WATERMELON Conference Newsletter of Green Left Autumn 2022

watermelon

Conference Newsletter of Green Left Autumn 2022

Green Left is an anti-capitalist, ecosocialist group within the Green Party of England & Wales. Membership is open to all GPEW members, (see back page for details). All views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Green Left.

Keith Baker

The UK is heading into the greatest cost of living crisis in living memory. Looming energy price rises are going to drive huge swathes of the population into fuel poverty, and none of the proposals being put forward by our political parties at Westminster or in Scotland or Wales are sufficient to deal with it.

So, let’s look at what the parties are proposing for households (businesses are also facing a serious threat but politicians have so far largely ignored them).

Newly-elected Prime Minister Liz Truss looks set to cap typical household energy bills at £2,500 per year for the next two years but, aside from not being enough to prevent many more households falling into fuel poverty, there are two serious problems with this. The first is the word ‘typical’ – the cap is on unit energy prices (excluding the standing charges), meaning many households will stall face bills far in excess of this figure. The second is that the cap will be paid for by loans to the energy companies which will be paid back, from the public purse and with interest, over the next ten to twenty years.

The £400 payment to all households planned for this October will still go ahead, but Truss is also planning to suspend the green levies for two years, but those green levies actually serve to reduce future bills by funding energy efficiency schemes and supporting the development of cheap renewable energy. And let’s not forget that Truss’s plan includes increasing oil and gas extraction from the North Sea, more nuclear, and allowing fracking in England (the Scottish and Welsh governments having stated that their effective bans will remain in place). It all adds up to a social and environmental disaster.

Labour leader Keir Starmer is proposing an increased windfall tax on energy firms to be used to freeze energy bills, albeit at a level that has already increased sharply since earlier this year, which he claims would save households an average of £1,000. The Liberal Democrats want to go a bit further by introducing a higher windfall tax, and doubling the Warm Homes Discount targeted at people on lower incomes and making more people eligible for it.

At Holyrood, Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon has warned that the country faces a winter of “deprivation” and said that Ofgem’s planned price cap increases should not go ahead. However, her party the SNP has excluded a motion on “creatively” using devolved tax powers to help tackle the cost-of-living crisis from the draft agenda for its annual conference in October. Sturgeon may live to regret this as heat, energy efficiency and fuel poverty are among her devolved responsibilities.

And that’s just the short-term bad news – fixing things in the longer-term may be just as tough. If we look at those EU countries which are proving most resistant to the energy price hikes, namely France and Norway, both have state-owned energy companies.

Public ownership has proven to be effective, at least in the long term, at making countries resilient and able to shield ordinary people from price fluctuations. For example, the French government used its majority stake in energy giant EdF to change the formula used for calculating electricity tariffs in way that further decouples them from market prices.

However, the Conservatives are opposed to public ownership, the Liberal Democrats are silent, and Labour has ruled out nationalising energy in England. The Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) has taken a more radical stance, supporting the permanent nationalisation of energy suppliers and for bills to be reduced to their levels before the price cap was raised in early 2022.

In Scotland, the SNP and its governing partner the Scottish Greens rejected a proposal to set up a public energy company last year, but now support the nationalisation of the existing energy companies. However, this would mean buying these companies out at time when they’re profitable and therefore more expensive, and is particularly frustrating given that that in 2019 the Scottish government had the opportunity to buy out Our Power, an Edinburgh-based energy company that collapsed owing the government millions in commercial loans.

Over in Wales, Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru are working across the independence divide to establish a net-zero company. Crucially, this public company could own assets like wind farms or heat networks.

In the model I have helped develop with the think tank Common Weal is it important that companies own such assets as they can be used to leverage funding when times get tough. Since retail-only energy companies – even public ones – lack these assets, they are still exposed to all the risks that have seen so many of them go under.

This means that those two parties, along with some smaller leftist and pro-Scottish independence parties, such as Scotland’s Alba Party, are the only parties that I’m aware of who support a realistic approach to bringing energy into public ownership.

So, there you have it. Honestly, after 15 years of working in this field I have to conclude that a lack of both historical and recent action means the UK is now in for a very, very hard winter.

Dr Keith Baker FRSA is a Research Fellow in Fuel Poverty and Energy Policy at the Built Environment Asset Management (BEAM) Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University; a Co-founder of The Energy Poverty Research initiative; a Director of Pattiesmuir Ltd, a not-for-profit training and reskilling company; a Director and Convenor of the Energy Working Group at the Scottish 'think and do' tank, Common Weal; an Officer of the National Coordinating Committee of Scientists for Global Responsibility; and a member of the Green Party of England and Wales and GreenLeft.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Minor changes have been made following the outcome of the Conservative Party’s leadership election. Read the original article at: https://theconversation.com/the-uk-is-facing-an-energy-bills-crisis-and-no-major-party-is-prepared-for-it-188853

'CLIMATE JOBS - BUILDING A WORKFORCE FOR THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY'

by Campaign against Climate Change, Trade Union Group, Nov 2021 98pp A5 booklet

This is the third edition of booklets on Climate Jobs produced collectively by CACC trade unionists since 2012. It deals with each sector of the capitalist economy in chapters:

* Lighting and Energy Conversion

* Warm homes and building climate jobs

* Green, accessible Transport network

* De-carbonising Industry

* Climate jobs on land, agriculture, food

* Zero waste in the circular economy

* Trade unions and action on Climate.

The truth is that moving from a carbon-based market to a clean, renewable energy economy will involve major disruption affecting millions of workers lives over the next 20 years or more. There's no getting away from this and most politicians from establishment parties have barely got a grip on this. They all need to study this volume and then they will be much better clued up. Thousands of leading trade unionists need to get a grip as well.

National Climate Service

On page 6 they say:' A national Climate Service would play a key role in a Just Transition, so that all workers would be guaranteed permanent, well paid, trade union protected jobs in work that reduces emissions. It would also guarantee that workers in the old high carbon sector are retrained with the new skills and knowledge that will be required'.

They go on to state that the market economy has 'failed' to deal with the climate emergency and cannot be relied on to create the solutions needed. Well, we don't need to dispute this. Poverty in Britain has been exacerbated by austerity and the pandemic. Capitalism created the global Climate and Ecological Emergency, and we know it can't fix this by tinkering with markets and incentives.

The campaign for a million plus Green and Climate jobs is a transitional demand which no British Government is likely to realise in the next 20 years in Britain. Many of the books 'transition policies' give 2038 as a target date. This seems to be realistic given the scale of transformation needed in the heavy energy and other industrial sectors like engineering, motors, chemicals, plastics etc.

The recycling and reuse sectors will be massively expanded and could employ over a million workers in saving and reusing tonnes of resources currently wasted throughout the economy. Campaigning for Green change will involve mass education of millions of homes in conserving and saving energy and material resources.

Eco-Socialism will need to go well beyond talk of radical Green New Deals to create a transformative Programme of Green Socialism to meet the urgent challenge of our times and need an effective strategy to combine the Green, Socialist and Labour movements in a great alliance to achieve it.

Download a free copy to read online

Climate Jobs: Building a workforce for the climate emergency pdf (6MB)

(Copies of Climate Jobs booklet are available from the Green Left stall at Green Party Conference at a reduced price of £4. Or order from mdouglas@gn.apc.org for £5 (includes postage.) Mark Douglas, Hackney Green Left.

One Million Climate Jobs (2014) Click here for information about the third edition of One Million Climate Jobs including free download

Depolarising trade unions: winning over the high carbon sector

One unfortunate product of living through a transformative

point in history is that, instead of rallying to the call of that much-needed transformation, some who should by all logic be with us start pulling in the opposite direction and make it instead a polarising moment.

Trade unions are, due to the need to protect jobs within the context of what we have now, particularly susceptible to this schism. So, it is with jobs and the environment. For some these are mutually exclusive terms, largely because environmental protest is often targeted at stopping something (a runway, a drilling site, an incinerator) from happening. No facility, no jobs. Okay, we get that, and so resort to moral arguments about the impact of climate change on communities, which include workers, to try and persuade the union(s) concerned that there is a ‘greater good’ to be observed.

But for a large part of the trade union movement, a counter narrative has become the norm. With the increasing scale and intensity of extreme weather events putting communities across the world on notice, it has become clear that the work that needs to be done far exceeds the work that must be stopped. That means a jobs surplus - putting our shoulder to the climate change wheel means more jobs not less. What those jobs are has been spelled out many times, not least in the booklet Climate Jobs: Building a Workforce for the Climate Emergency, to which I was a contributor.

So why are some unions pulling in the opposite direction? And not merely defending their members jobs in high carbon sectors (which they are right to do) but actively promoting the expansion of those sectors, and even - at its most extreme - regurgitating the fallacious arguments of the very employers who are constantly attacking them. The obvious explanation is that their members current jobs are real, while talk of just transition into climate jobs is notional and abstract. You can’t blame them for this perspective when our current government is a universe away from the transformations that are needed, and a Labour government, while bringing some welcome policies into play, looks unlikely to disturb the basic status quo.

All of which reinforces the view that just transition, decarbonisation, and long-term job security appear to hard-nosed union realists as promises made in empty air. And yet…those attitudes are shifting, agonisingly slowly perhaps, but perceptibly. Two things in particular are producing this shift: one, the undeniable reality of how climate change is altering our lifestyles, right here and now, in the U.K., and the urgent need for solutions (which means jobs); and two, the fact that the status quo means continued attacks by employers, on job numbers, pay, terms and conditions, fire and rehire and so on.

Today’s workforce is unrecognisable compared to even ten years ago - low paid, casualised, oppressed and with minimal rights. Does even the most regressive of trade unions want that trend to continue?

The key to winning over the more hesitant unions is to forget about trying to change their existing policies - let support for nuclear power, more oil and gas, and more runways stand. What we really need is to engage them in a genuine conversation, then in campaigns, and demands, for long-term thinking about the future of their members. Because not to do so is to risk those members future: when we reach a point where we literally cannot dig any more out of the ground, cannot allow another aeroplane to take off, we can’t allow those workers to simply fall off a cliff edge into mass redundancy. Instead, we have to start planning now for what happens to those workers when we reach that point. That includes the education and training needs for the future workforce, our particular focus in the Greener Jobs Alliance.

Importantly, regressive unions don’t have to abandon their existing policies to participate in this process, they can do both. What’s the worst that could happen - you have a contingency plan for something that never happens. No great disaster. But the fact is, it IS going to happen (and of course support for runway expansion, more drilling etc. will only accelerate us towards that point). The real urgency is to overcome the unwillingness of some unions to even talk about these issues.

That will change, but we need it to change sooner not later, if we are to safeguard the jobs of those currently working in high carbon industries. The rail strikes this summer have demonstrated that the ability to with-hold our labour power is fundamental to bringing about the change we need. Coming together around these points is what true solidarity is about, and its why jobs, the environment and cost of living should not be considered separate but facets of the same struggle. Only by recognising that we are one movement will we win.

Tahir Latif, Secretary, Greener Jobs Alliance

The Green Party Trade Union Group.

We are the group for trade unionists, allies and all supporters of the labour movement in the Green Party of England & Wales.

We believe that a powerful, organised labour movement bringing together millions of working people is essential to transforming society for people and planet.

We work together to offer practical solidarity to workers in their struggles, empowering Green campaigners up and down the country to work closely with trade unions.

If you are a Green Party member who supports our objectives, click here to join us today.

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MODEL MOTION FOR TRADE UNIONS BIOMASS AND DRAX POWER STATION

Drax power station in Yorkshire is the UK's single biggest carbon emitter yet is in receipt of millions of pounds of renewable energy subsidies. A large share of the pellets Drax burns are made from whole trees, routinely sourced from the clear cutting of forests in the Southeastern US, Canada and the Baltic states with impacts on biodiversity and the communities living nearby. Wood pellet production facilities in the southeastern United States are 50% more likely to be located in environmental justice (EJ)-designated communities.

As a Trade Unionist, there are a few things you can do:

1. Sign the Cut Carbon Not Forest petition and encourage other individuals to do so

2. Pass the Trade Union motion at your branch or Trades Council. See next pages for motion and resources. If you pass the motion, please email stopburningtreescoalition@gmail.com to let us know.

3. Get your Trade Union or Trades Council to sign up to Biofuelwatch's open letter for organisations calling on the government to redirect renewable subsidies from biomass burning to genuinely renewable energy.

4. Sign up to Stop Burning Trees coalition *SBT): https://stopburningtrees.org/

5. Sign up to BioFuels Watch for updates: https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/get-updates/

BECCS: Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage is The Costliest Scam

In the Fourth Century CE. Hippocrates stated, “Extreme diseases require extreme remedies”. This maxim has been adapted by opportunists since then to justify many dubious business ventures. Now Global Warming has brought us another extreme situation, in fact the gravest that humanity has ever faced, and how do our politicians respond? By putting our fate in the hands of those who have brought us to this precipice and have acquired unprecedented riches in doing so. They are also people who want to continue accumulating wealth regardless of the catastrophic consequences. As was clearly presented in the BBC documentary series “Big Oil v the World”, corporations and governments across the planet know about the full extent of the problem, they lie and dissemble about it, and thwart measures to reduce or avoid its worst consequences. We are told that “the market” and “technological innovation” will be our salvation and so we need not make a fuss.

This “Greenwash” includes concepts such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), Carbon Offsets, and many other Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs), all supposed to take us towards those flexible Net Zero Carbon targets. Thus, we are being fiddled while our home burns. The UN’s Sixth IPCC Assessment Technical Report, compiled by scientists, warns against these fantasies, and tells us how known and tested methods, such as natural ecosystem restoration and preservation, reforestation and sustainable agricultural practices can do a great deal more to alleviate Global Warming.

However, in the Mitigation and Adaptation Report, whose Working Group comprised of more economists and engineers (including Chevron and Aramco executives) than environment scientists, CCS creeps back in as a purported remedy and gets some 800 mentions, despite costing us all precious time and wasted scarce resources. These vested interests are selling us scam that betrays our children and our grandchildren with a “Strategy” based on the assumption that failed technologies will magically flourish and emissions from what we burn today will be erased by engines invented by our children.

The financial and functional bankruptcy of CCS glares at us as brightly as the flare-off from an oil rig on a dark night. There are currently 27 CCS facilities operating in the world and they were intended to capture a mere 37 megatons of CO2 annually, but this represents just 0.1% of fossil fuel emissions (Tyndall Centre, 2021). Just 7 megatons were captured for sequestration and all the remainder was pumped back down into oil wells to extract oil deposits that can’t otherwise be retrieved. This is called “enhanced oil recovery”. These facilities are capturing emissions from natural gas, fertilizer, hydrogen and ethanol plants and there is just one facility, Boundary Dam in Canada that currently deals with coal emissions. This installation uses 30 - 31% of the power it generates just to run the capture operation. In the USA, the government has invested $12B in 15 CCS projects and all of them have now closed with just negligible amounts of carbon captured and stored, yet the Biden administration has just granted huge tax credits for CCS in the Inflation Reduction Act he signed on August 16^th. This investment will prove to be more than just a money-making fraud as the US Dept. of Energy predicts that EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) will add 48B barrels of oil to the US economy by 2030.

So now, let’s take a look at BECCS, which stands for Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage. BECCS, in fact, combines two scams into one greater deception. There are all the problems outlined above plus additional problems regarding safe transportation of the captured CO2 and of its secure sequestration, but this is combined with the egregious fallacy that burning wood for electricity is “renewable energy”. It is now accepted scientifically that using wood for energy generation is quite as bad as using oil or coal when the entire life cycle of the process is taken into consideration. As well as the atmospheric pollution, the deforestation and the monoculture plantations required for biomass feedstock cause huge biodiversity loss, new health threats to long-established communities, soil and water-table depletion and contamination, and increased risk of wildfire. To explore these impacts in greater detail, follow this link https://www.environmentalpaper.org/biomass-faq/

Drax power station in Selby, Yorkshire, which is the single biggest emitter of CO2 in the UK, already receives a subsidy of almost £2M per day for burning 13M tons of wood every year as a renewable energy source and they are now applying for £31B in subsidy over the next 25 years to develop and install BECCS at Selby, claiming that this will make its electricity “carbon neutral”. Selling itself as a climate solution, Drax greatly exacerbates the problem and serves as a justification for others to do likewise.

Despite the acknowledged fallacy of “renewable” biomass energy and the failure of CCS, the UK, Scottish and US governments and the European Parliament support the expansion of this industry and the further funding of BECCS. In 2020, an area of forest larger than 50,000 Wembley Stadium football pitches was logged so that the UK could burn trees for energy. This madness must stop!

You can help. Please sign our petition

https://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/292/982/428/saynotoburningtrees1/?fbclid=IwAR2o-E_FRqyqLsZUgANiRjnGamgWPUZTBXrKWONTr3Pqrs4mVf4f5kaqLx8

And please sign up to email alerts and newsletters by Biofuelwatch here

www.email-lists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuelwatch

Email biofuelwatch@gmail.com

Peter Deane is a campaigner with Biofuelwatch and the Campaign Against Climate Change. The opinions expressed in this article are his own.

MAINTAIN GREEN PARTY POLICY ON WITHDRAWAL FROM NATO. IT CANNOT BE ‘REFORMED’ INTO A PEACE-BUILDING ORGANIZATION.

NATO’s official remit has been a defensive alliance for European peace & security, yet it has been a military aggressor for rich Northern nations against weaker nations, increasingly on a global scale. For those aims, NATO uses the ‘special relationship’ with UK - a euphemism for its complicity with US military aggression. NATO has become an ever-greater threat to world peace, especially given its policy on first use of nuclear weapons. Let’s maintain the Green Party’s policy for withdrawal from NATO.

NATO exploiting the Russia-Ukraine conflict

For all those reasons, many Green and Left-wing parties around Europe have opposed their own countries’ membership in NATO. The pro-NATO lobby has recently softened such opposition by exploiting Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine and the necessary armaments for its self-defence. This has become a pretext for a Europe-wide military expansion greatly increasing investment, production and trade in weapons. This is driven by NATO’s increasingly global aggression, which also conveniently finances the arms industry.

Moreover, NATO has played a part in worsening the Russia-Ukraine conflict. At the June 2021 Brussels summit, NATO leaders reiterated their earlier decision (at the 2008 Bucharest Summit) that Ukraine would eventually become a member. In March 2022 President Zelensky indicated his willingness for Ukraine to be a militarily neutral country. But the US government has preferred to antagonise Russia by continuing the prospect that Ukraine might join NATO and by expanding military installations near its borders.

NATO aggression masquerading as defence

Contrary to its official rationale as a ‘defence’ alliance, NATO has regularly used violence for political-economic objectives, especially against regimes resisting subordination to the US. Since 1989, NATO supporters have sought its permanence by exaggerating ‘security threats’, while NATO has expanded its remit far beyond Europe. It has used or threatened military attack for the USA’s political objectives. (See Annex below for details.)

Such intimidation includes nuclear weapons: In NATO’s Charter, Article 5 maintains the option for the first use of nuclear weapons. It has ‘nuclear-weapons sharing’ arrangements on the territory of five member states. NATO poses a major threat to a peaceful world and global nuclear disarmament.

Maintain the Green Party’s policy for withdrawal

According to the Green Party’s Peace & Defence policy: ‘Much international conflict today arises directly or indirectly from the abuse of power by rich Northern nations.’ Indeed. It advocates UK withdrawal from NATO:

‘The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is a military-oriented body, which imposes conflict cessation rather than encouraging peace building. As such, it is not a sustainable mechanism for maintaining peace in the world. In the long term, we would take the UK out of NATO. We would also end the so-called "special relationship" between the UK and the US.’

Green Party, Peace & Defence policies, PD513, https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/pd.html

This stance is contradicted by the spring 2022 conference Motion F02, sections PSD 317-319. They sanitise NATO's role as supposedly peacebuilding and security for weaker nations – the opposite of its real role. The Motion implies Green Party support for the UK staying in NATO, pending imaginary efforts at 'reforms'.

Question for Green Party members:

Do you want to sanitise NATO’s military aggression, weapons expansion, and further militarisation of society? If you do not, then maintain the current policy for withdrawal from NATO.

Oppose the NATO sections of Motion F02, as in the amendment being proposed.

Article written by some members of the Green Party’s Green Left: Les Levidow, Jay Ginn, Martin Francis

Supporting information Annex: NATO’s military aggression for US global political domination

http://londongreenleft.blogspot.com/2022/08/maintain-green-party-policy-on.html

The following resolution ‘Peace Is Union Business’ was passed at RMT’s recent Annual General Meeting in Birmingham. The RMT encourage all trade union branches across the country to adopt this resolution or that of our own here. We also urge all trade unionists to register and spread the word about our first ever Trade Union Conference coming up in January 2023.

PEACE IS UNION BUSINESS

“That this AGM notes with grave concern the NATO summit meeting in Madrid (28-30 June 2022) confirmed an escalation of military spending, troop build-ups and further expansion of this nuclear-armed bloc with a seemingly endless supply of money poured into weapons development and procurement including:

• expanding the numbers of NATO troops from 40,000 to well over 300,000.

• expanding NATO’s role at the request of the Spanish government to include the global south, including control over migration from sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahel region (north Africa) following the tragic deaths last week of 23 African migrants entering Melilla, Spain’s colonial enclave in north Africa.

• US President Biden’s announcement that the US would establish a permanent
military base in Poland, a brigade in Romania, air missile systems in Italy and Germany and two additional F-35 squadrons based in the UK.

• British PM, Johnson’s announcement on 30 June 2022, that UK defence spending will increase from 2.3% of GDP in 2022 to 2.5% of GDP in 2030 when wages are being held below inflation with taxes and energy prices rocketing contributing to a cost-of- living crisis.

These latest announcements of military escalation follow the announcement in September 2021 by the governments of Australia, the UK and US of the so-called AUKUS pact, which provides nuclear-powered submarines to Australia as part of a military alliance with the US and UK.

RMT’s sister union, the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) has warned these submarines use highly enriched uranium ideal for nuclear weapons. The Australian government has repeatedly tried to set up nuclear waste dumps on First Nations land. This will intensify that pressure. The AUKUS pact also contributes significantly to the likelihood of nuclear proliferation and the threat of nuclear war.

Workers have no interest in war with China, Russia, or any other country. Every effort should be made to pursue peaceful relations between countries through negotiations and disarmament.

RMT stands in solidarity with trade unionists and workers in all countries opposing war and wasteful, environmentally harmful, military spending. We pledge our opposition to development of nuclear submarines in Australia, to NATO expansion and to Boris Johnson’s disastrous pledge to further increase military spending by the UK government instead of addressing growing poverty, homelessness and hunger in Britain.” 24 Aug 2022 • by RMT

ZAPORIZHZHIA: Nuclear Power on the Front Line

- madness of nuclear reactors in the battlefield -

by Malcolm Bailey *

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in wartime Ukraine. (Reuters image)

In Europe 2022, amid the fog of war, we face the insane scenario of the unacceptable risks of nuclear power plants operating in an active war zone. The United Nations must act immediately to introduce a new international law banning military attacks and war around all nuclear reactors everywhere. Nuclear power plants operating in a battlefield is just plain crazy. It is imperative that international radiation safety scientists have full access to all nuclear sites for inspection and monitoring.

The war in Ukraine is demonstrating again that the risks associated with nuclear power are far too great. Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown that despite all technical assurances, the unexpected will happen. Risks will be further increased if and when small modular reactors are operating around the world. Radioactive waste storage problems, escalating costs, risks of terrorism, long construction timescales compared to the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crisis, the wasteful diversion of resources from plentiful renewable energy, must mean that no more nuclear reactors should be constructed, and existing reactors phased out and closed down.

The lessons of Chernobyl should have been learnt by now. On 26 April 1986, during a safety test, No 4 reactor at Chernobyl suffered melting of the reactor core, an open-air reactor core fire, and probably a fizzled nuclear weapon episode, lasting until 4 May 1986. Airborne radioactive material spread over the USSR and Europe. A concrete sarcophagus now shrouds the reactor, no one is allowed to live in the 30 km exclusion zone, and ‘clean-up’ is scheduled for 2065.

Chernobyl is in Ukraine, just 9.9 miles from the Belarus border. On the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on 24 February 2022, Russian troops seized the Chernobyl disaster site. Radiation monitors detected increased radiation levels, believed to be due to Russian tanks disturbing contaminated soil, and many radiation monitors went off-line, with disrupted communications. Some of the mines scattered by Russian troops have been detonated.

There are five nuclear power plants (NPP) in Ukraine: Khmelnytskyy, South Ukraine, Rivne and Zaporizhzhia, and the reactor still operating at Chernobyl, plus a small reactor used for research, giving a total of fifteen nuclear reactors in Ukraine. Since March, Russian soldiers have controlled the Zaporizhzhia NPP, which has six reactors, two currently online, near the city of Enerhodar, 430 km south of Kyiv. ZNPP is the largest nuclear power site in Europe, supplying 20% of Ukraine’s total electricity. The other NPPs appear to remain under Ukrainian control.

The so-called fog of war inevitably makes obtaining accurate information difficult if not impossible in war zones. The first casualty of war is truth. The Ukraine conflict is no exception. There are competing versions of events at ZNPP from the Ukrainian and Russian sides. Russia claims to be guarding the plant, Ukraine says it’s being used as cover to shell nearby Nikopol and Marhanets They accuse each other of shooting at the site.

The risks of a nuclear accident and radiation leaks at ZNPP are difficult to assess. Certainly, the reactors on this site are designed to a higher safety standard (VVER-1000) than Chernobyl (RBMK). They are supposed to be able to withstand a 9/11 type attack by a plane. They may be designed against terrorist attack, but not against war. Any use of battlefield tactical nuclear weapons, if the war becomes desperate for Russia, could become an enormous risk for ZNPP. There is also liquid and solid nuclear waste stored at the plant, which could be released to the environment during shelling. Leaked airborne radionuclides carried on the wind could reach Russia. Loss of power, as at Fukushima in 2011, for reactor and used fuel rods cooling, could be catastrophic. There have been several incidents reported of disconnected power to the plant. Overworked, tired and demoralised staff, working in wartime conditions, can lead to unforeseen human errors. The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross has said: ‘It’s time to stop playing with fire and instead take concrete measures to protect this facility, and others like it, from military operations.’

The UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) struggle to establish what is happening. The IAEA has a long history of scientific expertise in radiation physics. In March, the director general of the IAEA Rafael Mariano Grossi called on Russia to allow an international team of experts access to the Chernobyl site. In August he reported to the UN Security Council on the worsening nuclear situation at ZNPP, and again requested an IAEA mission access to the site. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has said that all military activity around the nuclear complex should end. Discussions between President Putin and President Macron of France appear to have secured agreement for an IAEA inspection team visit to ZNPP, agreed by President Zelensky.

The team arrived at ZNPP at the beginning of September, despite fighting in the Zaporizhzhia region and reports that the route was being shelled. It remains unclear how long they will remain at the site, whether they will have unrestricted access, with full opportunity to assess equipment and verify conditions for the workers.

At the time of writing, six months after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is not possible to predict the course of this conflict or its impact on ZNPP. Will the madness of this episode of nuclear reactors in a battlefield be a catalyst for international action to prevent it ever happening again?

New Scientist, No 3378, 19.3.22, p.7

New Scientist, No 3400, 20.8.22, p.7

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-91

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62595474

* Malcolm Bailey is a member of Green Left, formerly a radiation physicist working in the NHS.

Greens with Empathy for Universal Credit Claimants?

After England Women’s Soccer team’s triumph at Wembley, Herefordshire Green Party Leader Cllr Ellie Chowns wrote in her ‘opinion’ piece for Hereford Times that she “whooped and cheered as the Lionesses did us proud!”. She also wrote about the heatwave, climate change and cost of living crisis arguing for carbon neutral energy sources.

This seemed to me like ‘pie in the sky’ not recognising the financial catastrophes that many have been experiencing even before the electricity prices surged. few years ago, Herefordshire Greens voted with the majority group of Conservative councillors, to impose a percentage of council tax on working age claimants of state benefits following the axing of Council Tax Reduction Scheme funding for people of pre-pensionable age. Working age state benefits were never factored to pay for any council tax, as Taxpayers Against Poverty founder the late Rev’d Paul Nicolson argued against Haringey Council.(1)

My argument here is that Green Party ‘Target to Win’ strategy with its focus on appealing to ‘Core Voters’ furthers the alienation and dehumanisation of those hardest hit by Tory policies. Though no longer a Green Party member, I am still a ‘watermelon’: “green on the outside, red in the middle,” and believe that relating people’s issues to Green Party policies should be the core of Green Party strategy.

The down and dirty realities of an ideologically driven war of attrition

Amongst supportive national news media coverage of the England Women’s progress at Euro 2022, there was a Morning Star report, ‘Call to loosen DWP thumbscrews: Government urged to pause benefit deductions; MPs committee says families are struggling — and repayments are contributing to hardship’. (2)

Decades of mainstream mass media supported bad mouthing of working age benefit claimants has operated both as ‘gaslighting’ to detract attention from a system in meltdown and as prelude to privatisation. That has gone on for decades, from the time of Peter Lilley’s ‘Lord High Executioner’s’ Little List parody that demonised claimants, through New Labour’s televised ‘Targeting Benefit Thieves’ campaigns while millions of calls to DWP helplines went unanswered, and on and on, through the London 2012 Olympics and beyond. (3)

In the heavily regimented Universal Credit Terms & Conditions’ ‘Find a Job’ deflects attention from dodgy ‘Universal Job Match’ software onto claimant behaviour as sanctions fodder.

In 2017 a mental health nurse treated a self-harm survivor before accompanying him to the Jobcentre site that triggered his self-harm. A psychotherapist there, volunteering to help claimants get online to apply for UC, said, “My skills as a psychotherapist are more vital here than my IT skills.”(4)

Jobcentre Plus [sic] has no safeguarding policy for vulnerable claimants, and Secretary of State for Work & Pensions (SSWP) Théresè Coffey fails to acknowledge any safeguarding responsibility for claimants while refusing to disclose DWP reports on claimant deaths.(5)

UC penalises low incomes, not low wages, forcing claimants into a 35-hour per week commitment. In January 2015 (before UC became mainstream) Glasgow University Law Professor and adviser to Child Poverty Action Group, Dr David Webster wrote

“Few people know that the number of financial penalties (‘sanctions’) imposed on benefit claimants by the Department of Work and Pensions now exceeds the number of fines imposed by the courts….

“Sanctioned benefit claimants are treated much worse than those fined in the courts… Decisions on guilt are made in secret by officials who have no independent responsibility to act lawfully, since the Social Security Act 1998 they have been mere agents of the Secretary of State. These officials are currently subject to constant management pressure to maximise penalties, and as in any secret system there is a lot of error, misconduct, dishonesty and abuse… The claimant is not present when the decision on guilt is made and is not legally represented.” (6)

Now, UC encompasses Housing Benefit, Income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), Child Tax Credit, Working Tax Credit, and Income Support, sanctions can be and are more liberally applied.(7)

In August 2017, Somerset Live, reported:

“Since face-to-face Jobcentre appointments resumed in summer 2021, sanctions have massively increased. The number of claimants subject to a sanction rose from 3,827 in May 2021 to 109,506 in May 2022. Numbers rose steadily through winter but skyrocketed after Way to Work launched in February, from 74,746 in January to 93,479 in March. A record 59,000 new sanctions were slapped on Universal Credit claimants in March alone.”

In January 2022, The Mirror had reported: “Ministers are launching a target to get 500,000 Universal Credit claimants into jobs by June — and part of that will involve tightening the rules on work searches when people first sign up to the benefit….[I]t’s thought the plan is only to get 500,000 people into jobs — not off Universal Credit. Around two-fifths of Universal Credit claimants have a job. They still claim benefits because they have poor wages or work part time.” (8)

For decades I volunteered and was a disabled jobseeker before I claimed ESA and later State Pension amid a war on entitlement. Universal Basic Income had instant appeal for me from 2005, leading to my campaigning involvement in the Green Party from 2006 to 2021, before focusing on Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group of London (2012/17) and Unite Community Worcester [incorporating Herefordshire, as Herefordshire has no Trade Union Council (2017-present day). What can GPEW offer people on UC sanctions in the here and now?

A 60+ UC claimant recently told me I’d helped her a lot, just by listening and showing empathy.