Puffins On Farne Island

I've been away for 10 days in Northumbria. I'd never been north of York, so it was interesting spending time in places like Alnwick, Bamburgh and Seahouses.

We took a 2 1/2 hour boat tour to the Farne Islands ... seals lounging on rocks, and a landfall for an hour on Inner Farne (arctic terns sweeping over head, thousands of puffins).

Only a day later, news broke that the number of breeding pairs of puffins has fallen from over 55 000 in 2003, to 36,500 this year.

Sandeels, the staple food of puffins in the summer, are in good supply. There is a lack of ground predators, so the puffins can breed.

The suspicion is that fewer puffins are surviving over the winter, and something is happening in the open sea (an intensification of storms due to climate change) that affects the ability of puffins to find winter food.

It's not just polar bears!

Batman And America's Vigilante Violence

Andrew Neil is onto something ...

"Batman is really an allegory for America. He thinks he stands for truth and justice but his penchant for vigilante violence is deeply suspect as a means of spreading these virtues (think of G Bush's invasion of Iraq) and actually attracts the sort of evil he is meant to be destroying. The Joker is obviously al-Qaeda and you are given the strong impression that he wouldn't exist if Batman wasn't there in the first place. Batman is not averse to beating a confession out of the Joker (Gitmo, Abu Ghraib). Batman wins in the end, but since most of Gotham (Baghdad) is trashed in the process - even the city's biggest hospital gets blown to smithereens - you wonder if it was really worth it."

Recent Stories In The Telegraph

- One of the city council's scrutiny boards will discuss, on the 6th of August, the idea of private companies bidding against city GPs for the right to run a new health centre in Hillfields and two new clinics in Stoke Aldermoor and Foleshill.

- Over 400 people have signed a petition to save the post office on Standard Avenue in Tile Hill South.

- A new nature area for children has opened at Park Hill Primary School in Eastern Green.

Labour's New Benefits Proposals

Everytime I see a proposal like this from New Labour, I think, "close your eyes, and can you distinguish it from something the Tories would do?"

Jon Sparkes, chief executive of the disability charity Scope, said he had "deep concerns about the tone of these reforms and the target-led ethos underpinning them" He added: "Disabled people face a myriad of barriers in finding employment, including negative attitudes from employers and inadequate social care support. Punitive measures against individual disabled claimants will do nothing to remove these barriers."

Casinos In Coventry

Their gambling obsession means their finances are in a chaotic shape.

The BMA is concerned about the increase in their addiction and has called on the government to make it a condition treatable on the NHS.

Why should part of Coventry's regeneration policy depend on a casino at the Ricoh and a casino at the Belgrade development?

Early Day Motions On Peace

Early Day Motions are non-binding straw polls -- resolutions that MPs sign up to on topical issues. You can see a current list of them here, and you can also search for the EDMs that your own MP has signed up to here.

Some of the recent ones that I would be signing up to, if I was an MP, are:

- EDM 2076 - Mayors For Peace (criticises Boris for withdrawing London from the worldwide Mayors for Peace network)

- EDM 2057 - International Criminal Court (celebrating its 10th anniversary; supporting its work against individuals accused of international crimes, including the current Sudanese President Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur)

- EDM 2004 - US "Star Wars" base in the Czech Republic (the proposed base would work in tandem with Menwith Hill and Fylingdales and would heighten tension between NATO and Russia)

The North's Ecological Debt

Do you hear Gordon Brown, David Cameron, or Nick Clegg talking about the following?

Mike Davis, TomDispatch:

Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, already "committed" quotient of warming now working its way toward us through the slow circulation of the world ocean?

Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan?

Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?

Sheer demographic momentum will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people over the next forty years (9 percent of them in poor cities), and no one--absolutely no one--has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.

The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.

"Building Bridges"

A study called "Building Bridges" will be launched next week at a conference in London.

Whilst focused on London (it was a two-year study, by Londoners aged 16-25, and supported by the Race on the Agenda think-tank), it probably has lessons for communities spread across the country.

One of its conclusions is that the emphasis on knife crime meant that the focus was on how violence is inflicted rather than why. The report will call for:

"a greater focus on prevention by tackling problems such as a lack of aspiration, a culture of individualism, fear, poverty and a lack of educational opportunities for young people. It will also back the introduction of youth-led projects to address the issues, since these work because "young people trust other young people". The report will also call for improvements in black history education, since this was feeding into a feeling of exclusion among black teenagers."

10 Reasons To Cheer Teenagers

Mark Easton, the BBC Home Affairs reporter, has a "top 10" list to counteract all the "binge-drinking, drug-addled, knife-wielding thugs ready to leap out and stab a granny for a fiver" stories about teens. Among his points:

1. Teenagers are more likely to do voluntary work than people from any other generation. In fact, they are 10 times more likely to be volunteering in our communities than regularly being antisocial in them.
2. More teenagers than ever before are staying on at school after 16 to study.
3. And more than ever are going on to further and higher education.
7. Nearly two-thirds of 10-to-15-year-olds have helped raise money for charity.
8. According to English schools inspectors, bad behaviour in comprehensives is at its lowest level for at least a decade.
9. 175,000 under 18-year-olds are unpaid carers in the UK with some 13,000 providing more care than a full-time job (50+ hours).

Number 9 says a great deal about how our social care/eldercare system is broken, but it demonstrates selflessness.

One of the comments in response was from Andy Hamflett, Chief Executive of the UK Youth Parliament:

"Dear Mark,

I think I love you.

So great to read a (rare) balanced perspective on this issue. I'll make sure I dsitribute this throughout our UK-wide networks. It will certainly be well received by young people.

As we engage every day with the ever-burgeoning youth participation network which supports young people to be active citizens everywhere, I can tell you that young people are sick and tired of being demonised.

We all understand that youth crime is a major issue (but as you say, most victims are young peope, too), and that bad news sells (so everyone say, anyway), but we don't feel that any other group within society could be demonised in quite the same way as young people are, and there's a groundswell to try and do something about it."

Gordon Brown As Seen In 2006

Reading Andrew Rawnsley back in March 2006, all the signs were there ...

A majority of the cabinet still wants to put off the day of a Brown premiership. The real fears revolve around the temperament and style of a Brown premiership.

There would be no check and balance to Prime Minister Brown because there would no longer be a Chancellor Brown. You can run the Treasury by concentrating on one big project at a time. You can also disappear from view when it is politically convenient. When a princess dies in the middle of the night, when a bomb goes off in the middle of London, there is no time to commission a review or draw up five tests to determine the response.

Gordon Brown is a hugely formidable Chancellor and yet we cannot be at all sure about what he would make of being Prime Minister. We don't know. What might just scare him a little is that he can't know either.

Unison Strike In Coventry

For the next two days, nearly 600 000 members of Unison will be on strike.

It will be one of the biggest strikes since the general strike of 1926.

The chief issue is the cost of living and wages. Inflation was 3.8% in June. That monthly figure was the highest since June 1992. The Local Government Association is offering 2.45% to workers. The LGA is crying poor, but if central government stepped in, they could pay public sector workers a living wage. It's a gendered issue as well. As many as 250 000 of those balloted earn less than £6.50 an hour. Of these, 75 per cent are women.

It's an EU-wide issue. Across the 27 countries of the EU, average wages have grown by just 6.7% between 2000 and 2007 -- less than 1% a year. There has also been, across the EU, a "widening gap between productivity improvements and wage growth, with real pay lagging around 10 points behind increased output per employee."

So, we have increasing worker productivity, rampant inflation, and poor treatment of women workers on minimum wages in the public sector. What should Labour do?

The New Statesman captured it well in a recent editorial:

If millions of workers lose purchasing power by below-inflation wage settlements, we will quickly be in a recession. Is it realistic, or even morally acceptable, to call on the lowest-paid not to defend their families' living standards?

Tony Blair continued a Tory tradition of disdain for public servants such as teachers, social workers and probation officers. Brown must break with it.

Fighting them will not win him votes from the middle ground, because anything he can do on that front, the Tories will always do better. George Osborne has already made it clear that his response to strike threats will be tougher trade union legislation.

For the past decade, the country has been held to ransom, with Labour's blessing, by the richest in society. That is why an appeal to those seeking only a living wage to act for the greater good sounds hollow indeed.

National link: Green councillors respect town hall pickets

The Non-Negotiable Needs Of Capitalism

A Very Public Sociologist has an important post on the limits to political ecology. We need to think really hard about what kind of ideas and assumptions back up political action.

If we accept "non-negotiable" ideas (we need to use more and more energy; any scientific innovation is progress), then it leads to nuclear power and biotechnology. If we contest non-negotiable ideas, mainstream media won't listen to us (we're not being "realistic").

Are we at an eco-political turning point, a point where green politics is not about to take off but where it could give way to a politics of unsustainability?

The vision offered by sustainable development and political ecology talk about different lifestyles, re-engineered social-natural relations, new (post-capitalist) forms of economic life and a society animated by existential need, not the impoverished vision of acquisitive materialism.

When this is pitted against the non-negotiable needs of capitalism - labour flexibility and capital mobility, information, improved transport, nuclear energy and bio-technology, the system wins out every time.

Climate Camp, Kingsnorth -- 3rd to 11th August

You can read all about preparations for the climate camp protests at Kingsnorth in August here.

The climate camp has been held in 2006 (at the Drax plant in Yorkshire) and 2007 (at Heathrow).

Kingsnorth has been chosen, since it is the first proposed site of seven coal-fired power stations in the UK. These power stations would emit around 50 million tons of CO2 a year.

One of the 10 reasons not to build Kingsnorth is that, insted of employing people to burn coal, we need to talk about how about we build install and run an energy system based on renewables. Germany's renewables sector, for example, already employs 250 000 people. This is the only way forward -- figuring out how to shift employment from dirty industries to clean, sustainable industries, to jobs that pay living wages.

The organisers of the climate camp have issued an "open statement and invitation" to the trade union movement to attend the camp:

We want to clarify that this action is not against the workers at Kingsnorth, nor does it mean we think the UK coal industry should be shut down overnight. It means we want to show the seriousness of the threat both to humans and our environment, now and into the future. This crisis affects the world’s poorest people first and hardest and is a social justice issue.

We recognise the history of political attacks on the miners and the union movement and we firmly resist that. We recognise the need for jobs, viable communities and a strong trade union movement, and we want a decent, fair and long term deal for all, including miners, energy workers and their communities. Extremely rapid reductions in emissions are necessary if we are not to watch millions suffer and die in the most preventable disaster the world has ever known.

We have adopted the model of "Just Transition," in which the needs of workers are paramount within the transition to a new economy: their views are central, there should be adequate retraining where required, there should be no loss incurred. An increasing number of trade unions are adopting this model internationally. There will be ways we can make this transition protect, and benefit, workers and communities worldwide.

Migrant Recycling Workers Shut Down In Beijing

A relentless campaign by Beijing to present a sanitised, modern city to millions of Olympic Games visitors has led to a government shut down of scores of garbage recycling centres that provide these migrant workers with an income:

As the Olympic Games approach, the number of garbage pickers has visibly dropped across Beijing including at Qianbajia, a recycling station where about 200 households live among towering piles of plastic, building materials and scrap metals.

Qianbajia is among the dozens of urban recycling stations being shut down for the Games, effectively cutting off the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Beijing's temporary workers who eke out a living from the city's cast-offs. The workers process up to a third of Beijing's trash and have a "positive effect" on society, but most have criminal records, leave second-hand environmental pollution, and pose a health threat.

Scrap traders and recyclers, faced with a diminishing pool of rubbish collectors to do business with, grumble of lost profits and fear that their suppliers may not come back after the Games.

Rights groups and activists say the sweep has also taken in the homeless and the mentally ill, along with beggars, hawkers and prostitutes.

Car Club Membership On The Rise

- The public health director of Stockport: "We need much more widespread introduction of 20mph zones in side streets. We are killing our children for the sake of saving a couple of minutes."

- The Commons Public Accounts Committee says that the cost of decommissioning nuclear power sites could rise "significantly" above the £73 billion already estimated. We can install solar panels and wind turbines and tidal turbines now, not 10 years from now, and also avoid the massive decommissioning that will follow any nuclear power expansion.

- Despite years of sustained criticism from watchdogs, "significant weaknesses" persist in maternity and neonatal services across England, putting mothers and babies at risk.

Finally, car club memership is significantly up:

This week, two of the leading car clubs - Streetcar and City Car Club - both announced a sudden surge in members. They say that a likely catalyst was the moment the chancellor revealed increases in motoring taxes in his budget speech in March.

Streetcar said that in the period from March to June its UK membership leapt from 27,537 to 37,532.

Similarly, City Car Club reported a 300% increase in membership requests since March compared with the same period last year. It now has more than 6,000 UK members.