I went to see my MP the other day. He’s the one who was reported by the Daily Telegraph during the parliamentary expenses scandal to have wrongly claimed more than £11,000 in mortgage payments on his country property. This property had no mortgage and the MP, who according to the Telegraph had made 23 declarations that it was his main home, said the expenses were claimed in error. I seem to remember he said that he had forgotten that the mortgage had been paid off. Maybe the sort of MP who turns up to meet people like me at a constituency surgery wearing a dinner jacket, bow tie and cummerbund forgets these petty details, while the rest of us will never forget the day we paid it off, if it ever arrives. He is also the MP who, when the River Wye is in its death throes from phosphate pollution, has proposed an amendment to the upcoming UK Environment Bill to the effect that “in relation to consideration of phosphate levels when making planning decisions… the planning authority “can disregard any impact of the potential build and its long-term consequences on the level of phosphates in the water.”
https://hgnetwork.org/proposed-amendments-to-the-environment-bill-from-bill-wiggin-mp/
I shouldn’t really be lowering the tone by mentioning such things, because I had arranged the visit to propose the idea that everyone should drop any left-right tribalism and work together. It had seemed to me that those on the left were often more enthusiastic about green energy, for example, and that those on the right, like Mrs Thatcher, tended to think nuclear power was pretty sexy, and I was going to suggest that it was time to outgrow this polarisation and work together for the good of the planet. I didn’t begin to succeed in bridging this particular gap. Your man was so coated in the dinner jacket of self-satisfaction that I think he felt that he had charmed me, but he wasn’t really listening. He was thinking about the Hunt Ball.
I had intended to suggest that nothing short of a revolution would avert the coming climate calamity. That being a rich man, having gone to Eton and having followed the party line unwaveringly at Westminster, would not give him the slightest protection. For once, I would have said, we are all in this together. For once, some kind of revolution in the way we live is in all our interests. For the first time since the idea of revolution got people throwing insults and cobblestones, we should all be on the same side, trying to revolutionise the way we live and the way we look after the resources of the planet. At last it was possible to contemplate a revolution that was completely peaceful. At last there was no need for parties to cling on to their totems; they could sling their red flags and dinner jackets and start to take seriously the threats that will completely democratically affect us all.
He went off to the Hunt Ball quite pleased with himself, I think - it would take a better man than me to undermine his pleasure in being who he is - and I went home fairly cheesed off, not just for having lacked whatever qualities of eloquence or charm or sheer bloody intellect that might have at least dented his shell, but for being such an enthusiast, or idiot, to have thought such an attempt anything but a waste of my time. And his time – he had a Ball to get to.
Talking to you, however, doesn’t seem so crazy. I’m pretty sure you are not dressed for a hunt ball; I’ve no reason to think you are insufferably pleased with yourself, and you have an interest in the environment or we wouldn’t both be here now. I can reassure you that any criticism of capitalism that may follow is not based on some socialist or other ideology. I’m just bothered by what capitalism does to the planet. I’m bothered by the absurd idea of economic growth, because it seems to encourage an ever-expanding and ultimately doomed exploitation of the world’s resources. And maybe I’m bothered, and puzzled too, by an apparent lack of any kind of morality built in to the fabric of capitalism. When industry finds itself producing something that harms human beings, seriously damages the environment, or threatens the very survival of life on earth, it tends to react by trying to hide the truth while it continues to put shareholder value and dividends before the value of individual human lives, and even life on earth. These are men – I’m guessing mostly men – who have daughters, maybe, and grandchildren that they dandle - whatever that means – upon their knees.
Although businesses have been trying to sell us harmful but profitable ‘goods’ for years, the asbestos industry led the way in devising a new plan to mislead and misinform us about their deadly products. The link between exposure to asbestos and diseases such as asbestosis and cancer was first widely reported in the 1930s, often in workers with less than 6 months’ exposure to asbestos, though its dangers had been suspected for many years previously. A series of studies and reports in the 1940s and 1950s continued to make links between asbestos and lung disease, and a major epidemiological study in 1955 demonstrated that asbestos workers had a tenfold risk above the general population of contracting lung cancer.
The response of the asbestos industry was not to look for safer work-place practices or alternative products. Instead the three leading British asbestos companies founded the Asbestosis Research Council. This used links with academics to produce misleading ‘information’ about asbestos and asbestosis. The historian Geoffrey Tweedale in his paper ‘Science or Public Relations? The Inside Story of the Asbestosis Research Council, 1957-1990’ says ‘The impression of an independent science-based organisation could not have been further from the truth… Ultimately it was an attempt to capture the public agenda and influence public policy.’ According to a paper by Laurie Kazan-Allen, ‘The impression created of independent benevolent concern was manipulated to great effect. While statements by asbestos manufacturers would have been disbelieved, information disseminated by the ARC …was readily digested.’ While this deliberate deception continued large numbers of people were contracting very unpleasant diseases and dying without getting compensation from companies that had known about the risks for years and had tried to cover up the truth because profits were more important to them than people’s lives – and deaths. I find myself wondering who exactly knew about this. At what level in the companies were those who knew of the deception? Because they must have been concealing from their own colleagues, from the safety of the boardroom, the deadly danger of working in their industry.
Asbestos, like cigarettes, chiefly harmed people. The tobacco industry was similarly committed to marketing a product that caused illness and death. When in 1953 smoking was categorically linked to the dramatic rise of lung cancer, the industry’s CEOs came together at the Plaza Hotel in New York to develop a strategy, with the help of the nation’s leading public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton. Their plan was to cultivate any scientists who were sceptical about the research linking smoking and ill health, and to provide liberal funding to encourage new sceptics. They were way more devious than the asbestos industry. The aim was to manufacture a scientific controversy so that they could claim to be committed to science, and yet be protected by spreading the message that the links between smoking and disease were not proven. One of their tools, as with the asbestos industry, was to set up a ‘research’ body, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, based in the same offices as the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, with ample funding to draw in scientific sceptics and the power to dominate research in their own interests. Their stated aims were to maintain that there was no scientific proof of a link between smoking and cancer, that medical research pointed to many possible sources of cancer, and that ‘millions of people who derive pleasure and satisfaction from smoking can be reassured that every scientific means will be used to get all the facts as soon as possible.’
They were successful in protecting their industry at the cost of untold human deaths, and refining the techniques of perversion of scientific research to serve the needs of unscrupulous capitalism. Many other industries followed Big Tobacco to use ‘science’ for their own ends. The pesticide industry, for example, has somehow contrived a situation where they supply the safety data for their own products, giving them opportunities to use science to protect their profits rather than for the benefit of humanity. The story of glyphosate, long suspected of having serious effects on human health as well as on the environment, main ingredient of the weed-killer Roundup, the most widely-used weed-killer in the world, is typical. As I wrote in a previous post, ‘a recent court case in the US revealed that Monsanto, who had the patent for glyphosate, had suppressed research which highlighted potential links between glyphosate and cancer; had sponsored academics to deliver studies favourable to Monsanto; had written research papers on behalf of academics which suggested glyphosate was safe (‘ghost writing’) and had then used this body of evidence to lobby regulators in the US and the EU that the use of glyphosate was safe.’ Since then there have been further concerns that regulators such as the European Food Standards Authority have been accepting scientific studies funded and provided by the chemical industry and ignoring independent studies. Linda Birnbaum, former director of the US National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, said there has been an ongoing problem that is not unique to glyphosate with regulators taking industry studies “at industry’s word”, while ignoring red flags raised in non-industry-funded research. A recent Guardian article supports the view that the pesticide industry has successfully followed Big Tobacco’s example and hijacked science to protect its products. “This puts once more a finger on a sore spot: that national regulators do not seem to pay close scrutiny when looking at the quality of industry’s studies,” said Nina Holland, researcher at the watchdog group Corporate Europe Observatory. “This is shocking as it is their job to protect people’s health and the environment, not to serve the interests of the pesticide industry.”
Most deeply shocking of all, I think, is the way the fossil fuel industry has used these kinds of strategies, choosing to act as if the profits of their shareholders are more important than the survival of the planet. As early as 1958 they were hiring scientists to research the link between fossil fuels and global warming. Beginning in the 1990s, oil companies spent millions upon millions of dollars on public relations campaigns to confuse the press, the public and policymakers about the dangers posed by burning fossil fuels. Their aim was “to reposition global warming as theory, not fact” – the same Big Tobacco strategy of creating the impression of scientific controversy where they knew that there was incontrovertible scientific evidence. This has delayed our tackling of the climate crisis by decades. An ex-Exxon scientist quoted in a recent Guardian article said ‘Back in 1980, there was a guy working for Exxon and he was one of the inventors of the lithium battery, which electric cars now use. This guy won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on lithium batteries. Just imagine if Exxon management had taken our prediction seriously! They could have easily built huge factories to make lithium batteries to facilitate the transition to electric cars. Instead, they fired this guy. They shut down all their energy work. And they started funding climate deniers.’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crisis-crime-fossil-fuels-environment
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Maybe capitalism can have no conscience or morality, by its very nature. It also has the power to evade regulations, and to lobby and bribe governments not to regulate it. But there are alternatives. You experience them if you get your water from Welsh Water, a not-for-profit company, or if you shop in the Co-op. These enterprises have morality and ethics at their centres, Ok, the Coop may not have as many types of sun-dried tomato as Tesco, but they don’t try to sell you products from the illegally-occupied West Bank either. And Welsh Water would have no incentive, unlike Southern Water, a privatised utility, to dump enormous volumes of untreated sewage into the sea for years simply because it was more profitable than treating it. Southern Water’s customers had been paying them to treat the sewage. Not treating it contributed to Southern Water’s shareholders trousering £622 million in profit between 2013 and 2017.
https://weownit.org.uk/company/southern-water
I’ve visited social enterprises (in Romania, as it happens, although that is not important) where the workers seemed as enthusiastic about their work, and about the harmonious supportive atmosphere of working in a social enterprise, as they were about the children’s orphanage (or other good cause) that their business had chosen to support. And by definition there was no-one in the background getting obscenely rich while not contributing much except by ….being rich already. There are alternatives to capitalism that aren’t scary monsters, and won’t poison us or destroy our planet. They are as homey as the Coop or John Lewis’s. It’s about time we started channelling human energy into enterprises that aim to benefit us all, rather than companies seeking to benefit the rich and divide us ever more starkly into haves and have-nots. Otherwise we’ll all end up being have-nots.
Richard Fleming just now
Basil - so good to hear from you! I do try not to rant. I'm very conscious that certain segments of society are very quick to accuse one of 'getting on one's soapbox', 'virtue signalling' etc - all designed to belittle people who feel passionate about important issues. So yes,I do try to avoid ranting!
Good on yer, Richard, I'm with you. You express this stuff much better than I can, I so easily and quickly go into a rant. It's got to change or we are doomed.