Benefit System raises mAny Questions

Is it me, or is the BBC Radio Any Questions? programme sliding inexorably down the sticky slope that leads to the dogs?

The latest programme has the whole panel blithering meaninglessly about the benefit system, mainly focussing on the tiny minority of dysfunctional people and families who choose not to work.

Nobody mentioned the fact that most people on the dole are poverty stricken, embarassed, and frustrated by their position, and would gladly work if (a) it would increase their prosperity and (b) if there was some bloody work available for them to do.

Osbornomics means that (b) is going to get less in the next few months.

The Green Wage Subsidy is the way to go. George "Smeagol" Osborne is looking for suggestions. I will write to him.

Will Osbornomics at least rid the world of nuclear weapons?

< Picture of Trident missile in action. Thanks to the taxpayer.

Has George "Smeagol" Osborne bitten the Ring of Trident Power off the finger of the MoD? Will he take it with him when he plunges into the Crack of Economic Doom?

Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, has a real problem if Trident has to come out of the MoD budget.  The Press is on the case of individual soldiers dying because they have no body armour, no IED resistant transport and fewer helicopters than needed. If Trident comes out of the MoD budget, these items will be in even shorter demand. Alternatively he might have to throw vast numbers of servicemen and their families onto the mercies of the soon-to-be reformed Benefits System.  Which would not be popular with the core Tory vote.


Fox will undoubtedly take his case to the Star Chamber, backed by an army of lobbyists, and we will be entertained by the vision of the Irresistible Force of  Tory worship of Britain's WMD coming up against the Immovable Object of  Tory subservience to the Money Markets.

He will argue that Trident is Good Value for Money. This means that to create the amount of terror, devastation and death caused by one "British" (in fact they are US-controlled) nuclear warhead, an the whole British Army would have to rape and pillage in one area for some ten or twenty years. This would be Inefficient. WMDs much more productive.

One little irony is the fact that Liam Fox is a devout Catholic. In the nuclear weapons debate in the 1970s, his Church chewed over the ethics of nuclear weapons. They decided that it would indeed be sinful  actually to use nuclear weapons, presumably on the grounds that it would destroy unborn foetuses. However, it would not be sinful to keep the peace by threatening to destroy unborn foetuses with nuclear weapons.

In coming to this conclusion, the Catholic theologians had to plunge deep into the Pelagian heresy of the possibility of human perfection. If it is OK to threaten, but not OK to use, nuclear weapons, then the nuclear deterrence system has to be perfect. Nuclear Deterrence must never break down, either through deliberate Dr Strangelove-type political decisions, nor through a interplay of simultaneous errors within the early warning technology, command and control systems and political tensions. In fact, it is only too possible for the deterrence posture to make the transition to a nuclear holocaust.  See here for 20 instances where nuclear war might have broken out through mishaps. So although nuclear deterrence does raise the threshold for nuclear armed countries to go to war with each other, it does not raise that threshold absolutely, and therefor the probability of a general nuclear war approaches unity with each passing year that deterrence is in place.

Liam Fox must therefore know that he will surely go to hell if Britain actually uses Trident in anger, which it will if the world does not rid itself of nuclear weapons.

Th only reasonable use for Trident therefore is for Britain to put it on the table and lead the world in negotiating a general global and total nuclear disarmament.

This plan is no longer a stupid greenie idea, since Henry Kissinger and other cold warriors are calling for general nuclear disarmament.

So George Osborne, in his process of dismantling the UK economy, may, ironically, be doing the world a service.

The energy cost of water

I have long been pondering the carbon footprint of the tap water we so take for granted.  Water is heavy, viscous stuff, and it takes a lot of energy to collect, deliver, and process.

Recently I came across a figure: running a tap for 5 minutes represents the same power consumption as running a 60 watt bulb for 14 hours. Unfortunately I have lost the source for that.

But today I get a figure from the Energy Saving Trust. "The energy needed to treat and pump mains water to our homes, and to collect and treat waste water from the sewage network, is responsible for nearly 1% of the UK's annual greenhouse gas emissions."

OK. The UK Carbon Footprint Project says: The UK's carbon footprint is over 500* million tonnes of CO2 per year. 1% of 500 is 5, so the embodied CO2 in our annual water is 5,000,000 tonnes, right? or 5 trillion grammes? (Correct me if I'm wrong, I am poor at sums).

Now, Water UK says "Each day the UK water industry collects, treats and then supplies more than 17 billion litres of high quality water to domestic and commercial customers and then collects and treats over 16 billion litres of the resulting wastewaters, returning it safely to the environment."

So 33,000,000,000 litres a day, or 12,012,000,000,000 litres a year. Divide CO2 in grammes  by volume of water in litres to get number of grammes of CO2 per litre, right?

 5,000,000,000,000
_______________
12,012,000,000,000
= 0.42 grammes CO2 per litre.

In fact, 1 litre of tap water is about twice that, 0.8 grammes CO2, say, since once it's out of the tap, most of it has to be dealt with as sewage. Of course, sewage also  picks up some rain water runoff.

I should now go and check this against the thing of 5 minutes tap run = 14 hours of a 60watt bulb, but I need to go and have a little lie down after all this calculation.

Anyway, it all goes to prove that we shouldn't poo in our drinking water.

Restating the philosophical basis of the Green Party

Over on Bright Green  I found an interesting discussion on the dangers of diluting Green Party radicalism.  All good stuff, but  I stubbed my toe on this line:

"Our socially justice approach is what makes us unique. "

Er...no. There are several other parties, ranging from Respect, right down to the LibDems and poor old Labour who would claim (with varying degrees of justification, or not) that this is what they also are about.

The Green Party's USP lies in the fact that our political philosophy is rooted in ecology - the study of the interrelationship between an organism (in this case, humans) and its environment.

The great historical political divide has been between individualists (Hobbesians, Conservatives, neo-liberals &c) and Socialists - Communsits, Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, Labourites &c &c &c in their infinite regression of sub-divisions). The only thing they share is their anthropocentric starting point. Political ecology takes us beyond this divide.

The fact is that humans are social animals, like wolves, not solitary animals like bears. Socialists base their philosophy on this fact, which is undoubtedly better than individualist philosophy, simply because individualism has no scientific basis (all it has is a lot of money, which gives it its dominance).  Labour demonstrated the weakness of its socialism in its corrosive attack on individual civil liberties. We on the other hand have a fairly strong libertarian and anarchist tradition in our party.

We greens base our philosophy on our interdependence on the real world, that is, on ecology. We were called the Ecology Party before we changed to the Green Party. In basing our thought on ecological reality, we transcend the individual-social divide, and can reconcile the individual-social antithesis in our bigger framework. Our affinity is more with socialists, simply because of the fact that we are social animals, and because the solution to the ecological crisis depends on co-operative action. But because we are not merely social-"ists" (i.e. not religiously wedded to the idea of the primacy of society, or the interests of one group within society above all other groups) we can also promote the importance of individual liberty within the constraints of the needs of environment and society.

Our emphasis on social justice is not just based on the fact that it is ethical, but also on the fact that only an equitable society will have the strength and cohesion necessary to make the radical transition to a sustainable economy. (Spirit Level stuff)

I keep hearing this line from new(ish) Green Party members: "We must get beyond being an environmentalist party".  We never were an environmentalist party, in the sense that the LibDems would claim to be.  We sorted this one out in the 70s, but it seems that we have to sort it out again. We are an ecological party. The difference is between something that is desirable, and something that is existential.

The argument can be summarised by saying that we seek justice and equity, not just

• within our own nation (as most other parties would claim), and not just 
• between our nation and other nations (as internationalists would wish), but also 
• between our generation and future generations. 

This tripartite approach to social justice is what makes us unique.

Labour backs Tories in opposing democratic reform

The Labour shadow cabinet has decided to vote against a bill introducing reform to the voting system, raising the prospect of a Commons defeat for one of the governing coalition's flagship policies.

In this decision, Labour is creating an unholy alliance between itself and Tory dinosaurs in opposing any electoral reform, no matter how small. They want to stay with the outrageously unrepresentative and undemocratic  FPTP system.

Although AV is not proportional, and can sometimes deliver even less representative results than FPTP, it does at least mean that each MP has the support of more than 50% of the constituency vote. More importantly, a Yes vote in the AV referendum will break Britain's electoral mouldiness, and will open the way for AV+, which would be proportional and democratic.

This decision by the Labour shadow cabinet makes clear to all that the 100 year claim of Labour to be the party of the people is well and truly buried. Labour stands for nothing beyond its own desire to govern. People of principle who still support Labour are sadly deluded.