The FT reports this morning that:
Ministers made a last-minute decision to withdraw plans to force big UK companies and asset managers to disclose their environmental impact from Tuesday's Queen's Speech, according to government sources.
The decision to drop the “sustainability disclosure requirements” from a new financial services bill comes amid a wider retreat by the government from tightening corporate governance.
Leave aside for a moment that I think that the measures that the government were going to introduce were inadequate. Note instead that they were at least movement in the right direction. And now note that this has been abandoned. Like audit reform, the issue has been kicked into the long grass.
I have long argued that a truly neoliberal government is cowardly. When it sees a problem what it does is run away from it, claiming that the market is better equipped than it to tackle the issue.
This is what the government has done with Covid. We now have a government in denial about a disease killing more than 75,000 people a year. They won't even let medics test for it.
We also have a government in denial in the cost-of-living crisis. They say growth will deal with it. We are in a recession. They will do nothing else.
More mundanely, they have heralded audit reforms, and now they have announced incredibly weak legislation that no one thinks will actually be legislated in this session of parliament.
And now we can see how it will respond to climate change. When push comes to shove it will say it cannot possibly impose burdens on business, who must be allowed to let the planet burn if that is what markets dictate. This is, I am certain, the start of a trend on this.
We cannot afford any of these failures.
We cannot afford to have cowards running the country.
But that is what we have got.
And the Opposition is not a lot better.
We are in trouble.
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This is just a small point.
There is nothing cowardly about this.
This is boldness – boldness born of an emphasis on the profit motive and the single minded objective of maximising the bottom line. Boldness born of money-power.
For all Mark Carney’s accurate talk of markets not valuing elephants and the Amazon jungle until after they are gone, nothing changes really in the pursuit of short-term profit.
Because the short term gains are then invested into the process of ensuring longer term gains – such as ensuring that you get the Government you want who can do things like this by funding them into the democratic process.
This is not cowardice. I put it to you instead that this is the pure exercise of power.
Calling this Government ‘cowards’ is an insult to cowards and lets this bunch off the hook.
Johnson’s Government is a Government for the rich, by the rich, bought by the rich. And for some time, they’ve had no qualms about everyone knowing it either.
2008 was the denouement. An absolute failure of Neo-liberalism. Now there is no pretence, as Mirowsky has said, the rich have maximised the crisis. What else could they do? Sacrifice all the hard work done by the MPS and gains they had made? Now that would have been cowardly. No – they stuck around, changed the narrative and here we are.
The gloves are off.
The ball is in our court.
How do we respond?
The Tories have no intention of taking the climate crisis seriously. Only further massive protest will result despite the putting by Priti Patel.
Many years ago when I left Zambia and was looking for a house to buy in Ireland, close to the zinc mine I joined as a mining engineer. One of the things I considered was that it would be above sea level if all the ice melted.
I have just finished reading a science fiction book with a story line following the development of the human race from the stone age into the future. It ends upon a scene where the whole web of live has collapsed and a few humans survive by eating cockroaches, the only other life left.
Is it time to consider the epitaph for planet earth?
This would explain the Fermi paradox, if technological civilisation only lasts some 200 years.