Joss's blog

The relationship between Labour and industry means that parliament won't do enough.

I was pleased that your leader (A different kind of turbulence, August 20) recognised the climate campers' scientific argument that inaction on climate change now will cost lives later. As the leading climate researcher Dr Kevin Anderson said last week, "the government cannot reconcile current aviation growth with its stated position on climate change. Even with the latest more efficient aircraft, the climate-change imperative demands that air-travel growth be severely curtailed." However, I was stunned by the Guardian's notion that because nowadays "nearly all politicians will at least pay lip service to green issues", the merits of "Swampy-style activism" have been undermined. Equally, the idea that there has been a "big political shift ... since 1996" is not reflected by the facts.

The nature of protest has evolved. Campaigners today have to be far more sophisticated to capture attention and be truly effective.

People try to put us down. Polly Toynbee laments a lack of political passion over the bloody occupation of Iraq and the threat from dangerous climate change. She's absolutely right about the depressingly little active opposition to the war. But there are now real rumblings of a genuine and exciting resurgence in environmental activism.

BAA is seeking to stop me and my fellow protesters from approaching Heathrow. But there is nothing 'wild' about our claims - quite the opposite.

It is not often that you wake up to find yourself described in a Times editorial as a "semi-socialist" flat-earther but on the second day of our high court hearing in which BAA is seeking to injunct me (and Lord knows how many more Britons) from even approaching Heathrow, that is the turn of phrase the Thunderer has reached for.

The government has formed a cosy relationship with the aviation industry. No wonder environmentalists are preparing for direct action.

The aviation industry used to lobby government. Now it seems they practically are the government. If anyone's still in any doubt of Brown's plans to trample over popular opposition to airport expansion, his most recent appointments give a glimpse of Labour's cosy relationship with the airline industry and lay out the battle lines the green movement will have to face in coming months.

Plane Stupid is used to hearing strange things fall from the mouths of aviation industry executives, but this week we’ve heard the most extraordinary things from the climate criminals themselves…

Mr Van Wijk, Vice Chair of Air France-KLM, the world’s biggest airline, said:

“What I hear is a load of bullshit. I think we have lost the [PR] battle already. I don’t think the customer is interested to hear we have a great story. We know damn sure that within a reasonable time-frame, there is no way that we can diminish our carbon emissions.”

Do the Liberal Democrats' beloved green principles really hold up to scrutiny, or are they increasingly threadbare?

While they're often painted as the greenest of the major political parties, up and down the country the Liberal Democrats have been supporting climate-wrecking projects and opposing climate-friendly ones. So it was pretty ironic when Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem environment spokesman, this week lamented "Labour's rotten record on climate change". It's about time he took a look at his own party's record.

Some politicians and commentators have been trying to paint the fight against unsustainable aviation as an attack on working people.

Last week it was Tony Blair and Labour party chair, Hazel Blears. Not everyone would consider these standard bearers for New Labour to be the authentic voice of the oppressed working class. However, their credibility rocketed since they were joined by the shadow chancellor, George Osborne. He told the Guardian:

"For British people who are for the first time able to afford a foreign holiday, I don't think telling them not to fly is the answer."

The argument is so weak it reminded me of when well-spoken Countryside Alliance supporters said that their opposition to the hunting ban stemmed from their overriding concern for the village ratting industry.

You might think from their previous dramatic statements on climate change that our political leaders would be paying heed to the reccomendations of our top climatologists - although if you really are that naive then there's a very cheap carbon offset scheme I'd like to discuss with you. No, the truth is still inconvenient, and so is dismissed as some sort of bizarre snobbery from the people who hate freedom.

Dr. Brenda Boardman of Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, for instance. She said:

"The government has to confront the contradictions in its policies. Unless the rate in flights is curbed, the UK cannot fulfil its commitments on climate change. If government wants to be confident about achieving its targets, it has to undertake demand management."

So is she saying this because it represents a scientific truth? Or is it a cunning ploy to ensure she doesnt have to sit next to a 'chav' on her next flight to Barcelona? Then there's Dr. Kevin Anderson from the University of Manchester's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research who has also warned, "If the UK does not curb aviation growth, all other sectors of the economy will be forced to become carbon neutral." Presumably another one sick of the sight of Burberry.

The reality of course is that the rapid and climate-wrecking growth in flying has very little to do with the least well off and everything to do with the priviliged protecting their luxuries. The statistics from the Civil Aviation Authority show that around 51% of the population don't set foot on a plane each year anyway, and according to the the IPPR 75% of flights each year are taken by the most well off in social groups A, B and C.

But perhaps the most ironic part of Mr Osborne's position is the fact that he should have made such a claim whilst visiting Uganda - one of the countries that will be hardest hit by what the World Development Movement and Christian Aid predict will become a "climatic genocide" and where virtually none of the population will ever experience the opportunity to fly.

Afraid of giving up their own breaks in Tuscany, our politicians are ignoring their most prestigious scientists. Fortunately the public hold themselves to a higher standard. A recent MORI poll showed that 70% of us would support higher taxes on aviation if the money went to improve the environment. Another poll of Sun readers showed 63% said they'd be willing to give up a foreign holiday to help save the planet.

It's hardly surprising that Britons are choosing to trust our scientific experts and nor our scientifically illiterate politicians and provides yet more proof that it's up to us to lead our leaders, and take action ourselves.

The donkey jackets have been quietly retired and the Lenin busts wrapped in newspaper and stored in the bottom draw, while that once unshakable belief in the Hegelian dialectic is nothing more than an embarrassing dinner party anecdote. Now it's all sharp suits and bursting media contacts books.

Welcome to the curious world of Spiked Online, the internet home of the Revolutionary Communist Party, where members of that 80s Marxist sect now espouse free-market ideology while stuffing their Gap jackets with corporate booty.

I have had cause this week to take a closer look at this network of commentators after Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill described me, on Comment is Free, as "deeply conservative and censorious, wishing to hold society back, shut down debate and keep the uppity oiks in their place". The Spiked gang once thought society was held back by bourgeois tendencies. Now, it seems, the fault lies with environmental protesters - particularly those under thirty years of age who think tackling climate change might be, you know, a reasonably good idea.

I wandered into the crosshairs of Spiked's AK-47 after founding a direct action group to tackle the dangerous growth in aviation. Just to put it on the record, I and my friends did not do this because we were convulsed by a desire to force people to live in Hobbit-style grass huts, wear hair shirts, howl at the moon or listen to "One Way" by The Levellers on repeat. (We'll leave the cultural reprogramming to the Revolutionary Communist Party, eh Brendan?) No, we founded the group called Plane Stupid because the world's scientists are warning that the current growth in aviation threatens to destroy what hope we have of averting catastrophic climate change. Indeed, in recent months both Oxford University and the internationally respected Tyndall Centre have warned that if aviation expands as expected, even if Britain decarbonised the rest of its economy by 2050, we still won't even meet the prime minister's most conservative emissions target of a 60% cut. Reports in The Guardian this week make it abundantly clear that Tony Blair has no intention of paying heed to these warnings, only underlining the importance of groups like my own.

The growing and diverse movement calling for radical action to halt climate-changing carbon emissions won't be silenced by corporate-funded misinformation from recently converted, free-market, anti-green disciples like Brendan. This near cultish worship of the market, espoused by Spiked and those who fund them in the boardrooms, has blocked action on the most serious of problems for too long.

Brendan chides me personally, and the exciting grassroots movement of which I am part, as "anti-progress". Is his idea of progress a world in which there are180 million deaths from climate change this century in Sub Saharan African alone (as Christian Aid predicts)? Is his idea of progress a world in which sea levels swamp major urban conurbations? Is his idea of progress one in which hundreds of millions of people struggle to find fresh water? Because for me and my friends who campaign against the growth in aviation, progress has a very different hue.

It's time to put to rest some of the tired arguments that industry stooges like Brendan have taken to trotting out. It's important to make it clear that the battle against the unsustainable growth in aviation is not a reactionary middle-class attempt to get the hoi-palloi off "our" flights. Cheap flights haven't made it easier for poorer people to travel for the first time; they've just made it easier for the wealthy to travel more often. The Civil Aviation Authority's own data shows that the average person flying in or out of Stansted, a budget airport, earns in excess of £50k, whilst people in the bottom 20% of incomes never even set foot on a plane. Meanwhile, analysis by the industry reveals that second-home owners in Spain now take five or six flights a year. There's been an enormous growth in binge-flying with the proliferation of stag and hen nights to Eastern European destinations chosen not for their architecture or culture but because people can fly there for 99p and get loaded for a tenner. All good fun, but I can't help thinking of those 180 million Africans.

And woe betide anyone working in the UK's tourism industry. Thanks to the short-break phenomenon, Britain now has a £17 billion tourism deficit. That's thousands of smaller bed-and-breakfasts, seaside restaurants and cottage industries in Britain going under because the industry keeps telling us that flying to Barcelona is glamorous. Meanwhile government currently subsidies an Irish airline to buy American planes to enable British people to spend their pounds in Spain.

Plane Stupid has become used to scathing criticisms from people with vested interests. Debate is the lifeblood of our democracy and we're keen to engage with all the arguments but if Brendan wants to be taken seriously, he might at least try to base his case on empirical evidence. As it is, his rhetoric and statistics have all the credibility of those tractor production quotas he and his fellow travellers used to get so excited about.