I’m old enough to remember civil service lectures on the importance of evidence-based policy-making. But what can we do if ministerial and executive-level decision-makers repeatedly ignore the evidence, resulting in our collective loss?
Image: From the book How to be a global citizen
Climate campaigner Lauren MacDonald from Glasgow gave this speech a year ago to the AGM of Norwegian oil multinational Equinor.
Above – Lauren MacDonald to the AGM of Equinor, 11 May 2023
She was ignored. So she returned a year later. With this speech damning the record of the oil giant’s CEO.
At the same time, The Financial Times has picked up on the growing party political front line between the Conservative Party and The Green Party.
Recall this time last year the Conservatives lost control of the safe-as-military-fortresses East Hertfordshire District Council to a Green-LibDems alliance
“The Greens emerged as the largest party with 19 councillors and will form a joint administration with the Liberal Democrats who now hold 10 seats. With a combined majority of 29 out of a total of 50 seats, the new administration will run the council over the next four years, marking the end of 28 years of Conservative control.”
Above – Press Release by EHDC 17 May 2023
This will make the new constituency of Hertford and Stortford one to watch – can The Greens turn local election success into a constituency gain? Note history is not on their side as all too often the higher turnouts at general elections tends to favour the top two parties – Labour and Conservatives. Anecdotally I think it’s also why smaller parties can struggle when local elections take place at the same time at general elections – the publicity given to the national parties makes it much harder for smaller parties to ‘cut through’. Three or four rural districts to the east of EHDC is Mid-Suffolk, which The Greens won majority control of in the same year. It will be interesting to see how the new constituency of Waveney Valley – one of their top four targets, turns out.
‘Extract, extract, extract – and to hell with the consequences’
That still seems to be the attitude of those at the top of the fossil fuel economy. Yet one of the things both politicians and academia need to raise the profile of is the history of the fossil fuel industry: how did we get to here? Three books that shine a light on this include:
- Town and Countryside (1931) by Thomas Sharp – the town planning pioneer, in particular the section on where to site petrol stations
- The Middle East Crisis (1957) by Wint & Calvocoressi – the introductory chapters have energy security at their heart
- The Motor Car and Politics (1971) by William Plowden – which is hard to find but essential reading on the UK history of the fossil-fuelled car
And of course it has a huge impact on our politics, from local to global.
“[Condolezza] Rice said during her tenure as Secretary of State, oil prices began accelerating and at one point reached a high of $140 per barrel. While this directly affected gas prices and indirectly impacted the availability of goods in the United States, they also had a negative effect on foreign policy, Rice said. “During that period of time I said to my colleagues that I had never seen anything warp diplomacy like high oil prices,””
Above – Michigan Daily, 30 March 2011
And those energy prices have a knock-on impact at a neighbourhood level as we saw on telly this evening on BBC Look East, with one community shop serving an economically-deprived neighbourhood in King’s Lynn facing closure.
“Gas, electricity and our insurance have sky-rocketed – and that’s what people tend to forget, we have all of that to think about too, like any business.”
Above – BBC Norfolk 14 May 2023
When you consider the gigantic sums invested in fossil fuel infrastructure that have created the lives that we live today, it’s all but impossible to break free from the system. Not because of an ‘authoritarian oppression’, but in part because fossil fuels are components that supposedly make our lives more convenient and nominally/superficially more pleasant. Whether that’s driving to the supermarket to buying the ready-meal in a plastic container to the ‘prepared fresh fruit’ chilled in a hydrocarbon-powered refrigeration unit in plastic pots…to the polyester on the clothes that we wear.
And we know that the lifestyles that involve the high consumption of ultra-processed foods are making us unhealthy. This came up on BBC Two’s lunchtime current affairs programme that always seems to have a seat for a member of the #TuftonStreetMassiv or a random former party political adviser (mainly for the Conservatives, but not always).
Above – don’t get me started on the issue of transparency of think tanks
Whether it’s energy bills, or food bills, it seems incredible that we are hot-wired into a system that is bad for us, yet we continue with it. How is it that food items flown in from across the world and delivered to our supermarket shelves is ‘more accessible’ than the food grown locally? Why don’t we see our local supermarkets stocking much more locally-grown/reared seasonal produce at a more than token percentage of total stock, and where they do why are we not buying it?
This comes back to the point Jon Alexander made at Together Culture on us collectively not being in a position to imagine other ways of living. He mentioned that we’re brought up to ‘keep our heads down, get on with things, and not kick up a fuss’. Something that resonated strongly with me throughout my childhood in Cambridge. Never complain because adults will get angry with you and you’ll ‘get into trouble’. So I never did. Until it was too late.
“So…what is the solution?”
The paragraph at the end of an article about the UK’s housebuilding oligopoly put it better than I could:
“Ultimately any solution will lie in wider structural reform, causing a shift away from maximising shareholder value toward increasing stakeholder value. This would necessitate a change the patterns in ownership, operation and ethos of companies that provide essential public goods and services.
Above – The Invisible Hand that keeps on taking (2023) Archer & Cole (SHU) p15
Because the mass housebuilding industry and the consultancy and financial services that underpin it have become experts at extracting as much value as they can from the land in order to increase ‘shareholder value’ – at the expense of the communities that live in and around it, who find they cannot afford to have the the things that are essential for societies to function.
What those alternatives look like, your guess is as good as mine. But whoever forms the next government, they could find themselves being compelled to make the big changes that go against some of the very things that they have spent years arguing against. We’ve already been through that with the present party in power: Boris Johnson had a host of ‘small state’ Tories in ministerial office and on his back benches only to find that the outbreak of CV19 resulted in him and his ministers being compelled to bring in lots of very ‘big state’ solutions – which found more than a few of them wanting.
What will the next five years bring? Sometimes I dread to think.
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Below – a reminder of the Civic Quarters event on at The Guildhall – 15 May at 4pm. I wrote about it here.
The Cambridge Town Owl 