In the 1970s and 1980s, The Four Aces nightclub in Dalston was so famous in the capital that it was dubbed 'the London equivalent of the New York Apollo'. It mixed up reggae, soul, punk, and Motown in a way that was unique to its time. It then morphed into legendary rave club Labyrinth in the early 90s (I remember it!), with live sets by the likes of The Prodigy, before succumbing to gentrification in the area and closing its doors. In honour of the memory of this Hackney institution, there will be a screening of the documentary Legacy In The Dust: The Four Aces Story on Tuesday 26th November, 7pm, which charts the nightclub's fortunes - one that reflected the borough's mixed culture, in which white and black came together on the dancefloor despite simmering racial tension and on the streets and rising unemployment levels in the jobs market. Limited edition screen prints supporting the film's long-awaited release will be on sale. The screening will take place at The Jago (FKA Passing Clouds). I'll be involved with a Q&A taking place after the screening with director Winstan Whitter and Jago owner Kwame. There will also be DJs and encouragements to register to vote (given that Tuesday is the deadline to do so before December's general election - more on that in this blog coming soon). Tickets £5 from here. A trailer for the documentary can be viewed here on Vimeo. You can also listen a Spotify playlist that I've compiled of much of the songs that were played at The Four Aces and then Labyrinth below:
Last Thursday (4th April), I delivered a speech to my local Labour Party ward on climate change, along with two other colleagues. My colleagues focused on, variously, the work of groups such as SERA (Socialist Environment and Resources Association - the arm of the Labour party that focuses on the environment); Extinction Rebellion (the grassroots organisation that recently protested nearly naked in Parliament - EDIT UPDATE: and have also been ubiquitous over the last month for their worldwide protests against climate change); Red Green Labour; and what local Councils in London have been doing. Meanwhile, my portion of the speech - we each had ten minutes - focused on the general background of climate change. That meant covering what has happened in the Arctic; how a steady-state economic model could help combat climate change; and what needs to be done next. My speech has been adapted below, in Courier font. The speech was accompanied by some visuals, which are also included below. To accompany the speech, we also designed some leaflets to help with what is a dauntingly complex topic. The leaflets included resources and tips on what groups to follow - particularly if Hackney-based - and a relevant reading list. Those leaflets can be viewed at the bottom of this blog post.
I'd like to start this speech by mentioning the Plimsoll line. In 1872, a campaign took place to introduce a load line – a mark on the side of boats that would indicate, if level with the water, that the ship's maximum safe-loading capacity had been reached. Its inventor, Samuel Plimsoll, initially received opprobrium from big businesses, the media, and politicians, despite the fact that it saved countless lives. A parallel can be drawn towards an overloaded ship bound for its watery grave, and the Earth as an increasingly overburdened planet facing an unstable equilibrium, with climate change analogous to a heavy sea. We have pushed the planets' carrying capacity too far, and are likely to see catastrophe. Like Icarus ignoring his father's advice and flying too close to the Sun, we have become so carried away with economic growth and hubris that we have ignored the warnings from environmental experts. It's not hard to see, then, that we need an environmental Plimsoll line that needs to be set fast. In fact, we pretty much are in a sinking ship already, and need to move straight to last ditch emergency measures – things are that bad. However, it's also not hard to draw a parallel between the complaints that were made against the Plimsoll line by big businesses in the 1870s, and the complaints made by international Governments – most recently Trump when rejecting the Paris accords – and big businesses today when attempts are made to induce legally compliant or binding environmentally-sound regulations. The same argument is employed again: that obligating Governments and businesses to cut their carbon footprint in order to stop climate change could lead to a curtailing of endless economic growth and rising consumption. Meanwhile, in the UK, all of the focus on Brexit in the last two years has meant that this compelling of global Governments and businesses to sign up to environmental charters to impede the effects of climate change has effectively been side-lined.
Above: A
nearly-empty House of Commons discussing a climate change motion.
It's important to clarify a few things here. First of all, climate is not the same as weather. The climate is generated by four components: * The atmosphere; * The hydrosphere, i.e. the Earth's water; * The cryosphere – the Earth's ice sheets and glaciers; * The biosphere – the planet's plants and animals. Every one of these four components has been significantly altered by human activity. Our emissions of CO₂ have significantly modified the atmosphere, to the point where we are already past the safe level (considered to be considerably lower than 350ppm (parts per million)). Instead, current levels are about 410ppm and rising steadily.
Our enormous water use has significantly modified the hydrosphere. That water use is not just used for drinking – it's also used for producing all kinds of consumer goods (including bottled water). Meanwhile, climate change has led to rising sea levels. We are already over 1°C (degrees centigrade) of warming compared to pre-industrial levels. At 1.5°C, 80% of the coral reefs are expected to die, and 2°C warming should see around 100% of coral reefs die – especially alarming given that they are the rainforests of the sea and are considered essential to life in the oceans. In addition, rising sea temperatures force the plankton to move, affecting the feeding habits and places of a whole range of fish. Rising atmospheric and sea-surface temperatures have significantly modified the cryosphere. In the Arctic alone, four tipping points look set to be crossed within a few years: (1) Loss of the Arctic's sea ice's ability to act as a buffer to absorb incoming ocean heat; (2) Loss of Arctic's sea ice's ability to reflect sunlight back into space; (3) The destabilisation of seafloor sediments in the Arctic Ocean; (4) Permafrost melt. The Arctic and Greenland ice sheets have begun to shrink, losing around 475 billion tons of mass per year into the sea. Arctic coastlines are retreating by 14 metres per year. The ice just off the north coast of Greenland broke up last year in the summer. Ice is becoming so thin that the ice could break up and lead to a dark ocean. The current trajectory is so bad that the Arctic may be ice-free within half a decade, and permanently ice-free all year round a decade after that. The consequences would be a huge release of the methane deposits that lie under the ice, the permafrost in Siberia, and the bottom of the sea. If the Arctic melts, these will be released, 'turbo charging' global warming, with methane's global warming effect between twenty to one hundred times greater than CO₂.
Above: graph showing decline in ice in the
Arctic from the 1970s, as well as projection for the next five years. Source:
PIOMAS, Polar Science Center, University of Washington, USA (link).
Above: declining Arctic Sea Ice in the last seven years. National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado Boulder (link).
Meanwhile, increasing use of land, and the accompanying pollution, has led to the biosphere being significantly modified. Deforestation has severely impacted the forests' ability to act as a carbon sink. The chances of the Earth staying below the 2°C limit as set in the Paris Agreement – itself a kind of Plimsoll line - remains less and less likely, particularly now that, as mentioned, the US under Trump has pulled out of the Accords. Instead, projections show that we are on course for three degrees of warming. This would be catastrophic, in that it could lead to runaway climate change. We are already seeing unusual weather in Australia, which has endured huge heatwaves; and in the Northern US states and Canada, which have seen abnormally cold weather even by their standards. It would also lead to knock-on effects for everyone in this room. London would not be spared the effects of climate change. We have already seen unusually hot weather in the last few weeks, in contrast to this time last year. In 2010, for the videojournalism module of my journalism post-graduate course, I completed a three-minute documentary on the Thames Barrier, looking at its future, in which I interviewed a member of the Environment Agency for the Thames Estuary 2100 Program. She made it clear that rising sea levels due to climate change will mean that an entirely new Thames Barrier will need to be built soon enough. The river Thames is rising significantly. Now I'm going to shift to talk about the economy and Labour. Politicians favour economic growth at all costs. What the constant obsession with GDP fails to take into account is that growth in GDP will almost certainly lead to corresponding growths in resource depletion. We need to confront the taboo that economic growth is the only importance in the well-being of a nation, and acknowledge that a steady-state economy – also known as 'degrowth' or 'a circular economy' - is desirable for combating climate change. As many studies have shown – particularly The Spirit Level by Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and Cancel The Apocalypse by Andrew Simms - economic growth does not automatically contribute to individual happiness. What have Labour specifically done to tackle climate change? The local context of Hackney will be tackled in a bit, but before then it's worth mentioning that Labour have scrambled to find their own version of the Green New Deal resolution that US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has helped draft as part of a massive green economic stimulus across the pond, backed by Democrat presidential candidates. Ocasio-Cortez's plans have aimed to eliminate the vast majority of US greenhouse gas pollution over ten years – though this may already be too late a deadline, given the advancing feedback rates of climate change. In the UK Clive Lewis, the Shadow Treasury Minister for sustainable economics, convened a meeting in the last month at which the broad framework for a British Green New Deal has been drawn up, backed by Caroline Lucas and economist Ann Pettifor, both of whom were part of The Green New Deal Group ten years ago that proposed such a thing. In addition, the shadow secretary for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Rebecca Long-Bailey, has launched a year-long "unprecedented call for evidence" that can guide Labour's "green jobs revolution". At the same time, such moves could face resistance from the Unions, who fear losing jobs and growth, as with their vote on a third runway at Heathrow – which takes us back to the steady-state economy conundrum. And in breaking news, Labour has in recent days now declared a climate and environmental emergency. More generally, the stark truth facing us is that we need to move to a 100% emergency footing to deal with this direct existential threat. We need to change the economy at a level at least equal to that seen in World War II.
There are two mainstream views which are both catastrophically bad. The first is that there is widespread ignorance of this direct existential threat. The second is that most of the rest of society knows that the situation is extremely bad, but assumes that we will somehow muddle through in a typically British way and put up a few flood defences. Former NASA scientist James Hansen, who alerted the world to global warming in 1988, instead tells us in his book Storms of My Grandchildren that the Earth is out of energy balance and that if we don't stop the warming and return it to energy balance, it will keep on heating up until the effect that happened on Venus is replicated here and the seas will boil off into space. At that point, all life on Earth would subsequently become impossible. Even if this nightmare scenario doesn't materialise, we are looking at mass crop failures due to extreme weather and also loss of insect life like bees just a few years down the line, which would lead to mass starvation – including in Europe and the rest of the developed world.
So what can be done at this point? We need to initiate action immediately to start the three pronged approach outlined by climate system scientist Paul Beckwith (pictured above):
* Step 1: General Public, Policy Makers, Governments, Military, Scientists and Citizens must "get-with-the-program" and recognise our Climate Change EMERGENCY; * Step 2: Governments around the planet MUST declare a Global Climate Change Emergency; * Step 3: Deploy a "Three-Legged-Approach" to have a decent chance to survive the wrenching changes caused by climate change: o Leg 1: Slash fossil-fuel emissions; o Leg 2: Deploy Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technology to lower atmosphere concentrations to less than 350ppm; o Leg 3: Deploy Solar Radiation Management (SRM) technology to cool the Arctic. Methods can be achieved by things such as marine cloud brightening, as pioneered by Stephen Salter, Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh, with his specially designed ship (below). Solutions that are deemed to be 'geo-engineering' are very controversial, but this is a completely clean example that uses zero fossil fuels, utilises only sea water and would cost a paltry $100million per year.
Above: artist visualisation of a Flettner rotor ship / spray vessel, pioneered by Stephen Salter, Professor of Engineering Design at University of Edinburgh.
Here's Salter in a speech discussing marine cloud brightening:
Meanwhile, we need to move fast. The clock is ticking. Thank you.
Finally, in case the above isn't enough, I leave you with this, from someone just sixteen years old:
The UK was set to
be officially leaving the EU today. It’s a strange feeling that’s hard to put into words. It’s been delayed, of course.
How the UK got to
this situation in the first place is a moot point. Its roots can be traced back
to the end of World War II, yet were channelled by the tabloid press in earnest
during the last thirty years, who successfully ushered in the notion that
somehow the European Community has been an invading, hostile force, in which
the UK has constantly seen its sovereignty undermined – rather than the
reality, which is that the UK helped shape EU laws as a large member-state,
rather than have laws imposed on it. This quite deliberate campaign has been relentless in its stream of anti-EU propaganda, propagated by tabloid owners based in tax havens. The image propagated by the tabloids of
plucky 'us', the underdog dictated to by 'them', is something that writer
Fintan O’Toole picked up on with this article, which locates Brexit as a result
of the English psych about World War II. It can’t be a coincidence that many of
the British films that have been in the cinemas in the last few years have been
about WWII, from Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill to Dunkirk to, well, this. While cinema
in other European countries has addressed head-on all kinds of contemporary, a
good deal of British films have retreated to nostalgia about Britain’s finest
hour, standing alone against an invading Europe.
Something was
continually repeated during the referendum was the mantra “taking back control
of money, borders and laws” – despite the fact that the UK never really lost
control of all three. The UK never entered in the Eurozone, and thus uses its
own sovereign currency; while a member of the EU, the UK has had a
theoretically permanent opt-out from using the Euro. The vast majority of laws
have always been made in Westminster, as the Government’s own white paper
confirmed. The UK may have not been able to make its own individual trade laws,
but as part of the EU it has had sufficient clout when spearheading trade deals
together with the other member states to take on the USA and China. Meanwhile,
the UK’s exemption from the Schengen zone has meant that even UK citizens have
to show their passport when returning from other EU member states. The only UK
border that can be said to be ‘open’ in any meaningful sense is the one with
the Republic of Ireland – a situation that the UK agreed to, and which involves
a complicated confluence of factors, including the Common Travel Area agreement
between the two countries; the Good Friday Agreement; and the fact that both
countries have been in the EU up until now, thus guaranteeing the same
standards for everything from goods to livestock rules. The inconvenient problem of the border was circumnavigated by the leading Brexiters by simply ignoring it. Instead, the pro-leave leaflet that I received through the post at the time of the referendum obsessed over Turkey (along with a number of other Eastern European countries) joining the EU, despite the fact that discussions over Turkey joining the EU have effectively come to an end:
Not only did the tabloids manage to exploit the unfounded fear of Turkey joining the EU, but the leaflet above also heavily implied that the EU's borders would shortly be facing war-torn Iraq and Syria, instilling the idea that it would be easy for jihadists from those countries to walk into EU territory.
At the same time as this, what has become
more and more obvious during the political chaos that has engulfed Britain in
the last two years is that many of the right-wing thinktanks, institutes and
pressure groups that have emerged from the shadows into the public eye, such as
the European Research Group (ERG) and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA),
have used the spectre of no-deal Brexit, or 'Hard Brexit' in which the UK
severs all ties, precisely for reasons of self-interest. Sometime in the 2000s,
Conservative MP’s Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father, Lord William Rees-Mogg, wrote a
book called The Sovereign Individual, which detailed how one can exploit
economic chaos and civil unrest for personal benefit by shorting the pound (or
dollar, or yen, or whatever the local currency is). That’s precisely what many
people did in the resulting economic downturn that happened, on both sides of
the Atlantic (as captured in the film The Big Short).
Groups such as
the ERG remain shadowy, murky entities. They have been frequently accused of
breaking parliamentary rules in their use of public funds in promoting a
partisan view of politics rather than objective research. The ERG in particular
has openly plotted to oust Theresa May in the last few months.
As it turns out,
they are just one of many groups which all advocate similar plans. All believe
strongly in strengthening ties between UK and the US while distancing the UK
from the rest of Europe – an ethos that was central to The Atlantic Bridge, a
group that was set up in 1997 by current UK secretary for independent trade,
Liam Fox, who has close links to the Trump administration.
The rise of these
groups, and with it the popularity of politicians such as Rees-Mogg, has
alarming implications for the National Health Service (NHS). They advocate free market economic views,
including a rolling back on workplace regulations, food labelling laws, and
environmental protections, with Rees-Mogg commenting on the latter: "If it’s
good enough for India, it’s good enough for here". This systematic culling of
most state intervention would include a deregulated economy in which tax havens
would thrive. These groups advocate getting rid of 'red tape' and 'bureaucracy'.
The UK will be in
a situation in which it will be at the mercy of other countries in trying to
strike trade deals. Brexit, and especially a no-deal Brexit, is likely to lead
to a situation in which there will be increasing financial pressure on the NHS,
exacerbated by the falling value of the pound. As a UK In A Changing Europe
report puts it, "There are likely to be further pressures on public-service
funding more broadly from a hit to economic growth caused by Brexit. This will
mean tough choices for the Government. It could decide to increase healthcare
funding, but this will have to come from raising taxes, borrowing or diverting
funds from other priorities".
These "tough
choices" could lead to cuts to NHS spending and staff wages. Another right-wing
pressure group, The Taxpayers Alliance, advocate an insurance-based health
system involving increased charges for services. Those charges would fall on
ordinary citizens. It could also lead to NHS Trusts being maligned and left to
fail.
Indeed, the US could demand, as part of a free trade deal, a stake in an NHS
already reeling from a fall of around 96% in recruitment of nurses from other
EU countries. The result could be a situation in which American healthcare
companies could make money off sick and vulnerable patients.
Such a deal could
mean that the NHS could take on the form of American-style healthcare, where
large sums are paid for surgery and caps on pharmaceutical prescription prices
are dismantled. The result could be that many patients could be left in debt to
the tune of thousands of pounds.
This opening up
of the NHS to foreign competition could theoretically also lead to investment
protection measures such as Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS), in which
transnational corporations could claim compensation from the NHS if they
believe that their investments have been harmed by the breaching of treaties.
This wasn’t the
vision that some Brexiters had in mind. Instead, Vote Leave promised the public
shorter waiting times and £350 million per week. This vision was summed up
during the EU referendum campaign with videos such as 'Which NHS will you vote
for?', which unambiguously depicts the NHS as better off post-Brexit:
Yet it was a
member of Vote Leave, the MEP Daniel Hannan, who would go on to found the
Institute for Free Trade (IFT), who are now advocating a new trade deal in
conjunction with the Cato Institute – a libertarian right-wing organisation
based in the US that advocates Ayn Rand-style politics, in which Government
intervention is significantly rolled back. The IFT/Cato Institute advocate the
removal of tariffs, and EU regulations – and the opening up the NHS to foreign
competition. The Cato Institute has hosted lectures by the likes of Leave.EU
founder Aaron Banks, who has made no secret of his desire to see the NHS fully
privatised.
As the IFT/Cato
Institute’s report puts it: “Health services are an area where both sides would
benefit from openness to foreign competition…The United Kingdom should push as
hard as possible for the United States to allow U.K. goods and services
providers to have access to U.S. procurement markets, and open its procurement
to U.S. companies, as well…the United States and United Kingdom – traditionally
two of the world’s leading supporters of free trade – may be able to craft a
free trade agreement that reshapes the model by pushing it in the direction of
more trade liberalization and less governance”.
The IFT are not
the only right-leaning think tank obsessed with dismantling the NHS. The IEA is
another. Its news editor, Kate Andrews, a prominent lobbyist for private
healthcare companies, opined in an article in The Spectator that “reform of the
NHS is long overdue, and no amount of balloons or birthday cake can district
from this obvious truth”; she also appeared on Newsnight to ram the message
home. The IEA’s paper, 'Universal Healthcare Without The NHS', claims that "the
evidence on the quasi-market reforms [of the NHS] is overwhelmingly positive,
even if it could never be strong enough to convince the die-hard critics".
These right-wing
groups advocate a hard Brexit because the resulting chaos – similar to what
Naomi Klein describes in The Shock Doctrine – would provide a perfect
opportunity for them to seize natural assets and short the pound. This is what The
Sovereign Individual presciently predicted ten years ago, and which was borne
out in the financial crash taking place at the time the book was published. As Andrew Simms has pointed out in Cancel The Apocalypse, "This kind of economic shock therapy has been employed for decades, ranging from Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998...it also seems to have been used in response to the massive financial market failure of 2007-8 in Europe and and the United States".
It’s for this
reason that they have financial interests in seeing the NHS privatised. As a
member of a pressure group called Keep Our NHS Public, it’s become obvious that
the NHS is one of the big prizes that the Brexiters have their sight on.
As mentioned above, a parallel can be
drawn with what happened in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union,
in which wealthy oligarchs became rich at the expense of both the ordinary
public and public services. It’s not hyperbole to suggest that this is what
could happen to the UK once we finally do leave the EU.
Some more posts will be coming soon (promise!), but in the meantime, I’ve been compiling a Spotify playlist of my favourite songs throughout…well, my whole life, actually. The playlist stretches through my whole life back to childhood. It occurred to me while compiling the playlist that it’s the first time one has ever been able to do such a thing online on such a scale. Prior to the 21st century, the only way to compile a public playlist of your favourite tracks was to compile it on cassette tape, which I often did, adorned with lavishly detailed cover art, and with a strict 60 or 90-minute limit* - the literal end of the tape reel. Or you had the power to release your mix as a commercial release, often as a continuous mix, only really limited to established musicians and DJs. That meant doing the mix in real-time on a pair of decks. The modern online equivalent to this has been sites such as Mixcloud or NTS Radio. At some point at the start of the millennium, the ordinary person on the street had the power to burn a playlist to CD-R, by which time iTunes/the iPod was in ascendant – along with YouTube and more illicit ways of acquiring music such as illegal downloading. But it’s with online streaming platforms such as Spotify – and with others such as Pandora too – that you can publicly compile a playlist of your favourite tunes for the first time that everyone can access to stream – including on their mobile phones. Furthermore, those playlists are dynamic, in that you can add and subtract tracks at will - my own playlist clocks in at a puny thirty-one hours and fifty-eight minutes at the time of writing this, but will be longer soon enough... Coming from the pre-Internet generation that grew up with tapes and CDs, when musicians could actually make serious money from such things, the growth of platforms such as Spotify makes me think of David Byrne’s maxim that one day “music itself is going to become like running water or electricity”. The ease of accessing music now is extraordinary for those, such as me, who had to sit and listen to John Peel show all evening in the 90s in order to access exciting underground music, and then head to the record shop (or get the CDs/tapes that often came free on the front cover of music magazines). The effect on the music industry of this has been that for most musicians not in the top echelons of the industry, the live sphere has become where the profit is really to be made. Even record shops have cottoned on to this, with Rough Trade astute enough to often combine their CD/vinyl sales with a ticket to see the band play live in their stores. Could it be that a process that began with iTunes and Amazon offering the user the option to be able to buy individual tracks on an album as well as the album as a whole, rather than forcing the user to buy albums as a whole, and which ended up with Spotify playlists, has led to the demise of listening to albums in full? After all, in a strangely roundabout way, this is actually how listening to music started, with the phonograph and early gramophones only able to play individual songs due to their limitations (though I might be wrong on this!). Well, not quite. Record shops have been doing a healthy trade in vinyl. Why this has happened is down to a number of reasons, ranging from nostalgia (the same thing that brought us Record Store Day and – oh yes – Cassette Store Day); the justifiable issue of sound quality; to the inescapable allure of a tangible object in your hands rather than a music file. All of those things are emotionally resonant, difficult to replicate and unlikely to go away, especially when there are people like me who remember the old days when you pretty much had to buy an album, or a single, or an EP. And if you loved a song in the middle of an album, even if you didn’t think so much of some of the other songs on that album, you were still duty bound to buy the album if that song wasn’t released as a single or EP (or, alternatively, you could tape it from the copy in the library, as I often did, or wait for radio to play it). The differences in royalties for a musician between a download of an individual track and a stream of an individual track are likely to be the key issue in the next few years and beyond. Leaving aside whether you think purely streaming sites such as Spotify pay their artists enough for a single stream – something that remains difficult to ascertain – the fact is that streaming is likely to be the future of music until whatever bizarre idea comes along to replace it.
In the meantime, there is always hope with sites such as Bandcamp, my favourite streaming platform on the Internet, which combines listening to music with a brilliant aesthetic visual sense that makes up for the lack of a tangible object. The beauty of handmade CD-Rs and vinyl releases, with artistically interesting packing, have been preserved on Bandcamp far more than other online music sites, not to mention a genuinely independent commitment to their musicians (you can also pay to download the music, as well as subscribe, such as with the brilliant music that Richard Skelton has been producing under various aliases). Oh, and in a shameless act of promotion, I should add that my own music is up on Bandcamp too.
*Yes, there were 120-minute tapes too, but the sound quality apparently wasn’t as good, so I never bothered with them. If you did, please leave your thoughts in the comments.
