The past 15 years have produced the cash-for-questions racket, the Hinduja and Ecclestone affairs, the lies and fabrications which led to the invasion of Iraq, the forced abandonment of the BAE corruption probe, the cash-for-honors caper and the cash-for-amendments scandal. By comparison to the outright subversion of the functions of government in some of these cases, the expenses scandal is small beer. Any one of them should have prompted the sweeping political reforms we are now debating. But they didn’t.

The expenses scandal, by contrast, could kill the Labour party. It might also force politicians of all parties to address our unjust voting system, the unelected House of Lords, the excessive power of the executive, the legalized blackmail used by the whips and a score of further anachronisms and injustices. Why is it different?

I believe that the current political crisis has little to do with the expenses scandal, still less to do with Gordon Brown’s leadership. It arises because our economic system can no longer extract wealth from other nations. For the past 300 years, the revolutions and reforms experienced by almost all other developed countries have been averted in Britain by foreign remittances.

The social unrest which might have transformed our politics was instead outsourced to our colonies and unwilling trading partners. The rebellions in Ireland, India, China, the Caribbean, Egypt, South Africa, Malaya, Kenya, Iran and other places we subjugated were the price of political peace in Britain. Following decolonization, our plunder of other nations was sustained by the banks. Now, for the first time in three centuries, they can no longer deliver, and we must at last confront our problems.

There will probably never be a full account of the robbery this country organized, but there are a few snapshots. In his book Capitalism and Colonial Production, Hamza Alavi estimates that the resource flow from India to Britain between 1793 and 1803 was in the order of £2m a year, the equivalent of many billions today. The economic drain from India, he notes, “has not only been a major factor in India’s impoverishment . . . it has also been a very significant factor in the Industrial Revolution in Britain.”(1) As Ralph Davis observes in The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade, from the 1760s onwards India’s wealth “bought the national debt back from the Dutch and others . . . leaving Britain nearly free from overseas indebtedness when it came to face the great French wars from 1793.”

In France, by contrast, as Eric Hobsbawn notes in The Age of Revolution, “the financial troubles of the monarchy brought matters to a head.” In 1788, half of France’s national expenditure was used to service its debt: “the American War and its debt broke the back of the monarchy.”

Even as the French were overthrowing the ancien regime, Britain’s landed classes were able to strengthen their economic power, seizing common property from the country’s poor by means of enclosure. Partly as a result of remittances from India and the Caribbean, the economy was booming and the state had the funds to ride out political crises. Later, after smashing India’s own industrial capacity, Britain forced that country to become a major export market for our manufactured goods, sustaining industrial employment here (and avoiding social unrest) long after our products and processes became uncompetitive.

Colonial plunder permitted the British state to balance its resource deficits as well. For some 200 years a river of food flowed into this country from places like Ireland, India and the Caribbean. In The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger reveals that in 1748 Jamaica alone sent 17,400 tons of sugar to Britain; by 1815 this had risen to 73,800 tons. It was all produced by stolen labour.

Just as grain was sucked out of Ireland at the height of its great famine, so Britain continued to drain India of food during its catastrophic hungers. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis shows that Indian wheat exports to the UK doubled between 1876 and 1877 as subsistence there collapsed. Several million Indians died of starvation. In the North Western provinces the famine was wholly engineered by British policy, as their surplus production was exported to offset poor English harvests in 1876 and 1877.

Britain, in other words, outsourced famine as well as social unrest. There was terrible poverty in this country in the second half of the 19th Century, but not mass starvation. The bad harvest of 1788 helped precipitate the French Revolution, but the British state avoided such hazards. Others died on our behalf.

In the late 19th Century, Davis shows, Britain’s vast deficits with the United States, Germany and its white Dominions were balanced by huge annual surpluses with India and (as a result of the opium trade) China. For a generation “the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries . . . braced the entire system of international settlements, allowing England’s continued financial supremacy to temporarily co-exist with its relative industrial decline.”Britain’s trade surpluses with India allowed the City to become the world’s financial capital.

Its role in British colonization was not a passive one. The bankruptcy and subsequent British takeover of Egypt in 1882 was hastened by a loan from Rothschild’s bank whose execution, Newsinger records, amounted to “fraud on a massive scale.” Jardine Matheson, once the biggest narco-trafficking outfit in world history (it dominated the Chinese opium trade), later formed a major investment bank, Jardine Fleming. It was taken over by JP Morgan Chase in 2000.

We lost our colonies, but the plunder has continued by other means. As Joseph Stiglitz shows in Globalization and its Discontents, the capital liberalization forced on Asian economies by the IMF permitted northern traders to loot hundreds of billions of dollars, precipitating the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Poorer nations have also been strong-armed into a series of amazingly one-sided treaties and commitments, such as Trade Related Investment Measures, bilateral investment agreements and the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements. If you have ever wondered how a small, densely-populated country which produces very little supports itself, I would urge you to study these asymmetric arrangements.

But now, as John Lanchester demonstrates in his fascinating essay in the London Review of Books, the City could be fatally wounded. The nation which relied on financial services may take generations to recover from their collapse. The great British adventure — three centuries spent pillaging the labor, wealth and resources of other countries — is over. We cannot accept this, and seek gleeful revenge on a government which can no longer insulate us from reality.

We do not starve, we are not arbitrarily imprisoned, we may vote, travel and read and write what we wish only because of the political activism of previous generations. Almost all MPs, when pushed, will acknowledge this. Were it not for public protest they wouldn’t be MPs.

Yet, though the people of this country remain as mild and as peaceful as they have ever been, our MPs have introduced a wider range of repressive measures than at any time since the Second World War. A long list of laws — the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act, Terrorism Act 2000, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the 2005 Serious Crime and Police Act and many others — treat peaceful protesters as if they are stalkers, vandals, thugs and terrorists. Thousands of harmless, public-spirited people now possess criminal records. This legislation has been enforced by policing which becomes more aggressive and intrusive by the month. The police attacks on the G20 protests (which are about to be challenged by a judicial review launched by Climate Camp) are just the latest expression of this rising state violence. Why is it happening?

Before I try to answer this, let me give you an idea of just how weird policing in Britain has become. A few weeks ago, like everyone in mid-Wales, I received a local policing summary from the Dyfed-Powys force. It contained a section headed Terrorism and Domestic Extremism. “Work undertaken is not solely focused on the threat from international terrorists. Attention has also been paid to the potential threat that domestic extremists and campaigners can pose.” I lodged a freedom of information request to try to discover what this meant. What threat do campaigners pose?

I’ve just been told by the police that they don’t intend to reply within the statutory period, or to tell me when they will.¹ I’ll complain of course, and (in 2019 or so) I’ll let you know the result. But Paul Mobbs of the Free Range Network has found what appears to be an explanation. Under the heading “Protect[ing] the country from both terrorism and domestic extremism”, the Dyfed-Powys Police website repeats the line about domestic extremists and campaigners. “In this context, the Force was praised for its management of the slaughter of what was felt to be a sacred animal from the Skanda Vale religious community in Carmarthenshire.” You might remember it: this Hindu community tried to prevent Shambo the bull from being culled by the government after he tested positive for TB. His defenders sought a judicial review and launched a petition. When that failed, they sang and prayed. That’s all.

Mobbs has also found a bulletin circulated among Welsh forces at the end of last year, identifying the “new challenges and changes” the police now face. Under “Environmental” just two are listed: congestion charging and “eco-terrorism”. Eco-terrorism is a charge repeatedly leveled against the environment movement, mostly by fossil fuel lobbyists. But, as far as I can discover, there has not been a single recorded instance of a planned attempt to harm people in the cause of environmental protection in the United Kingdom over the past 30 years or more. So what do the police mean by eco-terrorism? It appears to refer to any environmental action more radical than writing letters to your MP.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) now runs three units whose purpose is to tackle another phenomenon it has never defined: domestic extremism. These are the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU), the Welsh Extremism and Counter-Terrorism Unit and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Because ACPO is not a public body but a private limited company, the three bodies are exempt from freedom of information laws and other kinds of public accountability, even though they are funded by the Home Office and deploy police officers from regional forces. So it’s hard to work out exactly what they do, apart from libeling peaceful protesters. I wrote a column in December about the smears published by NETCU, which described villagers in Oxfordshire peacefully seeking to prevent a power company from filling their local lake with fly ash as a “domestic extremist campaign.” It also sought to smear peace campaigners, Greenpeace and Climate Camp with the same charge. NETCU’s site went down on the day my column was published and hasn’t been restored since. But we have only patchy evidence of what else these three unaccountable bodies have been up to.

They appear to have adopted the role once filled by Special Branch’s counter-subversion campaign, which spied on Labour activists, including Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson (sadly the spooks failed to bump them off while there was still time). But as Paul Mobbs points out in his new report on Britain’s secretive police forces, today the police appear to be motivated not by party political bias, but by hostility towards all views which do not reflect the official consensus.

Mobbs proposes that mainstream politics in Britain cannot respond to realities such as global and national inequality, economic collapse, resource depletion and climate change. Any politics that does not endorse the liberal economic consensus, which challenges the concentration of wealth or power, or which doesn’t accept that growth and consumerism can be sustained indefinitely, is off-limits. Just as the suffragettes were repressed because their ideas — not their actions — presented a threat to the state, the government and the police must suppress a new set of dangerous truths. By treating protesters as domestic extremists, the state marginalizes their concerns: if people are extremists, their views must be extreme. Repression, in a nominal democracy, cannot operate accountably, so the state uses police units, which are exempt from public scrutiny.

I am sure Mobbs is right. There is no place for dissenting views in mainstream politics. I was told recently by a Labour back-bencher — a respected MP untainted by the expenses scandal – that “if the door was open just an inch to new ideas, I would stay on. But it has been slammed shut, so I’m resigning at the next election.” Our grossly unfair electoral system, which responds to the concerns of just a few thousand floating voters and shuts out the minor parties; the vicious crackdown on dissent within parliament by whips and spin doctors; the neoliberalism forced upon governments by corporate power and the Washington Consensus; the terror of the tabloid press: all combine to create a political culture which cannot respond to altered realities without collapsing. What cannot be accommodated must be suppressed.

The police respond as all police forces do; protecting the incasts from the outcasts, keeping the barbarians from the gate. The philosophy of policing has not changed; they just become more violent as the citadel collapses.

1. E-mail received on 6th May 2009. FOI REF: 263/2009.

The policing of the G20 protests at the beginning of this month was routine. Policemen hiding their identification numbers and beating up peaceful protesters is as much a part of British life as grey skies and red buses. Across 20 years of protests, I have seen policemen swapping their jackets to avoid identification, hurling people against vans and into walls and whomping old ladies over the head with batons. A friend had his head repeatedly bashed against the bonnet of a police van; he was then charged with criminal damage to the van. I have seen an entire line of police turn round to face the other way when private security guards have started beating people up. I have seen them refuse — until Amnesty International got involved — to investigate my own case when I was hospitalized by these licensed thugs (the guards had impaled my foot on a metal spike, smashing the middle bone).

But none of this featured in the conservative press. The story was always the same: we would stagger home after our peaceful protests were attacked by uniformed skinheads to discover that we were “Anarchist Thugs on the Rampage” whose attempt to destroy civilization had been thwarted only by the calm professionalism of the police. Violent police action mutated into violent protests. The papers believed everything the police told them.

This began to change when the police foolishly attacked a Countryside Alliance march in 2004. In the spirit of impartial policing, the cops gave these reactionaries the treatment they had been doling out to generations of progressives. It was grotesque, disproportionate and entirely familiar policing, but there’s a world of difference between bloodstained hemp ponchos and bloodstained tweeds. The exposure of the lies the police then told about the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and the shooting of Mohammed Abdul Kahar made the newspapers — which had reproduced the official version — feel stung.

In other circumstances, Ian Tomlinson, the passer-by who died after being thrown to the ground by police, would have been treated by the press as a violent anarchist who had assaulted the road with his body. But video footage and disillusionment has changed that — for a few days at least. On Friday the front page of the Daily Express carried lurid pictures of the injuries sustained by a woman at the G20 protests, under the headline “Police Did This to Me: It was just like being whipped by the Taliban.”

Yesterday the Daily Mail posted up a film made by climate camp activists. Its columnist Melanie Phillips, who is yet to be celebrated for her support of radical causes, opined that, “there are always elements in the ranks [of the police] who want to give people a good kicking.” A column in the Telegraph explained that, “there are individuals who join the police just because they like hitting people,” while the Spectator lamented the “disgraceful actions of a few Met officers.” Today’s Guardian poll suggests that the police are losing the wider battle for public opinion too.

The papers maintain that a few rogue officers got out of control. But as testimonies collected by Climate Camp’s legal team show, police violence at the G20 demos was organized and systematic. It is true that the police appear to have been carried away by testeria (a useful word which describes testosterone-fuelled male rampages). But this keeps happening, and senior officers make no attempt to prevent it.

Before the protests, the police fed stories to the media about terrorist plots hatched by G20 demonstrators. “We’re up for it and we’re up to it,” Commander Simon O’Brien told the press. Organizers from Climate Camp asked if they could attend police briefings to journalists in order to put their side of the story. They were rebuffed. The police initially refused to meet them even to discuss the protesters’ intentions. The police plan was called Operation Glencoe: it was named after the site of a notorious massacre.

If the police at the G20 protests were pumped-up, testerical, itching for a fight, it was partly because their commanding officers have spent years blurring the distinction between peaceful campaigners and terrorists. Until recently, this strategy worked well: by turning quiet protests into angry confrontations, the police could show the public that unless they received ever greater powers and resources, the country would be overrun by violent mobs. Now it has backfired.

Don’t expect this momentary backlash to change anything. The police appear impervious to criticism. Just eight days before the G20 protests, the parliamentary select committee on human rights published a report on the policing of protests. It recommended that “counter-terrorism powers should never be used against peaceful protestors”; and that “the presumption should be in favour of protests taking place without state interference”. The police ignored it. They used counter-terrorism powers to stop and search climate campers having supper at an Indian restaurant; they sought to prevent peaceful actions from taking place. Interestingly, they also appeared to allow a group of genuine rioters to break into a branch of RBS. This too is a familiar pattern: the police beat up peaceful protesters and stand by when vandals create some easy headlines for the tabloids.

The public revulsion towards the police lies about Mr. de Menezes didn’t prevent them from attempting a similar cover-up over the death of Ian Tomlinson. Just as the furor over Mr. Tomlinson reached its peak, the police again curtailed the right to protest when they pre-emptively arrested 114 people close to a power station. Their purpose was to impose sweeping bail conditions on the protesters, which will come in very handy when the decision to build a new coal-burning power station at Kingsnorth in Kent is announced. Yesterday the Guardian published evidence of collusion between the police and Kingsnorth’s operator, E.On.

The police behave like this, despite the opprobrium of left and right, because they know they will get away with it. They know that the government won’t rein them in; that the Independent Police Complaints Commission eats out of their hands; that the sternest sanction an officer can expect for beating or killing a passer-by is some extended gardening leave. They know that in a few days’ time the rightwing press will revert to publishing stories about the anarchist baby-eaters seeking to turn Britain into a bloodbath.

But something else has changed in this country: the resolution of the protesters. Despite repeated assaults, they appear to become better organized and less afraid. That, so soon after Operation Glencoe, 114 people were prepared to risk arrest and another beating testifies to the resilience of this movement. These people know that protest is not a threat to democracy but its cornerstone. They know that the issues they contest outweigh any harm they may suffer. They know that getting beaten up is a sign that state has lost the argument.

Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan sent children to jail for offenses so trivial that some of them weren’t even crimes. A 15-year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school’s assistant principal. Mr. Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave 14- year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6 million by companies belonging to the Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails.¹ This is what happens when public services are run for profit.

It’s an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising.

The United States is more corrupt than the UK, but it is also more transparent. There the lobbyists demanding and receiving changes to judicial policy might be exposed, and corrupt officials identified and prosecuted. The UK, with a strong tradition of official secrecy and a weak tradition of scrutiny and investigative journalism, has no such safeguards.

The corrupt judges were paid by the private prisons not only to increase the number of child convicts but also to shut down a competing prison run by the public sector. Taking bribes to bang up kids might be novel; shutting public facilities to help private companies happens — on both sides of the water — all the time.

The Wall Street Journal has shown how, as a result of lobbying by the operators, private jails in Mississippi and California are being paid for non-existent prisoners.² The prison corporations have been guaranteed a certain number of inmates. If the courts fail to produce enough convicts, they get their money anyway. This outrages taxpayers in both states, which have cut essential public services to raise these funds. But there is a simple means of resolving this problem: you replace ghost inmates with real ones. As the Journal, seldom associated with raging anti-capitalism, observes, “prison expansion [has] spawned a new set of vested interests with stakes in keeping prisons full and in building more. . . . The result has been a financial and political bazaar, with convicts in stripes as the prize.”³

Even as crime declines, lawmakers are pressed by their sponsors to increase the rate of imprisonment. The US has, by a very long way, the world’s highest proportion of people behind bars: 756 prisoners per 100,000 people, or just over 1% of the adult population.⁴ Similarly wealthy countries have around one-tenth of this rate of imprisonment.

Like most of its really bad ideas, the last Conservative government imported private jails from the US. As Stephen Nathan, author of a forthcoming book about prison privatization in the UK, has shown, the notion was promoted by the Select Committee on Home Affairs, which in 1986 visited prisons run by the Corrections Corporation of America. When the corporation told them that private provision in the US improved prison standards and delivered good value for money, the committee members failed to check its claims. They recommended that the government should put the construction and management of prisons out to tender “as an experiment.”⁵

Encouraged by the committee’s report, the Corrections Corporation of America set up a consortium in Britain with two Conservative party donors, Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd and John Mowlem & Co, to promote privately financed prisons over here. The first privately-run prison in the UK, Wolds, was opened by the Danish security company Group 4 in 1992. In 1993, before it had had a chance to evaluate this experiment, the government announced that all new prisons would be built and run by private companies.

The Labour party, then in opposition, was outraged. John Prescott promised that, “Labour will take back private prisons into public ownership — it is the only safe way forward.”⁶ Jack Straw stated that, “it is not appropriate for people to profit out of incarceration. This is surely one area where a free market certainly does not exist.” He too promised to “bring these prisons into proper public control and run them directly as public services.”⁷

But during his first seven weeks in office, Jack Straw renewed one private prison contract and launched two new ones. A year later he announced that all new prisons in England and Wales would be built and run by private companies, under the private finance initiative (PFI). Today the UK has a higher proportion of prisoners in private institutions than the US.⁸ This is the only country in Europe whose jails are run on this model.

So has prison privatization here influenced judicial policy? As we discovered during the recent lobbying scandal in the House of Lords, there’s no way of knowing. Unlike civilized nations, the UK has no register of lobbyists; we are not even entitled to know which lobbyists ministers have met.⁹ But there are some clues. The former home secretary, John Reid, previously in charge of prison provision, has become a consultant to the private prison operator G4S.¹⁰ The government is intending to commission a series of massive Titan jails under PFI. Most experts on prisons expect them to be disastrous, taking inmates further away from their families (which reduces the chances of rehabilitation) and creating vast warrens in which all the social diseases of imprisonment will fester. Only two groups want them built: ministers and the prison companies: they offer excellent opportunities to rack up profits. And the very nature of PFI, which commits the government to paying for services for 25 or 30 years whether or not they are still required creates a major incentive to ensure that prison numbers don’t fall. The beast must be fed.

And there’s another line of possible evidence. In the two countries whose economies most resemble the UK’s — Germany and France — the prison population has risen quite slowly. France has 96 inmates per 100,000 people, an increase of 14% since 1992. Germany has 89 prisoners per 100,000: 25% more than in 1992 but 9% less than in 2001. But the UK now locks up 151 out of every 100,000 inhabitants: 73% more than in 1992 and 20% more than in 2001. Yes our politicians have barely come down from the trees, yes we are still governed out of the offices of the Daily Mail, but it would be foolish to dismiss the likely influence of the private prison industry.

This revolting trade in human lives creates a permanent incentive to lock people up; not because prison works; not because it makes us safer, but because it makes money. Privatization appears to have locked this country into mass imprisonment.

1. Amy Goodman, “How Two Former PA Judges Got Millions in Kickbacks to Send Juveniles to Private Prisons,” Democracy Now!, 17th February 2009; “Bad judges: the lowest of the low,” The Economist, 26th February 2009; Stephanie Chen, “Pennsylvania rocked by ‘jailing kids for cash’ scandal,” CNN, February 24, 2009.
2. Bryan Gruley, “Prison Building Spree Creates Glut of Lockups,” Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2001; Joseph T. Hallinan, “Going Backwards,” Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2001.
3. Bryan Gruley, ibid.
4. The total prison population at the end of 2007 (see above) was 2,293,157. The most recent figure for the adult population I can find — 217.8 million — was produced by the US Census Bureau in 2004.
5. Stephen Nathan, 2003. Prison Privatization in the United Kingdom. Published in Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization & Human Rights. Clarity Press, Inc., Atlanta.
6. John Prescott, 1994, quoted by Stephen Nathan, ibid.
7. Jack Straw, 8th March 1995, quoted by Stephen Nathan, ibid.
8. 7.2% in the US, 11% in the UK.
9. The Committee on Standards in Public Life, cited by the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, 5th January 2009. Lobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall. Volume I, para 187.
10. ”G4S Appoints John Reid As Group Consultant,” Security Oracle, 18th December 2008.

Yes, I know that without money there’s no business, and without business there are no jobs. I also know that most of the money in circulation is issued, through fractional reserve banking, in the form of debt. This means that you can’t solve one problem (a lack of money) without causing another (a mountain of debt). There must be a better way than this.

This isn’t my subject and I am venturing way beyond my pay grade. But I want to introduce you to another way of negotiating a credit crunch, which requires no moral hazard, no hair of the dog and no public spending. I’m relying, in explaining it, on the former currency trader and central banker Bernard Lietaer.

In his book, The Future of Money, Lietaer points out — as the British government did a couple of days ago — that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of “an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange.” The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognize its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.

But the projects that have proved most effective were those inspired by the German economist Silvio Gessell, who became finance minister in Gustav Landauer’s doomed Bavarian republic. He proposed that communities seeking to rescue themselves from economic collapse should issue their own currency. To discourage people from hoarding it, they should impose a fee (called demurrage), which had the same effect as negative interest. The back of each banknote would contain 12 boxes. For the note to remain valid, the owner had to buy a stamp every month and stick it in one of the boxes. It would be withdrawn from circulation after a year. Money of this kind is called stamp scrip: a privately-issued currency which becomes less valuable the longer you hold onto it.

One of the first places to experiment with this scheme was the small German town of Schwanenkirchen. In 1923, hyperinflation had caused a credit crunch of a different kind. A Dr Hebecker, owner of a coalmine in Schwanenkirchen, told his workers that if they wouldn’t accept the coal-backed stamp scrip he had invented — the Wara — he would have to close the mine. He promised to exchange it, in the first instance, for food. The scheme immediately took off. It saved both the mine and the town. It was soon adopted by 2000 corporations across Germany. But in 1931, under pressure from the central bank, the ministry of finance closed the project down, with catastrophic consequences for the communities that had come to depend on it. Lietaer points out that the only remaining option for the German economy was ruthless centralized economic planning. Would Hitler have come to power if the Wara and similar schemes had been allowed to survive?

The Austrian town of Wörgl also tried out Gessell’s idea, in 1932. Like most communities in Europe at the time, it suffered from mass unemployment and a shortage of money for public works. Instead of spending the town’s meager funds on new works, the mayor put them on deposit as a guarantee for the stamp scrip he issued. By paying workers in the new currency, he paved the streets, restored the water system and built a bridge, new houses and a ski jump. Because they would soon lose their value, Wörgl’s own schillings circulated much faster than the official money, with the result that each unit of currency generated 12 to 14 times more employment. Scores of other towns sought to copy the scheme, at which point — in 1933 — the central bank stamped it out. Wörgl’s workers were thrown out of work again.

Similar projects took off at the same time in dozens of countries. Almost all of them were closed down as the central banks panicked about losing their monopoly over the control of money (just one, Switzerland’s WIR system, still exists). Roosevelt prohibited complementary currencies by executive decree, though they might have offered a faster, cheaper and more effective means of pulling the US out of the Depression than his New Deal.

No one is suggesting that we replace official currencies with local scrip: this is a complementary system, not an alternative. Nor does Lietaer propose this as a solution to all economic ills. But even before you consider how it could be improved through modern information technology, several features of Gessell’s system grab your attention. We need not wait for the government or the central bank to save us: we can set this system up ourselves. It costs taxpayers nothing. It bypasses the greedy banks. It recharges local economies and gives local businesses an advantage over multinationals. It can be tailored to the needs of the community. It does not require — as Eddie George, the former Governor of the Bank of England, insisted – that one part of the country be squeezed so that another can prosper.

Perhaps most importantly, a demurrage system reverses the ecological problem of discount rates. If you have to pay to keep your money, the later you receive your income, the more valuable it will be. So it makes economic sense, under this system, to invest long-term. As resources in the ground are a better store of value than money in the bank, the system encourages their conservation.

I make no claim to expertise. I’m not qualified to identify the flaws in this scheme, nor am I confident that I have made the best case for it. All I ask is that, if you haven’t come across it before, you don’t dismiss it before learning more. As we confront the failure of the government’s first bailout and the astonishing costs of the second, isn’t it time we considered the alternatives?

The interview I conducted with its chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, broadcast on The Guardian’s website yesterday, contains what appears to be an interesting admission. I asked him whether Shell had now stopped producing ads extolling its investments in renewable energy. Mr van der Veer does not express himself clearly at this point, but he seems to admit that his company’s previous advertising was not honest. “If we are very big in oil and gas and we are so far relatively small in alternative energies, if you then every day only make adverts about your alternative energies and not about 90% of your other activities I don’t think that — then I say transparency, honesty to the market, that’s nonsense.” So, I asked, Shell did not intend to return to that kind of advertising? “Probably not,” he told me. “I’m very much keep your feet on the ground, tell them who you are and explain why you are who you are.”

But since the interview was filmed, Shell’s messianic tendencies appear to have resurfaced. In December the company ran a series of ads in The Guardian suggesting again that it had come to save the world. “Tackling climate change and providing fuel for a growing population seems like an impossible problem, but at Shell we try to think creatively,” one of these advertisements boasts³. It features a diagram of a human brain, divided into sections labeled “fuel from algae,” “fuel from straw,” “fuel from woodchips,” “hydrogen fuels,” “windfarm,” “gas to liquids” and “coal gasification.” This suggests progress of a kind, in that the company is acknowledging that it sometimes dabbles in fossil fuels, but its core business — oil — and its massive investments in tar sands are missing from the corporate mind. Could Shell be having a senior moment?

The confusion deepens when you watch its latest publicity film. It’s called “Clearing the Air,” and it does just the opposite. It is supposed to tell an inspirational tale of discovery, but the script and the acting are so gobsmackingly bad that it inspires you only to rip your clothes off and run screaming down the street. The lasting impression it leaves is that Shell’s staff is chaotic and incompetent. Perhaps the clean-cut corporate clones featured in the ads of 2006 put people off.

Mr. van der Veer is neither an incompetent nor an automaton. He is charming, friendly and smart. But he refused to answer some of the questions I had prepared.

Reading Shell’s reports and publicity material, I kept stumbling on an absence. In 2000, the company boasted that it would be investing $1 billion dollars in renewable energy between 2001 and 2005. But since then it appears to have produced no figures for its renewables budget. The company now claims that “we’re investing significantly in wind energy”, but it doesn’t say what significantly means. Of the ten wind farms listed on its website, only one appears to be in the planning or development stage: the others are already in operation. Where is the evidence of new money? When Shell pulled out of Britain’s biggest windfarm, the London Array, last year, did this represent the end of its major investments?

I asked Mr. van der Veer a simple question — fifteen times. (Only a few of these attempts feature in the edited film). “What is the value of your annual investments in renewable energy?” He waffled, changed the subject, admitted that he knew the figure, then flatly refused to reveal it. Nor could he give me a convincing explanation of why he wouldn’t tell me, claiming only that, “those figures are misused and people say it is too small” and it “is not the right message to give to the people.” It strikes me that there is only one likely reason for these evasions: that Shell’s spending on renewables has fallen sharply from the figure it announced in 2000. It’s a fair guess that the current investment would look microscopic by comparison to its spending on the Canadian tar sands, and would make a mockery of its new round of advertising. I challenge Shell — for the 16th time — to prove me wrong.

Nor would Mr. van der Veer give me a straight answer to another straight question: “is there any investment you would not make on ethical grounds?” I asked this six times. He was unable to furnish me with an example. It’s not hard to see why. As well as exploiting the tar sands, which means destroying forest and wetlands, polluting great quantities of water and producing more CO2 than conventional petroleum, Shell is still flaring gas in Nigeria, at great cost to both local people and the global climate. It has been fiercely criticized for its secret negotiations with the Iraqi government, which led last year to the first major access for a western company to Iraq’s gas reserves⁴. It is prospecting for oil in some of the Arctic’s most sensitive habitats. All this makes my question difficult to answer. Aside from the greenwash, it is not easy to spot the practical difference between this civilized, progressive company and the Neanderthals at Exxon.

Like all oil companies, Shell simply follows the opportunities. Shut out of the richest fields by state companies, struggling to extract the dregs from its declining reserves, it has been turning to ever more difficult oil, some of which lies beneath rare and fragile ecosystems. When the price of oil was high, it announced massive investments in the tar sands. Now that the price has dropped again, it has canceled further spending⁵. It has even less of an incentive to invest in renewables. Shell does what the market demands.

I don’t blame Shell or van der Veer for this: they are discharging their duty to their shareholders. I do blame them for creating the impression that the company has a different agenda, and I blame governments for allowing them to drift into whatever fields they find profitable, regardless of the consequences for people or the environment.

On this issue Jeroen van der Veer and I agree. Oil companies, he says, should not seek to determine a country’s energy mix: that is for the government to decide. Saving the biosphere, in other words, cannot be left to goodwill and greenwash: the humanity of pleasant men like van der Veer will always be swept aside by the imperative to maximize returns. Good people in these circumstances do terrible things. Companies like Shell will pour big money into alternative energy only when more lucrative or immediate opportunities are blocked. Where is the government that is brave enough to block them?

1. The three examples I have in my files are: Shell, 30th May 2006. “The world wants more energy, the planet wants less pollution.” Page 10, Financial Times; Shell, 29th April 2006. “One energy company is going further to make hydrogen a reality.” New Scientist; Shell, 22nd May 2006. “How can we produce more energy but lower carbon emissions?” Page 23, New Statesman.
2. ASA, 7th November 2007. Adjudication: Shell Europe Oil Products Ltd; ASA, 13th August 2008. Adjudication: Shell International Ltd.
3. Shell, 20th December 2008. “In the New Energy Future, if it doesn’t exist we’ll need to invent it.” Page 21, The Guardian.
4. eg Terry Macalister, 24th September 2008. “Shell’s $4bn Iraq breakthrough could boost Britain’s natural gas supplies.” The Guardian.
5. Kristen Hays, 13th December 2008. “Petroleum companies delay expansion, new projects.” Houston Chronicle.

This impulse arises from a number of observations, viz:

1. In two years of walking through the valleys and over the hills here, I have never been shouted at.

2. The café in the local leisure centre serves smoothies in measures labeled “small” (about a pint) and “regular” (about two pints).

3. When I wrote to a very active councilor, asking his permission to recommend him for a gong, he replied, “I would prefer not to seek such an honour.”

Through such observations, I have begun to form the impression that Wales is less socially stratified, less grasping, more liberal than the rest of Britain. Though I am an outsider, from the colonial power, with an unerring ability to wind people up, I have never been made to feel unwelcome here. And it seldom rains here, and then only at night. (That’s not strictly true, but this is what nationalism does).

In this spirit I have to record that something is missing. Its absence offends my newfound national pride. It mocks our attempt to become a coherent country. It means that the Gogs (of North Wales) and the Hwntws (of South Wales) will forever be at each other’s throats. It means that the greenest nation in the UK is locked into unsustainability. It is also bleeding ridiculous. As far as I can discover, this is the only country in Europe which you cannot traverse by rail without spending most of the journey passing through another. The only rail link that allows you to travel from north to south crosses the border near Llangollen and doesn’t re-enter Wales until it approaches Abergavenny, 100 miles away.

The railway map of Wales is a classic indicator of an extractive economy. The lines extend either towards London or towards the ports. As Eduardo Galeano established in The Open Veins of Latin America, the infrastructure of a country is a guide to the purpose of its development.¹ If the main roads and railways form a network, linking the regions and the settlements within the regions, they are likely to have been developed to enhance internal commerce and mobility. If they resemble a series of drainage basins, flowing towards the ports and borders, they are likely to have been built to empty the nation of its wealth for the benefit of another. Like Latin America, Wales is poor because it was so rich. Its abundant natural resources gave rise to an extractive system, designed to leave as little wealth behind as possible.

Just as the railway network was developed largely for the benefit of another economy, it was dismantled for the same purpose. Wales was hit very hard by the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. Before that, one of the lines that could have been used as part of a North-South railway was flooded by Llyn Celyn, a reservoir which drowned the village of Capel Celyn in order to supply water to Liverpool. It was this act of enclosure which inspired RS Thomas’s famous poem Reservoirs, in which he mourned “… the smashed faces/Of the farms with the stone trickle/Of their tears down the hills’ side.” The dam wall was built across the Bala to Ffestiniog line.

Before Beeching, a handful of minor routes existed, which could have enabled a determined passenger who was prepared to make a few changes to travel from north to south, but there was no line either conceived or used as a long distance railway connecting the nation. Could such a railway be built? Thanks to the efforts of a remarkable man, the idea is beginning to seep into the national consciousness.

Archimandrite Deiniol is the only Orthodox priest serving in North Wales. Bull-headed, magnificently bearded, he is the spokesman for Yn Ein Blaenau, a group set up to lobby for the regeneration of Blaenau Ffestiniog, one of the country’s poorest communities. Unlike many other depressed Welsh towns, Blaenau has a way out: but it is blocked. It is surrounded — hideously — by the waste from its slate workings. The British government has a policy of replacing virgin building stone with mining spoil and rubble. The slate waste around Blaenau would supply Britain with roadstone for years, but it’s stuck there until the Conwy Valley railway line is upgraded. Father Deiniol has been negotiating with the byzantine network of railway companies, authorities and regulators, and has so far been frustrated.

But in doing so, he has learnt a good deal about how the railways of the United Kingdom work — or don’t. He has also discovered that a railway can be critical to a region’s regeneration, and that the north-south roads in Wales are close to gridlock.

There are plenty of lobbyists calling for new roads, but Father Deiniol’s plan is likely to be cheaper and more sustainable. His survey of the disused railway lines of Wales shows that there is one route — from Rhyl through Denbigh, Rhuthun, Corwen, Newtown, Llanidloes, Rhaeadr and Builth Road to Dowlais — which would require only two miles of new formation to link Holyhead to Cardiff.² The rest of the way makes use of current and former railways. He proposes that short feeder lines also be built connecting this trunk route to Mold, Llangollen, Oswestry, Bala, Hay-on-Wye and Brecon.³

The One-Wales Line could not only offer a much faster journey than the current long detour through England, it would also knit the other railways of Wales into a coherent network, as it uses the north coast railway and crosses the Cambrian line and the Shrewsbury to Swansea line. It would help to regenerate a desperately poor region in the south called the Heads of the Valleys. The project would look rather like the Western Railway Corridor in Ireland, which is reopening 184km of disused lines between Limerick and Sligo.⁴

The least the Welsh Assembly Government should do is to commission a feasibility study and cost-benefit analysis of Father Deiniol’s plan. His railway would help Wales looks like a country again, rather than a depot for someone else’s empire.

1. Eduardo Galeano, 1971. Originally published as Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina. Siglo XXI Editores.
2. Tad Deiniol, 3rd February 2008. Proposal for a Direct, All-Wales, Holyhead to Cardiff Fast Rail Link. Yn Ein Blaenau. If you would like a copy of this document, I can send it to you.
3. Tad Deiniol, 2008. Map of Proposed North South Rail Link and Feeder Lines. Yn Ein Blaenau. If you would like a copy of this document, I can send it to you.
4. See http://www.westontrack.com/

If you ask, it always produces the same response: “global oil resources are adequate for the foreseeable future.”¹ It knows this, it says, because of the assessments made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its World Energy Outlook reports. In the 2007 report, the IEA does appear to support the government’s view. “World oil resources,” it states, “are judged to be sufficient to meet the projected growth in demand to 2030″²; though it says nothing about what happens at that point, or whether they will continue to be sufficient after 2030. But this, as far as Whitehall is concerned, is the end of the matter. Like most of the rich world’s governments, the United Kingdom treats the IEA’s projections as gospel. Earlier this year, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the UK’s Department for Business, asking what contingency plans the government has made for global supplies of oil peaking by 2020. The answer was as follows: “the Government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans specifically for the eventuality of crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020.”³

So the IEA had better bloody well be right. In the report on peak oil commissioned by the US Department of Energy, the oil analyst Robert L.Hirsch concluded that, “without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs” of world oil supplies peaking “will be unprecedented.”⁴ He went on to explain what “timely mitigation” meant. Even a worldwide emergency response “10 years before world oil peaking”, he wrote, would leave “a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.”⁵ To avoid global economic collapse, we need to begin “a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking.”⁶ If Hirsch is right and if oil supplies peak before 2028, we’re in deep doodah.

So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA radically changed its assessment. Until this year’s report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as “doomsayers”. “The IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern,” he wrote. “Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future.”⁷ In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world’s existing oilfields of 3.7% a year.⁸ This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered. But the new report, published last month, carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7%, which means a much greater gap to fill.⁹

More importantly, in the 2008 report the IEA suggests for the first time that world petroleum supplies might hit the buffers. “Although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period.”¹⁰ These bland words reveal a major shift. Never before has one of the IEA’s energy outlooks forecast the peaking or plateauing of the world’s conventional oil production (which is what we mean when we talk about peak oil).

But that is as specific as the report gets. Does it or doesn’t it mean that we have time to prepare? What does “towards the end of the projection period” mean? The agency has never produced a more precise forecast — until now. For the first time, in the interview I conducted with its chief economist Fatih Birol, it has given us a date. And it should scare the pants off anyone who understands the implications.

Fatih Birol, the lead author of the new energy outlook, is a small, shrewd, unflustered man with thick grey hair and Alistair Darling eyebrows. He explained to me that the agency’s new projections were based on a major study it had undertaken into decline rates in the world’s 800 largest oil fields. So what were its previous figures based on? “It was mainly an assumption, a global assumption about the world’s oil fields. This year, we looked at it country by country, field by field and we looked at it also onshore and offshore. It was very very detailed. Last year it was an assumption, and this year it’s a finding of our study.” I told him that it seemed extraordinary to me that the IEA hadn’t done this work before, but had based its assessment on educated guesswork. “In fact nobody had done this research,” he told me. “This is the first publicly available data.”¹¹

So was it not irresponsible to publish a decline rate of 3.7% in 2007, when there was no proper research supporting it? “No, our previous decline assumptions have always mentioned that these are assumptions to the best of our knowledge – and we also said that the declines [could be] higher than what we have assumed.”

Then I asked him a question for which I didn’t expect a straight answer: could he give me a precise date by which he expects conventional oil supplies to stop growing?

“In terms of non-OPEC [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel]“, he replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view.”

Around 2020. That casts the issue in quite a different light. Mr Birol’s date, if correct, gives us about 11 years to prepare. If the Hirsch report is right, we have already missed the boat. Birol says we need a “global energy revolution” to avoid an oil crunch, including (disastrously for the environment) a massive global drive to exploit unconventional oils, such as the Canadian tar sands. But nothing on this scale has yet happened, and Hirsch suggests that even if it began today, the necessary investments and infrastructure changes could not be made in time. Fatih Birol told me “I think time is not on our side here.”

When I pressed him on the shift in the agency’s position, he argued that the IEA has been saying something like this all along. “We said in the past that one day we will run out of oil. We never said that we will have hundreds of years of oil … but what we have said is that this year, compared to past years, we have seen that the decline rates are significantly higher than what we have seen before. But our line that we are on an unsustainable energy path has not changed”.

This of course is face-saving nonsense. There is a vast difference between a decline rate of 3.7% and a rate of 6.7%. There is an even bigger difference between suggesting that the world is following an unsustainable energy path – a statement almost everyone can subscribe to – and revealing that conventional oil supplies are likely to plateau around 2020. If this is what the IEA meant in the past, it wasn’t expressing itself very clearly.

So what do we do? We could take to the hills, or we could hope and pray that Hirsch is wrong about the 20-year lead time, and begin a global crash programme today of fuel efficiency and electrification. In either case, the British government had better start drawing up some contingency plans.

1. Eg DECC Press Office, 28th October 2008. Statement e-mailed to Duncan Clark at the Guardian newspaper (UK).
2. International Energy Agency, 2007. World Energy Outlook 2007, page 43. IEA, Paris.
3. BERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request, Ref 08/0091.
4. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, February 2005. Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. US Department of Energy, page 4.
5. ibid, page 59.
6. ibid, page 65.
7. International Energy Agency, 2005. Resources to Reserves: Oil and Gas Technologies for the Energy Markets of the Future, page 3. IEA, Paris.
8. International Energy Agency, 2007, ibid, page 84.
9. International Energy Agency, 2008. World Energy Outlook 2008, page 43. IEA, Paris.
10. ibid, p103.
11. This interview is broadcast on the Guardian’s (UK) website, December 15, 2008.

The truth is more interesting. At the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, John Maynard Keynes put forward a much better idea. After it was thrown out, Geoffrey Crowther — then the editor of The Economist magazine — warned that “Lord Keynes was right … the world will bitterly regret the fact that his arguments were rejected.”¹ But the world does not regret it, for almost everyone — The Economist included — has forgotten what he proposed.

One of the reasons for financial crises is the imbalance of trade between nations. Countries accumulate debt partly as a result of sustaining a trade deficit. They can easily become trapped in a vicious spiral: the bigger their debt, the harder it is to generate a trade surplus. International debt wrecks people’s development, trashes the environment and threatens the global system with periodic crises.

As Keynes recognized, there is not much that the debtor nations can do. Only the countries which maintain a trade surplus have real agency, so it is they who must be obliged to change their policies. His solution was an ingenious system for persuading the creditor nations to spend their surplus money back into the economies of the debtor nations.

He proposed a global bank, which he called the International Clearing Union. The bank would issue its own currency, the bancor, which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange. The bancor would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country’s trade deficit or trade surplus.²

Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union, equivalent to half the average value of its trade over the past five years. To make the system work, the members of the Union would need a powerful incentive to clear their bancor accounts by the end of the year: to end up with neither a trade deficit nor a trade surplus. But what would the incentive be?

Keynes proposed that any country racking up a large trade deficit (equating to more than half of its bancor overdraft allowance) would be charged interest on its account. It would also be obliged to reduce the value of its currency and to prevent the export of capital. But — and this was the key to his system — he insisted that the nations with a trade surplus would be subject to similar pressures. Any country with a bancor credit balance that was more than half the size of its overdraft facility would be charged interest, at 10%. It would also be obliged to increase the value of its currency and to permit the export of capital. If by the end of the year its credit balance exceeded the total value of its permitted overdraft, the surplus would be confiscated. The nations with a surplus would have a powerful incentive to get rid of it. In doing so, they would automatically clear other nations’ deficits.

When Keynes began to explain his idea, in papers published in 1942 and 1943, it detonated in the minds of all who read it. The British economist Lionel Robbins reported that. “it would be difficult to exaggerate the electrifying effect on thought throughout the whole relevant apparatus of government . . . nothing so imaginative and so ambitious had ever been discussed.”³ Economists all over the world saw that Keynes had cracked it. As the Allies prepared for the Bretton Woods conference, Britain adopted Keynes’s solution as its official negotiating position.

But there was one country — at the time the world’s biggest creditor — in which his proposal was less welcome. The head of the US delegation at Bretton Woods, Harry Dexter White, responded to Lord Keynes’s idea thus: “We have been perfectly adamant on that point. We have taken the position of absolutely no.”⁴ Instead he proposed an International Stabilization Fund, which would place the entire burden of maintaining the balance of trade on the deficit nations. It would place no limits on the surplus that successful exporters could accumulate. He also suggested an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which would provide capital for economic reconstruction after the war. White, backed by the financial clout of the US Treasury, prevailed. The International Stabilization Fund became the International Monetary Fund. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development remains the principal lending arm of the World Bank.

The consequences, especially for the poorest indebted countries, have been catastrophic. Acting on behalf of the rich world, imposing conditions that no free country would tolerate, the IMF has bled them dry. As Joseph Stiglitz has shown, the Fund compounds existing economic crises and creates crises where none existed before. It has destabilized exchange rates, exacerbated balance of payments problems, forced countries into debt and recession, wrecked public services and destroyed the jobs and incomes of tens of millions of people.⁵

The countries the Fund instructs must place the control of inflation ahead of other economic objectives; immediately remove their barriers to trade and the flow of capital; liberalize their banking systems; reduce government spending on everything except debt repayments; and privatize the assets which can be sold to foreign investors. These happen to be the policies which best suit predatory financial speculators.⁶ They have exacerbated almost every crisis the IMF has attempted to solve.

You might imagine that the United States, which since 1944 has turned from the world’s biggest creditor to the world’s biggest debtor, would have cause to regret the blinkered position it took at Bretton Woods. But Harry Dexter White ensured that the US could never lose. He awarded it special veto powers over any major decision made by the IMF or the World Bank, which means that it will never be subject to the Fund’s unwelcome demands. The IMF insists that the foreign exchange reserves maintained by other nations are held in the form of dollars. This is one of the reasons why the US economy doesn’t collapse, no matter how much debt it accumulates.⁷

On Saturday the leaders of the G20 nations admitted that, “the Bretton Woods Institutions must be comprehensively reformed.”⁸ But the only concrete suggestions they made were that the IMF should be given more money and that poorer nations “should have greater voice and representation.” We’ve already seen what this means: a tiny increase in their voting power which does nothing to challenge the rich countries’ control of the Fund, let alone the US veto.⁹

Is this the best they can do? No. As the global financial crisis deepens, the rich nations will be forced to recognize that their problems cannot be solved by tinkering with a system that is constitutionally destined to fail. But to understand why the world economy keeps running into trouble, they first need to understand what was lost in 1944.

1. Geoffrey Crowther, quoted by Michael Rowbotham, Goodbye America!: Globalisation, Debt and the Dollar Empire (Jon Carpenter, Charlbury, Oxon, 2000).
2. My sources are: Michael Rowbotham, 2000, ibid; Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain 1937-1946 (Macmillan, London, 2000); Armand van Dormael, Bretton Woods: Birth of a Monetary System (Macmillan, London, 1978).
3. Lord Robbins, quoted by Armand van Dormael, ibid.
4. Harry Dexter White, quoted by Armand van Dormael, ibid.
5. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (Allen Lane, London, 2002).
6. Ibid.
7. E.g. Romilly Greenhill and Ann Pettifor, The United States as a HIPC (Highly Indebted Prosperous Country): How the Poor are Financing the Rich, Jubilee Research at the New Economics Foundation, London, April 2002; and Henry K Liu, “US Dollar hegemony has got to go,” Asia Times, April 11, 2002.
8. The G20 Summit, 15th November 2008. Declaration of the Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy. The White House.
9. See this article.

But the First World War, which ended 90 years ago today, seemed incomprehensible. The class interests of the men sent to kill each other were the same. While Germany was clearly the aggressor, the outlook of the opposing powers — seeking to expand their colonies and to dominate European trade was not wildly different. Ugly as the German state was, no one could characterize the war at its outbreak — with Tsarist Russia on the side of the Entente Powers — as a simple struggle between democracy and dictatorship. Neither did this resemble the current war in Iraq, in which legislators send the children of another class to die. The chances of being killed were at least five times higher for men who had been students at Oxford or Cambridge in 1914 than they were for manual workers.¹ The First World War was an act of social cannibalism, in which statesmen and generals on both sides murdered their own offspring. How could it have happened?

On July 1st 1999, consumed by the urge to understand the war before the century was over, I visited Thiepval on the Somme. This was the anniversary of the first great attack on the German salients, which caused devastating losses for British and Irish troops. Men carrying flutes and dressed in orange sashes — commemorating the Ulster Division — paced about. Beneath the arches of the Lutyens memorial a circle of evangelical Christians hugged and screamed and ululated, while a little boy dressed in combat gear played around their legs with a plastic machine-gun. I goggled at the names on the monument — the 73,000 commemorate only the British and South Africans who fell on the Somme and whose bodies were not recovered — but I couldn’t grasp the scale of what I saw.

Dizzied by these conflicting sights, unable to connect, I wandered behind the old German lines and into a field of sugar beet. Walking between the rows, trying to clear my head, I noticed a spherical pebble. I picked it up. It was strangely heavy. Then I looked around and saw that the field was covered with the same odd little balls. Almost every stone was in fact metal. Within a minute I picked up more grapeshot than I could hold. I found shell casings, twisted bullets, fragments of barbed wire, chips of armor plating. I stopped, overwhelmed by shock and recognition. It was a field of lead and steel; and every piece had been manufactured to kill someone.

There are plenty of words to describe the horrors of World War Two. But there were none, as far as I could discover, that captured the character of the First World War. So I constructed one from the Greek word ephebos, a young man of fighting age. Ephebicide is the wanton mass slaughter of the young by the old. But how did it happen, and why?

In his fascinating book The Last Great War, published a fortnight ago, Adrian Gregory shows that the notion that Britain was carried to war on a wave of patriotic enthusiasm is false.² The crowds that gathered around Buckingham Palace and in Downing Street when war was declared seem to have been more curious than excited. Most people appear to have greeted the war with resignation or dismay. Nor does voluntary enlistment provide clear evidence of enthusiasm. It is true that some wanted to fight, and others saw war as a more exciting prospect that working in a dead-end office job.³ But Gregory shows that voluntarism wasn’t all that it seemed. For many men fighting was the only employment on offer. The largest numbers volunteered not at the very beginning of war, but after the disaster at Mons on August 24th, when it became clear that there was a genuine threat to national defense.⁴

The speed with which the war began and Britain joined made effective resistance impossible to organize. By the time the anti-war meetings had been called, it was too late. And by then there was a genuine need to stop Germany. It was as rational to seek to curtail German expansionism in August 1914 as it was in September 1939.

But the narratives, like Gregory’s, which suggest that World War One was inevitable begin late in the sequence of events.⁵ Another anniversary, almost forgotten in this country, falls tomorrow. On November 12th 1924, Edmund Dene Morel died. Morel had been a shipping clerk, based in Liverpool and Antwerp, who had noticed, in the late 1890s, that while ships belonging to King Leopold were returning from the Congo to Belgium full of ivory, rubber and other goods, they were departing with nothing but soldiers and ammunition. He realized that Leopold’s colony must be a slave state, and launched an astonishing and ultimately successful effort to break the king’s grip.⁶ For a while he became a national hero. A few years later he became a national villain.

During his Congo campaign, Morel had become extremely suspicious of the secret diplomacy pursued by the British foreign office. In 1911, he showed how a secret understanding between Britain and France over the control of Morocco, followed by a campaign in the British press based on misleading foreign office briefings, had stitched up Germany and very nearly caused a European war.⁷ In February 1912 he warned that “no greater disaster could befall both peoples [Britain and Germany], and all that is most worthy of preservation in modern civilization, than a war between them.”⁸ Convinced that Britain had struck a second secret agreement with France that would drag us into any war which involved Russia, he campaigned for such treaties to be made public; for recognition that Germany had been hoodwinked over Morocco and for the British government to seek to broker a reconciliation between France and Germany.

In response British ministers lied. The prime minister and the foreign secretary repeatedly denied that there was any secret agreement with France.⁹ Only on the day before war was declared did the foreign secretary admit that a treaty had been in place since 1906. It ensured that Britain would have to fight from the moment Russia mobilized. Morel continued to oppose the war and became, until his dramatic rehabilitation after 1918, one of the most reviled men in Britain.

Could the Great War have been averted if, in 1911, the British government had done as Morel suggested? No one knows, as no such attempt was made. Far from seeking to broker a European peace, Britain, pursuing its self-interested diplomatic intrigues, helped to make war more likely. Germany was the aggressor; but the image of affronted virtue cultivated by Britain was a false one. Faced, earlier in the century, with the possibilities of peace, the old men of Europe had decided that they would rather kill their children than change their policies.

1. Adrian Gregory, 2008. The Last Great War: British society and the First World War, p.290. Cambridge University Press.
2. ibid, pp9-17; 24-30.
3. ibid, p31.
4. ibid, p32.
5. Another example is Gary Sheffield, November 2008. The Origins of World War One. BBC Online.
6. See Adam Hochschild, 1999. King Leopold’s Ghost. Pan Macmillan, London.
7. F. Seymour Cocks, 1920. E. D. Morel: the man and his work. George Allen & Unwin, London. The text of this book is available here.
8. ED Morel, 1912. Morocco in Diplomacy. Quoted by F. Seymour Cocks, ibid.
9. Asquith denied it on March 10th 1913 and March 24th 1913. Grey denied it on April 28th 1914 and June 11th 1914.

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone.¹ The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services – such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater – that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.

The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation.

Gordon Brown, for example, was as much in denial about financial realities as any toxic debt trader. In June last year, during his Mansion House speech, he boasted that 40 per cent of the world’s foreign equities are now traded here. “I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London.”² The financial sector’s success had come about, he said, partly because the government had taken “a risk-based regulatory approach.” In the same hall three years before, he pledged that, “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers.”³ Can anyone, surveying this mess, now doubt the value of the precautionary principle?

Ecology and economy are both derived from the Greek word oikos — a house or dwelling. Our survival depends upon the rational management of this home: the space in which life can be sustained. The rules are the same in both cases. If you extract resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment, your stock will collapse. That’s another noun, which reminds us of the connection. The OED gives 69 definitions of stock. When it means a fund or store, the word evokes the trunk — or stock — of a tree, “from which the gains are an outgrowth.”⁴ Collapse occurs when you prune the tree so heavily that it dies. Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows.

The two crises feed each other. As a result of Iceland’s financial collapse, it is now contemplating joining the European Union, which means surrendering its fishing grounds to the Common Fisheries Policy. Already the prime minister Geir Haarde has suggested that his countrymen concentrate on exploiting the ocean.⁵ The economic disaster will cause an ecological disaster.

Normally it’s the other way around. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond shows how ecological crisis is often the prelude to social catastrophe.⁶ The obvious example is Easter Island, where society disintegrated soon after the population reached its highest historical numbers, the last trees were cut down and the construction of stone monuments peaked. The island chiefs had competed to erect ever-bigger statues. These required wood and rope (made from bark) for transport and extra food for the laborers. As the trees and soils on which the islanders depended disappeared, the population crashed and the survivors turned to cannibalism. (Let’s hope Iceland doesn’t go the same way.) Diamond wonders what the Easter islander who cut down the last palm tree might have thought. “Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees!’? Or: ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood’? Or: ‘We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter . . . your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering’?”⁷

Ecological collapse, Diamond shows, is as likely to be the result of economic success as of economic failure. The Maya of Central America, for example, were among the most advanced and successful people of their time. But a combination of population growth, extravagant construction projects and poor land management wiped out between 90 and 99% of the population. The Mayan collapse was accelerated by “the competition among kings and nobles that led to a chronic emphasis on war and erecting monuments rather than on solving underlying problems.”⁸ Does any of this sound familiar?

Again, the largest monuments were erected just before the ecosystem crashed. Again, this extravagance was partly responsible for the collapse: trees were used for making plaster with which to decorate their temples. The plaster became thicker and thicker as the kings sought to outdo each other’s conspicuous consumption.

Here are some of the reasons why people fail to prevent ecological collapse. Their resources appear at first to be inexhaustible; a long-term trend of depletion is concealed by short-term fluctuations; small numbers of powerful people advance their interests by damaging those of everyone else; short-term profits trump long-term survival. The same, in all cases, can be said of the collapse of financial systems. Is this how human beings are destined to behave? If we cannot act until stocks – of either kind – start sliding towards oblivion, we’re knackered.

But one of the benefits of modernity is our ability to spot trends and predict results. If fish in a depleted ecosystem grow by 5% a year and the catch expands by 10% a year, the fishery will collapse. If the global economy keeps growing at 3% a year (or 1700% a century) it too will hit the wall.

I’m not going to suggest, as some scoundrel who shares a name with me did on these pages last year⁹, that we should welcome a recession. But the financial crisis provides us with an opportunity to rethink this trajectory; an opportunity which is not available during periods of economic success. Governments restructuring their economies should read Herman Daly’s book Steady-State Economics.¹⁰

As usual I haven’t left enough space to discuss this, so the details will have to wait for another column. Or you can read the summary published by the Sustainable Development Commission.¹¹ But what Daly suggests is that nations which are already rich should replace growth (”more of the same stuff”) with development (”the same amount of better stuff”). A steady state economy has a constant stock of capital maintained by a rate of throughput no higher than the ecosystem can absorb. The use of resources is capped and the right to exploit them is auctioned. Poverty is addressed through the redistribution of wealth. The banks can lend only as much money as they possess.

Alternatively, we can persist in the magical thinking whose results have just come crashing home. The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires. Now we must learn to live in the real world.

1. Richard Black, 10th October 2008. “Nature loss ‘dwarfs bank crisis’,” BBC Online.
2. Gordon Brown, 20th June 2007. Speech to Mansion House.
3. Gordon Brown, 16th June 2004. Speech to Mansion House.
4. Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989.
5. Niklas Magnusson, 10th October 2008. “Iceland Premier Tells Nation to Go Fishing After Banks Implode,” Bloomberg News.
6. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Survive or Fail (Allen Lane, London, 2005).
7. ibid, 114.
8. ibid, 160.
9. George Monbiot, 9th October 2007. “Bring on the Recession,” The Guardian.
10. Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics – 2nd Edition (Island Press, Washington DC, 1991).
11. Herman E. Daly, 24th April 2008. A Steady-State Economy. Sustainable Development Commission.

The latest people to join these surreal protests are the world’s fishermen. They are on strike in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Japan and demonstrating in scores of maritime countries. Last month in Brussels they threw rocks and flares at the police, who have been conspiring with the world’s sedimentary basins to keep the price of oil high. The fishermen warn that if something isn’t done to help them, thousands could be forced to scrap their boats and hang up their nets. It’s an appalling prospect, which we should greet with heartfelt indifference.

Just as the oil price now seems to be all that stands between us and runaway climate change, it is also the only factor which offers a glimmer of hope to the world’s marine ecosystems. No East Asian government was prepared to conserve the stocks of tuna; now one-third of the tuna boats in Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea will stay in dock for the next few months because they can’t afford to sail.¹ The unsustainable quotas set on the US Pacific seaboard won’t be met this year, because the price of oil is rising faster than the price of fish.² The indefinite strike called by Spanish fishermen is the best news European fisheries have had for years. Beam trawlermen — who trash the seafloor and scoop up a massive bycatch of unwanted species — warn that their industry could collapse within a year.³ Hurray to that too.

It would, of course, be better for everyone if these unsustainable practices could be shut down gently without the need for a crisis or the loss of jobs, but this seems to be more than human nature can bear. The European Union has a programme for taking fishing boats out of service — the tonnage of the European fleet has fallen by 5% since 1999⁴ — but the decline in boats is too slow to overtake the decline in stocks. Every year the EU, like every other fishery authority, tries to accommodate its surplus boats by setting quotas higher than those proposed by its scientific advisers, and every year the population of several species is pressed a little closer to extinction.

The fishermen make two demands, which are taken up by politicians in coastal regions all over the world: they must be allowed to destroy their own livelihoods, and the rest of us should pay for it. Over seven years, European taxpayers will be giving this industry E3.8bn.⁵ Some of this money is used to take boats out of service and to find other jobs for fishermen, but the rest is used to equip boats with new engines and new gear, to keep them on the water, to modernise ports and landing sites and to promote and market the catch. Except for the funds used to re-train fishermen or help them into early retirement, there is no justification for this spending. At least farmers can argue — often falsely — that they are the “stewards of the countryside”. But what possible argument is there for keeping more fishermen afloat than the fish population can bear?

The EU says its spending will reduce fishing pressure and help fishermen adopt greener methods. In reality, it is delaying the decline of the industry and allowing it to defy ecological limits for as long as possible. If the member states want to protect the ecosystem, it’s a good deal cheaper to legislate than to pay. Our fishing policies, like those of almost all maritime nations, are a perfect parable of commercial stupidity and short-termism, helping an industry to destroy its long-term prospects for the sake of immediate profit.

But the fishermen only demand more. The headline on this week’s Fishing News is “Thanks for Nothing!”, bemoaning the British government’s refusal to follow France, Spain and Italy in handing out fuel subsidies.⁶ But why the heck should it? The Scottish fishing secretary, Richard Lochhead, demands that the government in Westminster “open the purse strings”. He also insists that new money is “not tied to decommissioning”: in other words no more boats should be taken off the water.⁷ Is this really a service to the industry, or only to its most short-sighted members?

I have a leaked copy of the draft proposal that European states will discuss on Thursday.⁸ It’s a disaster. Some of the boats, which under existing agreements, will be scrapped and turned into artificial reefs, permanently reducing the sized of the fleet, can now be replaced with smaller vessels. The EU will pay costs and salaries for crews stranded by the fuel crisis, so that they stay in business and can start fishing again when the price falls. Member states will be able to shell out more money (E100,000 per boat instead of E30,000) without breaking state aid rules. They can hand out new grants for replacing old equipment with more fuel-efficient gear. The proposal seems to be aimed at ensuring that the industry collapses through lack of fish rather than lack of fuel. The fishermen won’t go down without taking the ecosystem with them.

What makes the draft document so dumb is that in some regions, especially in British waters, the industry is just beginning to turn. While French, Spanish and Italian fishermen clamor for a resumption of blue fin tuna fishing,⁹ knowing that if they are allowed to fish now, this will be the last season ever, around the UK it has begun to dawn on some fishermen that there might be an association between the survival of the fish and the survival of the fishing. Prompted by Young’s seafood and some of the supermarkets, who in turn have been harried by environmental groups, some of the biggest British fisheries have applied for eco-labels from the Marine Stewardship Council, which sets standards for how fish are caught.¹⁰ Fishermen around the UK also seem to be taking the law more seriously, and at last to be showing some interest in obscure issues such as spawning grounds and juvenile fish (which, believe it or not, turn out to have a connection to future fish stocks). By ensuring that far too many boats, and far too many desperate fishermen, stay on the water, and that the remaining quotas are stretched too thinly, the EU will slow down or even reverse the greening of the industry.

Why is this issue so hard to resolve? Why does every representative of a fishing region believe he must defend his constituents’ right to ensure that their children have nothing to inherit? Why do the leaders of the fishermen’s associations feel the need always to denounce the scientists who say that fish stocks decline if they are hit too hard? If this is a microcosm of how human beings engage with the environment, the prospect for humanity is not a happy one.

1. Tom Seaman, July 2008. “Global supply of sushi tuna to plummet on soaring fuel prices,” Intrafish, Vol 6, Issue 7.
2. Steve Quinn, 29th June 2008. “Time to jump ship? Almost, say commercial fishermen,” The Associated Press.
3. James Meikle, 23rd May 2008. “Fish prices may rise by up to 50%,” The Guardian.
4. 4. European Union, 2008. Evolution of the fleet’s number of vessels, tonnage and engine power.
5. European Commission, 2006. The European Fisheries Fund 2007-2013.
6. Fishing News, 4th July 2008.
7. No author given, 4th July 2008. “Open the Purse Strings.” Lochhead. Fishing News.
8. The Council of the European Union, 2008. Proposal for a Council Regulation instituting a temporary specific action aiming to promote the restructuring of the European fisheries fleets affected by the economic crisis.
9. Agence France Press, 17th June 2008. “EU rejects calls to drop planned tuna fishing ban.”
10. Severin Carrell, 26th March 2008. “British seas turning green, says watchdog,” The Guardian.

I had no intention of arresting John Bolton, the former under-secretary of state at the US State Department, when I arrived at the Hay Festival. But during a panel discussion about the Iraq war, I remarked that the greatest crime of the 21st century had become so normalized that one of its authors was due to visit the festival to promote his book. I proposed that someone should attempt a citizens’ arrest, in the hope of instilling a fear of punishment among those who plan illegal wars. After the session I realized that I couldn’t call on other people to do something I wasn’t prepared to do myself.

I knew that I was more likely to be arrested and charged than Mr. Bolton. I had no intention of harming him, or of acting in any way that could be interpreted as aggressive, but had I sought only to steer him gently towards the police I might have faced a range of exotic charges, from false imprisonment to aggravated assault. I was prepared to take this risk. It is not enough to demand that other people act, knowing that they will not. If the police, the courts and the state fail to prosecute what the Nuremberg tribunal described as “the supreme international crime,”¹ I believe we have a duty to seek to advance the process.²

The Nuremberg Principles, which arose from the prosecution of the Nazi war criminals, define as an international crime the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.”³ Bolton appears to have “participated in a common plan” to prepare for the war (also defined by the principles as a crime) by inserting the false claim that Iraq was seeking to procure uranium from Niger into a State Department fact sheet(⁴,⁵). He also organized the sacking of Jose Bustani, the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (⁶,⁷). Bustani had tried to broker a peaceful resolution of the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.⁸

Some of the most pungent criticisms of my feeble attempt to bring this man to justice have come from other writers for the Guardian. Michael White took a position of extraordinary generosity towards the instigators of the war.⁹ There are “arguments on both sides”, he contended. Bustani might have received compensation after his sacking by Bolton, “but Bolton says that does not mean much. That is sometimes true.” In fact Bustani was not only compensated at his tribunal; he was completely exonerated of Bolton’s charges and his employers were obliged to pay special damages.¹⁰

White suggested that Iraq might indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger, on the grounds of a conversation he once had with an MI6 officer. Alongside the British government’s 45-minute claim, this must be the best-documented of all the false justifications for the war with Iraq. In 2002, the US government sent three senior officials to Niger to investigate the claim.¹¹ All reported that it was without foundation. The International Atomic Energy Agency discovered that it was based on crude forgeries.¹² This assessment was confirmed by the State Department’s official Greg Thielmann¹³, who reported directly to John Bolton.¹⁴ No evidence beyond the forged documents has been provided by either the US or the UK governments to support their allegation.

White also gives credence to Bolton’s claims that the war in 2003 was justified by two UN resolutions — 678 and 687 — which were approved in 1990 and 1991, and that it was permitted by Article 51 of the UN Charter. The attempt to revive resolutions 678 and 687 was the last, desperate throw of the dice by the Blair government when all else had failed. When it became clear that it could not obtain a new UN resolution authorizing force against Iraq, the government dusted down the old ones, which had been drafted in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. This revival formed the basis of Lord Goldsmith’s published advice on 17th March 2003. It was described as “risible” and “scrap[ing] the bottom of the legal barrel” by Lord Alexander, a senior law lord.¹⁵ After the first Gulf War, Colin Powell, General Sir Peter de la Billiere and John Major all stated that the UN’s resolutions permitted them only to expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait, and not to overthrow the Iraqi government.¹⁶ Lord Goldsmith himself, in the summer of 2002, advised Tony Blair that resolutions 678 and 687 could not be used to justify a new war with Iraq.¹⁷

Article 51 of the UN Charter is comprehensible to anyone but the lawyers employed by the Bush administration. States have a right to self-defense “if an armed attack occurs against” them, and then only until the UN Security Council can intervene. On what occasion did Iraq attack the United States? Is there any claim made by the Blair and Bush governments that Michael White is not prepared to believe?

Conor Foley, writing on Comment is Free, suggested that my action “completely trivializes the serious case” against the Iraq war¹⁸ and claimed that I was seeking to “imprison . . . people because of their political opinions”¹⁹, as if Bolton were simply a commentator on the war, and not an agent. Does he really believe that the former under-secretary did not “participate in a common plan” to initiate the war with Iraq? What other conceivable purpose might the State Department’s misleading fact sheet have served? And what more serious action can someone who is neither a Law Lord nor a legislator take? Bolton himself maintains that my attempt to bring him to justice reflects a “move towards lawlessness and fascism.”²⁰ This is an interesting commentary on an attempt to uphold a law which arose from the prosecution of fascists.

But there is one charge I do accept: that my chances of success were very slight. Apart from the 300-pound gorillas, the main obstacle I faced was that although the crime of aggression, as defined by the Nuremberg Principles, has been incorporated into the legislation of many countries, it has not been assimilated into the laws of England and Wales.²¹ (formerly R v. J (Appellant)), Etc. This does not lessen the crime but it means that it cannot yet be tried here. This merely highlights another injustice: while the British state is prepared to punish petty misdemeanors with vindictive ferocity, it will not legislate against the greatest crime of all, lest it expose itself to prosecution.

But demonstration has two meanings. Non-violent direct action is both a protest and an exposition. It seeks to demonstrate truths which have been overlooked or forgotten. I sought to remind people that the greatest crime of the 21st Century remains unprosecuted, and remains a great crime. If you have read this far, I have succeeded.

1. Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, 9th November 2004. “Aggressive War: Supreme International Crime.”
2. The charge sheet Nicola Cutcher and I compiled can be read here.
3. http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/390?OpenDocument
4. See letter from Rep. Henry Waxman to Rep. Christopher Shays, 1st March 2005.
5. The State Department fact sheet can be read here.
6. Charles J. Hanley, 4th June 2005. “Bolton Said to Orchestrate Unlawful Firing,” Associated Press.
7. Bolton himself boasts of this role in his book, Surrender is Not an Option, 2008. pp 95-98. Threshold Editions, New York.
8. See www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/16/a-war-against-the-peacemaker/
9. Michael White, 29th May 2008. “What I really think about John Bolton.”
10. See www.ilo.org/public/english/tribunal/fulltext/2232.htm
11. 11. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Ambassador Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick and General Carlton Fulford.
12. Mohamed ElBaradei, 7th March 2003. The Status of Nuclear Inspections in Iraq: an Update. Statement to the United Nations Security Council.
13. Michael Duffy and James Carney, 21st July 2003. “A Question Of Trust.” Time magazine.
14. No author given, 1st August 2005. “Bush appoints Bolton as his UN ambassador.” The Economist.
15. Clare Dyer, 15th October 2003. “Goldsmith ’scraped the legal barrel’ over Iraq war,” The Guardian.
16. Philippe Sands, 2005. Lawless World, p190. Penguin, London.
17. John Kampfner, 2003. Blair’s Wars, p378. Free Press.
18. Conor Foley, 30th May 2008. “Monbiot’s silly stunt.”
19. Conor makes this claim in the comment thread.
20. Stephen Adams, 29th May 2008. “John Bolton: Citizen’s arrest attempt was comic,” The Telegraph.
21. House of Lords, 2006. Judgments – R v. Jones (Appellant) (On Appeal from the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division

These state the following:

“Principle VI
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

. . .

“Principle VII

Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.”

The evidence against him is as follows:

1. John Bolton orchestrated the sacking of the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Jose Bustani. Bustani had offered to resolve the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, and therefore to avert armed conflict. He had offered to seek to persuade Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, which would mean that Iraq was then subject to weapons inspections by the OPCW. As the OPCW was not tainted by the CIA’s infiltration of UNSCOM, Bustani’s initiative had the potential to defuse the crisis over Saddam Hussein’s obstruction of UNMOVIC inspections.

Apparently in order to prevent the negotiated settlement that Bustani proposed, and as part of a common plan with other administration officials to prepare and initiate a war of aggression, in violation of international treaties, Mr. Bolton acted as follows:

In March 2002 his office produced a ‘White Paper’ claiming that the OPCW was seeking an “inappropriate role” in Iraq.

On 20th March 2002 he met Bustani at the Hague to seek his resignation. Bustani refused to resign.

On 21st March 2002 he orchestrated a No-Confidence Motion calling for Bustani to resign as Director General, which was introduced by the United States delegation. The motion failed.

On 22nd April 2002 the US called a special session of the conference of the States Parties and the Conference adopted the decision to terminate the appointment of the Director General effective immediately. Bolton had suggested that the US would withhold its dues from OPCW. The motion to sack Bustani was carried. Bustani asserts that this ‘special session’ was illegal, in breach of his contract and gave illegitimate grounds for his dismissal, stating a ‘lack of confidence’ in his leadership, without specific examples, and ignoring the failed No-Confidence vote.

In his book Surrender is Not an Option, Mr. Bolton describes his role in Bustani’s sacking (pages 95-98) and states the following:

“I directed that we begin explaining to others that the US contribution to the OPCW might well be cut if Bustani remained”.

“I met with Bustani to tell him he should resign … If he left now, we would do our best to give him ‘a gracious and dignified exit’. Otherwise we intended to have him fired”.

“I stepped in to tank the protocol, and then to tank Bustani”.

Bolton appears, in other words, to accept primary responsibility for Bustani’s dismissal.

Bustani appealed against the decision through the International Labor Organization Tribunal. He was vindicated in his appeal and awarded his full salary and moral damages.

2. Mr. Bolton helped to promote the false claim, through a State Department Fact Sheet, that Saddam Hussein had been seeking to procure uranium from Niger, as part of a common plan to prepare and initiate a war of aggression, in violation of international treaties.

The State Department Fact Sheet was released on the 19th December 2002 and was entitled ‘Illustrative Examples of Omissions From the Iraqi Declaration to the United States Security Council.’ Under the heading ‘Nuclear Weapons’ the fact sheet stated –

“The Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger.

Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?”

In a US Department of State press briefing on July 14th 2003 the spokesman Richard Boucher said “The accusation that turned out to be based on fraudulent evidence is that Niger sold uranium to Iraq.”

Bolton’s involvement in the use of fraudulent evidence is documented in Rep. Henry Waxman’s letter to Christopher Shays on the 1st March 2005. Waxman says “In April 2004, the State Department used the designation ‘sensitive but unclassified’ to conceal unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, in the creation of a fact sheet distributed to the United Nations that falsely claimed that Iraq sought uranium from Niger.”

“Both State Department intelligence officials and CIA officials reported that they had rejected the claims as unreliable. As a result, it was unclear who within the State Department was involved in preparing the fact sheet.”

Waxman requested a chronology of how the Fact Sheet was developed. His letter states:

“This chronology described a meeting on December 18,2002, between Secretary Powell, Mr. Bolton, and Richard Boucher, the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Public Affairs. According to this chronology, Mr. Boucher specifically asked Mr. Bolton ‘for help developing a response to Iraq’s Dec 7 Declaration to the United Nations Security Council that could be used with the press.’ According to the chronology, which is phrased in the present tense, Mr. Bolton ‘agrees and tasks the Bureau of Nonproliferation,’ a subordinate office that reports directly to Mr. Bolton, to conduct the work.

“This unclassified chronology also stated that on the next day, December 19, 2003, the Bureau of Nonproliferation “sends email with the fact sheet, ‘Fact Sheet Iraq Declaration.doc,’” to Mr. Bolton’s office (emphasis in original). A second e-mail was sent a few minutes later, and a third e-mail was sent about an hour after that. According to the chronology, each version ‘still includes Niger reference.’ Although Mr. Bolton may not have personally drafted the document, the chronology appears to indicate that he ordered its creation and received updates on its development.”

Both these actions were designed to assist in the planning of a war of aggression. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg ruled that “to initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime.”

Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guantanamo detainees who have “taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention.”² Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that’s one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality it turns out that “anti-coalition militant activities” include talking to the media about their captivity in Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantanamo. But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from Al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government.

The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men “successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years.”³ The US government’s intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials or due process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guantanamo Bay not only deny justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world.

Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan.⁴ He admitted that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made “under pressure and threats.”⁵ When the Americans released him from Guantanamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissable evidence required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony.⁶ The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.

All evidence obtained in Guantanamo Bay, and in the CIA’s other detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques – devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington – have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear.

In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantanamo Bay and described by the authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as “the 20th hijacker”. By the time his interrogators started using “enhanced techniques” to extract information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he “was talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end.”⁷ He was sexually abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a man in this state?

The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guantanamo Bay. “Twelve thousand kilometers away from Mecca, I realized the reality of the Americans and what those infidels want,” he said.⁸ He claimed he was beaten, drugged and “used for experiments” and that “the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the Koran and threw it in dirty places.”³ Al-Ajmi’s lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying.⁹

The accounts of people released from Guantanamo Bay describe treatment that would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. “Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? That’s exactly what we’re going to do with you.” There were certain similarities. “I knew a man from Morocco,” Kurnaz writes, “who used to be a ship captain. He couldn’t move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.” The young man – scarcely more than a boy — in the cage next to Kurnaz’s had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp’s Immediate Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more.¹⁰

Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, “maybe the guy who goes into Guantanamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a fully fledged jihadist.”¹¹

In reading the histories of Guantanamo Bay, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process which generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.

1. Josh White, 8th May 2008. “Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack,” Washington Post.
2. Department of Defense, 12th July 2007. Former Guantanamo detainees who have returned to the fight.
3. ibid.
4. Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants at US Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Department of Defense, No date given. Abdallah Salih Ali Al Ajmi: summary of evidence. Pp8-9 of the pdf file.
5. Department of Defense, no date given. Summarized Administrative Review Board Detainee Statement. Page 47 of the pdf.
6. No author given, 26th May 2006. “5 ex-Guantanamo detainees freed in Kuwait,” Associated Press.
7. Philippe Sands, 2008. Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, extracted in Vanity Fair, May 2008.
8. Quoted by Alissa J. Rubin, 9th May 2008. “Bomber’s Final Messages Exhort Fighters Against US,” New York Times.
9. Ben Fox, 7th M ay 2008. “Ex-Gitmo prisoner in recent attack,” Associated Press.
10. Murat Kurnaz, 2008. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. Palgrave Macmillan. Extracted in the Guardian, 23rd April 2008.
11. Quoted by David Rose, 26th February 2006. “Using terror to fight terror,” The Observer.

Dover was Murdoch’s vice-president in China. He took his orders directly from the boss. His book, which was published in February, is a fascinating study of power, and of a man who could not bring himself to believe that anyone would stand in his way.¹ So why aren’t we reading about it?

Murdoch, Dover shows, began his assault on China with two strategic mistakes. The first was to pay a staggering price — US$525m — for a majority stake in Star TV, a failing satellite broadcaster based in Hong Kong. The second was to make a speech in September 1993, a few months after he had bought the business, which he had neither written nor read very carefully. New telecommunications, he said, “have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere. … satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.”

The Chinese leaders were furious. The prime minister, Li Peng, issued a decree banning satellite dishes from China. Murdoch spent the next ten years grovelling. In the interests of business the great capitalist became the communist government’s most powerful supporter.

Within six months of Li Peng’s ban, Murdoch dropped the BBC from Star’s China signal. His publishing company, HarperCollins, paid a fortune for a tedious biography of the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, written by Deng’s daughter. He built a website for the regime’s propaganda sheet, the People’s Daily. In 1997 he made another speech in which he tried to undo the damage he had caused four years before. “China”, he said, “is a distinctive market with distinctive social and moral values that Western companies must learn to abide by.” His minions ensured, Dover reveals, that “every relevant Chinese government official received a copy.”

But the satellite dishes remained banned, so he grovelled even more. He described the Dalai Lama as “a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes”. His son James claimed that the Western media was “painting a falsely negative portrayal of China through their focus on controversial issues such as human rights”. Rupert employed his unsalaried gopher Tony Blair to give him special access: in 1999 Blair placed him next to the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at a Downing Street lunch. To secure some limited cable rights in southern China, News Corporation agreed to carry a Chinese government channel — CCTV 9 — on Fox and Sky. Murdoch promised to “further strengthen cooperative ties with the Chinese media, and explore new areas with an even more positive attitude”.

Most notoriously, he instructed HarperCollins not to publish the book it had bought from the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Dover reveals that Murdoch was forced to intervene directly (he instructed the publishers to “kill the fucking book”) because his usual system of control had broken down. “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions to his senior executives or editors.” Instead he expected “a sort of ‘anticipatory compliance’. One didn’t need to be instructed about what to do, one simply knew what was in one’s long-term interests.” In this case executives at HarperCollins had failed to understand that when the boss objected to Patten’s views on China it meant that the book was dead.

Anticipatory compliance also describes Murdoch’s approach to Beijing. Dover shows that the Chinese leadership never asked for Chris Patten’s book to be banned: they didn’t even know it existed. But when Murdoch killed it, “our Beijing minders were impressed and the Patten incident marked a distinct warming in the relationship.”

The strategy failed. Murdoch was astonished that he couldn’t replicate “the cozy relationship he enjoyed with Britain’s political Establishment”. For the first time in his later career, he had encountered an organisation more powerful and more determined than he was. He has now retreated from China, after losing at least $1bn.

This is a riveting story about two of the world’s most powerful forces. Dover’s British publisher told me “I thought this was a natural for serialisation. We had the author primed and prepared to come over here. But we had to cancel as we could not raise enough interest. We’ve hit brick walls and we don’t understand why.”² The book has been reviewed in The Economist and the Financial Times, but neither the other British newspapers nor the broadcasters have touched it.

As far as I can discover, the book has been reviewed by only one Murdoch publication anywhere on earth — the Australian Literary Review — and that was an article of such snivelling sycophancy that you wonder why they bothered.³ The editor of another of News Corporation’s titles, the Far Eastern Economic Review, commissioned a review of Dover’s book, then admitted to contracting “cold feet” and spiked it.⁴

But what of the other papers? Why should they appease Murdoch? “When you see the reaction of the British media to the book,” Bruce Dover tells me, “one can better understand why in some respects the Chinese so admired Murdoch – an Emperor who inspires fear in his followers need not raise a hand against them.”⁵ He might be right, but I think there is also a general bias against relevance in the review sections. When I worked in faraway countries my books about the tribulations of obscure peoples were comprehensively reviewed. When I came home and wrote Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of Britain, it was ignored. There appears to be an inverse relationship between how hard a book hits and how well it is covered.

Paradoxically for a publication which inspires such fear, Bruce Dover’s story sometimes steps back from the brink. He observes that News Corporation never promised the Chinese government favourable coverage; Murdoch undertook only to be “fair”, “balanced” and “objective”. Dover takes these terms at face value, though it is obvious from his account that they were being used as code for sympathetic treatment. His book does not contain News Corporation’s most direct admission: the statement by Murdoch’s spokesman Wang Yukui that “we won’t do programmes that are offensive in China. … If you call this self-censorship then of course we’re doing a kind of self-censorship.”⁶ He is wrong to suggest that “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions”. As the testimony by Andrew Neil (formerly the editor of the Sunday Times) before the Lords Communications Committee shows⁷, the paramount leader micromanages the editorial content of the newspapers he owns which swing the greatest political weight.

But I am sure it is true that anticipatory compliance is Murdoch’s most powerful weapon. I doubt he needed to tell all 247 of his editors to support the invasion of Iraq, but they did.⁸ He might not even have had to lean on Tony Blair to ensure — as Blair’s former spin doctor Lance Price reveals — that no British minister said “anything positive about the euro.”⁹ Power is sustained not by force but by fear, as everyone seeks to interpret the wishes of his master and to meet them even before he asks.

1. Bruce Dover, 2008. Rupert’s Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife (Mainstream Publishing, 2008).
2. E-mail from Bill Campbell, 17th April 2008.
3. Mark Day, 2nd April 2008. “More than a mogul can bear,” Australian Literary Review.
4. Donald Greenlees, 3rd March 2008. “Review of Book on Murdoch Is Killed,” The New York Times.
5. E-mail from Bruce Dover, 17th April 2008.
6. Agence France Presse, 20th December 2001. “Murdoch’s News Corp looks for further China access after TV.”
7. Andrew Neil, 23 January 2008. Minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on Communications: Media Ownership and the News. House of Lords.
8. David Harvey, 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p35. Oxford University Press.
9. Lance Price, 1st July 2006. “Rupert Murdoch is effectively a member of Blair’s cabinet,” The Guardian.

You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%.¹ There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices.² But I bet you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records.³ It beat the previous year’s by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people.⁴

I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol …could feed one person for a year.”⁵ Last year global stockpiles of cereals declined by around 53m tons⁶; this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels this year will consume almost 100m tons⁷, which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis. In The Guardian yesterday the transport secretary Ruth Kelly promised that “if we need to adjust policy in the light of new evidence, we will.”⁸ What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.

But I have been saying this for four years and I am boring myself. Of course we must demand that our governments scrap the rules which turn grain into the fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tons of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tons will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals.⁷ This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the United Kingdom it has scarcely changed since the government started gathering data in 1974. At just over 1kg per person per week⁹, it’s still about 40% above the global average¹⁰, though less than half the amount consumed in the United States.¹¹ We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogram of flesh they produce; a kilogram of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.

In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby’s book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet grown by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half the current total).¹² Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.

But I cannot advocate a diet I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.

What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9bn by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tons of grain.¹³ Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians like Ms Kelly are able to “adjust policy in the light of new evidence” and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tons of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK’s average consumption.

This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it doesn’t contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that if animals were kept only on land that’s unsuitable for arable farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world could produce between a third and two thirds of its current milk and meat supply.¹⁴ But this system then runs into a different problem. The FAO calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely.¹⁵ The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible. Let’s reserve it — as most societies have done until recently — for special occasions.

For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. It’s a freshwater fish which can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency — about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat — of any farmed animal.¹⁶ Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.

Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realize that they feed off each other.

1. E.g. “The cost of food: facts and figures,” BBC, April 8, 2008.
2. World Bank, 14th April 2008. “Food Price Crisis Imperils 100 Million in Poor Countries, Zoellick Says.” Press release.
3. Food and Agriculture Organization, April 2008. Crop Prospects and Food Situation.
4. ibid.
5. World Bank, 2008. Biofuels: The Promise and the Risks.
6. Gerrit Buntrock, 6th December 2007. “Cheap no more,” The Economist.
7. Food and Agriculture Organization, April 2008, ibid.
8. Ruth Kelly, 14th April 2008. “Biofuels: a blueprint for the future?” The Guardian.
9. The British government gives a total meat purchase figure of 1042g/person/week for 2006.
10. There’s a discussion of global average figures here.
11. See Food and Agriculture Organization, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Figure 1.4, p9.
12. Simon Fairlie, Winter 2007-8. “Can Britain Feed Itself?” The Land.
13. Based on the current population of 6.8bn consuming 1006mt of grain.
14. Simon Fairlie, forthcoming. “Default livestock farming.” The Land, Summer 2008.
15. Food and Agriculture Organization, 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow.
16. The FAO (ibid) gives 1.6-1.8. On April 12th, I spoke to Francis Murray of the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, who suggested 1.5.

John Hutton claims that new nuclear power stations will generate not only the energy we need, but also 100,000 new jobs.² When and how? Here or in France? Northumberland County Council has revealed that it is spending £3.6 million on one new roundabout, at Haltwhistle. A staggering waste of public money? No, “it will both attract new jobs to the town and secure existing employment.”³

It is true that investment creates employment. But jobs are used to justify anything and everything. If recession strikes, the political value of any scheme which boosts them will rise. Projects which in more prosperous times might have been rejected by planners or ministers will suddenly find favor. Anyone who stands in their way — however daft the schemes may be — will be walloped as an anti-social Luddite.

But the big question is asked very rarely in the press: how reliable are these promises? Whenever a new defense contract or superstore or road or airport is announced, the papers and broadcasters repeat the employment figures without questioning them. They rarely return to the story to discover whether the claims were true.

The Guardian’s research service was able to find only two stories which challenged individual claims about job creation. One, from 2003, covered a National Audit Office investigation into the government’s grants to companies in deprived areas.⁴ The grants cost the taxpayer £1.4bn and were meant to have created or protected 300,000 jobs. But the auditors found that only 45% of these jobs were additional: the rest would have been saved or created if the grants hadn’t existed. Of these, 11% displaced other jobs in the same region, even when the multiplier effect (jobs creating further jobs) was taken into account.⁵ The schemes had worked, but not as well as the government had claimed.

The other story, in February this year, reported an odd but quite common phenomenom: a private equity boss attacking his own industry. Jon Moulton, the founder of Alchemy Partners, berated his own trade body for using “very dodgy statistics.”⁶ The British Venture Capital Association had claimed that jobs at private equity firms have risen by 8% a year over the past five years, while in publicly-listed companies jobs have grown by only 0.4% a year.⁷

Speaking at the industry’s SuperReturn 2008 conference, Moulton pointed out that the association’s figures excluded the private equity firms that had gone out of business. “If you use an adjusted figure, the number should be more like zero. We’re putting these things out as fact and we shouldn’t.”

Many of the published figures have to be wrong. At the beginning of his nuclear speech, John Hutton praised the efforts of Dougie Rooney, the energy officer for the trade union Unite, for his “unique contribution to nuclear’s renaissance in the UK.” But they can’t get their story straight. Rooney has claimed that the nuclear program will generate 10,000 new jobs: one tenth of Hutton’s figure.⁸

Ten years ago, a research organization called the National Retail Planning Forum — financed by Sainsbury, Tesco, Marks and Spencer, Boots and John Lewis — published a report on the superstores’ impact on employment. It found that there is “strong evidence that new out-of-centre superstores have a negative net impact on retail employment up to 15 km away.”⁹ The 93 stores the forum studied were responsible for the net loss of 25,685 employees: every time a large supermarket opened, 276 people lost their jobs. This is hardly surprising. The New Economics Foundation has calculated that every £50,000 spent in small local shops creates one job. You must spend £250,000 in superstores for the same result.¹⁰

But the press — especially the local papers — reports Eldorado every time a new store opens. In the past few days the Telegraph and Argus claimed that Marks and Spencer will create 2,500 new jobs in Bradford¹¹; the Halifax Evening Courier announced that the local B&Q will hatch an extra 60 jobs by moving to bigger premises¹²; the BBC published a story headlined “Morrisons site creates 1,000 jobs.”¹³ Seldom is there a word about the employment these schemes will destroy.

To produce a definitive account of the gap between the claims made by companies promoting new schemes and the jobs they really deliver would take years. Instead, I asked a researcher, Nicola Cutcher, to conduct a rough sampling exercise. She took the latest year for which job figures are broken down by the size of employer are available — 2006 — and selected the middle week of each quarter. She then went through all the stories that mentioned the word “jobs” in a press database¹⁴, selecting those which reported new openings or closures by large enterprises (over 250 staff) that were definitely taking place. She ensured that each claim was counted only once. To produce a rough average for the year, she multiplied the four weeks by 13.

The government reports that the number of jobs among large enterprises rose by 189,000 between 2005 and 2006.¹⁵ Our rough sample suggests a net gain of 1.4 million, or 7.4 times the official rate. If the same exaggeration applied to the whole economy, there would be 218 million workers in the United Kingdom.¹⁶

This exercise has severe limitations. Job figures tend to be quite lumpy. Some of the posts take several years to create, so they won’t show up in the 2006 figures; though 2006, of course, harvested the jobs announced in previous years. But the gains among large employers this decade have fluctuated between 160,000 and 330,000¹⁷: in no year has anything like 1.4 million net jobs been created.

Should we be surprised by such exaggerations? Of course not. Though the papers are generally good at reporting job cuts, they rely for the good news on companies and government departments that have an interest in talking up the benefits of their schemes. There is also plenty of confusion, often cunningly sown in corporate press releases, about whether the new jobs are being created directly or indirectly. When claiming wider benefits for their schemes, employers use the most generous possible multiplier effects. The indirect employment claimed by one company is the direct employment created by another. As they all declare responsibility for work created elsewhere, new jobs in this wacky world are generated several times over.

We need some reliable research into the reporting of employment claims. We need journalists to start asking questions about the figures they are fed; perhaps to refuse to print them unless they have been independently audited. And we all need to make a simple demand whenever a shiny new scheme promises to solve the community’s problems: prove it.

1. MoD, 27th March 2008, “£13 billion deal for new Tanker Aircraft signed,” Press release.
2. John Hutton, 26 March 2008, “New Nuclear Build: How do we make progress?“
3. No author, 28th March 2008, “£3m road scheme to aid jobs,” The Cumberland News
4. David Hencke, 17th June 2003, “£100m jobs subsidy scheme is poor value, say auditors,” The Guardian.
5. National Audit Office, 17th June 2003, The Department for Trade and Industry: Regional Grants in England.
6. Siobhan Kennedy, 27th February 2008, “High-profile buyout chief turns on his peer group,” The Times.
7. The British Venture Capital Association, 13th February 2008, The Economic Impact of Private Equity in the UK 2007.
8. No author, 26th March 2008, “Thousands of jobs’ in nuclear design licences,” The Herald.
9. Sam Porter, Paul Raistrick, January 1998, The Impact of Out-of-Centre Food Superstores on Local Retail Employment. The National Retail Planning Forum, c/o Corporate Analysis, Boots Company PLC, Nottingham.
10. Emma Hallett, New Economics Foundation, April 1998, pers comm.
11. Jo Winrow, 27th March 2008, “D-day looms for massive jobs project,” The Telegraph and Argus.
12. Carmel Harrison, 28th March 2008, “DIY superstore prepares to open,” Evening Courier.
13. No author, 19th March 2008, “Morrisons site creates 1,000 jobs,” BBC.
14. UK News.
15. http://stats.berr.gov.uk/ed/sme/smestats2005.xls and http://stats.berr.gov.uk/ed/sme/smestats2006.xls
16. The latest total figure is here.
17. All the tables are here: http://stats.berr.gov.uk/ed/sme/index.htm

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11th — I mean to say, December 11th 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto Protocol. George W Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore’s team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then it did something worse: it destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries.² When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy “hot air” from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the FSU countries would pass well below the bar. Gore’s scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren’t producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Factories in India and China have made billions by raising their production of potent greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up.³

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

By ensuring that the rich nations would not make real cuts, Gore also guaranteed that the poor ones scoffed when we asked them to do as we don’t. When George Bush announced, in 2001, that he would not ratify the protocol, the world cursed and stamped its feet. But his intransigence affected only the United States. Gore’s team ruined it for everyone.

The destructive power of the US delegation is not the only thing that hasn’t changed. After the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, the British environment secretary, John Prescott, announced that “this is a truly historic deal which will help curb the problems of climate change. For the first time it commits developed countries to make legally binding cuts in their emissions.”⁴ Ten years later the current environment secretary, Hilary Benn, told us that “this is an historic breakthrough and a huge step forward. For the first time ever all the world’s nations have agreed to negotiate on a deal to tackle dangerous climate change.”⁵ Do these people have a chip inserted?

In both cases the United States demanded terms which appeared impossible for the other nations to accept. Before Kyoto, the other negotiators flatly rejected Gore’s proposals for emissions trading. So his team threatened to sink the talks. The other nations capitulated, but the US still held out on technicalities until the very last moment, when it suddenly appeared to concede. In 1997 and in 2007 it got the best of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was praised for saving it.

Hilary Benn is an idiot. Our diplomats are suckers. US negotiators have pulled the same trick twice and for the second time our governments have fallen for it.

There are still two years to go, but so far the new agreement is even worse than the Kyoto Protocol. It contains no targets and no dates. A new set of guidelines also agreed at Bali extend and strengthen the worst of Al Gore’s trading scams, the clean development mechanism.⁶ Benn and the other dupes are cheering and waving their hats as the train leaves the station at last, having failed to notice that it is travelling in the wrong direction.

Though Gore does a better job of governing now that he is out of office, he was no George Bush. He wanted a strong, binding and meaningful protocol, but US politics had made it impossible. In July 1997 the Senate had voted 95-0 to sink any treaty which failed to treat developing countries in the same way as it treated the rich ones.⁷ Though they knew this was impossible for developing countries to accept, all the Democrats lined up with all the Republicans. The Clinton administration had proposed a compromise: instead of binding commitments for the developing nations, Gore would demand emissions trading.⁸ But even when he succeeded he announced that “we will not submit this agreement for ratification [in the Senate] until key developing nations participate.”⁹ Clinton could thus avoid an unwinnable war.

So why, regardless of the character of its leaders, does the United States act this way Because, like several other modern democracies, it is subject to two great corrupting forces. I have written before about the role of the corporate media (particularly in the US) in downplaying the threat of climate change and demonizing anyone who tries to address it.¹⁰ I won’t bore you with it again, except to remark that at 3pm eastern standard time on Saturday there were 20 news items on the front page of the Fox News website. The climate deal came 20th, after “Bikini-wearing stewardesses sell calendar for charity” and “Florida store sells ‘Santa Hates You’ T-shirt.”¹¹

Let us consider instead the other great source of corruption: campaign finance. The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies which stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things.¹²

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector (mostly coal, oil, gas and electricity) has given $418m to federal politicians in the US.¹³ Transport companies have given $355m.¹⁴ The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on George Bush, but they also gave Al Gore $142,000¹⁵, while transport companies gave him $347,000.¹⁶ The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

So don’t believe all this nonsense about waiting for the next president to sort it out. This is a much bigger problem than George W Bush. Yes, he is viscerally opposed to tackling climate change. But viscera don’t have much to do with it. Until the American people confront their political funding system, their politicians will keep speaking from the pocket, not the gut.

1. Friends of the Earth UK, 11th December 1997. Kyoto Deal Will Not Stop Global warming. Press release.
2. Through Emissions Trading, Joint Implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism.
3. See Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, September 2006. Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power. Development Dialogue 2006, no 48. And: Michael Wara, 8th February 2007. “Is the global carbon market working?” Nature, vol 445. p 595.
4. Department of the Environment, Transport & The Regions, 11th December 1997. “Historic Agreement Reached In Kyoto On Climate Change.” Press release 509/Environment.
5. No author, 15th December 2007. “Deal agreed in Bali climate talks.”
6. United Nations Climate Change Conference, 15th December 2007. Decision -/CMP.3
   Further guidance relating to the clean development mechanism.
7. You can read the Byrd-Hagel Resolution here.
8. ou can see how these two issues were played against each other in this statement by the Senate Republican Policy Committee.
9. CNN, 11th December 2007. “Clinton Hails Global Warming Pact.”
10. See in particular George Monbiot, 2007. Heat: how to stop the planet burning. Chapter 2. Penguin, London
11. Foxnews.com, viewed at 8.21pm UK time, 15th December 2007. Updated on the hour.
12. Open Secrets gives an almost-comprehensive account.
13. See here.
14. See here.
15. See here.
16. See here.

There is now a broad scientific consensus that we need to prevent temperatures from rising by more than 2°C above their pre-industrial level. Beyond that point, the Greenland ice sheet could go into irreversible meltdown, some ecosystems collapse, billions suffer from water stress, droughts could start to threaten global food supplies. (1,2)

The government proposes to cut the UK’s carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. This target is based on a report published in 2000. (3) That report was based on an assessment published in 1995, which drew on scientific papers published a few years earlier. The UK’s policy, in other words, is based on papers some 15 years old. Our target, which is one of the toughest on earth, bears no relation to current science.

Over the past fortnight, both Gordon Brown and his adviser Sir Nicholas Stern have proposed raising the cut to 80%. (4,5) Where did this figure come from? The last G8 summit adopted the aim of a global cut of 50% by 2050, which means that 80% would be roughly the UK’s fair share. But the G8’s target isn’t based on current science either.

In the new summary published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), you will find a table which links different cuts to likely temperatures. (6) To prevent global warming from eventually exceeding 2°, it suggests, by 2050 the world needs to cut its emissions to roughly 15% of the volume in 2000.

I looked up the global figures for carbon dioxide production in 2000 (7) and divided it by the current population. (8) This gives a baseline figure of 3.58 tons of CO2 per person. An 85% cut means that (if the population remains constant) the global output per head should be reduced to 0.537t by 2050. The UK currently produces 9.6 tons per head and the US 23.6t. (9,10) Reducing these figures to 0.537t means a 94.4% cut in the UK and a 97.7% cut in the US. But the world population will rise in the same period. If we assume a population of 9bn in 2050 (11), the cuts rise to 95.9% in the UK and 98.3% in the US.

The IPCC figures might also be out of date. In a footnote beneath the table, the panel admits that “emission reductions . . . might be underestimated due to missing carbon cycle feedbacks”. What this means is that the impact of the biosphere’s response to global warming has not been fully considered. As seawater warms, for example, it releases carbon dioxide. As soil bacteria heat up, they respire more, generating more CO2. As temperatures rise, tropical forests die back, releasing the carbon they contain. These are examples of positive feedbacks. A recent paper (all the references are on my website) estimates that feedbacks account for about 18% of global warming. (12) They are likely to intensify.

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters finds that even with a 90% global cut by 2050, the 2° threshold “is eventually broken.” (13) To stabilise temperatures at 1.5° above the pre-industrial level requires a global cut of 100%. The diplomats who started talks in Bali yesterday should be discussing the complete decarbonisation of the global economy.

It is not impossible. In a previous article I showed how by switching the whole economy over to the use of electricity and by deploying the latest thinking on regional supergrids, grid balancing and energy storage, you could run almost the entire energy system on renewable power. (14) The major exception is flying (don’t expect to see battery-powered jetliners) which suggests that we should be closing rather than opening runways.

This could account for around 90% of the necessary cut. Total decarbonisation demands that we go further. Preventing 2° of warming means stripping carbon dioxide from the air. The necessary technology already exists (15): the challenge is making it efficient and cheap. Last year Joshuah Stolaroff, who has written a PhD on the subject, sent me some provisional costings, of £256-458 per ton of carbon. (16,17) This makes the capture of CO2 from the air roughly three times as expensive as the British government’s costings for building wind turbines, twice as expensive as nuclear power, slightly cheaper than tidal power and 8 times cheaper than rooftop solar panels in the UK(18). But I suspect his figures are too low, as they suggest this method is cheaper than catching CO2 from purpose-built power stations(19), which cannot be true. (20)

The Kyoto Protocol, whose replacement the Bali meeting will discuss, has failed. Since it was signed, there has been an acceleration in global emissions: the rate of CO2 production exceeds the IPCC’s worst case and is now growing faster than at any time since the beginning of the industrial revolution. (21) It’s not just the Chinese. A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that “no region is decarbonizing its energy supply. “(22) Even the age-old trend of declining energy intensity as economies mature has gone into reverse. (23) In the UK there is a stupefying gulf between the government’s climate policy and the facts it is creating on the ground. How will we achieve even a 60% cut if we build new coal plants, new roads and a third runway at Heathrow?

Underlying the immediate problem is a much greater one. In a lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering in May, Professor Rod Smith of Imperial College explained that a growth rate of 3% means economic activity doubles in 23 years. (24) At 10% it takes just 7 years. This we knew. But Smith takes it further. With a series of equations he shows that “each successive doubling period consumes as much resource as all the previous doubling periods combined.” In other words, if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2040, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs. Then, between 2040 and 2063, we must double our total consumption again. Reading that paper I realised for the first time what we are up against.

But I am not advocating despair. We must confront a challenge which is as great and as pressing as the rise of the Axis powers. Had we thrown up our hands then, as many people are tempted to do today, you would be reading this paper in German. Though the war often seemed impossible to win, when the political will was mobilised strange and implausible things began to happen. The US economy was spun round on a dime in 1942 as civilian manufacturing was switched to military production. (25) The state took on greater powers than it had exercised before. Impossible policies suddenly became achievable.

The real issues in Bali are not technical or economic. The crisis we face demands a profound philosophical discussion, a reappraisal of who we are and what progress means. Debating these matters makes us neither saints nor communists; it shows only that we have understood the science.

REFERENCES

1. See, for example, IPCC, 2007. Climate change and its impacts in the near and long term under different scenarios and:

2. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Editor in chief), 2006. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.

3. Royal Commission On Environmental Pollution, June 2000. Energy — the Changing Climate.

4. Gordon Brown, 19th November 2007. Speech on Climate Change.

5. Sir Nicholas Stern, 30th November 2007. “Bali: Now the rich must pay.” The Guardian.

6. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. Fourth Assessment Report. Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Summary for Policymakers, Table SPM.6.

7. All the following figures are for CO2 from the burning and flaring of fossil fuel.

8. Currently 6,635m.

9. The latest figures are for 2005. http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls

10. Population figures for 2005.

11. This is a conservative assumption.

12. Josep G. Canadell et al. 25th October 2007. Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

13. Andrew J. Weaver et al, 6th October 2007. “Long term climate implications of 2050 emission reduction targets.” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 34, L19703. doi:10.1029/2007GL031018, 2007.

14. George Monbiot, 3rd July 2007. “A Sudden Change of State.” The Guardian.

15. Frank Zeman, 26th September 2007. Energy and Material Balance of CO2 Capture from Ambient Air. Environmental Science & Technology, Vol. 41, No. 21, pp7558-7563. 10.1021/es070874m

16. Stolaroff’s figures are $140-250/US ton-CO2. I have converted them into £/metric tonne-C. The weight of CO2 is 3.667x that of C.

17. You can read his PhD here.

18. Department of Trade and Industry (now the DBERR), 2003. Energy White Paper — Supplementary Annexes, p7.

19. The DBERR gives figures for C savings through capture-ready power stations of £460-560/tC.

20. It cannot be true because the concentration of CO2 in thermal power station effluent is many times higher than that in ambient air.

21. Josep G. Canadell et al, ibid.

22. Michael R. Raupach et al, 12th June 2007. Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol.104, no. 24. Pp 10288–10293.

23. ibid.

24. Roderick A Smith, 29th May 2007. “Lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Carpe Diem: The dangers of risk aversion.” Reprinted in Civil Engineering Surveyor, October 2007.

25. Jack Doyle, 2000. Taken for a Ride: Detroit’s Big Three and the Politics of Pollution, pp1-2. Four Walls, Eight Windows, New York.