While the planet burns @RishiSunak fiddles with himself.

Last year, before Covid struck, Australia was blitzed by devastating bushfires. Over 30 people died, many had to be evacuated from beaches, and it is estimated that more than one billion animals perished. Since then, we have seen yet more serious fires, most recently in Turkey and Greece, and horrendous flooding events across the globe. As if this wasn't enough we have seen record-breaking temperatures in Europe and North America, recently reaching 49.8ºC in Sicily. July was the world's hottest ever recorded month in history.

Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a stark 'code red' warning on the growing climate crisis, which is responsible for the floods, fires, and record temperatures we have witnessed. This is not news. Scientists have been warning us for decades that man-made global warming is real, and a threat to our futures. Global temperatures have already risen by more than 1ºC due to the continued use of fossil fuels and the fight is now on to restrict global temperatures from going above 1.5ºC.

This year, starting on 31 October governments, and scientists will assemble at COP26 in Glasgow to agree on a response to the climate emergency we face. Our UK government is hosting the event. But what is the UK government doing about climate change? Although some progress has been made in recent decades the government needs to take real and urgent action to lower CO2 emissions from industry, agriculture, transport, aviation, and domestic premises. It appears, however, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is blocking measures that could reduce our carbon output on the grounds of cost!

A recent Guardian article revealed that:

"A string of policies, from home insulation to new infrastructure spending, have been scrapped, watered down, or delayed. Rows about short term costs have dominated over longer-term warnings that putting off green spending now will lead to much higher costs in future" [my italics]

While Sunak quibbles about 'costs' this Tory government is putting all our futures at risk, and, as the article states, we know that spending now will save us from the need to spend much more in the future. It's hard to comprehend this attitude. We know that the government has spent hundreds of £ billions on Covid, including the furlough - because it had to - to prevent the economy from crashing. Most of this money was created by the Bank of England out of thin air. I wasn't borrowed. As a sovereign currency issuer, the UK can create as much money as it needs, so spending isn't an issue - watch this video, in which Richard Murphy explains how it works.

So, not only can we afford to bring in the measures we need to avert further damaging climate change but we also have in place costed programmes which explain to us how it can be done, and paid for. In 2014 the Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC) produced a document called One Million Climate Jobs which showed how we could deal with the looming climate crisis and create valuable and much-needed work in the UK. Similarly, the New Economics Foundation has produced a Green New Deal document which provides a viable way forward. We have the tools at hand and we now need to get on and use them, the time for prevarication is long over, but our government continues to prevaricate and subsidise fossil fuels.

What can we do? We need to educate, agitate, and organise, in short, we all need to become climate activists, and we need to do this at the grassroots and nationally. Locally, there are many groups you can join and link up with, from the Transition Network to solidarity and mutual aid groups. In my street, we have a mutual aid network that was set up for Covid but is still active and can be used for the climate crisis. In my town, we have a community garden, orchard, and a regular climate cafe. Local action cannot prevent catastrophic climate change but it can raise awareness and increase community resilience.

Nationally we have to put as much pressure on the government and political parties to bring about real climate action as soon as possible. Now is not the time for factionalism, we need to put aside political differences and create an alliance with all those who are fighting global warming. We need to work with groups like Extinction Rebellion and CACC, and support the Climate and Ecological Emergency (CEE) bill. 

This isn't just about global warming it's also about the wanton destruction of nature, driven by corporate greed. The threat to biodiversity is also a threat to our species. We need to rebalance our relationship with nature and get involved with the restoration of habitats. That means supporting rewilding projects, opposing roadbuilding, damaging construction projects, and deforestation.

One of the problems we face, apart from the climate denial and delay industry, which has darky money backers, is that people can feel powerless and overwhelmed by the crisis we face. We need first, to be able to imagine and discuss a better low carbon future for all. That's why I'm recommending Rob Hopkins's inspirational book - From What Is to What If. It's an excellent practical guide on how to create a world beyond extractive capitalism. The message is to learn more, get active, and do it now. We have no time to lose!

The good news is that the Tories are making themselves unelectable

Have you been following the Eastleigh byelection? No, neither have I. Its hard to get exited about a straight fight between the Tories and their Coalition partners, the Lib Dems, even though it could have implications for the future of the current government. What eventually brought the contest to my attention was the antics of the Tory candidate Maria Hutchings. I live in the North of England but you can hear her knuckles scraping from up here.

Hutchings is a typical Tory candidate, someone who sounds and looks like she was buried in the 1950's and has just been dug up for the occasion. Like most Tories, fifty years and more of social progress has passed her by. She's anti-abortion, doesn't like gay marriage and thinks her son is too intelligent to go to a mere state school. She says that her son wants to be a surgeon, and if he succeeds, after the high-powered private education she has planned for him, he would be well advised to operate on his mother and remove the small particle of brain lodged in her skull.

I'm not a psephologist, and I don't look at opinion polls, but what I do know is that the Tories last won a general election in 1992. Cameron failed to win a majority in 2010, much to the ire of his backbenchers, but Cameron himself is far more popular than the Tory Party. Cameron didn't fail. What he did do was to give the Tories a chance of power by de-toxifying the brand of the nasty party sufficiently to enable them to win more seats than any other party. As I've said before, Cameron is a complete charlatan, a deeply reactionary Thatcherite toff, who manages somehow to con people that he is the bloke next door, rather than a fully paid-up member of the ruling class. 

But every cloud has a silver lining, and despite the fact that Cameron,  Osborne and co. are screwing our economy and waging class war against all but their own kind, what they are doing in the process is making the Tories even more unelectable than they were in 2010. They are in a very similar predicament to the Republicans in the USA. Making predictions in politics is a dangerous game but here we go; I predict that the Tories already have no chance of winning outright in 2015, and will not be the largest party; furthermore, they will never win another election in their own right unless they stop serving their own narrow class interests and wise-up to that fact that they are completely out of touch with the majority of the British people. The former being impossible of course. Nothing could be better for Britain than the demise of the Tory Party, a Party which has caused immense damage to this island and its people. 

The Tories will destroy the NHS

The Tories are now able to do something they have been dreaming about for years - the destruction of the NHS. Make no mistake about it - that is what privatisation of the NHS means. What makes the NHS unique is that it is a public service, publicly provided, and something we all pay collectively for. It's a great idea and it means that millions of people have access to decent healthcare who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it. The NHS is not perfect but, despite what the 'free' market fundamentalists would have you believe, it is still the envy of the world. Who wouldn't want a health service free at the point of delivery?

So, the NHS isn't perfect but what could be any better? Many of the problems of the NHS are because of  to the chronic underfunding it received under 18 years of successive right-wing Tory governments. Governments who believe that what you get should be based on your ability to pay, and that everything should be subsumed to the market its easy to run down public services so that they become unpopular with voters. That is what happened to health, education and the railways in those Tory years. Despite this neglect the NHS still remained popular.

What the marketeers want is a private take-over of the NHS. The NHS brand will remain as a fig leaf behind which the profiteers will be lurking. So what is wrong with privatising the NHS and introducing competition as the Coalition government proposes? The answers are well known. Private corporations will cherry pick the most 'profitable' parts of the NHS, leaving the difficult and expensive stuff to the public sector. The NHS will, in effect, be broken up. Costs will rise and quality will fall. The private sector has extra costs not borne by the public sector: marketing, administration, and of course profits. Healthcare in the UK costs half of what it does in the USA because of this. The NHS will become unaffordable leading to call for people to take out insurance on top of the taxes they already pay. We will end up paying more for less.

Anyone who doubts this should watch Michael Moore's excellent documentary Sicko which shows how individuals and families are bankrupted by healthcare costs, how many people suffer because they can't afford drugs or routine operations, and how the insurance companies avoid paying up. We must defend what is the most important of public services. Get involved and join the fightback against this shameful proposal which will destroy our most important institution.