Two Thirds of Britons Believe World in "Climate Emergency"

Good. It seems the British people have done what their political caste has so far refused to do. They have concluded that the world is in a state of climate emergency.

Two-thirds of people in the UK recognise there is a climate emergency and 76% say that they would cast their vote differently to protect the planet. 

The findings, in a poll commissioned by Greenpeace, come as the group unveiled a detailed “climate manifesto”, listing 134 key actions they say the government should take immediately to ensure the UK hits zero carbon emissions as soon as possible. 

The manifesto – which will be sent to MPs, policymakers, thinktanks and other experts for feedback – was released on Tuesday, a day before a parliamentary vote on whether to declare a national climate emergency.

In Canada, the great petro-state of Canada, we've been groomed, both domestically and by the nonsense relentlessly spewed south of the border, to believe there is no emergency. Just go to a story on climate change in any Canadian news site and read the comments. But, if you really want to get down in the sewer you'll have to rub elbows with the likes of Scheer, Kenney, Pallister, Moe and Ford, paid patsies of the fossil energy giants. And before you Liberals get smug, your guy is a little better but not all that much.

The measures outlined in the manifesto include:

A tripling of wind and solar power from current levels to ensure 80% of electricity comes from renewables by 2030.

Ambitious targets to phase out the internal combustion engine in cars and vans with all new vehicles to be electric by 2030.

Huge insulation drive on all existing and new buildings, and the installation of renewable generation on site as far as possible.

A commitment to protect all high-carbon natural habitats and bold targets for habitat restoration/rewilding on land and at sea – including planting at least 700m trees over the next decade. 

The manifesto was released alongside polling carried out by Opinium in the midst of the Extinction Rebellion protests. It found:

63% of British public think they are in a climate emergency.

76% say they would vote differently to protect the planet and climate.

64% say government is responsible for taking action on climate change.

The Brits have it figured out. If you want real action on climate change from your government, you have to make them afraid of you, very afraid. It's time we did the same here.

Goin' Tactical

If there's one thing no society needs it's "black guns." There is a whole family of these things out there, "tactical" semi-automatic assault rifles that can be yours for just a few hundred dollars.

Those patterned directly on the Colt M-16 require a "restricted" gun licence but there are plenty of others, just as sinister and Rambo-manly, that you can get with an ordinary, non-restricted licence.  Follow the link above, take a look.

I use the word "sinister" deliberately. That's what sells these guns, the idea that you too can join the warrior class. They're short, really easy to conceal. They're black. They've got Picatinny rails, ready to mount your scope, laser sight, red-dot sight or accessory flashlight in case you get a hankering to start blasting away in the darkness. Like the kid in the photo above with his accessorized Bushmaster.

And, if you don't have a couple of grand to plonk down, don't worry. You can get a Chinese SKS, with folding bayonet, on sale right now for $199.

People who buy these black guns often claim they're for hunting. Yeah, right. Take a look at this baby, priced at a modest $599. It's a knock-off of the German, WWII MP-40.

That's a shoot-from-the-hip blaster. You won't be heading out to take a deer with that. It just screams "Wehrmacht" all day long.  It's very inaccuracy makes it more dangerous, not less.

I'm not an anti-gun zealot. I have rifles, real hunting rifles, that I periodically take to the range for an hour of target shooting. They're not for "self-defence." It takes me more than 20 minutes just to get everything unlocked, assuming I can locate the keys and figure out what key works on which lock.

I think there's a place for rifles, some rifles. There's a place for handguns - cops, armoured car crews, competition shooters - but that's about it.

We need to ratchet down access to a lot of these firearms. If you want a tactical rifle, join the army. If you want a handgun, demonstrate that you have a legitimate need for one.

It's time the federal government cracked down on black rifles and automatic pistols - but don't hold your breath.

UPDATE:

New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, vows to reform her country's lax gun laws.

“Our gun laws will change,” she said. “There have been attempts to change our laws in 2005, 2012 and after an inquiry in 2017, now is the time for change.” 

She said five guns were used by the primary perpetrator of the attack, including two semi-automatic weapons and two shotguns. The shooter was in possession of a gun licence obtained in November 2017.

Australia banned semi-automatic rifles. Britain has strict gun control. Now, New Zealand is going to follow. That leaves Canada the last bastion of assault rifle access.

Well, With the Week He's Had Who Wouldn't Want to Let Off a Little Steam?

The United States has launched missile strikes against government targets in Syria. This time Britain and France tossed in a few missiles of their own, brothers in arms sort of thing, I suppose.

Trump announced the strikes in an address to the nation Friday evening. “The purpose of our action tonight is to establish a strong deterrent,” he said, against the production and use of chemical weapons, describing the issue as vital to national security. Trump added that the United States is prepared “to sustain this response” until its aims are met.

Trump asked both Russia and Iran, backers of Assad, “what kind of nation wants to be associated” with mass murder and suggested that someday the United States might be able to “get along” with both if they change their policies.

Details of the attack are still sketchy at best. There's no word on any action by the Russians either. They had threatened to use their S-400 systems to shoot down incoming American missiles. Russia had also warned it would retaliate against US installations should its bases in Syria be targeted.

Trump's remarks indicate that the US and perhaps the French and British are preparing for a sustained air and missile campaign.

Maybe Bill and Justin Should Read This Before They Get Carried Away with Themselves.

The Guardian's  Lefty Luddite, Polly Toynbee, offers an entertainingly morbid look at the devastation privatisation has brought to Britain. Perhaps our prime minister What Me Worry? and his finance minister, Bill Churn Baby, Churn Morneau, or, as I like to call them, the Kids Without a Clue, should have a read.

Toynbee blames much of the toxic pollution that now befouls London as the inevitable side effect of privatization of utilities, transportation and even the mail service.

The second month of the year begins with London having already reached its legal air pollution limit for the whole of 2018. The city’s limit of 18 breaches of air quality regulations was used up in January.

As with most of the gravest problems facing Britain, the solutions are relatively easy to find: the problem, as ever, in this fractured and fractious country, is summoning up the collective political will to take action.

...

Take the explosion of van deliveries as the Amazon I–want-it-now impulse is followed by every company that wants to stay in business. Be it Argos or John Lewis, everyone delivers it to your doorstep fast, multiple vans criss-crossing each other and knocking on the same doors over and over. Van traffic has grown faster than any other vehicle type since 2005.

Why? Royal Mail visits every household once a day, these days delivering mostly junk mail at ever-rising stamp prices for lack of volume business. As predicted, private companies cherrypick easy deliveries, leaving Royal Mail to take single letters to every remote farm.

...

After Carillion and the shock suggestion Capita and others might be wobbling, the reality of the destruction caused by privatisation is beginning to dawn even on true believers, such as the infamous Barnet council. Labour is right to plan taking back control of utilities, mail and transport, though they have yet to make that case sound not just ideological but pressingly practical. They need to spell out the daily reality of the harm privatisation and illusory “choice” has done over the last decades, not least in the poisoned air we breathe.

While We're On the Subject of Jerusalem.

The Palestinians are once again on people's minds (sort of, briefly) due to Donald Trump's announcement that the US will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  It sort of confirms the idea that if a nightmare drags on for decades, half a century is plenty, we forget what really happened and we're prepared to swallow just about anything.

Most people I know have never read David Hirst's "The Gun and the Olive Branch." (You can get it here, free it seems, in PDF.) It's a long read but in it the veteran Middle East journalist shatters many of the myths we have come to embrace as the accepted narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There's probably no prime minister in Canada, sitting or past, who would want you to read it for it would not cast them in a flattering light.

But if you're not up for that sort of effort, you might to whet your interest with Dr. Shir Havir's account of the origins of this intractable conflict that has seen an entire people held in captivity for a half century, their lands occupied and annexed by a state that persistently flouts international law, a rogue state we proudly proclaim our ally.

Now There's an Idea

Brookings Institute fellow Ranj Alaaldin has a clever idea about how Trump can strike back against Iran, back the Iraqi Kurds in their independence struggle against the Shiite-controlled central government in Baghdad.

The Kurds and their Peshmerga have always been America's best allies in the region going back well before Saddam was driven out of Kuwait.

The Kurds are a people without a homeland. The French and British had promised them they would get just that during WWI after the Ottomans, Germany's ally, were toppled. That led to the Treaty of Sevres in 1920.

But then along came a fierce Turkish nationalist, Ataturk, threatening to give the Brits and the French another bloody nose and so they folded and replaced Sevres with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 that restored Turkey to the boundaries that stand today.

While they were at it, the Brits and the French carved up the rest of the Ottoman empire between themselves creating new nations including Syria, Iraq and Iran. It was called the Sykes-Picot or Asia Minor agreement.

France was to have control of A while the Brits got B. The deal was drawn strictly for European convenience and ignored all the ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural realities on the ground. That also meant that the Kurdish homeland was carved up among Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey where, as ethnic minorities, they fared pretty much as minorities fare in the Middle East.

The Brits and the French made a horrible mess of it, lumping Shiite minorities with Sunni majorities here, Sunni minorities with Shia majorities there, Arabs here and Persians there. A formula for the conflicts that have persisted ever since.

Right now Trump is really pissed with Iran but he's also pissed with Iraq, Syria and, more recently, Erdogan's Turkey.  The only group that has given America no grief is the Kurds.  And wouldn't it plant a burr under the saddle of the Turks, the Syrians, the Iraqis and especially the Iranians if Trump backed the Kurdish north's independence from Baghdad?

Then again, given America's record of winning wars in that region, maybe Trump will sit this one out.

China's "Century of Humiliation" And Why It Matters.

I'm regularly astonished at the reaction I receive when I mention the militant nationalism flourishing within China's military establishment, stoked by the perceived need to avenge what they call China's "century of humiliation."

Few in the West have the slightest idea of how Britain and her allies suppressed the Chinese and laid low their once powerful nation (along with India).

Eduardo Galeano, who died a few months ago, wrote this very eloquent summation of what China endured at the hands of the West that helps explain the bellicosity of China's military leadership today.  We ignore this at our peril.  The West's (i.e. Washington's) ongoing attempts to contain China and prevent it from establishing a sphere of influence in its own backyard are dangerously provocative in a time of shifting balances of power.

Opium was outlawed in China.

British merchants smuggled it in from India. Their diligent efforts led to a surge in the number of Chinese dependent on the mother of heroin and morphine, who charmed them with false happiness and ruined their lives.

The smugglers were fed up with the hindrances they faced at the hands of Chinese authorities. Developing the market required free trade, and free trade demanded war.

William Jardine, a generous sort, was the most powerful of the drug traffickers and vice president of the Medical Missionary Society, which offered treatment to the victims of the opium he sold.

In London, Jardine hired a few influential writers and journalists, including best-selling author Samuel Warren, to create a favorable environment for war. These communications professionals ran the cause of freedom high up the flagpole. Freedom of expression at the service of free trade: pamphlets and articles rained down upon British public opinion, exalting the sacrifice of the honest citizens who challenged Chinese despotism, risking jail, torture, and death in that kingdom of cruelty.

The proper climate established, the storm was unleashed. The Opium War lasted, with a few interruptions, from 1839 to 1860.

The sale of people had been the juiciest enterprise in the British Empire. But happiness, as everyone knows, does not last. After three prosperous centuries, the Crown had to pull out of the slave trade, and selling drugs came to be the most lucrative source of imperial glory.

Queen Victoria was obliged to break down China’s closed doors. On board the ships of the Royal Navy, Christ’s missionaries joined the warriors of free trade. Behind them came the merchant fleet, boats that once carried black Africans, now filled with poison.

In the first stage of the Opium War, the British Empire took over the island of Hong Kong. The colorful governor, Sir John Bowring, declared:

“Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade.”
Outside its borders the Chinese traded little and were not in the habit of waging war.

Merchants and warriors were looked down upon. “Barbarians” was what they called the English and the few Europeans they met.

And so it was foretold. China had to fall, defeated by the deadliest fleet of warships in the world, and by mortars that perforated a dozen enemy soldiers in formation with a single shell.

In 1860, after razing ports and cities, the British, accompanied by the French, entered Beijing, sacked the Summer Palace, and told their colonial troops recruited in India and Senegal they could help themselves to the leftovers.

The palace, center of the Manchu Dynasty’s power, was in reality many palaces, more than 200 residences and pagodas set among lakes and gardens, not unlike paradise. The victors stole everything, absolutely everything: furniture and drapes, jade sculptures, silk dresses, pearl necklaces, gold clocks, diamond bracelets... All that survived was the library, plus a telescope and a rifle that the king of England had given China 70 years before.

Then they burned the looted buildings. Flames reddened the earth and sky for many days and nights, and all that had been became nothing.

Lord Elgin, who ordered the burning of the imperial palace, arrived in Beijing on a litter carried by eight scarlet-liveried porters and escorted by 400 horsemen. This Lord Elgin, son of the Lord Elgin who sold the sculptures of the Parthenon to the British Museum, donated to that same museum the entire palace library, which had been saved from the looting and fire for that very reason. And soon in another palace, Buckingham, Queen Victoria was presented with the gold and jade scepter of the vanquished king, as well as the first Pekinese in Europe. The little dog was also part of the booty. They named it “Lootie.”

China was obliged to pay an immense sum in reparations to its executioners, since incorporating it into the community of civilized nations had turned out to be so expensive. Quickly, China became the principal market for opium and the largest customer for Lancashire cloth.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Chinese workshops produced one-third of all the world’s manufactures. At the end of the nineteenth century, they produced 6%.

Then China was invaded by Japan. Conquest was not difficult. The country was drugged and humiliated and ruined.

The history of British exploitation and subjugation of India is scarcely better.  At the time of their conquest, China and India were the first and second largest economies in the world.  Britain showed a friendlier face to India and brought the country into its empire.  China received none of that solicitous engagement.  The "humiliation" was very much alive right up until the British finally returned Hong Kong.

I think we're entering perilous waters if we ignore this history or dismiss it, demanding that China let bygones be bygones.  That's the sort of thing you can do or say to small countries with some impunity.  It's a different thing altogether when the country with the scars and profound grievances is the emerging superpower.

The Falklands - Again?

The British government is planning to reinforce its garrison on the Falklands Islands out of concern of another attempt by Argentina to take the islands by force.

The south American nation is feared to be increasing military expenditure. Senior ministers in the country have also made a series of increasingly aggressive statements about the islands in recent years.

[Defence secretary ]Michale Fallon said: "The threat remains. It is a very live threat. We have to respond to it."

He said reports that Russia is working on an agreement to lease 12 long-range bombers to Argentina which could be used to support a renewed attack are unconfirmed.

"We do need to modernise our defences to ensure that we have sufficient troops there and that the islands are properly defended in terms of air defence and maritime defence.

"The threat, of course, to the islands remains but so does our commitment to being absolutely clear that islanders have the right to remain British and the right to proper protection by our forces.

"It is our general view that the threat has not reduced. Argentina still, sadly, maintains its claim to the islands 30 or more years after the original invasion and the war and we have to respond to that."

Are We Really Willing to Go To War over Ukraine?

Would you be okay if it was your kids in uniform going off to a shooting war with the Russians over Ukraine?

The whole idea seems fantastic, ridiculous.  We tend to dismiss it as unimaginable but giving it short shrift can be lethal.

Earlier this week three words caught my attention - "une guerre totale."  That was the prospect French president Francois Hollande foresaw if there was no quick resolution to the conflict between the warring sides in the Ukraine and between Moscow and Kiev.

Total war.  That's something we've not done for quite a while.  Even at the top ranks of our militaries there's no one around who has any experience of it.  Our military and political leadership resemble more, say, 1914 than in 1918 or 19459 (and, trust me, that's not a good thing).

Modern Total War (MTW).  If you want an idea of what that means, go back to the extensive research on nuclear weapons escalation and use that as your "start" point.  We already had the ability, several times over, to obliterate life on this planet when this business began.  Sure, we've cut the inventories overall but so what?  There's still far more than would ever be needed to turn Earth into Mars, all in under 15-minutes. When was the last time 15-minutes had that relevance in your life?

One of the reasons  WWI went so horribly wrong was that almost no one had the foggiest idea of how it might play out.  Neither side went into that war expecting to be dragged down into years of murderous trench warfare.  Both sides went into the war with large contingents of cavalry - guys on horses with swords and lances.  They didn't have mass deployment of machine guns on their minds, that's for sure.  They didn't foresee aerial warfare, chemical weapons, the introduction of tanks to the battlefield - and so much more.

Add to our naivete, a thick layer of hubris.  We think we can deploy a rapid response force of 5,000 soldiers that can quickly accordion into 30,000 to nip any Putin adventurism in the bud.  NATO has "an erection lasting more than four hours" for that one.  At the top levels of the Alliance the bellicosity is searing. Maybe they're reminiscing of NATO's studly days staring down the Soviets back in the 60s.  Are we so blinded with our sense of superiority that we imagine a shooting war with ten or twenty thousand troops wouldn't escalate to something far exceeding our contemplation?

Here at home we've got no end of Chickenhawks busily banging the war drums lately.  Ignatieff introduced the Liberals to the notion of a "muscular foreign policy" and it seems to have stuck.  There's no overt, "you're either with us or with the terrorists" policy in Canada but the opposition parties sure act as though there was.  Every morning Mulcair steps outside to test which way the winds are blowing while Trudeau conferences his Bay Street advisers for his orders of the day.

We seem to want to militarize any real estate we can occupy within spitting distance of the Russian border.  NATO talks about establishing "forward bases" in the Baltic states, lest Moscow get designs on their sovereignty.  The very nature of forward bases is to define a front, a military front, and we're pressing it right up hard against Putin's doorstep.  What could possibly go wrong?

And, on our side, we've already broken into various camps.  There's NATO snarling angrily, straining against its chains, eager for the fray.  Then there's the US and Britain tossing about the idea of arming the Ukrainians, conveniently leaving unmentioned what probably follows such a bold move.  That puts them at odds with Hollande and Merkel who perhaps see the dangers more clearly and are on their, self-described last ditch tour to defuse the conflict before other nations get sucked into the malestrom.

It seems like we've amassed the perfect circumstances for backing ourselves into a war that we probably would regret fairly quickly.  It's as though we're caught in a process that has no "reset" button.  Hollande seems to acknowledge as much with obvious resignation.

Maybe all sides are already in this too deep to back down.

This reminds me of getting stuck taking shelter from a gale in a northern inlet on what had been a floating logging camp.  It consisted of a number of vintage wood buildings sitting atop rafts of cedar logs.  The buildings were being repurposed, renovated.  The one we were inside had the plaster and lathe removed to reveal old Vancouver newspapers stuffed inside for insulation.

We obviously had a few hours to wait so I opened a few of these old papers going back to from 1936 to around 1941.  There were daily accounts of Hitler's armies on the move through Europe and Japan's assault on China.  As I read them I wondered how we didn't foresee world war returning and dragging us all in yet again.  How could anyone read these reports, day by day, month after month and think anything else?  And yet we did for it was unimaginable to us in those years that we would inevitably get swept up into a world on fire.

Merkel's right, keep Ukraine out of NATO.  We don't need another country able to pull the Article 5 trigger.

In my view the 'grand bargain' that we need to bind the West and Russia requires a zone of buffer states between NATO and Russian positions.  It would mean Old NATO, the original members, stepping back.  Yet I think that possibility is already foreclosed.

Brits Throw In the Towel in Helmand

Like Canada, Britain maintained a military contingent in Afghanistan for more than a decade.   Like Canada, the Brits set lofty goals of their Afghan War.  Like Canada, the Brits are leaving Afghanistan with precious little to show for their sacrifice in lives and treasure.

Like Canada in Kandahr, the Brits used a carrot and stick approach in their mission to Helmand province.  This consisted of taking the fight to the Taliban, the warfighting, and construction of schools, roads and other infrastructure to win over the hearts and minds of the local Afghans.  According to The Guardian, even the civil assistance mission failed.

The UK has said a quiet goodbye to its political ambitions in Helmand, the corner of Afghanistan it once dreamt of remaking, handing over its former headquarters in the provincial capital.

The dusty offices of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), which once channelled hundreds of millions of dollars into trying to build everything from roads to rule of law, now belong to an Afghan government public health team.

The departure this week was agreed years ago by Nato and President Hamid Karzai, who railed against the reconstruction teams as militarised outsiders undermining the government by providing services that should be the work of his ministers.

Still, they are leaving behind a province that last year harvested a record opium crop and where violence in northern Sangin got so bad that government forces reportedly struck a deal with the Taliban.

Unemployment is rampant, electricity is scarce and malnutrition is common. "People are worried," said Ghulam Sarwar Ghafari, 65, a school teacher in Lashkar Gah who said security was getting worse. "People had jobs working for the British. They were building roads, clinics and bridges, but a lot of things are unfinished."

The British government has retreated into the vast Camp Bastion military base, and in less than a month will shut what remains of the PRT. The mission in Kabul will still include the province in its aid plans, but the days of intense focus on an area that is home to fewer than a million people are over.

These nebulous, little wars rarely, it seems, turn out well.  We take a half-assed approach going in and the same approach when we pry ourselves out.  Canada's mission, for all the pompous boasts of our political and military leadership, was farcical.  To think that Canada could dominate the Taliban in a province of the size and population of Kandahar with a fighting force that rarely reached 1,000-troops was laughable or might have been but for the dead and wounded we sustained.

Harper was in on the gag too.   Remember he proclaimed that Canadian troops would crush the insurgents, render Kandahar free of the Taliban, make it safe for democracy.  Stephen Harper set the bar by which the outcome of our Afghan War would be judged victory or defeat.  Given that, like the Brits, we failed to achieve our leader's stated objectives, we were defeated.  At least in Korea we fought to a tie.

Higher Fees for Guilty Pleas

Only in Cameron Conservative Britain.   There the government wants to 'reform' the legal aid system to set defence counsel against their clients by making it lucrative for lawyers to enter guilty pleas as early as possible.  Legal aid lawyers will also lose money if cases actually go to trial.

The London Criminal Courts Solicitors Association (LCCSA), which has examined revised fee figures  ...says that a pattern of perverse financial incentives will affect both magistrate and crown court cases.

'A clien pleading guilty to a standard actual bodily harm charge in crown court will earn their lawyer as much as a 20% fee increase,' the LCCSA said. 'There are some cases in crown court where a quick guilty plea will earn a lawyer a 75% fee increase.'

Perfect, give your defence lawyer a financial incentive to toss you to the wolves. Only in post-Thatcher Britain and, yes, it's a pity.

Are We Going to Stand By as Our Kids' Future is Stolen?

Jimmy Carter recently observed that today's American middle class is coming to resemble America's poor back in the pre-Reagan era.  That's the bad news.  The worse news is that Americans aren't alone.

Last week the International Red Cross warned that Europeans face decades of poverty, mass unemployment, widening inequality, social exclusion and collective despair from austerity measures inflicted on them by their own governments.

Like much of Europe, Britain's middle class is also being ravaged by chronic unemployment and mounting inequality.

The social mobility and child poverty commission, established by David Cameron, is expected to warn that government initiatives have all too often been aimed at the poorest 10%.   Yet the inability to get on in life is now a major and growing problenm for middle-class children and this group is in dire need of attention, it is expected to report.

A Whitehall source said:  "This will be controversial, but for the first time in over a century there is a real risk that the next generation of adults ends up worse off than today's generation.  This is a problem for the children of parents with above-average incomes, not just a problem for those at the bottom.   Many, many children face the prospect of having lower living standards than their parents.

With nihilistic corporatism firmly entrenched in the ranks of Canada's Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, our kids and theirs face the same future.  It's only a question of degree that will distinguish them from their American or European counterparts.  And it's not a matter of whether they'll be able to afford a McMansion either.  They're already being herded into the Precariat Corral. As their economic strength is sapped, their political power will also be siphoned off.  That's the way the slide works.  Our failure to look out for them today means our kids and theirs will face an awful fight tomorrow.

IMF Calls on Cameron Tories to Change Course

Britain's Conservative Cameron government are the High Priests of bone-crushing austerity.   David Cameron and his gaggle of privileged Saville Row suiters are not interested in sparing the lash when it comes to Britain's weak and vulnerable.   Meanwhile, Steve Harper looks on with fawning admiration at everything he wishes he could be.

Yet Cameron has now run afoul of that bastion of radical socialism, the International Monetary Fund.  The IMF is crying "enough already" and pleading with Cameron to reverse course if only to boost the British economy.

It said the £10bn-worth of spending cuts and taxes planned for the coming year would be a "drag on growth" and urged the government to do more to stimulate the economy.

The fund's deputy managing director David Lipton said Britain should bring forward investment on infrastructure and defer some near-term spending cuts to kickstart the economy.

"In a range of policy areas, the government should be more supportive of growth. What is important now is not to make a mistake today and presume that all will be well with the economy some years from now. I think it's important to get started on infrastructure projects that will support the economy." He said that would allow the government to push back some of the cuts and bring forward more supportive measures.

The UK could suffer higher unemployment and lose economic capacity permanently if it ignores the fund's advice, he warned.

And the Walls Come Tumbling Down

Another look at the century old and ongoing, lethal aftermath of the way Britain and France carved up the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire post WWI.  It's a topic addressed here in several posts, the most recent just yesterday.

We're now witnessing the walls, built by the Brits and the French in carving up the region to suit their convenience, beginning to crumble.   Will the west now step in to shore up their malignant handiwork even as it collapses under the weight of irreconcilable ethnic and religious tensions?  From The Independent:

...for the first time in over 90 years, the whole postwar settlement in the region is coming unstuck. External frontiers are no longer the impassable barriers they were until recently, while internal dividing lines are becoming as complicated to cross as international frontiers.
In Syria, the government no longer controls many crossing points into Turkey and Iraq. Syrian rebels advance and retreat without hindrance across their country's international borders, while Shia and Sunni fighters from Lebanon increasingly fight on opposing sides in Syria. The Israelis bomb Syria at will. Of course, the movements of guerrilla bands in the midst of a civil war do not necessarily mean that the state is finally disintegrating. But the permeability of its borders suggests that whoever comes out as the winner of the Syrian civil war will rule a weak state scarcely capable of defending itself.

The same process is at work in Iraq. The so-called trigger line dividing Kurdish-controlled territory in the north from the rest of Iraq is more and more like a frontier defended on both sides by armed force. Baghdad infuriated the Kurds last year by setting up the Dijla (Tigris) Operations Command, which threatened to enforce central military control over areas disputed between Kurds and Arabs.

Dividing lines got more complicated in Iraq after the Hawaijah massacre on 23 April left at least 44 Sunni Arab protesters dead. This came after four months of massive but peaceful Sunni protests against discrimination and persecution. The result of this ever-deeper rift between the Sunni and the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad is that Iraqi troops in Sunni-majority areas behave like an occupation army. At night, they abandon isolated outposts so they can concentrate forces in defensible positions. Iraqi government control in the northern half of the country is becoming ever more tenuous.

The history of the outright, self-serving duplicity of France, Britain and, to a lesser extent, Czarist Russia is fascinating and reveals plainly how they planted the seeds of the ongoing and endless conflict that wracks the Muslim world to this day and will continue into the future.

Not surprisingly, the leaders of the 30 million Kurds are the most jubilant at the discrediting of agreements of which they, along with the Palestinians, were to be the greatest victims. After being divided between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria, they sense their moment has finally come. In Iraq, they enjoy autonomy close to independence, and in Syria they have seized control of their own towns and villages. In Turkey, as the PKK Turkish Kurd guerrillas begin to trek back to the Qandil mountains in northern Iraq under a peace deal, the Kurds have shown that, in 30 years of war, the Turkish state has failed to crush them.

But as the 20th century settlement of the Middle East collapses, the outcome is unlikely to be peace and prosperity. It is easy to see what is wrong with the governments in present-day Iraq and Syria, but not what would replace them. Look at the almost unanimous applause among foreign politicians and media at the fall of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, then look at Libya now, its government permanently besieged or on the run from militia gunmen.

It's no wonder that London, Paris and Washington wrestle with how to deal with Syria?  What are their choices but to bow out entirely or attempt to reinstate a 21st century equivalent of their early 20th century fiasco?

Will Climate Change Drive Britain Back Into Recession?

Britain's Tory government is hoping desperately to avoid a "triple dip" recession on its watch.   The Cameron government eked out a 0.1% growth for the three months ending March 1st, about as slender a margin as they come.

Recently, however, the British Isles have been plunged into a deep freeze that researchers are now attributing to atmospheric changes triggered by the loss of Arctic sea ice.   Now it seems the cold snap could plunge Britain into yet another recession, the "triple dip."

...amid reports of empty shopping malls, closed schools and factory shutdowns, analysts said the weather increased the chance that the fall in activity in the final three months of 2012 would be followed by another quarter of falling gross domestic product in early 2013 – thus satisfying the official definition of a recession.

Economists said the cold snap would affect takings at pubs and restaurants, while parents would have had to take time off work to look after their children when the schools were closed. Manufacturing firms were likely to be affected by disrupted supply chains.

The outlook for Britain is anything but promising.  The U.K. deep freeze is expected to continue until the end of April.   April, Britain, freezing, really?  It's difficult to grasp the enormity of climate change in the U.K.   For centuries it's been a damp, soggy, mild sort of place save for the northlands.   Over the past two years it has gone from mega-drought to mega-floods to sustained freezing conditions across the length of the country.   Britain is not built nor is it organized for these conditions.  British agriculture, for example, is facing a crisis worse than the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak of 2001.

Farming faces a perfect storm. Appalling weather – 2012 was the second wettest year on record in England – has coincided with disease in livestock, including bovine TB and Schmallenberg in sheep, which causes birth defects. On top of this there are commercial pressures, with retailers driving prices down because of the state of the economy, combined with the cost of animal feed needed to replace poor quality silage due to the weather, shooting up by 40%.

As a result, farmers are seeing incomes slashed. According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), some livestock farmers have seen incomes cut by more than 50% to only £14,000 a year, while dairy farmers have seen decreases of more than 40%

Britain should be a wake-up call for Canada and for all our parties, Conservative, Liberal and NDP.  If ever there was a time to reinstate the "Precautionary Principle" this surely must be it.

A triple dip recession would be the first recorded in Britain.  Wait a second, was the Black Death just a single dip recession?

It's Not Extreme Once It Becomes Normal

Britain's Environment Agency has warned that the country must prepare for increasingly extreme weather conditions.

Last year, flooding was recorded on 20% of days and drought on 25% of days, with rivers such as the Tyne, Ouse and Tone going from their record lowest flows to record highest in four months.

"It was an extraordinary year and it serves as a warning for the country that we face a future in which there are likely to be more and more extreme weather events," said Lord (Chris) Smith, the agency's chairman. "We need, very urgently, to prepare plans to deal with these extremes."

In early 2012, the Environment Agency issued a series of warnings about desperately low levels in rivers, reservoirs and groundwater aquifers. The previous year was one of the driest on record, and reservoirs and boreholes were at record lows for that time of year. In winter, they should have been full and the agency warned that only a downpour lasting weeks could avert a serious summer drought.

Britain got its downpour, but it lasted months, with previously parched fields turned into quagmires and more than 8,000 homes flooded. "We saw environmental damage caused by rivers with significantly reduced flows, hosepipe bans affecting millions and farmers and businesses left unable to take water from rivers," said Smith. "But we also saw the wettest year on record in England."

A dramatic illustration of the extraordinary changes in weather is revealed by water flow measurements in the Tyne. In March, flow was 28% of its long-term average for that time of year. By June, after months of heavy rain, the flow hit 406%. 

Cameron's Austerity Wins Britain a Credit Downgrade

It's not like Britain's Conservatives weren't warned their austerity platform would bludgeon their nation's economy.  Still, David Cameron didn't have to boast that keeping Britain's AAA credit rating intact would by the real test of his economic and political credibility.

Oopsie.

Britain's credit rating has now been dropped from AAA to Aa1 by the ratings agency, Moody's.   And the Tories, predictably, have vowed to stay the course since that seems to be working so well.

Chancellor George Osborne said the government would continue taking "tough measures" to deal with the deficit.

Mr Osborne said the decision was "a stark reminder of the debt problems facing our country" and did not mean the government should change course.

Britain's Norman Legacy - One Thousand Years of Inequality

I first became aware of the Norman impact on Britain post-1066 when I learned of its effects on the English language.

Normans, effectively Vikings or Norse from France, settled in as a dominant socio-economic layer atop Saxon England.  They claimed the best of the best - of everything.

The Saxon peasant may have raised chickens but it was his Norman lords who enjoyed "poultry" (poulet).   The Saxon peasant herded cattle but his lord feasted on "beef" (boeuf) and veal.   Sheep from the field became "mutton" on his lordship's table.   Modern English is laced with these traces of Norman dominance over its Saxon people.  They all seem tinged with the elements of affluence and power (indict, jury and verdict for example).

An item in today's Guardian goes beyond linguistics to show how the Norman legacy remains prevalent in modern British inequality.

According to the author Kevin Cahill, the main driver behind the absurd expense of owning land and property in Britain is that so much of the nation's land is locked up by a tiny elite. Just 0.3% of the population – 160,000 families – own two thirds of the country. Less than 1% of the population owns 70% of the land, running Britain a close second to Brazil for the title of the country with the most unequal land distribution on Earth.

Much of this can be traced back to 1066. The first act of William the Conqueror, in 1067, was to declare that every acre of land in England now belonged to the monarch. This was unprecedented: Anglo-Saxon England had been a mosaic of landowners. Now there was just one. William then proceeded to parcel much of that land out to those who had fought with him at Hastings. This was the beginning of feudalism; it was also the beginning of the landowning culture that has plagued England – and Britain – ever since.

The dukes and earls who still own so much of the nation's land, and who feature every year on the breathless rich lists, are the beneficiaries of this astonishing land grab. William's 22nd great-granddaughter, who today sits on the throne, is still the legal owner of the whole of England. Even your house, if you've been able to afford one, is technically hers. You're a tenant, and the price of your tenancy is your loyalty to the crown. When the current monarch dies, her son will inherit the crown (another Norman innovation, incidentally, since Anglo-Saxon kings were elected). As Duke of Cornwall, he is the inheritor of land that William gave to Brian of Brittany in 1068, for helping to defeat the English at Hastings.

My early introduction into the language question left me convinced that Britain remains a foreign-occupied country.  This piece erases all doubt.

IMF Calls Bullshit on Brit Tory Austerity Farce

David Cameron's boneheaded austerity fetish isn't working.   Even the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, says that much is plain.  The Guardian's Jonathan Portes has this take on the IMF report.

A non-technical summary of Thursday's International Monetary Fund report on the UK economy would be that we are up the creek – "recovery has stalled" – and that we should use any available paddle to head as fast as possible in the opposite direction. "Demand support is needed. Additional monetary stimulus … credit easing measures … increased government spending on public investment." Stop pretending we're on track, and throw the kitchen sink at the economy.

 There are, however, two much more interesting parts to the IMF report. The first is its demolition of the government's argument that this pain was necessary and the alternative would have been worse – that, as George Osborne says, without accelerated fiscal consolidation we would have had higher interest rates and maybe even a debt crisis. This is nonsense: low interest rates reflect not economic confidence but its opposite, and the IMF says so: "Bond yields have been driven more by growth expectations than fears of a sovereign crisis."

 But even more important is the IMF's analysis of the consequences of this policy failure: not just low growth now (they estimate fiscal consolidation has so far knocked about 2.5% off output) but permanent economic and social damage. This is primarily because unemployment – especially long-term and youth unemployment – has "scarring" effects; someone who is unemployed now because of recession is more likely to be out of work later in life, even after economic recovery.

...the basic point is spot on. In other words, what the government is offering is not pain today for a better economic future tomorrow. It's pain today for more pain tomorrow. As many of us have long argued, the reason for changing course is not because of the short-term boost to growth, but because of the longer-term impacts.

Boneheaded Britain

The big problem with ideologues is their propensity to do genuinely stupid things that leave others paying the price for years, sometimes decades.

With Harper at the helm, Canada has no cause to be smug, but it's Britain that provides the best example of conservative boneheadedness at the moment as the Cameron government plunges the UK into a double-dip recession.   The Guardian's Will Hutton points out how utterly unnecessary this all was:

Yet [George] Osborne – the kamikaze chancellor – and his coalition partners decided that the prime aim of government policy had to be eliminating the structural public sector deficit in just one parliament. Caution was thrown to the wind. The assumption was that the economy would quickly get back to business as usual; after all, as long as markets were free and flexible, what could go wrong? 

Osborne, a laissez-faire economic dry, would repeat Sir Geoffrey Howe's budget of 1981, opening the way for tax cuts in the runup to the general election. He would keep the Murdoch press onside – and repeat the years of Margaret Thatcher's hegemony.

The result has been as inevitable as it is desperately sad. On Wednesday we learned that Britain has experienced a double-dip recession just two years after the biggest decline in output since the early 1930s. Worse, it will not be until 2014 that output will return to 2008 levels – a six-year recession not equalled since the 1870s. What is happening is a disgrace.

Moreover, it is totally unnecessary. Britain has a very strong public balance sheet. The stock of our national debt, accumulated over decades, is modest compared with other countries and our own past. The rate of interest is the lowest since the 1890s. The debt is exceptionally long term and does not need to be refinanced with any sense of panic. Total debt service costs have been higher for only a few decades over the past 200 years.

Britain was supremely well placed to take a measured approach to budget deficit reduction. ...Only an innocent or a fool would insist on it being done in four years, with four-fifths of the burden assumed by spending cuts. It was clear that a vicious circle could be created in which the severity of the programme would so puncture the growth in demand that the weakened banks would stay weakened – and business confidence would remain flat. Britain would be deadlocked in stagnation.

That is what is happening. The Office for Budget Responsibility's forecast of a return to growth next year, driven by a surge in investment and exports, has looked absurd for months. The idea that business investment will jump 40% by 2015/16, the biggest since 1945, is risible.

A collective madness seems to have descended on our policymakers. Too few understand that what besets capitalism is unknowable risk – the risk of transformative new technologies, the risk of making epic business mistakes, or the risk of there being no demand for the goods and services a business produces. 


But it's not really a collective madness, it's the appearance of a class of ideologues who persistently ignore facts in favour of their gut instincts.  And that, in a nutshell, is the recipe for a ruler of the small stature of Stephen Harper.   He has been indulged and pampered by his rightwing acolytes so long that he has thrown caution to the wind in pursuing his illogic.   That he has descended into megalomania was almost pre-ordained.   That we and our kids will pay dearly for his boneheadedness is virtually assured.