Kingsnorth: Police Repression

Police are blocking food deliveries to the climate camp. Police have confiscated such dangerous items as disabled access ramps, crayons, marker pens, radios, banners, nuts and bolts holding toilet cubicles together, blackboard paint, biodegradable soap, and toilet paper.

Caroline Lucas, Green MEP for the South-East:

"The climate camp protest is a peaceful and legitimate demonstration against a proposed facility that many view as a potent symbol of the government's misguided commitment to highly polluting and unsustainable fossil fuels."

"Activists from far and wide have travelled to register their disgust at government support for new coal-fired power stations and at the lack of urgent action on climate change."

"As climate campers hold workshops and debate some of the key issues of our time – peak oil, economic downturn, food shortages – scores of police sweat in their riot gear on the other side of the fence. They all clutch a copy of a pocket booklet entitled "Policing Protests" - produced by the ominously titled "National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit" - which appears designed to provide endless ways of shutting down legitimate protests. One such tactic has been to smash the windows of vehicles parked outside the camp and to try to tow away cars under the Abandoned Vehicles Act."

"I am shocked by the violent and excessive attack on civil liberties meted out by the police here, as is my Green colleague on the London assembly and member of the Metrolitan Police Authority, Jenny Jones, who has already raised concerns with Met commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, and New Scotland Yard. We will be calling for any Met officers who have acted inappropriately to be reprimanded, fined or even sacked. It is crucial that we defend the right to peaceful protest, a right that is under threat from the government's disproportionate anti-terrorism legislation and anti-democratic amendments to its planning bill."

Kingsnorth: Climate Camp And Social Justice

You can see some photos uploaded to Indymedia yesterday here. Medway Trades Union Council has announced its support for the Kingsnorth protest.

George Monbiot:

"Everything now hinges on stopping coal. Whether we prevent runaway climate change largely depends on whether we keep using the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Unless we either leave it - or the carbon dioxide it produces - in the ground, human development will start spiralling backwards. The more coal is burnt, the smaller are our chances of future comfort and prosperity ... Everything I have fought for and that all campaigners for social justice have ever fought for - food, clean water, shelter, security - is jeopardised by climate change. Those who claim to identify a conflict between environmentalism and humanitarianism have either failed to read the science or have refused to understand it."

Kingsnorth: Photos (1)

Protest march through Rochester:

Kingsnorth: Police Forward Intelligence Team

Kingsnorth: George Monbiot

The Guardian, 18 March 2008

"If Kingsnorth goes ahead, it will be operating by 2012, two years before the CCS [carbon capture storage] experiment has even begun. The government says that the demonstration project will take 'at least 15 years' to assess.

It will take many more years for the technology to be retro-fitted to existing power stations, by which time it's all over.

On this schedule, carbon capture and storage, if it is deployed at all, will come too late to prevent runaway climate change.

Kingsnorth will produce around 4.5m tonnes of CO2 every year; if all eight of the proposed coal plants are built, they will account for 46% of the emissions Britain can produce by 2050, assuming the government sticks to Brown's new proposed target of an 80% cut.

Aviation, using the government's own figures, will account for another 184% (these figures are explained on my website).

Even if we stopped breathing, eating, driving and heating our homes, the new runways and coal burners the government envisages would more than double our national greenhouse gas quota.

Kingsnorth: Breaching Bail To Attend

Ellen Potts, Oli Rodker, Johnathan Stevensen, Paul Morozzo, and Mel Evans:

"The climate camp is designed to challenge not just the expansion of coal but the idea that progress can only be attained through growth and the extension of "free" market ideologies. We need new ways of thinking and acting that put people and the planet we all live on back at the heart of things. We need a just transition away from fossil fuels. That is the singular and urgent task of this generation and that's what the Climate Camp is all about."

"On Monday at 3pm, we intend to breach our bail conditions and join hundreds, maybe thousands of others at the climate camp. We do not take this decision lightly; the legal implications are very serious. We may be arrested and jailed for our determination to be at the camp. Scientists tell us that from this week we have just 100 months to solve climate change. That's not long; from this moment on every week counts."

100 Months

"In just 100 months' time, if we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change."

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."