The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has organised an emergency protest on Monday 22nd May for 6.00pm outside Parliament Square, as it fights to protect the right to strike which is under attack from the Tory government.
Mick Lynch from the RMT, Matt Wrack from the FBU and Kevin Courtney will be speaking at the rally, with Unison, USDAW and the PCS union all showing their support.
The government’s strikes bill, which will empower employers to sue unions and sack staff in crucial sectors if minimum service levels aren’t maintained, has been slammed as an attack on the fundamental right to strike and as a draconian piece of legislation. The Bill essentially means that when workers lawfully vote to strike in health, education, fire, transport, border security and nuclear decommissioning, they could be forced to attend work – and sacked if they don’t comply.
The TUC said in a press statement: “We can’t afford to lose the right to strike. But multi-millionaire Tory politicians are attacking our right to strike for better pay and fair treatment at work.
Former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has once more refused to apologise for his disastrous mini-budget which caused financial turmoil and which eventually led to him being sacked and Liz Truss being forced out of office.
Kwarteng, whose mini-budget resulted in chaos on the financial markets, the pound hitting an all-time low against the dollar and mortgage rates soaring, said he was ‘not in the business of forgiveness’.
“I’m not going to apologise,” he told Channel 4 News.
Former Tory MP and now Reform UK party member Ann Widdecombe has been widely condemned for her ‘out of touch’ and appalling comments on families struggling to make ends meet during the cost of living crisis.
Widdecombe was asked on BBC 2’s Politics Live programme about the cost of living crisis and what advice she would give to viewers who could not even afford the basics.
Jo Coburn asked the former Tory MP: “What do you say to those viewers who literally can’t afford to pay even for some of the basics – if they’ve gone up the way that cheese sandwich has, with all its ingredients?”
“Well, then you don’t do the cheese sandwich,” Widdecombe replied.
Her comments were immediately condemned by fellow panellist Rachel Cunliffe who said: “We’re talking about absolute basics and staples. We’re talking about own-brand pasta, we’re talking about bread, we’re talking about families who can’t afford to feed their children.
‘The First Past the Post system hands more power to the establishment than MPs or people.’
The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has set out the reasons for why the Labour Party should back a change to the voting system in favour of proportional representation (PR), despite party leader Keir Starmer saying that voting reform will not be a priority should Labour win power.
Although the Labour Party conference last year overwhelmingly backed a motion calling on the party to embrace a proportional electoral system, the leadership has made clear that it would not do as the motion says.
Since then, at the Progressive Britain conference last week, Starmer made clear that voting reform would not be among the priorities should Labour win power.
Burnham however has urged the party to adopt PR, saying that the current first-past-the-post voting system hands more power to the establishment than MPs or people and changing the system to proportional representation would mean “every vote would matter”.
Carla Denyer claims Greens are the strongest party on democratic reform
Carla Denyer, Cost of Living Crisis, Bristol, 2 April 2022
The Green Party has slammed the Tories for dragging democracy in the UK in a dangerous direction.
Speaking at an event last night, co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, Carla Denyer, laid out how the Tory’s have assaulted our democracy – and how the Greens would solve it.
Denyer discussed how to restore public faith in politics and argued that the Greens were the strongest party on democratic reform.
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The Greens have said they would apply proportional representation for all elections to all levels of government, along with bringing the voting age down to 16.
They would introduce devolution, mirroring systems in Europe by giving more power to local and regional government and Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Parliament. They would also introduce an elected upper house to replace hereditary power in the House of Lord and set up a Citizen’s Convention.
Introducing a fairer system of state funding for political parties, which would hope to eliminate the dependence of large private donations and strengthen transparency on political lobbying and donations. One in four people believe that party donors have the most influence on government decisions, according to Unlock Democracy.
Denyer also accused the media of preventing democratic conversations through its bias towards certain political parties.
Just Stop Oil supporters have been forcibly removed from the Houses of Parliament where they were attending the Home Affairs Committee inquiry into the policing of public protests during the Coronation. Just Stop Oil is demanding an end to all new oil, gas and coal projects in the UK.
At around 10:30 am, five of the 19 Just Stop Oil supporters, who were wrongfully arrested on the 6th May, were ejected from the Home Affairs Committee inquiry after one of them attempted to speak. The supporters were wearing the same t-shirts they wore on Coronation Day, which prompted the police to arrest them for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.
Dr Kush Naker, 33, a doctor of infectious diseases from London, began to read their prepared statement: “We, as supporters of Just Stop Oil, are here today because our democracy is under threat…” however, he was unable to finish before all five were forcibly removed from the committee. One Just Stop Oil supporter could be heard saying “we should not have been arrested for wearing t-shirts,” as she was ejected from the hearing.
Meanwhile, outside Parliament, eight supporters of Just Stop Oil were being arrested for peacefully marching in Parliament Square after a section 12 public order notice was issued earlier.
The Home Affairs committee has invited evidence from policing representatives, the anti-monarchy group Republic and human rights lawyer Adam Wagner. However, no invite has been extended to Just Stop Oil, despite supporters of the campaign making up over a third of those wrongfully arrested on Coronation Day.
Just Stop Oil has presented a written submission of evidence about the day’s events that can be read here. The committee has responded to advise it will ‘not be formally accepting written evidence.’
A Just Stop Oil spokesperson said:
“This is a continuation of the silencing of legitimate dissent we saw at the Coronation. The Metropolitan Police baselessly arrested doctors, lecturers, students and electricians, simply for possessing flags and t-shirts. This is clearly politically motivated and represents a massive overreach by the police. No evidence has been provided and now those wrongfully arrested are being prevented from giving evidence to the very committee that has been organised to assess the policing during the coronation.”
“The world is watching in horror at what has become of our once proud British democracy. This government, against all available scientific information, is pursuing an agenda of opening new oil, gas and coal projects, during a climate crisis that threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people. This silencing of those opposed to these genocidal policies is not going unnoticed by the young, who will be overseeing the climate trials of the future. Those who facilitated and co-operated with these criminal acts will be held to account for the crime of genocide.”
It is ‘deeply concerning’ that Suella Braverman, Michael Gove, and a raft of Tory MPs are speaking alongside anti-green forces, say opposition politicians
The National Conservatism (NatCon) conference kicks off today in Westminster, London, featuring a roster of high-profile speakers drawn from the upper reaches of the government and the conservative right.
A DeSmog analysis has found climate denial and a hostility to net zero to be a common feature among many of the individuals speaking at the three-day summit.
The gathering comes as Rishi Sunak’s government – which is already off track to meet the UK’s climate commitments – pursues new fossil fuel extraction, and prominent figures in the right-wing media continue to cast doubt over net zero policy.
The NatCon conference is being organised by the US-based think tank the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF) and intends to catalyse a “revival” of a political philosophy based on “national identity and culture” alongside “god and country”.
While energy and climate policy is oddly absent from the agenda, many of the speakers and their parent organisations have a record of hostility to climate action, a scepticism of climate science, and interests in fossil fuels.
The event features keynote speeches from Home Secretary Suella Braverman, and Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Secretary Michael Gove. Braverman ran for Tory leader last year vowing to “suspend the all-consuming desire to achieve Net Zero by 2050”. They will be joined by David Frost, a Conservative peer and a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s most prominent climate science denial group.
Fellow conference speakers also include Lee Anderson, Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party, who has claimed that people are “sick to death” of net zero, and former Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has said that taking action on climate change is “unrealistic” because “it would have no effect for hundreds or possibly a thousand years.”
Another speaker is Conservative MP John Hayes, a former energy minister who received £150,000 between 2018 and 2020 from Lebanon-based oil company BB Energy for work as a “strategic advisor”. Also in attendance will be Conservative MPs Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, and Conservative peer Daniel Hannan.
Cates used her speech to claim that “epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion” among young people are being caused by “culture, schools and universities” teaching that “our country is racist, our heroes are villains, [and] humanity is killing the Earth.”
Wera Hobhouse, Liberal Democrat Climate Spokesperson, told DeSmog: “It is deeply concerning to learn that Conservative ministers would attend a conference with climate deniers who stand in the way of progress.
“We need leaders who are committed to finding solutions to this crisis, not those betraying the trust of the people they were elected to serve by ignoring the overwhelming evidence of climate change.”
The selection of high-profile MPs, peers, and ministers are attending the NatCon conference despite Conservative backbencher Daniel Kawczynski having been reprimanded by the party in 2020 for speaking at a NatCon conference in Rome alongside far-right politicians.
“Daniel Kawczynski has been formally warned that his attendance at this event was not acceptable, particularly in light of the views of some of those in attendance,” the Conservative Party said at the time. Kawczynski spoke alongside Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orban and other far-right figures from across the EU.
The Edmund Burke Foundation
NatCon conferences have been running since 2016 and have featured radical right-wing politicians, academics and journalists from across the world, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni.
The EBF, which has organised the conferences since 2021, is a US think tank founded in 2019 under the founding principle that “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honoured by the state and other institutions both public and private.”
NatCon conference chairman Christopher DeMuth, who is co-chairing this week’s London conference, has previously expressed climate science denial and is tied to a number of think tanks that have opposed climate action.
DeMuth served as president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) from 1986 to 2006, an influential conservative think tank whose representatives have consistently cast doubt on humanity’s contribution to climate change.
The AEI has received over £2.9 million ($3,615,000) from ExxonMobil since 1998, and over £1.6 million ($2 million) from foundations related to petrochemicals giant Koch Industries from 2004 to 2017.
Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch drew criticism for meeting the AEI in November. Her predecessor Liz Truss met with the group in 2018.
In 2001, DeMuth wrote in the AEI’s Energy Crunch publication that “The Kyoto Treaty Deserved to Die”, and cast doubt on climate science. He wrote: “Although it is fairly well-established that the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed somewhat (one degree Fahrenheit) during the past century, it’s not clear why this happened.”
“Whatever the causes, we don’t know if future warming trends will be large or small, or whether the net environmental and economic consequences (including both beneficial and harmful effects) may be large or small,” he added.
It’s not clear whether DeMuth’s views towards climate science have evolved since. However, at the 2022 EU NatCon conference, he praised the contested science that emerged during the Covid pandemic and appeared to contrast this with a too-eager scientific consensus over man-made climate change. “The climate-change mantra of ‘the science is settled’ never got traction in a genuine crisis,” he said.
DeMuth is also a distinguished fellow of The Hudson Institute, a group which has reportedly worked to defeat climate bills in Congress. The group received more than £6.3 million ($7.9 million) in funding from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund between 2011 and 2013 – two opaque groups that have provided finance for anti-green causes.
DeMuth is also on the Alliance of Market Solutions board of advisors – an organisation of “conservative leaders” that aims to build support for policies that “protect the environment and deregulate and grow the economy.”
Another keynote speaker at the conference is Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation – a hub of opposition to climate action. The think tank, which influenced the policy of the Reagan administration, has platformed high-profile climate deniers such as the late S. Fred Singer, and received over £4.9 million ($6.1 million) from groups linked to the Koch family between 1997 and 2017.
The Heritage Foundation’s Vice President for Outreach, Andrew Olivastro, will also be speaking at the NatCon conference. Olivastro has said that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing – based on standards measuring a business’s impact on society and the environment – “is a direct assault on the heart and soul of the free market economy”.
‘Doom Mongering Propaganda’
The London conference will also play host to a number of British speakers who have refuted the scientific consensus on climate change in recent years.
Keynote speaker Douglas Murray, Associate Editor at The Spectator, argued in 2020 that “terrible policy decisions” were being made due to “the false belief that we are seeing an increase in catastrophic weather events.”
A Carbon Brief analysis of 504 scientific articles examining the link between climate change and extreme weather events found that 71 percent of the events and their underlying trends were made more likely or more severe by human-caused climate change.
Elsewhere, Murray claimed that educating children about climate change was akin to “terrifying our children with doom mongering propaganda” which “is nothing less than abuse.”
Speaker Melanie Phillips, a regular contributor to the The Daily Mail, The Spectator and The Times, wrote in 2022 that “there is no evidence that anything is happening to the world’s climate that lies outside historic fluctuations.”
She continued by arguing that “net zero has been a major contributor to Britain’s soaring fuel prices and the cost of living crisis, which played an outsize role in defenestrating Boris Johnson by turning the public against him.”
Daily Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs, who will also speak at the event, argued in 2019 that “CO2 emissions may not be the only reason for warming.”
She added: “sidelining studies that have, for example, found the natural climate system can suddenly shift, and ridiculing researchers who explore other possible variables – from solar changes to volcanoes – could be driving us further from the truth.”
Beyond climate science denial, many of the conference’s speakers have attacked green policies, with a particular focus on net zero.
Along with Lord Frost, the conference will host Gwythian Prins, a member of the GWPF’s academic advisory council. In 2021, Prins argued that “net zero agenda hands geopolitical control to China,” because green policies “attempt to defy the laws of thermodynamics.”
Toby Young, Editor of the Daily Sceptic, will also be speaking at the conference. Young wrote in The Spectator in 2022 that, “it’s not the fact of climate change that I’m sceptical about, but the claim that it’s anthropogenic [caused by humans]. I think that could be true, but the evidence isn’t compelling enough to justify the net-zero policy.”
A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.
“There is no scientific evidence or method that can determine how much of the warming we’ve had since 1900 was directly caused by humans,” Young told DeSmog. “What we do know is that temperatures have varied widely over the last 600 million years, along with levels of greenhouse gases, and these natural forces did not stop operating at the start of the last century.
Young questioned the validity of studies that cite near unanimous agreement among scientists on climate change. “Science is a process, not a consensus. The unproven hypothesis that humans have caused all or most climate change since the Industrial Revolution does not lend itself to a yes or no answer. The debate is over how much or how little humans are responsible for”.
The National Conservatism website also recommends a number of books which dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. Of the 41 books listed on the website and reviewed for this article, 14 contain passages that either refute climate science, criticise climate action, or demonise those calling for climate action.
Legatum’s Presence
A number of speakers at the conference also have links to Legatum – the Dubai-based investment fund behind the broadcaster GB News, which regularly platforms views that are hostile to climate science and net zero. Legatum also funds the Legatum Institute think tank, which received over £61,000 ($77,000) from a Koch Industries foundation in 2018.
“Legatum is an investor in GB News, a platform which hosts individuals with views on both sides of the argument,” a Legatum spokesperson said. “GB News supports media plurality in the UK, bringing fresh perspectives to the national conversation.”
Five of the UK NatCon speakers are on the advisory board of The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a Legatum-funded enterprise, founded by Jordan Peterson and dedicated to empowering “responsible citizenship” by drawing “on our moral, cultural, economic and spiritual foundations.” ARC members speaking at the conference include: the Conservative MPs Cates, Hayes, and Kruger, EBF UK chair James Orr, and UnHerd columnist Louise Perry.
Fred de Fossard, who heads a research unit at the Legatum Institute and acted as a special advisor to Jacob Rees-Mogg between 2020 and 2022, will also be speaking at the conference.
Rees-Mogg is now a GB News host, as is Tory deputy chair Anderson. They will be joined at the NatCon conference by fellow GB News host Darren Grimes, who has used his TV platform to demand a Brexit-style referendum on the UK’s net zero target, which he called “an asphyxiating straitjacket bound around the body of Britain”.
“This collective of climate deniers should have representatives of this government nowhere near it – yet multiple cabinet ministers aren’t merely in attendance, they’re keynote speakers,” Green Party MP Caroline Lucas told DeSmog. “Ministerial links to this conference wipe away any remaining shred of this government’s climate credibility. It’s time to kick toxic fossil fuel interests out of politics once and for all.”
There was a van waiting outside. One of the activists waved to the man in the driving seat. They didn’t think there was anything to worry about then; not ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ but close. They knew that what was planned for the group entering the meeting space in Haggerston, five miles away from the Coronation route, had nothing to do with King Charles III or his cavalcade of self-congratulation.
The members of Animal Rising, the direct-action group that advocates animal rights and plant-based foods, had a training session planned. They were going to learn more about non-violent protest action.
But the Metropolitan Police was more interested in violent anti-protest action. The women and non-binary people in the meeting space had just made cups of tea and coffee and sat down in a circle to introduce themselves when the police arrived. It was roughly 10.30 am and 20 officers stormed in.
The officers told the group that they had intelligence that Just Stop Oil planned to disrupt the Coronation and pointed to leaflets, and paint used for screenprinting as ‘proof’. Most of the Animal Rising activists were cuffed but they had to wait about an hour for a police bus to arrive.
They were then held for three hours in the police bus before being processed at the police station and then spent a further nine hours in custody before being released under investigation but not charged. It was after midnight when the women were back on the streets, far from where they had begun the previous day.
Judge Silas 'Silence' Reid ordered the arrest of Trudi, an #InsulateBritain supporter, who stood outside Inner London Crown Court yesterday with this placard: pic.twitter.com/fjXnWtrGwK
On Monday morning[ Today], 24 activists from Extinction Rebellion sat outside Inner London Crown Court carrying placards with the same message borne by Ms Warner.
The activists said they also handed in a letter to the court stating their intentions.
Lawyer Tim Crosland, who was disbarred for leaking a draft judgment about the building of a third runway at Heathrow Airport, said the protesters had chosen to be outside the court during another Insulate Britain trial to test Judge Reid.
He said: “He’s backed off, he’s left us alone. He’s exposed himself as an unprincipled bully. Because if he really believed that those signs were interfering with the courts of justice, it was his duty to stop us. And he didn’t.
“Think about what it means for Trudi and others who’ve been arrested. Those prosecutions are completely unsustainable, assuming we don’t get arrested now.”
The protesters, made up of doctors, lawyers and Quakers as well as a rabbi and a former police officer, sat in a row along the pavement outside the court premises showing their placards to passers-by.
