Monthly Archives: March 2021

Time for a Progressive Alliance

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Miriam Margolis is spot on. What to do about it?

Perhaps the time has come to form a progressive alliance, with a view to forming a national coalition government? There are many urgent challenges that need to be addressed. Here are my top ten demands. Could a coalition be formed around these issues?

  1. Support the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill.
  2. Support: 100% renewable energy, Agro-ecological farming & rewilding.
  3. Reverse the disaster that is Brexit: Rejoin the EU.
  4. A public inquiry into the Covid pandemic.
  5. Electoral Reform: A Proportional system of voting is needed now.
  6. Reverse economic policy: higher taxes and better funded public services.
  7. NHS funding should be increased, for-profit health companies banned.
  8. Radical decentralization: funding to be focused through local authorities.
  9. Bring in a Universal Basic Income for all.
  10.  Slash defence spending by 90%.

My list of ten demands may sound pretty radical. It may not be possible to unite around such an ambitious set of policies. However, something along these lines seems essential. Let us at least start the kinds of conversations that might help build a progressive alliance.

What is the best possible cabinet we could imagine? There are lots of people from outside parliament who I think would be excellent, but let us limit ourselves to just current MP’s.

Let us start with the twelve MP’s who are sponsoring the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. Caroline Lucas (Green) tabled the bill, and was supported by Alan Brown (SNP) Claire Hanna (Social Democratic and Labour Party) Wera Hobhouse (Liberal Democrat) Clive Lewis (Labour) Liz Saville-Roberts (Plaid Cymru) Stephen Farry (Alliance) Ben Lake (Plaid Cymru) Tommy Sheppard (SNP) Alex Sobel (Labour) Zarah Sultana (Labour) and Nadia Whittome (Labour).

These twelve represent a broad sweep of party political opinion, regional and ethnic diversity. It is far from a comprehensive list. Would some former Conservative MP’s support such a coalition? Many are deeply unhappy with the current government. Perhaps John Major or Dominic Grieve would be useful in the conversation? Having both Jeremy Corbin and Tony Blair in on this might add something?

Most important from my point of view would be to add the voices of young people, especially those in the Friday’s For Future school strikes movement, but sadly they are not represented within our existing political system. Bringing down the age of voting to 16, 14 or indeed younger might be another vital aspect of electoral reform.

Fruit

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Peach blossom in the foreground, with apricot blossom behind, today, 15th March 2021

It is amazing how much food can be grown on a small area. In my urban garden every day of the year my wife and I have a range of salad crops and usually several types of vegetables ready to harvest. For about six months of the year there is an abundance of fresh fruit, with plenty to freeze to see us through the winter and spring gap in production. In my average sized town garden I grow strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, blackberries, blueberries, jostaberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, redcurrants, grapes, cape gooseberries (physalis) and then there are the trees: apples, pears, cherries, plums, greengages, damsons, peaches and apricots. We also grow elder trees for elderflower and elderberry cordials. We used to grow hazelnuts but decided we didn’t have the space. There are many more species I’d love to grow but we don’t have the space, the time or really the need for any more fruit.

The UK imports 84% of all the fresh fruit that we eat. This means that only about 16% is grown in UK. This is such a bizarre state of affairs. We could reverse these ratios with many positive outcomes. Just to take one example. Plums that are grown in distant countries and shipped to UK have to be picked under ripe and therefore of poor flavour and poor nutritional content. Really ripe plums are delicious and nutritious, but need to be eaten as soon as they are picked. It is almost impossible to transport, store and retail them in the kind of model that supermarkets and greengrocers use, so most people in UK have never eaten a properly ripe plum. Before the days of cheap imports we used to grow more plums than we do now. I recall old and often neglected plum orchards in Herefordshire which now have all gone. In their heyday the fruit would have been harvested and sold locally, or bottled or made into jam for longer term storage. Plums, like so much fruit and vegetables, should be grown close to where people live, and picked and eaten on the same day, or failing that the very next day.

Of course not everybody has the space, the time or the inclination to grow fruit and vegetables. If the government want to ‘build back better’ post Covid there are lots of things I’d love to recommend they do. One of which would be to encourage and fund the expansion of community supported organic farming projects, and especially agro-forestry systems focused on producing a wide range of fruit and vegetables for their local communities.

Covid & Disaster Capitalism

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The Covid pandemic is now about one year old. It is just over a year since the first person in the UK died from it. The response to the pandemic has been very different in different countries, and this has led to very different outcomes. As of today the UK has had 4.21 million cases, resulting in 124,261 deaths. New Zealand by contrast has had 2,398 cases and only 26 deaths.

The extraordinary differences in these outcomes is attributable to the very different actions of the governments of these two countries, especially during the first days and weeks, in February, March and April last year. New Zealand, under Jacinda Ardern, listened to the science, closed borders and locked down early. It quickly and cheaply developed an effective track and trace system, and kept transmission rates low.

UK, under Boris Johnson, talked of ‘taking it on the chin’ and boasted of shaking hands with everyone in a hospital where people had the disease. Like Gove, Johnson has contempt for experts. Instead they were over influenced by some crazy ideas about herd immunity. Thousands of British people paid with their lives for this ideological nonsense.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed and Rebecca Davis, writing in Business Maverick have plotted the links in a bizarre disinformation network featuring Cambridge Analytica and a strange organization called Panda (standing for Pandemics: Data & Analytics) which have been promoting an ideological anti lockdown agenda, claiming it is bad for business. Much of the Tory right wing shares this dysfunctional libertarianism, not least Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson.

Paradoxically, but not surprisingly, this so-called pro-business ideology has been disastrous for business. The UK has suffered badly economically, as well as in health terms, due to Covid becoming widespread. New Zealand on the other hand, by shutting down early nipped the infection in the bud and have since had less economic restrictions and costs.

But maybe from the point of view of the ideologues of the far right and for the Tory government things are going more or less to plan. According to the principles of Disaster Capitalism crises are opportunities to create change and bring forward ever more extreme free market policies, to roll back the state, and an opportunity to simply make money. Many ridiculously lucrative contracts have been awarded for dubious quality PPE, a track and trace system that cost billions and yet didn’t even work, but all opportunities to make money for the governments friends and supporters. One of the largest American health insurance companies is buying up GP practices across London, and the derisory pay rise offered to nurses are all symptomatic of this governments desire to undermine the NHS and to profit from its privatization. From this ghastly perspective Covid has been a splendid opportunity, and they have grasped it, and increased their wealth, power and influence. They have done so at the expense of many peoples’ lives and livelihoods. Of the UK population many of us are incandescent with rage at this government, but apparently nowhere near enough of us. According to the latest opinion poll the Tories are 13% ahead, so this government are very pleased with themselves. They have created a disaster and profited handsomely from it. Welcome to the weird world of Disaster Capitalism.