“There is no future in which we do not transform this civilisation”: Rupert Read interview

“There is no future in which we do not transform this civilisation”: Rupert Read interview
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
2 April 2024

In 2023 the Climate Majority Project was set up in the UK to help catalyse a shift towards mass citizen action that is urgently needed to effectively mitigate and adapt to the ongoing climate crisis.

Climate public intellectual Rupert Read, one of the co-founders of the project, talks to the Morning Star about the new book about the initiative, The Climate Majority Project: Setting The Stage For A Mainstream, Urgent Climate Movement, why 1.5°C is dead and the importance of trade unions to climate action.

Morning Star: Before we get to the book I want to ask where we are in terms of the likely increase in global temperature (from pre-industrial levels) coming down the track. For example, a November 2023 Guardian headline reads Deal To Keep 1.5C Hopes Alive Is Within Reach, Says CoP28 President. What’s your take on this?

Rupert Read: 1.5°C was toast already before CoP28. The last year has shown categorically that we’re heading deep into the danger zone. The average global temperature is and has already been for the last year over 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels! The ship has sailed. I, and my colleagues at the Climate Majority Project (CMP), believe – and we set out the case for why, in the early part of our book – that holding onto the forlorn hope of staying within the official 1.5°C maximum-ceiling-target for global over-heating is not only now tragically unrealistic, but actively detrimental to organising the kind of adaptation and mitigation we are still in time for.

On ‘mitigation’ (AKA reduction of the greenhouse gases that are the material cause of the climate crisis): until we acknowledge that our efforts to date have palpably failed, we are unlikely to step-change those efforts. But so long as we pretend that staying below 1.5°C is still possible, then we have not made such an acknowledgement.

On ‘adaptation’ (resilience-building, preparedness): acting as if there will be no dramatic changes to our eco- and socio-political- systems resulting in unreliable food supplies, disruption of travel, etc. is reckless. We will never take adaptation seriously so long as we continue to fantasise staying within the ‘safety zone’, which is symbolised by the 1.5°C maximum-ceiling-target. And this matters utterly for those who most badly need adaptation to be taken seriously: strikingly, many inhabitants of the Global South, and many of the working class here in the Global North. If you care about climate justice, then it’s time to admit the terrible truth, that 1.5°C is gone, and draw the consequences: including crucially a massive injection of cash and tech into not just mitigation, but adaptation, and compensation for loss and damage. Plus a righteous anger at those who have led us down the garden path to this. We have been profoundly let down by our ‘leaders’. Industrial-growth capitalism is proving itself incapable of being sustained: because we literally cannot go on like this.

If, instead of the fantasy climate politics still prevailing at the CoPs [United Nations Conference of the Parties], we pragmatically appraise the situation we are in, and get serious about making the changes we need from grassroots to policy level, we can still transition to a society based on much sounder priorities.

Morning Star: Where does The Climate Majority Project fit into the larger UK climate movement – what are its aims, and methods for achieving these aims?

Rupert Read: The CMP exists for the majority of people who care about the climate and ecological crisis but don’t want to glue themselves to anything. Many still feel unsure of how to take action – or whether it counts – because they feel alone with their concerns. Beginning in the UK, the CMP aims to make the climate majority aware of itself and take meaningful, effective climate action wherever they have most leverage. Though our campaigns, we model the kind of citizen action people can take:

1. Most businesspeople know innovation won’t get us out of relying on fossil fuels in time. The only way to swiftly transition to an economy that we can live with is via better policies and regulation. We are pioneers in bringing this message to green business conferences and organising businesspeople to speak up about their need to be regulated. We also work actively alongside groups such as Climate Voice in the USA, who pursue much the same agenda chiefly by way of seeking to organise employees. There are many firms which are subject to pressure from their employees or potential employees, through ‘conscious quitting’, through difficulty in recruiting, and much much more.

2. In the near future, education about dangerous manmade climate change will become a part of every student’s curriculum. Teachers who deliver the truth of our predicament are used to feeling the mood in the classroom sinking and are afraid of plunging their students into hopelessness. Our climate courage campaign brings climate scientists, mental health professionals, educators and youth activists to mobilise resources that help address climate distress in the classroom.

3. This year I’ll be leading a campaign on Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER), intended to bump adaptation way up the collective agenda, in line with what I said in answer to your first question. Right now, Britain is chronically ill-prepared to face the climate-shitstorm that will be coming at us; don’t take my word for it, this is the verdict of the government’s own Committee on Climate Change. No-one is coming to save us. In the next few years, we’re highly likely to experience weather extremes we’ve literally never experienced before. (One is wildfires; these have of course been devastating recently in places such as California, Greece and Australia, but at least those countries have good preparedness for such eventualities. We simply do not.) The SAFER campaign will expose the scandal of our unpreparedness – and help people to organise from the ground up to make ourselves safer against the coming storm for which not one of us – not a one of us – is ready. We in the CMP have also funded especially-promising initiatives which take or sustain various kinds of necessary climate action such as WildCard, MP Watch, General Counsel Sustainability Leaders, Teach the Future, Community Climate Action, and Cadence Roundtable. We function, in other words, not just as a strategic-campaigning organisation but as a strategic incubator. We envision a political culture where the promise of decisive action on mitigation and adaptation becomes crucial to electoral success, and we’re working to transform climate and ecology from polarising issues into unifying drivers of collective action. In the 2030s, rather than running away from climate, Labour and even the Conservatives, as well as the Greens, will be taking the climate concerns of huge numbers of citizens very seriously; if our endeavour to mobilise the #climatemajority comes to fruition. We only get to have a future if our politics becomes about competing over who can deal with climate breakdown best.

Morning Star: In the book you cite the United Nations Environment Programme as saying trade unions are in a unique position to help build a climate majority. Can you explain?

Rupert Read: The environmental movement has often done a poor job at welcoming working-class people. As a lifelong trade unionist myself, who has been involved in strikes and in pay negotiations etc., I know, like many Morning Star readers do, from first-hand experience, the power of a union. But our workplaces have as yet mostly barely begun to face the climate threat. If and when trades unions step into that breach, it would be truly game-changing.

Morning Star: You have co-edited a book which is being published later this year about Transformative Adaptation. What is this?

Rupert Read: Transformative Adaptation (‘TrAd’ for short) is embraces this climate- and poly-crisis as an opportunity to return to a more natural way of being, that will enable us collectively to survive the future. So it includes a focus on food-growing as something that the majority of us should have access to, rather than just a miniscule mechanised cadre of farmers. The CMP book already includes some discussion of Transformative Adaptation, because it is a necessary dimension of our project, as my previous answers in this interview have suggested. There is no future in which we do not transform this civilisation, and adapt to the damage that is baked in, and the worse damage that is coming. Please join us, in co-creating a future: start by coming to http://www.climatemajorityproject.com.

Co-edited by Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell, The Climate Majority Project: Setting The Stage For A Mainstream, Urgent Climate Movement is published by London Publishing Partnership, priced £12.99.

By rejecting the pro-Palestinian protests the government is making a terror attack more likely

By rejecting the pro-Palestinian protests the government is making a terror attack more likely
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
24-25 February 2024

There have now been nine national pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 7 2023.

Every two or three weeks hundreds of thousands of people have marched through London – and cities and towns across the UK – to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The biggest protest took place on November 11 2023, with organisers estimating 750,000 people on the streets of the capital. After climbing over a fence in Hyde Park (the opened gates couldn’t deal with the enormous number of people trying to get onto Park Lane to start marching) it took me a couple of hours to shuffle about a kilometre before I gave up and headed for home.

This tenacious movement has almost certainly had important impacts – think of how the government has become more critical of Israel, Keir Starmer’s shift to saying the “fighting must stop now”, and how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted being worried about “the huge demonstrations in western capitals”. However, it has been unable to compel the government to end its support for Israel and call for a ceasefire.

No doubt some in Number 10 are revelling in the fact they have been able to stand firm in the face of this intense pressure. But it would be naïve to think at the end of every march people have simply gone home grumbling that nothing has changed.

Consider, for a moment, just how strongly someone must feel to give up one day of their weekend, travel to central London and walk achingly slowly in very cold temperatures. And then do it again and again. Seeing the passion and anger on display when I have marched it seems unlikely people will forget how the government and Starmer’s Labour Party have backed Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians.

As Iraq War architect Alastair Campbell told the Iraq Inquiry: “I always have a rule of thumb that, if somebody goes on a march, there are probably ten others who thought about it.” Fast forward to today and polls have repeatedly found a majority of Britons support a ceasefire in Gaza – 71 per cent of respondents in a December 2023 YouGov survey.

Campbell was commenting on the February  15 2003 anti-Iraq War march, which was also broadly reflective of wider public opinion. And though it’s often dismissed as being a complete failure, it provides a teachable case study, and an important warning, about the significant and unexpected influence large demonstrations can have on participants, national politics and society.

The biggest demonstration in British history, February 15 was the high point of an anti-war movement that started in the wake of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on the US and continued putting large numbers of people on British streets several years into the US-UK occupation of Iraq.

In the May 2005 general election, the first since the invasion, support for Labour fell by five per cent, with their governing majority dropping from 167 to 66 seats. “One of the last polls conducted [before the election] by the BBC… suggests hostility to the war was a bigger issue than has so far been acknowledged,” the Guardian noted. “The poll found 23% of people surveyed cited opposition to the war as a reason for being reluctant to vote Labour, while 21% said they did not trust Mr Blair”. There are echoes of this today with reports of Labour scrambling to stop the exodus of Muslim supporters, and voters “in affluent, predominantly white parts of the country, such as Bournemouth, Bristol and Brighton, where many voters also feel strongly about the Palestinian cause.”

And the strength of the anti-Iraq War movement arguably played a key role in terminating Tony Blair’s premiership and political career. By 2010 a ComRes poll found 37 per cent of voters thought the former prime minister should be put on trial for invading Iraq. Starmer, who is still only the leader of the opposition, has already been on the receiving end of a huge amount of flak over the war in Gaza.

The anti-Iraq War movement also led to a shift in activist tactics. Groups like anti-airport expansion group Plane Stupid and anti-austerity UK Uncut turned to nimble, media-friendly direct actions out of a frustration with the A to B marches of the anti-Iraq War movement. Ditto Black Bloc, the now largely forgotten masked activists who vandalised shops and banks during 2011 in opposition to the savage Tory cuts. “All of them said the failure of the peaceful anti-Iraq war march to overturn government policy was formative in their decision to turn to violence,” the Guardian reported after speaking to a number of people involved in actions.

Sadly, another small group of people turned to far more deadly violent action. We know at least one of the 7/7 suicide bombers, Germaine Lindsay, and three of the 21/7 failed suicide bombers – Muktar Said Ibrahim, Yassin Omar and Hussain Osman – attended an anti-Iraq War protest. When he was captured in Rome, Osman said “I am against war. I’ve marched in peace rallies and nobody listened to me.”

Speaking to me for my book on the anti-Iraq War movement, author and activist Mike Marqusee provided a plausible explanation for this journey from non-violent protest to suicide bombings: “It is definitely true that the more you reject a community’s legal, lawful and non-violent expressions and aspirations the more some of them are going to turn to illegal and violent responses”.

When I asked terrorism expert Raffaello Pantucci about this in 2014, he urged caution about making any sweeping claims. “The link between the non-violent protest, subsequent frustration and action is not as linear as you might suggest”, he told me. “I would say that in both the 21/7 and 7/7 lot, there is considerable evidence that they were very radical before the invasion of Iraq. Iraq seems to have acted as an accelerator, but I would say that they were headed down that path long before the 2003 rally.”

The 7/7 atrocities will not have been a surprise to the government – before the Iraq War Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Director General of UK security service MI5, warned ministers and officials that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat to Britain.

Similarly, in January the head of counter-terrorism policing in the UK warned there has been an “unprecedented” spike in terrorism threats since October 2023, with Israel’s war on Gaza creating a “radicalisation moment” with the potential to push more people towards terrorism. This follows European security officials reporting in November 2023 they are seeing a growing risk of attacks by Islamists radicalised by the war. “A British security official said the war in Gaza was likely to become the biggest recruiter for Islamist militants since the Iraq war in 2003,” according to Reuters.

As with Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, these warnings confirm the UK government, by continuing to support Israel diplomatically and militarily, and therefore prolonging the brutal onslaught, is fuelling an increase in the terror threat in the UK. So, far from protecting British citizens, the government is actually endangering Britons. Indeed, the repeated expert warnings point to a dark truth: the safety of British citizens is ultimately a low priority for the government, and certainly a lower priority than supporting Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza.

Ian Sinclair is the author of The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003, published by Peace News Press. Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.

Book review: Saving the World from Nuclear War: The June 12, 1982 Disarmament Rally and Beyond by Vincent J. Intondi

Book review: Saving the World from Nuclear War: The June 12, 1982 Disarmament Rally and Beyond by Vincent J. Intondi
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
October-November 2023

Concise, accessible and well-referenced, this is a wonderful book about a protest I wasn’t previously aware of.

Vincent J. Intondi, Professor of History at Montgomery College, sets the scene: surrounded by ‘advisors who believed nuclear war was a reasonable option to deal with adversaries,’ in the early 1980s newly elected US President Ronald Reagan massively increased both military spending and his warmongering rhetoric.

In response the antinuclear movement, having lost its voice during the Vietnam War, re-emerged, quickly growing to become ‘one of the largest social movements’ in US history. The aim of the new nuclear freeze movement in the US was simple – ‘The United States and the Soviet Union should adopt a mutual freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons.’

With polls showing the vast majority of the American public supported a freeze, a rally was organised in New York City’s Central Park on 12 June 1982 – to highlight and apply pressure on the Second Special Session on Disarmament taking place at the United Nations a few blocks away.

Based on original interviews with the leading organisers, movement materials, newspaper reports and secondary sources, Intondi tells the story of what, with an estimated one million people participating, was then the largest demonstration in US history. A large number of established and new organisations involved, and predictably there were difficulties keeping the large coalition together (sticking points included minority representation in the coalition leadership and whether condemnation of superpower intervention in the ‘Third World’ should be included in the official slogans). Two days after the demonstration, the War Resisters League coordinated sit-ins at the UN missions of the five major nuclear powers. Nearly 2,000 people were arrested, making it ‘the largest action of disarmament-related, non-violent civil disobedience ever,’ according to Intondi.

Mentioned in passing is the fact there were 1.5 million signatures collected in the UK in support. An impressive number, though dwarfed by the incredible 30 million strong petition from Japan calling for a nuclear-free world – ‘weighing twenty tons and transported… in three jumbo jets.’

While the Reagan Administration publicly ignored the protest and derided the wider movement, Intondi makes a persuasive case that antinuclear activism had a significant constraining influence on US nuclear policy. More broadly, he summarises the important and encouraging conclusion of historian Lawrence Wittner’s three-volume study of international disarmament campaigning: ‘The antinuclear movement… prevented nuclear weapons from being used during the duration of the Cold War.’

Intondi also argues ‘the success of the antinuclear movement in the 1980s was… due in large part to organizing through fear and hope’, and connects it to the successful struggle by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which came into force in 2021. ‘June 12 was indeed part of a movement and not a moment,’ he concludes.

Combatting the zombie myths about nonviolent struggle

Combatting the zombie myths about nonviolent struggle
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
28 November 2023

There is widespread ignorance on the Left about what is called civil resistance (AKA nonviolent struggle).

Let’s start with first principles. In her essential 2021 book Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know, Harvard University’s Professor Erica Chenoweth defines civil resistance as “a method of active conflict in which unarmed people use a variety of coordinated, noninstitutional methods – strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, alternative institution-building, and many other tactics – to promote change without harming or threatening to harm an opponent.”

Following the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas, various people told me on X/Twitter this method struggle is unrealistic, ineffective, not as powerful as armed resistance, relies the on inherent restraint of the oppressor, can only create gradual change, and so on.

On October 8, the popular Leftist X/Twitter account @zeisquirrel approvingly posted a video of Malcolm X asserting “You don’t get freedom peacefully. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn’t deserving of a peaceful approach.”

This echoes what Afua Hirsch, writing in the Guardian in 2018, argued about the end of Apartheid in South Africa: “Columnists did not cut it. Activists could not have done it. Peaceful protest did not do it. Sports boycotts, books, badges and car boot sales did not do it. It took revolutionaries, pure and simple. People willing to break the law, to kill and be killed.”

Fellow Guardian journalist Owen Jones agreed, tweeting: “Apartheid was brought down by revolutionaries, not peaceful protest. Brilliant piece by @afuahirsch.”

With all these assertions in mind, it is worth addressing some of the common myths about civil resistance.

Myth: Nonviolent struggle is not as effective as violent struggle

In their 2011 Columbia University Press book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan compare the efficacy of nonviolent and violent campaigns. Analysing 323 examples of resistance campaigns and rebellion from 1900 to 2006, the authors concluded that nonviolent campaigns have been twice as successful as violent campaigns in achieving their objectives. 

Research conducted by Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, currently a professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, broadly supports Chenoweth and Stephan’s thesis. Studying a different data set of violent and nonviolent strategies of organisations seeking self-determination between 1960 and 2005, in 2016 Cunningham concluded that non-violent resistance “is more effective than violence in obtaining concessions over self-determination”.

More recently, citing an updated dataset of 627 revolutionary campaigns from 1900-2019, in 2021 Chenoweth re-confirmed her earlier conclusion: over 50 per cent of nonviolent revolutions succeeded, compared to 26 per cent of violent ones.

And what about confronting murderous dictatorships? According to Chenoweth and Stephan “the notion that nonviolent action can be successful only if the adversary does not use violent repression is neither theoretically nor historically substantiated.” The removal of General Pinochet in Chile, the downfall of President Marcos in the Philippines, the ousting of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and, yes, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, all show that nonviolent struggle has played a decisive role in toppling the extremely ruthless regimes.

Myth: Nonviolent struggle is passive

In Civil Resistance, Chenoweth explains “civil resistance is a method of conflict – an active, confrontational technique that people or movements use to assert political, social, economic or moral claims… in a very real sense, civil resistance constructively promotes conflict.”

The strategically brilliant US civil rights movement provides a valuable case study. Writing about the representation of Martin Luther King in the 2014 movie Selma, US journalist Jessica Leber argues the nonviolent campaign he led for African-American voting rights in 1965 “was incredibly aggressive, brave, and strategic – in many cases aiming to force the state into violent opposition.”

The same applies to the successful campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference he led put together and executed a detailed plan for mass confrontation with the city’s white power structure. Writing in his famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King noted “The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

If anyone wants to read more about this extraordinary strategic intelligence, I would strongly recommend the 2022 book Waging A Good War: A Military History Of The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks.

Myth: The success of nonviolent struggle is based on appealing to the better nature of the enemy

“Civil resistance works not by melting the adversary’s heart,” Chenoweth explains in her Civil Resistance book. Chenoweth and Stephan elaborate in How Civil Resistance Works: “nonviolent campaigns achieve success through sustained pressure derived from mass mobilization that withdraws the regime’s economic, political, social, and even military support”.

The Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, the US civil rights movement, the struggle for independence in Ghana and Zambia, Otpor’s ousting of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia – the oppressors in these examples of successful civil resistance didn’t suddenly discover their better nature. They were forced to make concessions because of the unstoppable power of the movements they faced.

Myth: In the face of repression, nonviolence will mean lots of defenceless people get killed

After analysing a dataset of 308 resistance campaigns between 1950 and 2013, Evan Perkoski, an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, and Chenoweth highlight a “counterintuitive paradox” – that those campaigns which remain nonviolent and unarmed with no significant foreign support are safest from mass killings. “Nonviolent uprising are almost three times less likely than violent rebellions to encounter mass killings, all else being equal,” they conclude in a 2018 International Center on Nonviolent Conflict research paper.

Similarly, Chenoweth, citing her expanded and updated dataset, confirmed in 2021 that “nonviolent campaigns aimed at dislodging a power structure between 1946 and 2013 suffered remarkably fewer fatalities than their armed counterparts” – 105 deaths per year compared to 2,800 deaths per year.

For example, the largely nonviolent 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt overthrew Tunisian president Ben Ali and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak with a relatively low number of deaths (estimated to be around 340 and 850, respectively). In comparison, the violent 2011 uprisings in Syria and Libya led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, as well as millions of refugees, a huge increase in international terrorism and the decimation of those countries’ economies.

When I interviewed him in 2011, nonviolent action guru Gene Sharp highlighted how the Baltic states won independence from the Soviet Union in 1990-91 – primarily using civil resistance. “They got out with very few casualties. I think in Lithuania it may have been 14 dead, in Latvia eight and in Estonia nobody was killed,” he noted.

Myth: Nonviolent struggle takes a long time

According to Chenoweth and Stephan’s 2011 study, on average nonviolent struggles either succeed or fail three times faster than their violent counterparts – likely one reason why nonviolent struggles generally experience less mass killings.

Again, it is instructive to compare the largely nonviolent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia with the violent uprisings in Libya and Syria. The movement sparked by the self-immolation of fruit and vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi took four weeks to overthrow Ben Ali, while Mubarak was toppled after just over two weeks of demonstrations. In contrast, Libyan leader Gaddafi was overthrown (with US-UK-NATO assistance) after eight months, and the Syrian civil war has now gone on for well over a decade.

To be clear, I do not think those of us living in relative privilege in the UK should judge anyone living under occupation who takes up arms against their oppressor (though, of course, I do condemn attacks on civilians). It’s possible civil resistance may not work in some settings. However, I do think it’s important to consider and publicise the evidence for the efficacy of nonviolent and violent resistance on a genera level. Because it seems to me the Left’s ignorance of nonviolent struggle has potentially damaging ramifications for the fight for a better world – namely the dismissal of what Professor Stephen Zunes has called “the most powerful political tool available to challenge oppression.”

Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know by Erica Chenoweth is published by Oxford University Press.

Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.

Britain’s nuclear terrorism: interview with Milan Rai

Britain’s nuclear terrorism: interview with Milan Rai
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
8 November 2023

The Editor of Peace News newspaper and author of the 1994 book Tactical Trident: The Rifkind Doctrine and the Third World, peace activist Milan Rai has recently written several articles about the UK’s nuclear arsenal.

Ian Sinclair asked Rai to respond to the popular framing of the UK’s nuclear weapons being for “deterrence”, and to explain his claim that the UK has carried out “nuclear terrorism.”

There is a consensus in the UK’s mainstream political culture – from the media to politicians to academia – that the UK’s nuclear weapons are primarily used for deterrence. What’s your take?

For the general public in Britain, the idea of using nuclear weapons is so deeply horrifying, so taboo, that it is unthinkable. It isn’t unthinkable for the British military establishment.

The propaganda version of ‘deterrence’ that has been sold to the British public is that the British government only has nuclear weapons to defend Britain itself from nuclear attack and they’re only there in order to be able to threaten nuclear retaliation against a nuclear attack on the territory of the UK.

In other words, British nuclear weapons are focused just on hostile nuclear weapon states, they’re about protecting the British homeland from nuclear attack, and they’re retaliatory weapons. They just sit there, unused, like (incredibly expensive) insurance that you hope you’ll never have to claim.

On all counts, this version of deterrence is a Big Lie.

In fact, British nuclear weapons have also been pointed at non-nuclear weapon states: they have been used repeatedly to threaten countries that posed no possible threat to any part of the UK.

The US has been lucky enough to have had a former nuclear war planner explain the realities of US ‘deterrence’: Daniel Ellsberg, the US insider who leaked the Pentagon Papers, the top secret internal history of the Vietnam War.

Ellsberg wrote in 1981: “The notion common to nearly all Americans that ‘no nuclear weapons have been used since Nagasaki’ is mistaken. It is not the case that U.S. nuclear weapons have simply piled up over the years… Again and again, generally in secret from the American public, U.S. nuclear weapons have been used, for quite different purposes: in the precise way that a gun is used when you point it at someone’s head in a direct confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled.”

Here is one of the dozen or so examples that Ellsberg listed in his 1981 essay: ‘[US President] Nixon’s secret threats of massive escalation, including possible use of nuclear weapons, conveyed to the North Vietnamese by [US National Security Advisor] Henry Kissinger, 1969-72’.

Here in Britain, there are several known examples of similar threats.

In the 1960s, Britain’s “strategic nuclear deterrent” was the V-bomber force of Valiant, Victor and Vulcan aircraft. In December 1963, V-bombers from Bomber Command were sent out to Singapore during Britain’s 1963-1966 “Confrontation” (war) with Indonesia.

Andrew Brookes, a former Vulcan pilot and a historian of the V-bomber force, wrote that the V-bombers were kept in Singapore longer than usual, “positioned to be seen as ready to eliminate Indonesia Air Force capabilities if they launched air attacks.”

The Sunday Times revealed on 31 December 2000 that RAF Tengah in Singapore started storing 48 Red Beard nuclear bombs in 1962, the year before the V-bombers arrived there. The squadron began low-altitude nuclear bombing exercises, signalling British intentions to Indonesia.

This is one example of how the British state has used nuclear weapons “in the precise way that a gun is used when you point it at someone’s head in a direct confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled,” as Ellsberg put it.

RAF Air Chief Marshal Sir David Lee later wrote about the nuclear-capable Victors sent to Singapore: “Their potential was well known to Indonesia and their presence did not go unnoticed.”

Lee added: “the knowledge of RAF strength and competence created a wholesome respect among Indonesia’s leaders, and the deterrent effect of RAF air defence fighters, light bombers and V-bombers on detachment from Bomber Command was absolute” (emphases added).

Lee is pointing us to one of the true meanings of “the deterrent effect” or “deterrence”: creating a “wholesome respect” among the natives in far-off lands that Britain wishes to dominate.

Can you give examples of when the UK has carried out what you call “nuclear terrorism”?

Iraq has been threatened with British nuclear weapons at least four times.

In 1961, Britain sent nuclear-capable Scimitar aircraft to the Gulf on an aircraft carrier, and put strategic nuclear bombers in Malta on alert during a (manufactured) crisis with Iraq.

There were many British (and US) nuclear threats against Iraq in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War. Here are some examples. On 10 August 1990, just eight days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Daily Star reported: “Whitehall sources made it clear that the multinational forces would be ready to hit back with every means at their disposal… [including] using tactical nuclear weapons against [Iraqi] troops and tanks on the battlefield.” On 30 September 1990, the Observer reported (on its front page) a warning from a senior British army officer with 7th Armoured Brigade: if there were Iraqi chemical attacks, British forces would “retaliate with battlefield nuclear forces.”

On 4 February 1991, the Guardian carried this report of a statement by the then Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd: “Mr. Hurd said that if Iraq responded to an allied land assault by using chemical weapons, President Saddam [Hussein] would be certain to provoke a massive response – language the U.S. and Britain employ to leave open the option of using chemical or nuclear weapons.”

Those threats took place under Conservative governments.

In February 1998, during a crisis over UN weapons inspections, a Labour Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that if the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein used chemical or biological weapons in retaliation for a US-UK attack, “he should be in no doubt that, if he were to do so, there would be a proportionate response”. In other words, Cook threatened that Britain or the US would use weapons of mass destruction, either nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, there were more Labour nuclear threats. Then Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, on 20 March 2002, that states like Iraq “can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons”.

Four days later, Hoon appeared on ITV’s Jonathan Dimbleby show and insisted that the government “reserved the right” to use nuclear weapons if Britain or British troops were threatened by chemical or biological weapons.

All of these were nuclear threats against a non-nuclear weapon state (which posed no military threat to the territory of the British homeland).

These are examples of state nuclear terrorism – by the British government.

You’ve argued that the UK peace movement hasn’t even begun to engage with the fact UK nuclear weapons are tied up with British colonialism. Can you explain what you mean?

The nuclear weapons debate in the UK has been about the rights and wrongs of ‘deterrence’ in the sense of ‘having nuclear weapons to threaten retaliation if the UK itself was ever at risk of being attacked by nuclear weapons’.

By taking part in this Eurocentric debate, we have reinforced the idea that this is all that nuclear deterrence is about.

We have not exposed the history of British nuclear threats which show a very different side to Britain’s nuclear history.

Has anti-war activism or public opinion impacted UK nuclear policy in the past?

The government is clearly terrified of the possible public reaction to its policies and actions in this area, which is why so much effort has been put into distorting the record. For example, it’s clear that after the upsurge of CND in 1958, ministers and military officials became a lot more careful about how they spoke about nuclear weapons.

Where do you think the anti-nuclear campaigners should focus their energy going forwards?

If the British disarmament movement focuses on preventing the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons, it will prioritise holding back British military intervention and calming nuclear danger zones such as the Middle East and South Asia, as well as challenging the development and deployment of new nuclear weapons and exposing British nuclear threats.

Milan Rai is giving a talk on this topic at 7.30pm on Thursday 16 November: Vital Interests and British Nuclear Threats: 30 Years of the Rifkind Doctrine. Registration: http://www.tinyurl.com/peacenews4122.

Reinforcing the imperium: Joseph Gerson on the US nuclear arsenal

Reinforcing the imperium: Joseph Gerson on the US nuclear arsenal
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
7 November 2023

In the first of two interviews on the topic, Ian Sinclair speaks to Joseph Gerson, President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security, about his seminal 2007 book Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.

While the media has presented Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repeated nuclear threats during the Ukraine War as uniquely reckless, Gerson highlights how the US has prepared or threatened nuclear war at least thirty times since the end of the Second World War.

What is the function/s of the US nuclear arsenal?

In addition to providing massive profits to the US military-industrial complex, the US nuclear arsenal has two primary purposes: reinforcing the US global imperium and deterring nuclear blackmail or attacks by rival nuclear powers.

The origins of the US nuclear arsenal and the first-use doctrine are instructive. The Manhattan Project was initiated amidst fears that Nazi Germany would create nuclear weapons to be used against the United States and its wartime allies. The idea was to have a US nuclear weapon to deter Nazi use of the apocalyptic weapon.

However, by 1942 US intelligence concluded that Germany would not be able to develop nuclear weapons in time for use during the war. Nonetheless, there was no slackening in the drive to build the US bomb. Soon after the physicist (and late Nobel Peace Prize laureate) Joseph Rotblat arrived in Los Alamos, General Groves, who led the Manhattan Project, informed him that the bomb project’s target was the Soviet Union.

It is now widely recognized that, as US Secretary of War Stimson said at the time, attacking Japan with nuclear weapons was not necessary to end the war. He explained that Japan was functionally defeated, and that Japan’s surrender could be achieved on terms acceptable to the US. The determinative reason for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings nuclear attacks was to bring the war to an immediate end, before Russia could enter the war and gain control of northern China, Manchuria, and Korea. It was not the nuclear attacks that led Emperor Hirohito to order Japan’s surrender. It was the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan on the same day as the Nagasaki A-bombing. And not to be missed was President Truman’s diary entry that with the A-bomb he would have “a hammer over those boys” – the ability to terrorize Soviet leadership.

Can you provide some historical examples of when the US threatened to use nuclear weapons?

US Secretary of Defense Harold Brown once testified that with the US nuclear arsenal our “conventional weapons” become “meaningful instruments of military and political power.” Noam Chomsky explained that means that the US nuclear arsenal allows the US to “sufficiently intimidate… anyone who might help to protect people we are determined to attack.” Daniel Ellsberg, who was once the lead author of the US nuclear war fighting doctrine, taught that during many US wars and international crises the US prepared and/or threatened to initiate nuclear attacks.

I have documented at least 30 times that the US has made such threats and preparations, providing the model for current Russian nuclear sabre rattling in its Ukraine War. A partial list includes the 1948 Berlin blockade, Eisenhower’s 1953 nuclear threat to win the Armistice Agreement with North Korea and China, and again in 1955 and 1958 during Taiwan crises. During the Cuban Missile Crisis President Kennedy thought that the odds that the US would resort to nuclear attack was between a third and a half. President Johnson threatened the use of nuclear weapons during the Six-Day and Vietnam Wars. We had [President] Nixon’s “madman” nuclear threats mobilization against Vietnam. And in the 1973 October War [the Yom Kippur War] Kissinger prepared and threatened use of nuclear weapons.

The post-Cold War era included such threats and preparations during the wars against Iraq (including a 1991 threat by [UK] Prime Minister Major) and against North Korea.

In Empire and the Bomb, you indicate US public opinion likely helped to foil President Nixon’s nuclear threats against Vietnam. Can you explain more?

During his 1968 presidential election campaign Richard Nixon vowed that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. Few believed him. But in his diary Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Halderman explained that it was true. It has also been documented by leading figures on Kissinger’s National Security Council Staff and others. Modelled on President Eisenhower’s 1953 threats to North Korea, during the spring and summer of 1969 secret threats were communicated to North Vietnam’s leaders, and plans for Operation “Duck Hook” were put in place. If Hanoi refused to end the war on Nixon’s terms, it risked nuclear attack or destruction of their vital dam infrastructure. Several on Kissinger’s staff warned that, given the growing influence of the US peace movement, use of nuclear weapons would trigger massive peaceful protests and widespread domestic violence.

On October 1 [1969], Nixon ordered a nuclear alert and mobilization which lasted for 29 days, including flying nuclear armed bombers along the Russian coastline, lining up nuclear armed B-52 bombers on Strategic Air Command runways so they could be seen by Soviet satellites, and even deploying nuclear weapon to civilian airports across the US. The danger of a nuclear accident became so great that in the last days of mobilization senior Pentagon officials appealed that it be ended.

Parallel to Nixon’s and Kissinger’s nuclear war planning was intense organizing for an escalating series of general strikes, termed Vietnam moratoriums, to force Nixon to end the war. Rallies and marches in which protestors carried the names of the US war dead were held in cities, towns, and universities across the country and dominated the media. On October 15, rallies were held with thousands of protesters, even in conservative bastions like Arizona. In Washington, D.C. a quarter of a million people, led by Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s widow, marched along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

There are various explanations about how and why the nuclear alert was terminated, but in his memoir, Nixon confessed that “I knew for sure that my ultimatum failed… a quarter of a million people came to Washington.” Little did we know that we played a powerful role in preventing catastrophic nuclear attacks, even if it took the Vietnamese and our movement more years to end the terrible war.

Empire and the Bomb was published in 2007. What is your assessment of US nuclear policy since then? Does the US still use nuclear weapons to dominate the world?

As has been the case since the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, US nuclear weapons policies continue to serve two functions: deterrence and reinforcing the imperium. In 2010 President Obama made a deal with Senate Republicans to replace and upgrade the [US] nuclear arsenal and all three legs of the nuclear triad in exchange for their support of the New START Treaty. The pact limits the number of strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 – more than enough to cause nuclear winter. This includes the upgraded B-61-12 warheads now being deployed in Europe and the UK.

US post-Cold War nuclear threats were made in the run up to the 1991 and 2003 wars against Iraq to ensure that US and allied troops being assembled in the Middle East for those wars were not attacked. Today, as we face the danger of the Gaza War becoming a regional war including Iran, we can be sure that Iranian policymakers are well aware that in a worst case scenario the US or Israel (which threatened use of its “Temple Weapons” during the 1973 October War) could respond to attacks with tactical nuclear weapons or use precision and devastating “conventional” weapons in an effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

[Ex-US National Security Council official] Fiona Hill recently lectured that the Pax America era is over as we enter the still uncertain multipolar era. In Ukraine, Russia, whose GDP barely exceeds that of Australia, has demonstrated that a nuclear arsenal can limit or prevent other nations coming to the aid of a country it is determined to attack. The same applies to Iran today. And the US first-strike doctrine and arsenal are seen as the guarantor that Taiwan can be defended against a possible Chinese invasion.

Never forget: grassroots protest is a crucial driver in securing positive change

Never forget: grassroots protest is a crucial driver in securing positive change
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
16 October 2023

The mainstream political culture – from the media to politicians to academia – often has a hard time recognising the decisive role of grassroots activism and protest in securing political change.

For example, last month the Guardian reported on the latest British Social Attitudes survey, noting “From attitudes to gay sex and single parenting to views on abortion and the role of women in the home, Britain has evolved into a dramatically more liberal-minded country over the past four decades.” According to the liberal newspaper, the study suggests “the evolution of liberal public attitudes… have been driven by profound social changes such as more people going to university, more women going out to work and the decline in marriage and organised religion.”

Missing is any reference to the decades of essential work done by the feminist, gay and left-wing activists, with groups like the Women’s Liberation Movement, Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front and Outrage dealing with violence, threats and abuse in their struggle to win equal rights, changes in the law and shift public opinion.

The tendency to conflate “politics” with “Westminster” is a common way in which grassroots action gets sidelined.

Writing for the Hansard Society blog in August, Dr James Strong, a Senior Lecturer in British Politics and Foreign Policy at Queen Mary University of London, highlighted four factors which determine whether parliament gets to decide on military action. These are: the prime minister’s position, the balance of power between the political parties, what prior experience MPs have had of voting for war, and the nature of the proposed military operation. Missing again is any reference to the role of social movements or public opinion, which the historical record reveals as being crucial in determining the shift in parliamentary norms on matters of war.

As Strong’s research shows, the constitutional convention that parliament be given a vote in advance of military action was set in March 2003, when Labour Party prime minister Tony Blair held, and won, a parliamentary vote to invade Iraq.

However, as Milan Rai, the Editor of Peace News newspaper has explained, “Tony Blair did not want to have a vote in parliament on whether or not to go to war with Iraq. It was the anti-war movement, both inside and outside the Labour party, that forced Blair into holding the vote”.

Indeed Strong himself helps to corroborate this reality in a 2014 article, noting that “until after January 2003” Blair maintained “he would decide and then parliament would discuss, but not vote on, war with Iraq.” The problem for the prime minister, as Andrew Rawnsley set out in his 2010 book The End Of The Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour, was that the impending war “was already hugely contentious”. The growing anti-war movement held huge rallies in London in September 2002 and February 2003, engendering rising discontent within the Labour Party itself. In January 2003 The Guardian noted ICM polling was showing support for the war had slumped to its lowest level since it started tracking opinion on the question in summer 2002. According to Rawnsley, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, told Blair if MPs were denied a proper vote “people will go berserk.”

The flagship BBC news programmes also seem institutionally prone to framing politics as whatever happens in SW1. “Since we… see ourselves as public policy journalists then necessarily we look at what is happening in public policy i.e. politicians and officials” rather than “those who were not in a positon to make decisions, like the anti-war movement,” Kevin Marsh, the Editor of the BBC Today Programme in 2003, told me when I interviewed him about the run-up to the Iraq War.

Another reason why what happens in the streets is disregarded is because politicians sometimes have the audacity to claim responsibility for positive changes that were in fact fought for by grassroots campaigns – often in the face of elite opposition.

Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions in the summer, Chris Philp, the Minister of State for Crime, Policing and Fire, did exactly this. “10 years ago, or 15 years ago, a huge proportion of our domestic electricity was generated by coal-fired power stations, which are unbelievably polluting in terms of CO2,” he noted, before bragging “We now have virtually zero electricity generation in the UK from coal-fired power stations.”

In contrast, when no coal was used to generate electricity in the UK for a week in May 2019, environmental campaigner Joss Garman tweeted: “It’s not an accident. A decade of activism and organising at all levels made it happen.” The first Camp for Climate Action rocked up at Drax coal-fired power station in summer 2006, Greenpeace campaigners occupied Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in October 2007, and activists ‘hijacked’ a coal train in June 2008. The same month the Conservatives did propose a policy of only supporting new coal-fired power stations if they incorporated carbon capture and storage (which was, and still is, unlikely to happen). But note the circumstances and date – it was when the Tories were in opposition, keen to rebrand, and in the wake of the civil society-led campaign. And, surprise surprise, when they got the keys to Downing Street they weakened some of their proposals.

“The recession is E.ON’s stated reason for… pulling the plug”, an editorial in the Guardian noted when the energy company withdrew their plan to build a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in October 2009. “The awkward squad of activists who have variously agitated, camped and campaigned over two years will take some persuading that this account represents the whole truth.”

Ignoring role of activism in political and social change is problematic for a number of reasons. As the examples above show, campaigning often play a key role, so ignoring this means people will have trouble understanding how the world works. Second, important figures and organisations will not receive the recognition and respect they deserve. And third, it means the general public will find it more difficult to comprehend its own agency and power to influence government policy.

This is especially concerning when it comes to the climate crisis because, to stand any chance of a liveable world in the future, we desperately need to building huge social movements that can exert an unprecedented level of pressure on governments to force them to implement policies that rapidly reduce carbon emissions. And this needs to happen as soon as humanely possible.

The UK government recently approving the development of the Rosebank oil field – which could lead to the equivalent emissions of running 56 coal-fired power plants for a year – has significantly raised the already high stakes.

The good news is in December 2021 the Stop Cambo campaign won a huge victory, forcing Shell into announcing it was pulling out of the controversial oil field project off the Shetland Islands. The role of protest was confirmed by media coverage at the time.

“Shell say the economic case for investing in this project just isn’t strong enough. There is more at play here than just economics and making money,” Paul McNamara reported on Channel 4 News. “Senior city financiers have told us the blowback they would get from shareholders, from pension funders, from the press, from the public, mean that pumping yet more money into firms with so-called dirty investments often just isn’t worth the hassle now. With Cambo oilfield there is a reputational liability for Shell, and ultimately it is one they’ve decided to walk away from.”

We know too that Equinor, the oil and gas giant which is set to develop Rosebank, has U-turned on other projects. Earlier this year it paused its development of Bay du Nord in Newfoundland, Canada, and in 2020 it abandoned plans to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight. While Equinor, which is majority-owned by the Norwegian government, said the latter project did not make commercial sense, the Guardian described it as “a significant win for environment groups and other opponents of the project, including Indigenous elders and local councils.”

Of course, the very existence of a grassroots campaign doesn’t guarantee success. Far from it. But, to quote the playwright Bertolt Brecht: “Those who struggle may fail, but those who do not struggle have already failed.”

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

A guide to the UK’s new grassroots climate groups

A guide to the UK’s new grassroots climate groups
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
5 September 2023

Perhaps it’s because of the pandemic, but Extinction Rebellion’s public opinion-shifting occupations of central London in 2018 and 2019 now feel a very long time ago.

Since then successive Tory governments, ignoring increasingly loud warnings from scientists and the intensification of the climate crisis, have maintained their addiction to fossil fuels and have missed their own Net Zero climate targets on nearly every front.

In response to this inaction numerous grassroots groups have sprung up in the UK, often led by young campaigners.

If, like me, you sometimes get confused by all the actions and organisations, here is a summary of some of the key players and what they’ve been up to.

Just Stop Oil

The most obvious descendent of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil’s confrontational – always non-violent – actions have the fingers of XR co-founder Roger Hallam and his supporters all over them.

Established in February 2022 with the aim of stopping the UK government licencing new oil, coal and gas projects, the group has undertaken a huge number and range of actions, including gluing themselves to the frames of famous paintings, slow-walking on roads to hold-up traffic and disrupting high profile sporting events.

By May Just Stop Oil had reported over 2,100 arrests, with 138 people spending time in prison, many without trial.

There has been a lot of discussion about whether their actions are effective. And while a February YouGov poll found 78 per cent of respondents thought disruptive protests hinders, rather than helps a cause, a more hopeful July survey of 120 experts found nearly seven in 10 rated disruptive protest tactics as “at least quite important” to the success of a movement.

https://juststopoil.org/

Green New Deal Rising

Launched in August 2021, Green New Deal Rising is a movement of young people working to win a Green New Deal for the UK – that is a rapid and radical transformation of the economy to address the climate crisis.

They regularly release videos of activists challenging politicians about their actions, and gained lots of coverage last month when they interrupted Keir Starmer’s speech on education.

In March Green New Deal Rising commenced their Labour Be Bold campaign, with activists picketing Labour Party MPs constituency offices every Friday. “Labour have been backsliding on their commitment to climate action, so we need to put pressure on them to do the right thing and back a Green New Deal,” a Green New Deal Rising spokesperson tells me. “We know that a Green New Deal will tackle climate change and improve living standards. The public are in favour of bold climate policy when economic justice is prioritised, and the Green New Deal does exactly that. We want wealth taxes, public ownership of essential services, a green jobs guarantee and a secure income for all. This is about investing in our future.”

The Labour Be Bold campaign is building towards the Labour Party conference taking place in October. “There is more to come. We will keep organising, keep mobilising, keep the pressure up.”

https://www.gndrising.org/

This Is Not A Drill

“We’re an action reporting website which focuses on amplifying anonymous direct action against fossil fuel companies and their partners,” This Is Not A Drill explains. “Anyone can take climate action and report it through us provided no harm is caused to people, animals or other types of life.”

They don’t have any formal aims or methods, though are guided by three basic principles – carrying out direct action against fossil fuels, decentralisation and anonymity. “We are sceptical about the idea of arrest as a strategy in environmental movements and we support an alternative,” they note. “We know that sometimes it can be tactically necessary to take that risk, but we specifically focus on the types of actions where people aim to get away safely without being accountable to their oppressors.”

The most recent action reported on their website is of activists smashing windows at the Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre in protest of the oilfield service’s company’s extractivst activity.

Fossil Free London

With their media-savvy, creative actions, Fossil Free London feels like the progeny of mid-2000s non-violent direct action groups like Plane Stupid and Climate Rush.

They aim to make the capital “inhospitable to the fossil fuel industry and the banks that fund it,” their website notes.

“The climate crisis is made in London,” Joanna Warrington, spokesperson for Fossil Free London, says. “The capital’s financial sector is the global engine of the fossil fuel industry, with banks like Barclays pouring millions in oil and gas production every day. London plays host to some of the world’s biggest climate wrecking oil companies – like Shell and BP – as well as the UK government which enables them.”

In May they gained lots of media coverage for their singalong disruption of Shell’s annual general meeting. “Go to hell Shell, and don’t you come back no more, no more!” they sung to the tune of Ray Charles’s hit song.

“We’re preparing for our biggest mobilisation yet – Oily Money Out,” Warrington reveals. “On the 14-20th October, mega-rich oil bosses and their financiers are all coming to London for the ‘Energy Intelligence Forum’ – formerly self-named the ‘Oil and Money’ conference (yes, really!). We’re organising six days of workshops, demonstrations, and disruptions to protest those accelerating climate catastrophe, and say no to oily money in our city. We’re inviting climate activist groups from across Europe to join us, and you should too.”

This Is Rigged

This Is Rigged, a Scottish non-violent direct action group set up in early 2023, has two demands. First, that the Scottish government oppose all fossil fuel projects in Scotland. And second, that the Scottish government create a clear and fully funded transition for oil and gas workers.

“This Government is all talk no trousers,” spokesperson Emma Brown says about the SNP-Green government. “When it comes down to it, on the big questions and the local issues, they’re not brave enough.”

Brown continues: “Climate is not a separate issue from progressive campaigning. We are being let down on multiple fronts, from the silence on new oil and gas projects in our North Sea, the destruction of social housing, the selling off of community land to an oil tycoon (Sir Ian Wood) for bullshit carbon capture in Torry, to the scrapping of our night bus services in Glasgow.”

Their brilliantly quirky website highlights recent actions including activists smashing the case holding William Wallace’s sword in Stirling, repeatedly disrupting First Ministers Questions and spraying red paint on the Scottish Parliament.

“Into autumn and winter we’ll be actively taking inspiration from successful Scottish movements which challenged poverty, and developing ways to connect the crises we face,” Brown explains, noting “Direct action is an effective tool to force political and social change.”

“Business-as-usual is maintained by our isolation, our depression and our hopelessness but collective action, defiance and a bit of cheekiness are our best weapons against it.”

https://www.thisisrigged.org/

Climate Majority Project

Founded in June, the Climate Majority Project is based on the idea there are huge numbers of people who agree with the aims of groups like Just Stop Oil but don’t see themselves as activists, or may not be able or want to take non-violent direct action that could lead to arrest.

“Climate Majority Project works to find the common ground where Swampy and Lord Deben can both stand,” Co-Director Dr Rupert Read tells me. “We are engaging with communities, businesses, actors and producers, farmers, scientists, and beyond to help various sectors of society organise amongst themselves and with each other to address this civilizational crisis. There is no way we get to actually win this without the majority on board.”

They are currently working with advertisers trying to use the dark arts to help the environment, Lawyers For Net Zero, and MP Watch, a network pushing MPs to take urgent climate action.

Jadzia Tedeschi, the group’s Operations Manager: “Climate Majority Project is refreshing as it understands and isn’t afraid to say that most people, workers and leaders alike, are becoming silently sick of business as usual, and are determined to do something effective about it.”

Book review: Nomad Century: How To Survive The Climate Upheaval by Gaia Vince

Book review: Nomad Century: How To Survive The Climate Upheaval by Gaia Vince
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
August-September 2023

Due to the impacts of global warming ‘human movement on a scale never before seen will dominate this century and remake our world.’

This is the central proposition of this important popular science book. Gaia Vince, an honorary senior research fellow at University College London, believes we are on course for 3-4oC of temperature rise by 2100, with tens of millions of people forced to leave their homes by mid-century.

By 2030 Dar es Salaam will have a population of 11 million, Cairo and Lagos 24 million each, she notes. ‘None of them will be viable within a few decades.’

Frightening though many of Vince’s conclusions are, she sees this huge upheaval as an opportunity, arguing ‘migration is not the problem, it is the solution.’ The ageing population in the relatively wealthy north, including in the UK, will require a large influx of younger migrants to keep society functioning, she argues.

Beyond this, she contends large cities need to be quickly built in the Arctic – including in northern Canada, Greenland and Siberia – to house the millions of climate-induced migrants in the years to come.

One of the most interesting sections of the book looks at how this might be managed. She suggests a global United Nations migration organisation with powers to compel governments to accept refugees, oversee a system for matching people with job vacancies, bestow UN citizenship, and manage relocation, funding and, in the future, returns.

It is worth noting the book is about much more than climate change and migration. From our diets to urban design, housing, transport and agriculture, the second half is an inspiring blueprint for how society can be sustainably re-organised. Many of the proposals will be familiar to green activists, though Vince has a knack for highlighting fascinating developments. I didn’t know Australia is currently building the world’s largest solar battery installation to send renewable electricity to Singapore, over 4,000 km away. Or that for the past decade Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the Pacific Ocean, has been undertaking mass emigration in the face of catastrophic sea-level rise, purchasing land in Fiji to house some of its population.

With informative maps and a manifesto at the end, Nomad Century is an accessible introduction to the existential threat of climate change – a useful book to give to someone who isn’t sold on the urgency of the crisis.

However, I have a couple of serious reservations. First, there is a frustrating lack of referencing at times. For example, while coral reefs are no doubt hugely important, I would have liked to have seen a citation for her claim they support ‘the livelihoods of one billion people globally’. Furthermore, the references she does use when discussing the size of the mass migration caused by climate change don’t seem to stack up: either they don’t accurately reflect the research being cited, or the research cited refers to the worst case, much less likely temperature increase scenario – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “business as usual” emissions pathway (AKA RCP8.5).

Second, Vince leans heavily on (often unproven) technological solutions, backing genetically-modified crops and the idea farming in regions which will become unliveable, such as India and Thailand, could remain viable with ‘remotely-controlled robotic farmers, drone seed dispersal and AI-directed machinery for harvesting’.

Moreover, she ends by advocating planetary-sized geoengineering, arguing solar reflectivity ‘should be deployed without delay’ – a course of action many climate scientists and experts, including Professor Michael Mann and Naomi Klein, are highly sceptical about.

This focus on technology masks a relative lack of interest in politics, specifically the role of grassroots activism in driving the changes she believes we need to urgent make. As Dr Aaron Thierry, a climate scientist active with Extinction Rebellion, recently tweeted: ‘*THE* key question of our times is; how can we create powerful social movements that can resist and challenge that corporate capture and reclaim our democracies’.

Beware the anti-democratic liberal centre

Beware the anti-democratic liberal centre
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
24 July 2023

If you have read the seemingly endless work of US dissident Noam Chomsky you’ll know he regularly cites twentieth century US intellectuals to highlight the elitist, anti-democratic thinking of the so-called liberal centre.

The public are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” who should be “spectators, not participants in action”, while the “responsible men” govern. Therefore, the “bewildered herd” must be “put in their place” by “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications.” These quotes, Chomsky notes in the 2021 book The Precipice, are from influential progressive US thinkers like Walter Lippmann, Harold Laswell and Reinhold Niebuhr.

John Carey, then Professor of English at the University of Oxford, mapped out similar levels of contempt for the general population in his 1992 study The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. In the book he names and shames canonized British and Irish writers like Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence for their often visceral revulsion of the public and popular culture. W.B. Yeats joined the Eugenics Society, while Aldous Huxley and Shaw were sympathetic, Carey notes.

He notes a dehumanising diary entry written by Woolf in Brighton in 1941 – about people she had observed in Fuller’s (presumably the same pub which still serves punters today): “They ate and ate. Something… parasitic about them. Where does the money come from to feed these fat white slugs?”

Are similar hateful attitudes common amongst the liberal centre today? The discourse around Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour Party, which created the largest political party in Europe, demonstrates fear of popular participation in politics is very much alive and kicking.

Here’s what Financial Times political columnist Janan Ganesh sneeringly tweeted (and then deleted) in 2016: “You can do analysis of Corbyn and his ‘movement’ (I have done it) but the essence of the whole thing is that they are just thick as pigshit.”

The late novelist Martin Amis was similarly disdainful about Corbyn when he was interviewed in the Guardian Weekend magazine in 2017: “Two E grades at A-level. That’s it. He certainly has no autodidact streak. I mean, is he a reader?”

Lip service is usually given to supporting democracy, but it’s worth attending to deeds, not words. Remember, for example, that the vast majority of Labour Party MPs either cheered on or stayed silent when thousands of people were purged from the party, or barred from becoming members, in an attempt to rig the 2016 leadership contest between Corbyn and his establishment-friendly challenger, Owen Smith.

Chomsky understands what happened: “As in the case of [Bernie] Sanders, I suspect the prime reason for the bitter hatred of Corbyn on the part of a very wide spectrum of the British establishment is his effort to turn the Labour Party into a participatory organization that would not leave electoral politics in the hands of the Labour bureaucracy and would proceed beyond the narrow realm of electoral politics to a broader and constant activism and engagement in public affairs.”

This goes way beyond the Labour Party, of course. Here’s Ganesh again, echoing Lippmann and Laswell in his weekly Financial Times column last year: “Key to the smooth running of democracy is the indifference of much of the population, much of the time. Voters are crucial as an eye on things, as a righter of the ship of state when it lists. That requires a measure of knowledge. Round-the-clock absorption is something else. It causes politics to take place in too loud a setting, laws to be made in too hot a smithy.”

The monarchy provides a useful litmus test for people’s views on democracy. And unsurprisingly, many liberals prefer the hierarchical, imperialist, racist, hereditary institution over an elected head of state. Remainiac Ian Dunt, writing in the i newspaper last year, maintained the monarchy “works fine”, before arguing “It doesn’t really matter how we decide the head of state role… all that matters is that it is arbitrary. It must not, under any circumstances, be democratic.” Similarly, National Treasure Stephen Fry, commenting on the coronation of King Charles, told the BBC “the beauty of a King is that it is for everyone”, before warning “imagine the alternative… that is what other countries and republics have… you vote for your head of state”. The horror!

Writing in 2017, Abi Wilkerson noted a few of the core beliefs of this type of elite liberalism: “Politics is about nothing more than the effective administration of the current system”, which means “the best politicians are those with the most experience wielding power” and “that nobody could possibly do a better job than the professionals.”

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer’s repeated refusal to commit to increased funding of public services, and his reversal on poverty-increasing policies like the two-child benefit cap, is the embodiment of this technocratic, managerial style of politics.

Wilkerson doesn’t mention it but this is very much the politics of The West Wing, the influential US television series that ran from 1999 to 2006. Written by Aaron Sorkin, the show followed the working lives of serious, Ivy League-educated White House staffers under liberal President Bartlett. Politics is presented less as clashing values and interests and more about simply getting smart people in the room together. Social movements, when they do appear on screen, are often depicted as an uninformed irritant to the adults Trying To Get Things Done.

And when I say influential, I mean influential amongst – you’ve guessed it – the liberal political elite. Many members of the Obama Administration were fans, as were “the Blair, Brown and Cameron camps” in the UK, according to Mark Lawson writing in the Guardian.

All this broadly fits with research conducted by the political economist David Adler, who concluded in the New York Times in 2018 “that across Europe and North America, centrists [compared to those on the far-left and far-right] are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions and the most supportive of authoritarianism.”

The deliberate exclusion of the general public from policymaking is particularly palpable when it comes to foreign affairs.

“The [UK] government’s preference is to see both [military] strategy and defence policy as areas to be settled between it and the armed forces, and so far as possible within the corridors of power,” top British military historian Hew Strachan and Ruth Harris concluded in a 2020 RAND report. This elite stitch-up is not new, of course. “British government has long been fearful of public opinion, and even public engagement, in matters to do with defence of the realm,” they explain. Why? Because the government believes “the public is reluctant to support the cost of defence” and “is unpersuaded of the utility of military force”. This hesitancy is a consequence, in part, of the large-scale opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something the elite became enormously concerned about when parliament voted against military action on Syria in 2013.

Mark Curtis, arguably the most incisive critic of UK foreign policy, agrees, arguing in his 2004 book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses that “the public is feared” by the government: “A perennial truth that emerges from the declassified files is the public’s ability to mount protests and demonstrations that divert the government from its course.”

The key problem, as Chomsky, Curtis and other wise people have noted, is that addressing the many political, social and economic crises we face today – in particular the escalating climate crisis – will require huge social movements to lead an unprecedented mobilisation of the general public to apply overwhelming pressure on our rulers and divert them from their dangerous course.

Rather than being reliable allies in this ongoing struggle, liberals’ fear of popular participation in the political sphere is a key barrier to the radical change we so desperately need.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.