Editorial: Solving the Social and Climate Crisis Means Breaking with Market Madness

by Ken Ferguson

FACED WITH HEAT WAVES which bend railway lines, lead to premature deaths, see homes burned by fires and threaten not just food shortages but the actual non-availability of some basic vegetables it would be fair to expect politicians to hit the alarm button.

Yet they are not — why not?

All the supposed mainstream parties are to greater or lesser degree supporters of the existing market capitalist system which was pioneered by Thatcher over 40 years ago and not only kept in place by all major parties but positively endorsed by them with that fatal phrase that it’s “the only game in town”.

Indeed these politicians now offer unquestioning support to the very system whose profit before people policies lie at the heart of the many headed crisis which are rapidly producing despair among voters and, in extremis nurturing the racism of far right parties and loosing balaclava clad thugs on our streets.

Voice readers don’t need to have the consequences — huge housing waiting lists, job insecurity, mushrooming climate crisis and an overarching cost of living crisis — spelled out in detail.

However, they do need to be part of the forces that help answer the key question… what is to be done?

Much hype surrounded the removal of the hapless Keir Starmer from Downing Street and the ascent to power of — maybe — lefty Andy Burnham who denounced the politics of the last 40 years as a ‘wrong turn’.

A month on we have some preliminary evidence on which to gauge the nature and depths of this supposed break with the last 40 years of failure but to spot it readers will need to borrow Sherlock Holmes’s famous magnifier.

First, and perhaps centrally, Burnham is pledged to stick with the iron discipline of Reeves’s ‘fiscal rules’ which — whatever the rhetoric — makes cuts in jobs and services inevitable in the October budget when it is delivered by a Chancellor who recently resigned as defence secretary, demanding more war spending.

This leads us to the brutal reality that this new government has moved not one millimetre away from the bloated war plans of its predecessor including billions for suicidal nuclear weapons and an expansion into A-bomb delivering, US-made jets.

But perhaps of greater significance in this regard is the unyielding endorsement of the idea that stepping up war spending and remaining, to all intents and purposes, tied to increasingly unhinged policies of Trump is the way ahead.

This allows the use of the fictional “RAF Fairford” — actually a US base in the English countryside — as a launch point for the disaster which is the war on Iran exposing as a fairy story that this doesn’t involve the UK.

Likewise the supply and use of British made Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine to bombard Russia only feeds the horror of death and destruction killing thousands every month when a real attempt to end the fighting is ignored.

So far then, the Burnham government has been good on sound bites and declarations but in the absence of concrete policy changes it needs to be viewed a wary eye with the jury still out on it.

Here in Scotland, much attention has revolved around the to be or not to be decisions on the Rosebank oil field and Jackdaw gas field.

Discredited claims of ‘opposition’ parties

The so called ‘opposition’ parties — Scottish Labour leadership contenders, Tory, Reform — with, to their shame, some trade unions — back the environment-trashing plans to drill the fields with discredited claims about energy security and jobs.

Yet the much more long term proposal to construct wind turbines at Ardersier on the Moray Firth by a consortium including Chinese firm Ming Yang and promising 1,500 jobs is blocked by the Labour government on ‘security grounds’ and goes largely uncontested.

These “security grounds” proved no block on the massive new Chinese embassy in the heart of London or prevented Chinese involvement in several nuclear power stations.

Irrespective of the truth of UK security claims what the proposed development shows is that the construction of those structures here in Scotland is perfectly viable and points the way to a major de-industrialisation and re-skilling in Scotland.

However given the urgency of the cost of living and climate crisis Scotland needs to break with the idea that trawling the globe to win the plants capable of building such structures is a viable option and demand that energy in all its forms be taken into public ownership and developed not to enrich the profiteers but supply the energy needs of people.

Clearly this approach would include the development, in public hands, of the yards and factories to supply this industry of the future rather than bribing oil companies to pollute the planet.

Some years ago the STUC produced a report which estimated that a Green New Deal would produce 70,000 jobs. Obviously many of them would be filled by former oil workers whose valuable skills can be utilised in this new technology.

Rather than debating the future of oil and floating the idea of privatising Prestwick and Ferguson Marine the Scottish Government needs to be pressed to get behind the public ownership of our vast energy resources and the technology to harness them for jobs and provide energy for industry and homes at realistic stable prices.

The climate clock is ticking ever more rapidly.