>>90535 From all accounts she's a fruitloop. Leicester East isn't even one of the four constituencies she applied for, but she's called people racist and accused them of spreading lies for pointing this out even though it's demonstrably true.
I suppose this is what happens when you appoint politicians based on cronyism and adherence to ideology.
>The Londoner has also learned that if NEC member Claudia Webbe had not been 10 minutes late to Friday’s critical meeting, Watson’s enemies may have got their way. The NEC chair Wendy Nicholls ultimately ruled the motion to scrap the post of deputy leader as out of order, but her decision could have been overruled by a two-thirds majority. It was 17 to 10, which was one vote short, but if Corbynite Webbe hadn’t been delayed, the result could have been 18 to 10 — which would have passed the threshold. Those 10 minutes may have saved Watson’s bacon. For now.
If Webbe was actually capable of turning up to NEC meetings on time then the position of deputy leader would have been abolished last year so they could oust Tom Watson. It's said to be covered in more farcical detail in the book Left Out.
>>90587 >her decision could have been overruled by a two-thirds majority
>the result could have been 18 to 10 — which would have passed the threshold
Have they got Diane counting the votes again?
It wouldn't matter. The issue has never been that politicians are stupid the problem is people vote for them. If you want a better democracy you need a better education system.
The pay off from doing that is so far in the future though that democracy doesn't reward it. Democracy is set up to to stifle long term planning in fact it is considered a bonus kicking the can down the road, if the short sighted solution breaks down during your opponents watch. The stars need to align quite spectacularly for a democracy to better anything for the children and not over stretch the system appeasing the old.
>>92858 It's actually quite amazing but a lot of people really don't know a thing about history and I think this is the source of quite a few problems we face in the world generally.
>>92859 >>92860 These people get elected because nobody cares about local politics so it's easy to monopolise political control with the right rosette or just having enough mates. It's not entirely the people's fault ether, I've recently been reminded that there's absolutely no candidate information for local council elections with the candidates themselves not even bothering to do this. Someone who doesn't know the basics of cyber-stalking and holds less interest in politics would only end up disengaged.
The twitter thread also appears indicative of a problem where it's not so much that people aren't educated but that they must be spoon-fed information. The state can't possibly give you all the information you need in life and that's not what educators do - you don't wait for someone to help you, you look up what those two 'free' countries are yourself. You learn this stuff just because that's a necessary thing to do in life to make informed choices and hold informed opinions.
FFS Liberia wasn't even a 'free' country in the common understanding, it was a surreal African-American settler state imitating European society and oppressing the natives. Ethiopia was also an empire. It's absolutely infuriating that many people who present themselves as in the know on African history are in reality fucking idiots who haven't even opened Wikipedia. This creates a whole industry of shysters that particularly blight the black dysphoria from knowing their own history but also wider society when it discusses Africa.
tl;dr it's all our own fault. If you have time to piss about twitter you have the time and resources to learn good.
>>92862 Looks to be roughly fine. Liberia and Ethiopia being autonomous makes sense, they've got the Portuguese areas roughly right, and based on that I'd imagine they've gone the whole hog and at least tried to be accurate.
>>92860 Counterpoint - establishing a new normal. I've recently had to "Hol up" myself with my hatred of Bridgerton. It is possible that simply completely ignoring some aspects of history when presenting them to the general populace might actually be better for harmony going forward. But then, I do really want to hate Bridgerton so I don't know how much weight I'll put on that.
>>92864 >FFS Liberia wasn't even a 'free' country in the common understanding, it was a surreal African-American settler state imitating European society and oppressing the natives. Ethiopia was also an empire. It's absolutely infuriating that many people who present themselves as in the know on African history are in reality fucking idiots who haven't even opened Wikipedia. This creates a whole industry of shysters that particularly blight the black dysphoria from knowing their own history but also wider society when it discusses Africa.
The point is that you had to write out a small essay to explain that. 'Free' might not be the best word, but it gets the point across. Ethiopia was free because it was an autonomous Empire, and Liberia had its own weird thing going on with the Africa - America - Africa route, so referring to them as free/sovereign/autonomous *in the context of the land grab* etc is all pretty much fine.
The only people who have a problem with it tend to be those who want to show off their own education by leaping on technicalities at the risk of missing the greater point. The point of the map is to show the land carving, it's not to muse on the degree of 'freedom' possessed by those regions.
>>92866 I think it's a relevant technicality given what people were asking in the comments and the responses. A map showing spheres of influence is one thing but if the focus shifts to those states marked as free then it becomes important. Hence why I'm talking about people presenting themselves as in the know.
>>92862 Tripolitania will have been part of the Ottoman Empire at that point and I don't think they've got Somaliland correctly, but the issue is that "this map has been hidden from you your whole life" is absolute bollocks; it's taught to children in school as part of history.
Fair point. The map is not "hidden", but thinking back to my own education*, the teaching of history is still highly selective and pro-nationalist. It's possible to cover a topic but leave out unflattering details.
Take the website that otherlad posted. I know the BBC Bitesize website is not necessarily a fair representation of our curriculum, but just taking it as one example: the phrasing of Britain "acquiring" colonies and "conquering" territories seems to imply the world was fair game. The idea that people only became "increasingly critical of imperialism" after 1924 is a lie by omission, and contributes to the idea that violent colonisation was justifiable at the time.
*Actually, I grew up in one of the many neglected and hopeless backwaters that we like to pretend don't exist in this country. So thinking back to my own education, the quality of it was so poor, rote, and perfunctory, I seriously doubt the intention of it was ever to properly teach anything. Any education that was really designed to educate I either sought out myself or occurred after age 21.
The current narrative about colonialism and slavery is tacitly racist, by denying the agency of Africans and perpetuating the myth of the noble savage.
Prior to European colonisation, Africa was full of powerful empires and kingdoms. Conquest and colonialism was nothing new to Africa; Renaissance Europeans just developed better military and bureaucratic technology that allowed them to overpower the existing African empires.
Africa had a huge slave trade before the Europeans turned up, both within the continent and across the Indian Ocean. The European slave traders that arrived in the 16th century weren't rounding up hapless Africans and chucking them on boats - they were buying slaves at pre-existing slave markets, most of whom were captured as prizes of war by African imperial powers.
There was also a substantial Mediterranean slave trade, with raiding parties of North African Berbers taking slaves from Iberia. The Barbary pirates had a huge operating range, with at least one instance of an attack on Ireland (the 1631 sack of Baltimore). For more than 500 years, most of Spain and Portugal was part of the Umayyad and Almohad caliphates.
The supposed counter-narrative to British imperial glory isn't a counter-narrative at all, it's just another way of disempowering and marginalising black and brown-eyed people. Africans and Arabs were and are our equals, they're fundamentally no different to us, we just had better ships and better guns for a bit.
>>92871 >with at least one instance of an attack on Ireland (the 1631 sack of Baltimore)
I'm not particularly trying to get into this argument but it's funny you'd mention that raid as an example of Africans having agency and it not all being Europeans, the raid being led by a Dutchman.
It's hard to have this conversation without seriously digging into source material, and while I'm not going to challenge any point directly here, I can't just take what you've said at face value, either. Assuming you are absolutely correct in your assessment of history, though, I'd still bring up the point:
>Africans and Arabs were and are our equals, they're fundamentally no different to us, we just had better ships and better guns for a bit.
I think it's possible to recognise the pre-existing flaws and power struggles within a territory, but also acknowledge the overwhelming force and exploitation of one people over another by dint of their expansionism and military superiority at the time.
To reverse the example, if an invading force took the people in living in poverty in 18th and 19th century Britain, rounded them up on ships, and exploited them even more ruthlessly in another setting, that doesn't mean the initial system was noble and correct -- but it also doesn't justify the extracting force, either. It absolves neither party, but "doing the bad thing more effectively" seems to me to be worth acknowledging. Taking something that's bad within a territory and turning it into an international trade, especially if it underpins much of the concentration of wealth and power in the world today, must be recognised.
And to bring the point back to education, I think our curriculum fails to do this.
Jan Janszoon was one of a number of European privateers who converted to Islam to join the Barbary pirates, with the most notable English example being Jack Ward (Yusuf Rais). I think if anything, the fact that Europeans were willingly abandoning their country and their faith to join the Ottoman empire supports my argument.
>The supposed counter-narrative to British imperial glory isn't a counter-narrative at all, it's just another way of disempowering and marginalising black and brown-eyed people. Africans and Arabs were and are our equals, they're fundamentally no different to us, we just had better ships and better guns for a bit.
Precisely. It's purely by the coincidence of history that European powers dominated the world, and if we didn't exist it would have been some Chinese dynasty, or the Inca*, or whoever else, if you gave it long enough.
There is currently a trend towards interpreting history and its effects on the modern world through a highly ideological lens, and it is an ideology that revolves around the victimhood of Western minorities. People will often bring up the concept of "horseshoe theory", where one side of the political spectrum starts to resemble the other, and while it's an often misused and misunderstood phrase, I think what you're getting at is a good example of it.
Even with the best of intentions (which I think most people do hold sincerely in this case), if you view history and the cultural heritage of African people through that lens, you're ultimately looking at them as lesser than us, weaker, inferior.
*Who are fucking fascinating by the way. They implemented what could almost be described as a fully socialist planned economy across half a continent, without even having written language. Incredible stuff.
>>92873 >To reverse the example, if an invading force took the people in living in poverty in 18th and 19th century Britain, rounded them up on ships, and exploited them even more ruthlessly in another setting, that doesn't mean the initial system was noble and correct -- but it also doesn't justify the extracting force, either. It absolves neither party, but "doing the bad thing more effectively" seems to me to be worth acknowledging. Taking something that's bad within a territory and turning it into an international trade, especially if it underpins much of the concentration of wealth and power in the world today, must be recognised.
Is this, more or less, what William the Conqueror did, albeit with the resources available to hand at the time? You could argue that a lot of the class issues we face today relate to noble families still holding on the same areas of land that William gave to their ancestors almost a thousand years ago.
>>92875 >It's purely by the coincidence of history that European powers dominated the world, and if we didn't exist it would have been some Chinese dynasty, or the Inca*, or whoever else, if you gave it long enough.
The presumption of guilt of futurecrime, that cornerstone of logic. Be that as it may, if that had happened then it would still be objectionable. The issue is imperialism, not specifically Western imperialism. Just ask the Chinese. "Whatabout all these other people who might have potentially done the same thing too at some point in the future?" doesn't mean the status quo is fair.
The National Curriculum for history is loosely defined and gives a lot of discretion to teachers; they're required to cover the topic "ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901" but the interpretation of that topic is very much for the school to decide. Likewise, the GCSE specification is mostly about the skills of studying and interpreting history rather than acquiring a particular set of knowledge or imparting a particular point of view.
I'm not sure how the National Curriculum could mandate a section on "colonialism is bad" without being absurdly prescriptive and formulaic. "History" is such a massive topic to cover in a couple of hours a week that we'll inevitably have disputes on what should and shouldn't be covered, which is precisely why I think it's reasonable for the government to keep a light touch.
Frankly, most people forget most of what they learned at school almost immediately; if you want people to actually know and remember stuff, you need to get them as adults.
Fundamentally, white people love making it all about themselves. In the present day, Africans just don't give a shit about us other than our football - their politics and economics are all oriented towards China, because the Chinese are actually working to establish mutually beneficial relationships with African countries.
>>92877 >You could argue that a lot of the class issues we face today relate to noble families still holding on the same areas of land that William gave to their ancestors almost a thousand years ago.
I would say that's not necessarily a bad argument. There are many events throughout history which do a lot to explain our current state of affairs in terms of power and how it really affects the population that our curriculum does not cover. I think it potentially could. I've never read Howard Zinn, but I know his presentation of history is radically different to what's taught in U.S. schools, yet his books have been adapted for younger people, for example.
>"History" is such a massive topic to cover in a couple of hours a week that we'll inevitably have disputes on what should and shouldn't be covered, which is precisely why I think it's reasonable for the government to keep a light touch.
But this assumes that the government is keeping a light touch as a whole, which I'm not convinced of. For one, the very structure of secondary education and the curriculum will prevent many students, even the most keen ones, from doing personal research into the subject. That's leaving out whether they would even be able to find histories which challenge the conventional.
Adding to that, keeping a specific part of the education curriculum broad doesn't mean there's not a much bigger apparatus rewarding certain interpretations of history over others. For example, it's taken academic history at the level of universities a very long time to even begin to question stories which are flattering to our colonial past. Teachers are educated at these universities and will inevitably reproduce some of this bias. The academic histories and the popular works from which they're derived originate in that system.
>I'm not sure how the National Curriculum could mandate a section on "colonialism is bad" without being absurdly prescriptive and formulaic.
Perhaps it shouldn't need to, it should be common knowledge and therefore reflected in the way that history is taught in schools. The fact that it's not indicates that the problem extends further than schools.
>>92879 >they're required to cover the topic "ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901"
I don't know if this was changed somewhere in the last 20 years, but when I was at school all we were taught under this heading was the Industrial Revolution and the Chartist Rebellion.
>>92885 There are perfectly sensible reasons to oppose ideas like reparations, but the absurd rhetoric of "well no one's asking the Danes for a handout" is not one of them, you utter cretin. Perhaps if you cared more for ideas and less for your own gleamed knowledge of history you would not make these mistakes.
>>92887 It might sound a bit absurd, but that's because the idea is absurd/arbitrary. Your reply is highlighting that reparations are generally only considered 'valid' if there are certain boxes ticked. I think their post highlights that these 'certain boxes' are a bit arbitrary.
It's all class anyway, it's a joke making it about race and whatnot.
>>92888 >You mean the dead ones?
You'd be okay with me killing your parents and moving in to their place, wouldn't feel like anything was wrong with that?
I feel there should be a better way of explaining how slavery was conducted by, say, the Vikings, Romans, Africans, Arabs, etc, and how the European powers were doing it in the 1800s. Although slavery has been around since humans have been around, it was never done the way it was done by the European powers, mainly thanks to industrialisation and better technology. There really should be a distinction. Given a choice, I am sure most of you would pick being a slave to a Roman than an American/Englishman.
Had an ancestor who suffered a grave injustice by modern standards? Seeking to deflect criticism of today's society? Are you a disgraced Labour MP? Then call the Brian Butterfield reparation agent-say.
Our specialist electronic tweeters will ensure the atrocities of the past are bought back. Today. Whether your ancestor suffered:
>Captivity
>Gypsy curse
>Pagan sacrifice
>Runaway slaves
>Pirate-hand
>Pirate-leg
>Non-acceptable mummification
And that's not all:
>Roman taxation
>Slander via tapestry
>Education at a comprehensive
>Education by pirate
>Pyramid bends
>>92893 What an utterly bizarre worldview you have. Can you please post me some of whatever it is you're huffing?
Not to diminish the suffering of slaves in recent history, being a slave in the cotton fields would have been pretty horrible but I'd had definitely preferred it to being a slave in a time where torturing slaves to death was called entertainment.
>You'd be okay with me killing your parents and moving in to their place, wouldn't feel like anything was wrong with that?
I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these parents by the fact that a stronger parent, a higher-grade parent, a more worldly wise parent to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
That said, your crime would be that of a living individual, not sanctioned by the state either, whereas these atrocities were committed by individuals with essentially legal backing. The damage done is incalculable, and even if you argue that a state might be better off for being pillaged or conquered at some point, the atrocity still took place.
I don't think you can directly scale it up. What's the smallest significant unit of a reparations-worthy act? They just seem to start quite big.
>>92899 Slavery was pretty chill until Europeans started classing people by race and by using the magic of science and skull measurements to convince themselves tanned people were soulless and animals. Didn't they even quote the bible?
It was miles better until then. You can't convince me otherwise. Find me a Viking Congo Free State, and I might concede.
>>92893 When I think this way I tend to quickly find myself cynically thinking that we never really get any better as a society, we just change the way power moves through it. That the abolition of slavery owes more to the fact a hungry, unemployed man will work harder in a sweatshop with his notional freedom than he will if you chain him to the machinery as a slave, and that the improvement in working and living conditions are again owed to this sort of power rather than "because it's the right thing to do". The NHS not as a system of caring for one another, but a system of improving national efficiency.
So you wind up asking: What if the dynamic flips again? What if it's advantageous to those who hold power to make things worse rather than better - if we move from Roman style slavery and Serfdom to Confederate plantations, why can't we move from the job for life without even needing a degree to toiling on the Martian neo-Plantations, grateful for the fact that because you had a PhD you were spared the destruction of earth? What if instead of a general tendency to go from Barbarism to Civilisation, it's actually a tendency to move to-and-fro depending on what the balance of technology, class power, economics, and so on sum to?
Even if you want to be optimistic and say the tendency is for things to get better, you still wind up with a view that you're lacking in any meaningful political agency, still toiling away under an absolute ruler - but a distributed one. A market of markets rather than a king.
>>92899 >being a slave in a time where torturing slaves to death was called entertainment.
I'd not agree, though I know a bit more about Rome than I do Django's America. It's much more of a lottery in the classical era, but from what I recall this wasn't exactly commonplace, any more so than lynchings. Slaves were property, which meant the slaves of the powerful had power. The flip side is that you were property, so your owner could do anything. Not sure if that differs from America, but generally you'd have a lot more daily freedom than an American plantation slave.
You'd also have a realistic opportunity to pay for your freedom, or be freed through an act of public kindness. The biggest factor would be the racism. You'd have a much easier time integrating in Rome than Alabama, free or not.
>>92906 That's how people describe their weekends on MS Teams meetings nowadays. Maybe not socialising with our peers, and only consuming American media is making us adopt these terms at an accelerated pace.
>Even if you want to be optimistic and say the tendency is for things to get better
If you do want to be that optimistic, I'd say you're naive and overall quite ignorant.
History has had its ups and downs many times over the years. Civilisations have risen and fallen, and the people left in the dark age after the collapse had only crumbling, mysterious precursor ruins to remind them that someone was once there before. Imagine what it must have been like to be a British peasant in 300AD, living in the shadow of these mysterious ghost towns left by some long lost precursors, while barbarian warlords fight for control over what's left. What was it like to be one of the ancient Babylonian, Mesopotamians or early Greeks, when those budding early civilisations were snuffed out by an invading force even today we can't identify, known only as "the sea peoples".
The Dark Ages were called the Dark Ages for a reason, they're the period of decline after the fall of a great empire, a world order which the people living under must have assumed would carry on forever. European history as we know it is pretty much just a chronicle of our climb back out of that period. There's no reason it couldn't happen again. What would Europe look like if Rome never fell? Would we be having this conversation about imperialism and slavery today, and who would we be pointing the finger at if we were? It's impossible to say, but that illustrates the point in a way.
>>93008 But this is exactly what I've been calling for. What an excellent tweet. It's not self-righteous (I assume you posted it because it's such a mad opinion) and it's not even offensive because of the plausible deniability that comes with saying something so crazy. There's no message that you need to be ashamed to be white, or that the reader is personally responsible for slavery and must be punished accordingly, but it still plants these ideas in people's heads, so they can be discussed by people who are not that extreme. She has sacrificed herself, and her credibility, for an idea more noble than she herself can ever be. Given her total lack of credibility based on other tweets in this thread, that sounds like a bargain to me.
>>93012 Yeah 100% this.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56723560 >the world's wealthiest 1% produce double the combined carbon emissions of the poorest 50%, according to the UN.
>The wealthiest 5% alone – the so-called “polluter elite” - contributed 37% of emissions growth between 1990 and 2015.
A single person taking home £400 a week is in the top 5% of earners globally. A £40k net salary puts you in the top 1%. MPs take home £56k plus expenses.
Calling for your own abolition is an interesting political stance.
I know you're just being a smart arse here, but moving the goalposts by using absolute wealth instead of relative wealth in order to trick ordinary people into thinking they're the ones in the firing line and personally responsible, and therefore reject the idea, isn't changing the truth of the matter.
Even disregarding that, your assumption is that people are incapable of acting selflessly or holding selfless beliefs. I'd happily surrender my global 5%er super wealth (lmao) if it meant the Earth wasn't going to burn to a crisp over the next few decades. If a fairer distribution of wealth globally also saves the environment I'm more than in favour of it.
Anyway let's stop playing silly buggers. The fact is a person earning minimum wage in a first world country can't help the fact that they're technically part of the global super elite, and there's often little they can do to reduce the emissions contribution that comes with merely existing and going about necessary life tasks in the first world. By "abolishing" these people, and the actual elites above them, what you'd really be doing is fundamentally restructuring the economy and slashing the cost of living, and you'd probably leave them better off in real terms despite the fact they earn less in absolute terms.
Of course, that's just a neat way to tie basic human dignity and equality to the concept of environmentalism- The truth is economic activity itself, in the modern, industrialised world, is harmful to the environment. I suppose if you're so inclined there could plausibly be a solution that allows the global elite to retain their disgustingly disproportionate wealth except they recycle everything and go vegan, but I sincerely doubt it. I think in reality the plan is just to start again on Mars, because you know. Right wing types are better at facing up to their mistakes, rather than leaving it for somebody else to fix, aren't they.
I'm not being a smart-arse. Money doesn't emit carbon. Average and below-average earners in Britain still produce vastly more emissions than their counterparts in the developing and middle-income world. Climate change isn't being caused by a rich elite, it's being caused by billions of people who are producing grossly unsustainable levels of CO2.
>there's often little they can do to reduce the emissions contribution that comes with merely existing and going about necessary life tasks in the first world
That's absolutely untrue. The three biggest sources of carbon emissions are heating, eating and transport, with everything else being pretty much negligible. Heating and transport do require state-level action to make GSHP and BEV technology affordable (much of which is already being undertaken), but there's no green solution to flying other than "don't fly" and there's no green solution to eating meat other than "don't eat meat". Our per-capita meat consumption continues to rise and we're absolutely hooked on cheap flights. Someone can earn thousands of times more than the average person, but it's pretty much impossible to emit thousands of times more CO2 unless you spend all your time dropping napalm on a rainforest from your personal B52.
>The truth is economic activity itself, in the modern, industrialised world, is harmful to the environment.
Nope. Some economic activity is grotesquely detrimental, while other activity is neutral or positive. Elon Musk is currently the second richest person in the world, having built his fortune on electric cars and solar panels. Tech entrepreneurs make up a huge chunk of the world's billionaires and that industry is rapidly moving towards net zero.
A new iPhone results in about the same carbon emissions as a leg of lamb, Google and Facebook are investing billions in renewable energy and Amazon have placed orders to replace their entire delivery fleet with electric vans. They're all on target to hit net zero by the end of the decade. The idea that it's only possible to get rich by burning loads of stuff is hopelessly outmoded - the value of fossil fuel companies is collapsing because the cost of sustainable energy is dropping so rapidly.
There's a separate argument to be had about the social impacts of wealth inequality on a national level, but in environmental terms "rich" simply means "rich enough to drive, eat meat for most meals, go on foreign holidays and have AC or central heating". Whether you feel poor is irrelevant to the climate.
"Abolish the rich to prevent climate change" is just lazy sloganeering, the left-wing equivalent of blaming everything on Brussels or Muslamics. There's a lot of unfairness in the world, but your average British person is absolutely complicit in that unfairness. If everyone in the world received an equal share of global GDP, we'd get £2800 a year each. Nobody in this country actually wants fairness, they just want to couch their self-interest in the rhetoric of egalitarianism. We are rich, we are part of the problem and blaming it all on billionaires is just a distraction.
I think it's bollocks to assign pollution from an industry to the people who consume that industries products. The pollution that comes from a factory farm or an airliner is the fault of the food and airline company, not the average person eating the end product or the passenger. If you want that pollution to go away, take a legislative stake to the heart of those industries rather than going "that's your fault, that is" and then leaving everyone to it.
There's a high minded element to this (focus on structural problems, not individual culpability) but equally there's a more intuitive approach, one that says: Yes, I am responsible for the pollution generated by driving my car - I am the one doing that - but I can hardly be blamed for the pollution someone else did just because they did it in the assumption it would give them something to sell me.
I'm not saying I'd be overjoyed to find that I can't gorge myself on cheap sausage rolls anymore, but the most insufferable nonsense in the world is this idea that you can do "something to help" with your own personal consumption choices, a task that (if you approach it seriously) quickly exceeds centrally planning the economy of Russia in terms of logical impossibility, put forward by a coalition of those who're overinvested in legacy industries, actual idiots, and those who'd rather be the personally most morally virtuous prick on a dead planet than just another guy on a live one where the government stepped in.
If we're going to outlaw meat or jet aviation, we're going to need a critical mass of people who would support it. We need a culture change where those things are broadly regarded as unacceptable. A democratic government won't impose that change from the top down, the electorate need to demand it from the bottom up; individual and collective action are two sides of the same coin.
That depends on how necessary the product is. It's easy enough to forgive you buying food which you need to eat to live, but flying is almost never genuinely necessary.
>>93030 France has just voted to ban short haul flights where railway links exist. (Though for all I know it'll die in their senate.) The idea that politicians can't act in a top down fashion is one I find hard to believe. Politicians impose top down change that nobody wants all the time, and I'm not sure there's been a manifesto in living memory that has accurately reflected what the public actually want. Our government's in a particularly lucky position: It's the party of the right. What're voters going to do if they ban non-essential flights tomorrow - vote Labour, who'll be under substantial internal pressure to adopt an even harsher policy, and who'll bleed a few votes to the Greens if they don't?
>>93031 Even when flying for completely unnecessary reasons, the airline industry is good at yield management. If you don't buy the seat they'll doubtless find someone else, and even if they don't they'll fly the plane empty if they have to since the plane still has to move to where it's going to be next. It really is something to be dealt with at the airline or government level, not the consumer level.
Someone ought to go out and do a report on how we could substitute the airline route network. Until France's vote I was quite worried that the main approach of governments would be taxing emissions properly so as to not interfere with the market too much, which sounds all well and good until you remember that the most hard to replace routes are usually more economically marginal - remote communities and such - while some of the least necessary flights come from those with the greatest ability to pay (the entire existence of private jets)
It would be much better to have a report that could rank each route by its necessity, alternative transport links, etc, to give a clear look at the prospects for shrinking the industry. Staring with routes that can immediately be scrapped, then moving on to routes that can be scrapped with some marginal changes to current transport policy (say, introducing more trains on a given route), then those that can be scrapped with a more co-ordinated view of things (say, building a high speed rail link), then those which can be scrapped with some difficulty (such as flights to the Scottish Islands), and then finally those which would be the least desirable to cancel (Which from my impression would be flights to remote pacific islands, perhaps not too relevant for British officials.)
Perhaps in a prior life I was a central planner...
out of interest can anyone show me what proposals the environment movement have for mitigating the loss of jobs and business which will result if their proposals are implemented
That's a bit like asking "can anyone show me what proposals the fire brigade have for mitigating the water damage from extinguishing my house fire". Whatever the answer is, you still need to put the fire out ASAP.
Climate change is expected to reduce global GDP by somewhere between 5% and 20%. Transitioning to an economy with net-zero emissions will cost about 2% of global GDP. Whether we invest in new industries, create make-work jobs or just put people on the dole is a matter for the government and really a secondary concern, because the impacts of climate change will be utterly catastrophic. We are absolutely confident that doing nothing or acting too late will be far more costly than acting quickly and aggressively to curtail our emissions.
>It would be much better to have a report that could rank each route by its necessity, alternative transport links, etc, to give a clear look at the prospects for shrinking the industry.
The problem with this is that you'd end up with data that suggests you should shut down some of the least impactful routes. Yes, oil rig workers can get a train to Aberdeen but the usual Jetstream and Embraers that fly them there use less fuel to get there than a 777 uses just taxiing out of terminal 5 to the far end of the runways (this is not an exaggeration!).
And obviously this approach would almost always suggest that nobody should be flying to Spain for their holidays, which personally I find little reason to disagree with but I don't think the average person (more importantly the average voter) will ever be convinced to take a train to Tenerife. There's also the question of what you do with cargo flights, or airlines that do pax and cargo combined - is that more efficient? If it is all you're doing is encouraging more airlines to use bigger airframes.
Tax won't work either, not when most british airlines have overseas hangars and bases already - you'd have to convince every country to match your penalties and that would have been hard even when we were in the EU. Taxing jet fuel (currently tax free) might help a little, but only in as much as we'd just tanker up in cheaper countries, making for less economical takeoffs as you'd want as much as you could carry to bring back over.
There's already a built in cost incentive to build or buy more and more economical engines, obviously. But I would say a way to encourage that development further would be the least worst approach a government could take right now. Whether it be tax relief based on how efficient your fleet on average is, or a boost to the aerospace engineering sector or what, I don't really know. But even then the cost of building and upgrading aircraft is hardly environmentally cheap.
>>93044 Is that really such a problem? The real-world trade-off is surely that you either scrap the Jetstream to Aberdeen now and wait a bit to kill the LHR-JFK 777s, or you scrap neither. The same with bigger airframes in some circumstances - while obviously it varies by distance and other factors, in some situations you'll surely get less emissions per passenger doing low frequency flights with a big plane than high frequency flights with a smaller plane, even if customer preference currently forces airlines to go for frequency.
Now that we're out of Europe there's surely got to be more we can do to regulate airlines operating into and out of Britain? I assume there's still a pile of bilateral treaties with fun acronyms that say we can't do this or that, but surely we're getting away from the sort of situation where every airline can just buzz everything through an Irish subsidiary if they don't like our rules? What barrier is there to going back (if we so wished) to the sort of regulated environment of the 1960s where if an airline wants to operate a route to Britain it'll need the approval of 3 ministries and still never start service because the deputy undersecretary to agriculture vetoed their right to use airspace over British farms? That would surely resolve any issues with tax avoidance and so on at a stroke. (Making the bold assumption that none of the ministers are crooks in the pocket of our national carrier.)
Unless we hit something like electric planes, regulate, or just stop constructing and upgrading airports to lock capacity at current levels I'm not sure how you avoid Jevons paradox, where more efficient engines just make more and more flights viable until you're back where you started. I'm all for supporting their development all the same (we're probably always going to need some aeroplanes, might as well make them the most efficient ones possible) but I feel like something more forceful is needed to counteract "what the market wants".
>>93042 >create make work jobs or just put people on the dole
And where is the finance from that coming from? I'm not suggesting climate change doesn't need radical change but there doesn't seem to be a workable economic route map.
My belief is there isn't one and basically we are utterly boned
I just don't see, for example, the millions of people employed by the airline and aircraft industries finding work in renewable industries. Some yes but a large proportion will be left unemployed if the reduction in flights necessary to combat climate change happens.
I'll say it again, either we short circuit the global economy or accept global economic catastrophe - either way we are boned and does explain the relative lack of action on climate change
Not him, but a huge amount of air industry jobs are entry level or minimum wage. Even the bloke responsible for calculating or planning your plane's weight and balance is probably paid less than a McDonald's employee, if they're using a third party handling agent.
And quite frankly, what you described has already happened. Swissport laid off about 70% of ground staff in 2020. There are already pilots delivering your Tesco shop because they got cut loose from their airline. I'm the last person who wants to see the industry die but I don't think it would have the impact you assume it would.
>>93058 Good points but I was using the airline/aircraft industries as an example.
Factor in the restrictions necessary to reduce climate change, ie personal vehicles, shipping vast amounts of unnecessary shit from china, getting people to accept changes many would see as a reduction in life style, the whole picture in other words = to me us boned.
I hope I'm wrong and that's why I've asked a few times for links to serious studies showing a route map for change without economic melt down. To me the changes required at the pace required are not economically feasible. Simple statements put forward by some such as 'we need to fix the climate first and worry about the economy later' ignore the fact that screwing the economy is just as dangerous to the global population as climate change.
To use a crude example and using the third world as shit tends to effect the third world more than any others - if a third world farmer is starving to death the mechanism of why is largely irrelevant - be it he has been forced off his land by rising sea levels or the market for his product has gone, the poor sod is still staring to death
