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Fracking is not just an issue for a small corner of England

Aug 19

Posted by Dom in Democracy, Economy, Energy, Environment | 4 Comments

As I write this Caroline Lucas MP is being detained in the back of a police van and likely making her way to a charge desk for her part in the anti-fracking protests in the sleepy English village of Balcombe. If you’re in any doubt as to the pros and cons of fracking, this piece by the Northern Irish green researcher Ross Brown should set you straight

Caroline will be the first MP arrested this year for reasons other than fraud, sexual assault and perjury. This alone is a feat to be applauded. What will be interesting is how the rest of the Commons reacts to one of their own being detained when they have previously shuffled uncomfortably in their shoes and looked the other way.

Caroline Lucas is no George Galloway, and bundling one of Britain’s more popular MPs into the back of a police van is unlikely to make the government’s support for fracking any less dubious than it already is.

The reason that Caroline was the only MP at the protest is that she is, at present, the only English Green MP. That may well change at the next election if people suddenly find gas wells popping up at the ends of their gardens and draw a blank when writing to their local parliamentarian. Rather shamefully, every single other English party has refused to properly assess the risks of the technology. The Lib Dems and Conservatives are all on board because their energy policy is such a woefully inept compromise of ill-informed dogma and private interest, and Labour have offered some typically non-committal assurances that they will look at the impact of fracking once it is underway. They tried the same with PFI ventures and we all know how that ended.

So it has been left to Westminster’s solitary Green to stand up for what any right-thinking MP should be and protect the energy bills, water supplies and integrity of the English public’s landscape.

How and where fracking might happen in Scotland is less clear cut. The Scottish Government currently exercises control over planning but not over energy. What’s more, the Scotland Act means that the Westminster government could feasibly overrule Holyrood if push came to shove. This might sound unlikely, but the dash for gas is so great that speculators will be looking longingly north. As we all know, there is pretty much nobody in Scotland to complain anyway. It was at least easier in the old days when you could just force people off of their land if you fancied using the natural resources.

Neither should we rely on the benevolence of the SNP in safeguarding Scotland’s communities and natural resources. As Trumpgate has shown, the modern-day SNP behemoth is no more a friend of the small man than Labour or the Conservatives when money is being waved about. The biggest challenge will be to appeal to Alex Salmond’s past as an oil economist – hopefully even black-eyed Alex will see that the sums don’t quite add up.

If the SNP or, in the future, Scottish Labour decide that fracking is a good idea they’ll be met with all sorts of opposition from Greens and non-Greens alike. As the German Green Party have shown in Stuttgart and elsewhere, riding roughshod over the rights of communities and public opinion does not make those pesky environmentalists go away. It instead leads to them having a workable majority in the local state parliament. MPs and MSPs all across the central belt would be wise to do a bit of research before they do as much as invite Dart Energy and the rest of Scotland’s fossil lobby around for a cup of tea and a slice of Dundee cake.

Caroline Lucas’ arrest is a sign of the seriousness with which we should be taking Britain’s worrying energy politics, but also a concrete illustration of the commitment which Greens across the board have to doing as much as talking. You can pass as many climate change acts as you like, but when push comes to shove there is apparently only one group of parties in the British Isles and across Europe that has the courage to stand up and be counted. Hopefully there’ll soon be a lot more of them to count.

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A Niceway To Die

Aug 13

Posted by Dom in Democracy, Economy, Environment, Equality, Health, Ideology, Parties | 5 Comments

 

The ’Niceway Code’ is not just about appeasing cyclists – it is typical of a government increasingly tokenistic and out touch with the challenges it faces.

The Scottish Government recently launched a campaign to improve Scotland’s road safety record called ‘The Niceway Code’. You may have missed this due to the fact that it only has a budget of 500,000 pounds and it is so appallingly lame that Transport Minister Keith Brown’s department seem faintly embarrassed about the whole thing.

The campaign aims to reduce the number of road deaths by asking road users to be nice to one another, which is surprising in that the law already compels people to be nice to and not kill one another on the roads.

The fact that the campaign does not even remind motorists or their legal obligations (and in some cases directly contradicts what road markings tell cyclists to do as shown in the picture below) has incensed active and sustainable transport groups. One Holyrood insider even talked of how an panel of interest groups were left dumbfounded when Keith Brown’s team revealed their grand strategy for preventing death and injury on the nation’s streets. The Scottish Government’s own statistics show that 1 in 14 road deaths each year are cyclists, and only in a tiny minority of cases have the cyclists committed even minor infringements to the highway code.

Don’t go left, even though that’s where the cycle lane is.

The SNP seem to want to keep everyone happy, which is why they seem to view cyclists and cycling as an interest group and not as a genuine means of tackling some of the endemic transport and urban problems of contemporary Scotland. They will happily commit three BILLION pounds to doubling the A9 from Perth to Inverness but cannot muster the couple of million pounds it would require to radically reshape Scotland’s urban and suburban spaces to make them more liveable.

Cycling is not just about lycra and weekend hobbyists – harnessed properly it can create safer streets for children and families in particular, cut air pollution and help meet Scotland’s climate goals. It can save the government and taxpayers money, cut health bills and reduce the strain on public transport networks without extra subsidies. If even a crumb of that three billion were spent on redesigning towns and cities to make them more people-friendly the SNP would be a world leader, but for the time being they’ve just got everyone sniggering into the back of their hand. And I’m being nice.

 

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On the reporting of data.

Aug 2

Posted by James in Economy, Media | Comments off

Good solid data is loved by the political and media classes, unless of course it points in the wrong direction. Then it’s an outlier, within the margin of error, set with an inappropriate baseline, or perhaps even the wrong thing to measure at all.

But very little data is neutral, nor neutrally reported. Each sort tends to have a skew built into it, some of which are well worth analysing.

Daily Mail FPHouse prices. A rise in house prices is overwhelmingly regarded as a win by the media, not just the Daily Mail. And if you have a buy-to-let portfolio it is, or indeed if you’re planning to sell your house and run a beach bar in Goa for your retirement. If, however, you don’t own a home but would like to, or have a small home and need a larger one, it’s bad news. I don’t own a home, but maybe I’d like to at some point, so rises are bad news for me. I think they’re also bad news for the economy and society, too: they give to the haves and increase division.

Inflation. Lower inflation is universally regarded as good news, which it is for pensioners on a fixed income, or people with substantial savings. But if you have substantial debts, they’re great. You want £10,000 back from me? Some inflation’s great, because the real value of that debt is now markedly lower. Hyperinflation along the Weimar model is clearly bad news, but for as long as we’re stuck with capitalism, very low inflation is certainly economically divisive.

Unemployment. Insofar as jobless rates are still much reported on, and given the caveat that the official figures are only those people still tenacious enough to navigate a Kafka-esque benefits system, reductions are regarded as good news. Which I would agree they are, of course. But if you’re a rapacious big business in need of desperate jobseekers, moderately higher unemployment is in your interests. A rare example where the standard reporting frame doesn’t follow the class interests of the employers.

Net immigration. All three parties who’ve run Westminster of late support bringing this number down, as part of their ultra-subtle Cosy Up To Farage strategy. I have entirely different concerns, including a desire to live in a more culturally diverse and economically successful country, and I see a decline in this rate as bad news. As the Telegraph itself put it, “because of immigration to the UK, British taxes are lower, spending is higher and the deficit is smaller. So, just for fun, let me ask the question again. Immigrants: don’t you just love ‘em?” Yes, yes I do.

Stock market movements. More tangential for most people, but rises are always described as positive. Personally, I’d love to see shares in polluting industries collapse, but that may be a minority position. Still, the reporting is even weaker here. Back in the old days, when British interest rates were still allowed to vary, you’d regularly see “Interest rate cut boosts markets” in the media. Er, no. If you’re in the City, you’re looking for the best return for your clients, or more accurately for yourself. So if interest rates fall, the balance of profitability between shares and bonds/currency tips in favour of shares. So share prices go up. It doesn’t tell you anything about the real economy whatsoever.

Anyone got any other glaring examples?

Would we rather the SNP be sensible or knee-jerk nationalist on welfare?

Jun 12

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Defence, Democracy, Economy, Governance, Society | Comments off

I do sometimes feel sorry for the SNP. They spend all their time being pilloried by the Scotsman and the opposition benches about not having any vision of how an independent Scotland would work, and when they do try and give a practical answer it is so willfully misconstrued that they probably wish they had done the easy thing and not bothered coming up with a more detailed insight.

The idea that Scotland and the United Kingdom might share welfare administration for a period after independence makes perfect sense. In fact, to the credit of the sections of the SNP who can be fairly absolutist about such things, it is an extremely sensible step.

Independence inevitably means the establishment of separate Scottish structures for the provision of public services in the same way that the country already enjoys control of the healthcare and education systsems. Nobody has suggested that that will not ultimately be the case.

What the Scottish Government have suggested is that welfare administration should be shared until a point is reached at which both the United Kingdom and Scottish Governments feel they can manage their own domestic affairs on home soil. So far, so sensible.

It would be the reverse of the process of German reunification, whereby an initially measured timescale was steamrollered for political reasons with unintended consequences. Whereas the integration of systems in Germany was done far too speedily, the division of something as complex as welfare in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom on the same timescale as the assumption of statehood would be irresponsible for any government to take.

But this does not change the principle of full autonomy for Scotland in the long term. The discussions of aspects such as pensions are often used as a stick to beat the very idea of an independent state, including some mischief making from the Better Together campaign about Scotland’s status as a subsidy junky, but it is at the end of the day a practical detail to be worked out.

The Forces Together campaign launched by Alistair Darling at The Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party’s conference in Stirling goes to town on this, asking how our brave troops would be paid their defence pensions if they were living in a foreign country, and whether Scotland could afford to pay them. Britain has years of experience paying military personnel resident in foreign countries for years at a time and living abroad does not exclude former personnel from being the responsibility of the British military pensions scheme, as shown by the Irish citizens who choose to fight in the British army even today.

There is a fair deal the SNP are wrong about in terms of the details of independence, but for once let us congratulate them for actually being honest and practical about how Scotland would best engineer a smooth transition which made sure that all of its citizens were well looked after.

Scotland 2.0, or why the nation needs a new operating system.

May 28

Posted by Dom in Culture, Democracy, Economy, Energy, Environment, Science, Society | 2 Comments

Today a guest post from Lee Bunce, a Green with a keen interest and academic expertise in the relationships between information, democracy and technology. 

Whitelee wind farm creative commons

Scotland is uniquely placed to take advantage of the new technologies that together will shape the future of our planet. It is both geographically and technically well-positioned to place itself at the forefront of  renewable energy and information technology. But to make the most of these new technologies it most avoid repeating old mistakes. Rather than handing the benefits, and profits, over to a handful of corporations Scotland should direct its efforts towards its communities.

Scotland’s renewable potential is well understood. It has some best resources in wind, wave and other renewable energy sources of any country in the world. Perhaps less appreciated is Scotland’s potential to be a leader in technology. Scotland’s ICT industry already directly employs around 40,000 people (according to ScotlandIS ), compared to 11,200 in its whisky industry for example, and its games industry in particular is thriving. Government support combined with access to a highly skilled workforce, as well as geographical advantages such as proximity to both the rest of Europe and America, and indeed its renewable energy sources, could help make Scotland a world leader in the field in much the same way that Iceland is to the north.

Development of these industries has so far been carried out along traditional corporate lines.  Scotland has hugely ambitious targets for renewable energy, aiming for 100% of Scotland’s electricity to be produced by renewables by 2020 . The majority of this energy will be produced by large scale top-down onshore wind projects, which largely means a continuation of the trend whereby the ‘Big Six’ energy companies provide around 99% of UK energy. The Scottish government meanwhile envisages  that around 500MW of this renewable capacity will be community owned, or just around 3% . It’s a start, but nowhere near ambitious enough. In Germany around 65% of its turbines and solar panels are community owned, and Scotland could aim even higher.

Community owned renewable energy comes with a number of benefits. It creates local jobs, keeps money circulating within local economies and builds community cohesion. Projects that are community owned are also more likely to be supported by the communities they serve, which is important at a time when resistance to wind-farms is prevalent. By taking a more ambitious approach to community energy, Scotland reap these benefits on an enormous scale.

Likewise, the way in which information technology works sometimes holds back innovation and progress due to commercial monopolisation. Technology is primarily about knowledge, in particular using knowledge for the benefit of society. Again, development in technology has so far followed the traditional route followed by the rest of the UK, whereby this knowledge economy is built on classic conceptions of private enterprise which commodify knowledge using stringent intellectual property legislation that restricts the use of knowledge and information to those who can afford to pay for it. Again, Scotland could benefit by adopting a more community based approach.

Community here means something different of course. It might mean online communities developing free and open source software that is available to all, or building useful applications based on free and open data. It might even mean communities of artists and musicians using information technologies to make their work freely available under ‘copyleft’  licences, or scientists sharing data and collaborating online. The benefits of adopting this ‘open’ philosophy could be substantial. Relaxing intellectually property laws could stimulate a boom in innovation in technology and beyond as ideas are able to freely spread and developers are able to build on the ideas that came before them.

Supporting free software and open data does not mean being anti-business, as is often claimed. It just means being rejecting business models that do not benefit society in favour of other models that do. Taking free software specifically, this might mean that instead of making a profit by selling expensive licenses to use software while keeping the source code hidden programmers can make money by offering their expertise as a service, providing support or bespoke modifications. The result is that the technological benefits can be spread far and wide (the classic example of this is the GNU/Linux operating system, though there are countless others).

Both these approaches towards new technologies, energy and IT, mean doing something quite different to the economic default.  They mean discarding policies and practices that benefit the few in favour of quite radical new ideas that can benefit the many. Given that the future of these technologies and industries will likely shape the future of Scotland, and indeed the planet, any method of distributing benefits as widely as possible deserve to be taken very seriously.

 

Lee is one of the two founding editors of the Edinburgh green journalism project POSTmag. The text published here is available for reproduction under a creative commons licence with attribution to the author.

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