seemingly impossible solutions, we need to reduce consumption and stop burning fossil fuels.

Drax coo their concern for climate change. Yet they are taking legal action against the European Union to get an increase in their already massive emissions allowances. This, also, is not the action of people who want to decrease emissions.

Responding to the Camp for Climate Action’s plans, Drax said they ‘share the objectives of these people,’ which is odd, given that the protesters want to see Drax shut down; if the spokeperson did share the objectives they wouldn’t have been at work to give the statement. They went on to say that as the protesters share the same objectives, Drax ‘would like their help in getting government changes to help us’ before they act.

It’s absurd to say ‘we know we shouldn’t do this thing, but we will continue to do it until someone forces us not to’. As a FTSE100 company, Drax could easily afford to invest in cleaner technology without waiting for a new regulatory framework, if such technology existed. The fact that they don’t shows their claims to responsibility are spin and lies.

The Yorkshire Post has come out against the Camp for Climate Action and in favour of Drax as they are a major local employer. Yet more people would be employed implementing sustainable energy and energy efficiency measures that could reduce our demand by more than Drax generates. Jobs that result in mass extinction and the deaths of millions are jobs that should end today.

Drax say that ‘We need a diverse mix of power sources’. Coal is already the largest source of electricity (around half). Increasing the largest source is not about increasing diversity but reducing it. We do indeed need a diverse mix of power sources. But all of them sustainable, most of them decentralised, and none of them fossil fuels that threaten the continuation of life on this planet.

Put bluntly, we need a future without places like Drax if we are to have any future at all.

There are numerous detractors of which Janet Street-Porter seems typical. She bemoans ‘white van man’ and the pointlessness of football. Aside of the snobbery involved in belittling people for their working class jobs, she’s plainly wrong. The flags are on every kind of car. And even if, unlike her, you love the skill of the sport at this level, it has to be viewed as a cultural phenomenon above all else.

But these things aren’t why I like it. It’s the flag thing that makes me feel good.

It appears that the English flag dates from the Norman Conquest, relatively speaking soon after England’s unified nationhood began.

At the beginning of the 17th Century a single flag was required for shipping travelling between the countries of this island, and the first version of the Union flag was invented. As is so often the case, this free-trade agreement was thought to be a precursor to more complete union, and was accompanied by the introduction of a single currency and the first usage of the term ‘Great Britain’. The constituent countries were thought to be waning. In his decree introducing the flag, King James referred to Scotland only as ‘North Britain’, and the rest of the island as ‘South Britain’.

But such things aren’t always fair partnerships. Slovenian or Polish governments may sell EU membership to their electorate as an equal footing with Germany and France, there may even have been the odd Uzbek who thought they’d get a good bargain from Soviet status, but if there’s a clash of interests there’s little doubt who’ll get the benefit. In the same way, for all the talk of integration, there has always been one dominant nation in the British union.

This has discouraged the English from thinking clearly on the issue and differentiating between England and Britain. Intelligent and educated English people will use the terms English and British interchangeably, often switching from one to the other in a single sentence, even though the words refer to very different bodies of land and people.

Even those in charge of the state have seemingly been unable to tell one from the other. Come with me to the Oxfordshire village of Sutton Courtenay where Herbert Asquith’s remains are buried.

He was Prime Minister of the UK in the early 20th Century. But that’s not what he thought.

From the point of view of its government, there had not been a separate nation of England since 1536. There has never been a Prime Minister of England, except as part of a wider nation. As such, Asquith’s inscription is as ludicrous as if it declared him to have been Prime Minister of Nantwich.

I was intrigued by a footnote in volume 19 of The Complete Works of George Orwell, explaining a reference to Asquith’s contemporary Marshal Foch.

I do like the idea of finding some act – preferably lewd – permissible under French law but prohibited under English and then doing it with impunity atop Foch’s statue. But whatever, let’s mosey along to Grosvenor Gardens and have a shufty at that statue for a sec.

‘I am conscious of serving Britain as I served my own country’?

That’s not what he said;

Given the anglocentric nature of the British institutions of government, education and media, it’s not surprising that the English have taught the rest of the world to confuse the concepts as well. So much so that the prefix ‘anglo-‘ is still used to mean British. When was the last time you heard anyone refer to Brito-American relations or Brito-European politics?

But even the word ‘British’ is at best ambiguous and often inaccurate. The country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, yet ‘British’ can refer to things that are from either Great Britain or from the UK. There is no word for ‘UK-ish’. I cannot think of another country that has no word for that which pertains to it.

In Northern Ireland, cars drive round with ‘GB’ stickers on the back even though Northern Ireland has never been and will never be part of Great Britain. The international currency abbreviation for the pound sterling is GBP, even though it is the currency of Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, Man and elsewhere. The UK goes to the Olympics as ‘Team GB’.

Yet for other things, such as the World Cup, we enter as four separate nations. No wonder we’re confused. Stopping this haphazard approach and taking the four-nation approach would help us define our national identity more clearly and remove some of the vestiges of English supremacy and overtones of annexation.

When we compete as one nation, the national anthem is God Save The Queen. When we compete as four nations, Wales and Scotland have their own anthems. Northern Ireland alternates between God Save The Queen and the Londonderry Air (the tune to Danny Boy). England, of course, uses God Save The Queen every time; the Englishness of the Union is reinforced to everyone concerned.

How can it be fair that the anthem of one of the four nations is the anthem of them all? How would it feel if the roles were reversed and English members of a UK team had to sing Flower of Scotland? Next up after shedding the Union Jack should be England getting its own tune. (My vote would be Blake’s Jerusalem. It’s got the requisite striving, yearning and historical elements but without the galling arrogance and glorification of militarism so common in national anthems.)

If we were to decide to separate a little further and shed the now we’re one/ now we’re three/ now we’re four attitude it would give us a clearer understanding of our own and each other’s identities.

This need not even mean complete constitutional separation. It’s one of the reasons why Plaid Cymru shied away from using the word ‘independence’ for so long, preferring instead ‘full nation status within Europe’. You could make a case for Cuba or Bhutan being independent, but the UK – as one nation or four – or, say, Portugal or Italy can no longer be regarded as independent in any true sense.

Such redefinition should be on terms of equality and respect. This cannot be achieved while we still cheer a flag that symbolises the repression of many who lived and died under it, and is resented by a serious number of their descendants who live under it.

The Union Jack was invented at the time of our first forays of empire. It is the flag that flew over our worst excesses of imperialism. It is the symbol of that which brutalised and repressed millions, of all that was fought against by dozens of movements wanting self-determination. All around the world, it is a hackle-raiser.

This is not only the case far away but within the UK, as the Union flag includes symbols for non-UK territory and omits one of the constituent countries. The red diagonal cross is St Patrick’s flag, an emblem of all Ireland from its time as a British colony. Although the Welsh flag had been in use for centuries before the Union flag, it was excluded from the design as the country was regarded as a mere English principality.

The English having their own national symbols and a clear sense of what they are (and what they are not) goes some way towards sorting all this out. The flags on the cars are a welcome catalyst.

When – as you will be unable to avoid until England are knocked out this summer – you see the footage of England’s World Cup victory in 1966, check out the flags. Union Jacks, every last one of them. In 1982 the England World Cup squad released a singalong record, This Time (We’ll Get It Right). If you’ve more money than sense you can buy a download here. First time around, it was a piece of vinyl released on the one-off label England Records. What flag was used as the logo?

The inaccuracies stretch to the lyrics, and not just in terms of ‘getting it right’ equating to being knocked out in the second round. The opening line celebrates their unity under manager Ron Greenwood.

We’re on our way, we are Ron’s twenty two

So far so good. Well, not actually good; it’s a typical old school football record of baritone gargling, but it’s only wrong in terms of taste rather than fact. But for the second line, what rhymes with ‘two’? How about something that denotes Scottishness?

Hear the roar of the red white and blue

In the last ten years, though, all this has been shifting. Euro 96 saw a marked increase in the number of England flags around.

In a pre-election broadcast in 1997 John Major hilariously warned that Labour’s devolution would ‘undo a thousand years of history’. He would do well to study some history himself and explain which thousand years of union he’s talking about. The union with Scotland is only 300 years old, with Wales 500. And as able a politician as Blair has been, not even he could actually undo history.

The paltry devolution (I’ve yet to hear anybody justify why Scotland got a modest parliament yet Wales only got a castrated talking shop) has nonetheless played a significant part in helping the English understand their national identity. As the Celtic neighbours secede a little, so by default we must see what we are without them. The uptake of the England flag is evidence that this is what we’re doing. This year I’ve seen only one Union Jack and that was in Hadfield, a village so parochial it was used as the set for The League of Gentlemen. This time we really have got it right.

The English flag certainly has been used by a few tiny and obscure racist groups, but the mass use of the flag has the effect of effortlessly reclaiming it. People invariably have regional and national symbols. They get used by supremacists, the state and others who seek to wield power in the name of a nation, but they do not belong to them.

There is common history, culture and experience that bonds any group of people. I’m European, I’m English, I’m northern, I’m part of my family and social circles. None of these things need exclude the others. There is a need for a national identifying totem, a visual shorthand that is not any more inherently oppressive or exclusionary than a family name or regional accent.

A diminishing number still see far-right connections. One school banned the flag which has ‘been linked to the British National Party’. This ably illustrates the confusion I’m talking about. The BNP is the British National Party. They don’t wave English flags, they stick to the Union Jack. Furthermore, if they ran the show there wouldn’t be an England football team, they’d make us have a single British team. If anything, the English flag defies the BNP.

Aside from the easily squashed connotations of those trivial racist English nationalists, the English flag has far less of the Union Jack’s imperialist overtones. It is comparatively neutral.

As Billy Bragg reasoned on Euro 2004’s flag waving,

I’m not saying that football is free of xenophobia or clarity on flags has been some magic cure for such sentiments. The Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Jurgen Klinsmann single with its war references is as unsavoury as The Sun that predictably promotes it. (Incidentally, even that song is a case of mixed national identities; the Dad’s Army title sequence has union jacks pushing back Nazi flags, while the lyrics sing of ‘old England’). Three centuries and more of confusion, conflation and contradiction won’t be undone by half a dozen football tournaments.

The change of the last ten years is extraordinary though, and the apparently incidental momentum is gathering pace. With some deliberate steering, we could shake this thing off within a generation.

If, during Bono’s cosying up to the G8 last summer, I’d done a sketch about him launching a consume-to-give campaign, urging people to buy products made by sweatshop barons Nike and Gap, it would’ve seemed like a cheap shot.

It would’ve gotten plain unfunny if I’d said there’d be a ‘help Africa by buying a special mobile phone’ idea.

I’m just one of many who’ve written about how Central African mining of coltan – the metal for mobile phone chips – is the catalyst for the largest war on earth and the destruction of World Heritage rainforest habitat and wildlife.

To say Bono would endorse flogging a ‘sexy, sophisticated, groovy’ phone for Africa would be too far gone. He couldn’t possibly be so ignorant. Someone who says he’s been spending years looking into Africa’s problems would surely have stumbled across a war that has killed tens of millions over the last 12 years, drawing in troops from Libya in the north to Zimbabwe in the south.

Yet as Bono edited an edition of The Independent on Tuesday for his Red campaign, all this happened and more. He fakes humility, claiming rock stars can’t instigate real change, with an clever-clever wink that saying so in a campaign edition of a national newspaper means the opposite.

He’s a dab hand at declaring one thing about himself when the opposite is true. In his speech to last year’s Labour Party conference he warmly compared Blair and Brown to Lennon and McCartney, yet in The Independent he claims to have been constantly ‘banging my fist’ on their doors.

He uses his one-day tenure to allege that concentrations of power and wealth predicated on poverty are actually some kind of mechanism for eradicating it.

He gets Radio 1’s Zane Lowe in to discourage any altering of political power. It’s not that multibillion dollar corporations don’t want to help, it’s just that they can’t figure out how to and we’ve been slack in showing them.

 

The only thing people who are trying to make a difference can do is work alongside corporations. We’re not going to abolish big business, people aren’t going to stop drinking Starbucks and buying Nike, but you can say to them, ‘There’s a big difference you can make and if we find a way to make it easier for you, would you contribute?’

 

The contents got as incongruous as the ‘Genesis 1.27’ on the cover. (It’s the bit that says God created humans in His image. Thanks for that, Bono); Condoleeza Rice claiming that anything by U2 would be in her all time top ten. Yeah, right.

The role the rich play in creating poverty isn’t dealt with anywhere. Conservative Party consultant Bob Geldof takes a look in that direction and turns away. He laments how ‘African states never developed from the skittish single-commodity market into a more balanced economy’ without asking who forced the single-commodity economies on them and prevented any change.

He says there should be ‘no enforced liberalisation by the IMF, the World Bank or the EU’. That would be enforced liberalisation such the G8 making debt relief conditional upon measures to ‘boost private sector development’ and ‘the elimination of impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign’, and not actually cancelling any debt until such measures are up and running.

Those would be policies that Geldof praised to high heaven last summer, scoring them ‘eight out of ten’. Indeed, in this supposedly critical new article he contradicts himself and reiterates his support, calling them ‘brave and bold political breakthroughs’.

The overall message is that Africa is a helpless starving victim and we are the people who should generously help out of the kindness of our hearts. The fact that Africans had been feeding themselves perfectly well for millennia until colonialism just doesn’t get a look in.

The attitude is one of stirring us to charitable consumption. Yet our consumption is the engine of the problem. We are still the colonial power, just without the imperial troops. The farming methods we impose that ruin the soil and ecosystems, the cash crops grown in them for our demand, the vicious client governments we set up and support, the arms we sell them, the minerals they supply for our fuel and jewellery and hi-tech gadgets; these cause the problems. We can’t consume our way out of overconsuming.

Just as we may say we want ‘no war for oil’ but by our oil-thirsty lifestyles we demand the war it requires, so we find poverty distressing but are not prepared to give up the ‘rights’ and goods that can only be made possible for us by the poverty of others. We would like to see change, but not at the expense of our comforts.

One Labour MP recently conceded,

 

We are imprisoned by our political Hippocratic oath: we will deliver unto the electorate more goodies than anybody else. Such an oath was only ever achievable by increasing our despoliation of the world’s resources. Our economic model is not so different in the cold light of day to that of the Third Reich – which knew it could only expand by grabbing what it needed from its neighbours.

 

We get our out of season fruit and our cut flowers at the expense of their staple crops. Put simply, we are rich because they are poor, and they are poor because we are rich.

As Nyarai Humba said

 

I hear tell
that the ‘West’ claims
‘Third World’ countries
owe them a debt. 

The white people them
They come to our countries
they unleash
upon we
the holocaust of slavery
the evil, parasitic, violent process
them call colonization.

What this means is
them rape Mother Africa
took her children to use as donkey
went right inside Mother Africa belly
and steal her resources
send them back home
to the ‘west’.

We the Africans,
funded the industrial revolution
with our blood, sweat, and tears and
Life.

So I don’t really understand
what the ‘west’ means
when them talk
‘bout ‘Third world debt’
I believe them have no shame
I know they full of untruth
they lie to themselves constantly
cause truth will kill them fe true.

I ask you to reconsider
who owes whom?

The west owes Africa
a debt so great
them can never
fully repay.

 
 

It is an obscene insult to think our responsibility is merely charitable, and it is a nonsense to think we can do it by means of corporations selling us phones built on African blood. It’s a nonsense to think a corporation can be truly moral at all. A public company has a duty to maximise profits to its shareholders. To stray from that is actually illegal.

Corporate Watch’s Corporate Law and Structures report explains,

 

profit is absolute, social and environmental values are relative: their first aim is to make as much money as possible, but given two ways to make that money they choose the one that requires the least murder, blatant theft or environmental destruction. Then they pat themselves on the back for being so responsible.

 

The solution, much to the distress of the corporations Bono and friends court, is not something they can sell us like a Make Poverty History wristband made in a Chinese sweatshop. For corporations and their agents in government to make poverty history they would need to dismantle the power they derive from poverty.

That’s beyond turkeys voting for Christmas, it’s more like expecting the farmers to baste and cook themselves for the turkeys to eat.