We must stop investing in our own demise

The financial sector is fuelling climate change. If the investments made by the banks, venture capitalists and asset managers of the City of London were their own country, it would sit above Canada and Germany as the world’s ninth-largest polluter. The financial markets continue to pour trillions of dollars into fossil fuel industries, new oil and gas projects, and carbon-intensive activities. In doing so they are driving themselves, and the planet, towards a cliff edge. The task of redirecting these investments towards the goal of achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is as mammoth as it is crucial if the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial global temperatures is to be achieved.

Failing to achieve net zero by 2050 would not just be a human and environmental catastrophe. It would be an economic one. Business as usual, leading to warming of 2°C or 3°C, would break the foundation of the financial system and risk major economic collapse. The adverse impacts of extreme weather events will undermine the ability of insurance companies to evaluate risk, with hurricanes, bush fires and droughts causing entire business models to fail. The consequence is that insurers would set the price for cover at increasingly unaffordable rates. With assets uninsurable, banks will be unable to offer security for loans such as mortgages, and without insurance or banking functioning as before, the entire financial system that today generates so much capital could fail.

Yet the risk to the sector presented by climate breakdown currently plays a minor role in investment decisions. Fossil fuel investments remain high-reward, and very few financial institutions are committed to ending investment in oil and gas: private banks invested $742bn in the fossil fuel industry in 2021 alone, and the UK bank Barclays is the seventh-largest investor in the world. Reversing this trajectory requires global action.

Some moves are already under way, with parts of the financial system indicating their willingness to transition to net zero by joining alliances such as the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (Gfanz). Gfanz is a collective of more than 500 firms across the financial sector, such as banking, asset management and insurance, which has publicly committed to net zero by 2050, dedicating $130trn to weaning the economy off fossil fuel investments.

Bridging the gap between words and action, however, requires standardised and uniform goals. Without these, companies will be accused of elevating their own particular climate credentials publicly in an attempt to be seen to be green, while doing little to implement measurable and accountable change. Financial industries can claim to be making environmentally informed decisions, while failing to make public the exact indices and standards to which they measure success. Sadly, the varying standards against which different investments are bench-marked – whether environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies, carbon emissions, carbon productivity or other climate-focused metrics – are extremely inconsistent. Inevitably companies tend to pick and choose the ones that show them in the most favourable light. To address this, consistent metrics are needed for investors to determine the environmental performance of their investments – a “green taxonomy” that is globally aligned and can be an informed resource to rank green investments.

Restructuring requires a robust regulatory framework. Gfanz members are clear: “We are policy-takers, not policymakers.” They will run their businesses in accordance with the rules, but the rules must be the same for everyone. Until they are they will continue to justify carbon-intensive investments. Policy that engages the financial sector towards climate action must recognise that voluntary schemes are unlikely to deliver the change required. As things stand, Gfanz operates through voluntary initiatives, but only 60 of the 240 largest members have policies against coal investments, and only 11 robustly oppose offering financial services to new coal mines or related infrastructure.

To remain members of the United Nations’ net zero initiatives, investors have been told they must phase out unabated fossil fuel assets to support a just transition that does not leave communities to suffer. But the commitment to this phased approach must involve action and not be a “smokescreen” to disguise the financial sector’s foot-dragging. Regulation must create accountability. This could involve mandating diverse investments to ensure a move away from fossil fuel reliance with minimum economic pain, or oil and gas companies paying a bond for expected decommissioning costs, effectively ensuring that any new projects have their end firmly in sight.

By far the most direct way to factor environmental degradation into investment decisions is to put a price on CO2 emissions. This is supported by the majority of Gfanz members because it internalises the price of carbon and ensures the most polluting sectors pay their fair share. Put simply: the polluter pays.

But to align investment decisions with net zero requires a global focus that brings the entire financial sector under the same rules so as to avoid carbon leakage, which will be inevitable if industries in countries with high carbon prices can be undercut by those that have low ones. A unitary metric is required and competitive undercutting must be prevented. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the global price of carbon must increase from the current average of $6 per tonne to $75 by 2030, or the positive impact of carbon pricing risks being undone by leakage.

The global financial sector needs systemic change if it is to survive and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Faced with tackling the ravages of the Second World War, 44 nations gathered for the Bretton Woods conference in America to set up a system of rules, institutions and procedures to regulate the international monetary system after the war. It set unitary metrics for currencies – convertibility against the dollar – and demanded cooperation to prevent competitive devaluations. Next year, on the 70th anniversary of the original conference in New Hampshire, the world has a perfect opportunity to reconfigure our global financial institutions once again. We must do so to meet a climate change challenge that is both economic and existential.

This article was published in the New Statesman om the 23rd of May 2023

We need a legal right to food

Never before! Not in 25 years serving the people of Brent North, has my office seen such desperation in the emails and letters I am receiving. People are struggling to see how they can afford to pay the basics they need to stay alive — a roof over their heads and food on the table.

One man described how the utility bills were piling up and he was finding it impossible to manage his diabetes as he was only able to feed himself once a day.

Another constituent, who relies on Universal Credit to top up her extremely low pay, wrote that she could not afford to keep buying ready meals but didn’t have the money to buy a cooker so she could cook fresh food for herself.

I’m glad to say my brilliant caseworkers were able to get help for both of these people via Brent’s Resident Support Fund. But these, are just a snapshot of the thousands of heart-breaking appeals for help my office receives every week now.

Here we are in the wealthiest city, in the 6th largest economy in the world, and yet The Food Foundation tells us that nearly 10 million adults struggled to feed themselves during the past month during the past month.

Nearly 40 per cent of Brent North residents have had to  cut back on food, a recent TUC mega poll revealed, with 1 in 7 people in the whole country now skipping meals or going without food.

Something is very wrong. The “mini-budget” saw mortgage rates soar to 6.5 per cent, costing the average family an EXTRA £300 a month, while wages have declined in real terms over the past 12 years and food inflation has hit 14.5 per cent.  The chancellor Jeremy Hunt told the country: “Nothing is off the table.”…Except food Mr Chancellor. Except food!

My colleague Ian Byrne MP has campaigned to give everyone a human right to food. Fans Supporting Food Banks and the Right to Food Campaign are demanding a legal framework to ensure the poorest in our society don’t go hungry.

Ian and I sit together on the Select Committee that focuses on food. We recently quizzed our witness Henry Dimbleby – the restauranteur who heads the government’s National Food Strategy, and whose recommendations to ministers have been largely ignored.

Henry provided compelling evidence to support our call for universal free school meals, which surveys show most of the electorate also support. It’s an investment in our children’s and our country’s future and it’s not just me, Ian and Henry saying that.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers did a careful costing of the proposal and concluded that in terms of savings in health spending, increased productivity and improved education outcomes it would pay for itself.

Reliance on foodbanks has soared both in Brent and across the country since the first pandemic lockdown in 2020. Demand is now greater than the generosity of public food donations as households who used to donate try to save money on their own weekly shopping.

We have some tremendous initiatives in this borough, including the Brent Right to Food campaign which is working with trade unions to tackle food and fuel poverty. I speak regularly to Brent’s chief executive Carolyn Downs to discuss how we meet the challenges.

But like austerity, food insecurity is a political choice by governments, not something that “just happens”. It cannot be fixed without government taking clear responsibility. We need a legal right to food, but above all we need a change in government. One that will recognise the pain that people are going through when they can’t afford the basics of life and which will reverse these 12 years of austerity.

This article appeared in the Brent and Kilburn Times on 3 November

IDENTITY politics is infecting our communities in the UK

Recently, some hate preacher decided it would be a good idea to try to organise a demonstration against a Hindu temple in my constituency.

I responded immediately, pointing out that their inflammatory post was incitement to religious hatred and was a crime that carried a jail sentence. I made it clear that any would-be protesters should back off and stay away.

The next nine hours were pretty intense – talking to the police borough commander to make sure the necessary security arrangements were in place to protect residents, worshippers and the temple; liaising with the council’s chief executive, meeting leaders of faith communities and Indian TV journalists, to make sure that any demonstrators had a wasted journey.

The key thing was to understand what it was that the hate-filled people behind the demonstration wanted. They wanted a fight, and my job was to make sure they didn’t get one.

Understandably, some in the Hindu community wanted to mount a counter demonstration to defend the temple. The police were very clear that this would play into the racists’ hands.

Leaders like Narendra Thakrar, chairman of the Sanatan Mandir, and Nirmala Patel, the president of Brent Hindu Council, were both too clever to rise to the bait and urged people to go to the mandir, to say prayers, do arti, but NOT engage with any demonstrators. The Indian community does not need to march and parade and wave flags against racists to be confident in its own identity.

Identity politics is being stirred up in a disgusting way on both sides of the divide. It does not matter if you call it a Hindu-Muslim divide, or an India-Pakistan one. There are people who believe they can establish their power base by telling young men (and it is usually young men), ‘the only way you can prove you are a good Hindu, a good Muslim or a good Sikh is by standing up and hating the other side’. And it’s not true. But that’s their power base. That’s why they do it. It’s vicious, it’s horrible, and it is corrupting our politics in the UK.

It’s really easy for the leaders of each of the communities to stand up and point a finger at people who are doing it on the other side. But it’s much more difficult to stand up and point the finger at the people on your own side who are doing it. That’s what’s important. Because true leaders don’t just say, ‘Yeah, I’ll lead you into the battle against them.’ True leaders say, ‘Look what you’re doing to our community, look how you’re corrupting the values our community is based on.’

I am clear that the Labour party itself has been guilty in the past of such gutter politics when we came up against the militant Islamic Respect Party in the Batley and Spen by-election. As some of the traditional Labour voters in the Muslim community were attracted to their demagoguery, Labour put out a scurrilous leaflet linking (then prime minister) Boris Johnson with India’s prime minister Narendra Modi.

There was a backlash from the Indian community. And quite right, too. What did the party think they were playing at? It was a mistake and happily not to be repeated. We must always appeal to voters on the basis of our values, not on the basis of identity.

In 1997 when Tony Blair made his first speech to the parliamentary Labour party, the first thing he said was not ‘we are the masters now’, but, ‘We are the servants now.’

If anything connects with the Indian community, it is sewa or service. It’s what the community is built on. It doesn’t matter whether you see it in a gurdwara, a mosque or a temple. But it’s based on sewa, on service.

So as the party relaunches the Labour Congress of Indian Organisations, we should ask ourselves – why are we doing this, why are we setting this up? Are we setting it up because we want something from the Indian community, because we want votes?

I hope not. I really hope not. Because if we’re setting it up for that reason, it is doomed to fail. I don’t want 80, 90, a 100 per cent of any community to vote for just one party. Because I know if it does, it’s because they are regarded as a vote bank.

But if we are setting it up because we believe ‘all of you in the Indian community have values, have things we can learn from, have ideas, have innovation, have ambition, that we need to understand and harness for the good of our country.’ That’s the right reason. That’s the right purpose for this organisation.

All parties must not allow identity politics to infect our communities. We must stop those who want to import the politics and disputes of the subcontinent into our polity here in the UK. And we must stand up against those who want to use those disputes to harvest votes.

Leicester must be a warning to us all. No community has gained from those riots. Arrests have been made on both sides and both have debased the values of peace and respect which they claim to hold dear.

But political parties cannot control the mood of whole communities. Ultimately, it is for strong community leaders to steer their people away from hatred, and to call out people within their own ranks who would seek to make such hatred a means of asserting their own identity.

This article was published in the Eastern Eye

The Met's been failing in two fundamental ways

The Met Police Commissioner is one of the toughest jobs out there. I welcome the appointment of Sir Mark Rowley to the job, but he’s got a mountain to climb to win back the trust of Londoners, given that less than half of them believe the police are doing a good job.

Back in December I wrote to the then commissioner Cressida Dick to ask that her officers investigate the Downing Street lockdown parties. With still no investigation forthcoming and mounting concern over a toxic culture in the Met, I called on her to resign.

With the force now in special measures, my view has been borne out. She was not the leader that the force needed to carry out a root and branch reform.

The Met has been failing in two fundamental ways: on violence against women and girls and in systematically failing to tackle endemic racism — issues I have repeatedly raised in parliament.

Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to those decent, courageous Met officers who put their lives on the line every day and who are as disgusted as the rest of us by those of their “colleagues” who have corrupted the culture, and hinder them from doing the job they love. 

But it’s not good enough to say they are “just a few bad apples”. I am angry that so many people come into my surgery because they and have been subjected to police violence or had spurious prosecutions against them which appear to be racially motivated.

I remain sickened that it took two years for the Met to get the officers who took and circulated photos of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman off their payroll. I am equally furious about the treatment of 15-year-old Child Q who was strip-searched without any adult there to protect her. Racist attitudes have no place in our police and Sir Mark Rowley needs to make this a top priority.

Alongside it is the appalling number of incidents of violence against women and girls. The statistics are horrific with less than one in every hundred reported rapes ending up going to trial. It is too easy to say that women decide to drop the case. They do so because they do not get adequate support from the police and fear they will have to relive the trauma with no chance of justice at the end.

The abhorrent kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer has only undermined women’s confidence further. And the police behaviour in attacking the peaceful vigil women held in her memory shows just how little senior officers understood or empathised with the distress people felt.

The Minister for Police had to make a Statement to Parliament when the Met was put into special measures. Sadly, he used it to deny any responsibility and to make an ill-judged partisan attack on the London Mayor. Unlike the Minister and his government who have been in power for 12 years, the Mayor has at least set out a plan to make London safer and rebuild trust in the police.

Sadiq is demanding more robust vetting of new and serving officers, better recruitment processes, proactive procedures to weed out those who should never have been allowed to become police officers in the first place and the need for clear steps not just on how the Met will tackle racism, but how they will build a proactive anti-racist force.

He has also called for 6,000 new officers to bring police numbers per head of population to the level they were in 2010. So far, the government has failed to provide the funding to do so.

It’s utterly shameful.

Why we need a new start under a Labour Government.

Our national debt is the highest in peacetime history. Inflation is at its highest for 40 years. The tax burden is the highest it has been in 70 years. Most families have had no real terms wage rise in 12 years, and our growth, at Zero%, is the lowest in the G7. But don't worry, you'll get a new Prime Minister in October!

 Until then the person who has presided over this economic wrecking ball both as a Cabinet Minister and as the Leader of our country has graciously decided to stay in charge! No matter that 60 members of his government have resigned saying he is not fit to remain in office – this Prime Minister has decided he will become the "caretaker".

 Few words could suit Mr Johnson less. Care is the very opposite of what this man takes. He was reckless over parties at No 10. He was reckless to bulldoze through an international treaty only to find that neither he nor the people of Northern Ireland could live with it. He was reckless with PPE and contracts to cronies during Covid.

 But if he was reckless, others were complicit. And yet others were simple hypocrites. All those MPs who only last month voted in the 1922 Committee to keep the Prime Minister in office have been the very ones queueing up before the TV cameras to say that they were now resigning "for the good of the country". How cynical of anyone to think they had resigned in order to wipe their slate clean for a promotion by whoever is the next resident of No.10.

Every single Tory MP—every single one—should take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask themselves how we got here. They propped him up, they knew what he was like and they colluded in 12 years of stagnation, declining public services and empty promises. That is why on Wednesday evening I called publicly on TV a for a general election. A new start under a Labour Government.

This article appears in the Brent and Kilburn Times

Industrial action is the one real power the worker has. Labour must support it

Barry wrote today for Labour list on the need for an industrial strategy and why Labour must always be on the side of working people. The article can be read in its original form here; https://labourlist.org/2022/06/industrial-action-is-the-one-real-power-the-worker-has-labour-must-support-it/

I can hear them now. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, The Chartists, the Suffragettes, the Jarrow Marchers descending upon parliament in their thousands, chanting in chorus the words held aloft on their banner: “Trim and Triangulate!” Is this really where the soul of the labour movement has ended up? With Keir Starmer’s spokesperson saying: “We’ve been clear in the position that the strikes shouldn’t go ahead.”

For heaven’s sake! We have a government that is seeking to destroy what little employment rights workers in this country still have left by legislating for minimum service and taking away overtime pay for former strikers. A government that did nothing to stop the disgraceful firing of 800 P&O workers and blocked legislation to stop fire and rehire. And all the official response the party can make is: “Nobody wants to see industrial action that is disruptive.” For pity’s sake! What is the point of industrial action if it is not disruptive?

Industrial action is the one real power the worker has: to withdraw her labour when she feels exploited and that her terms and conditions are under attack. Has the Labour Party forgotten that we were born out of disruptive action? With inflation at 9% after a decade of declining wages, workers are on average £68 a month worse off than this time last year. People know they face worse to come with energy costs rising again in the autumn and they simply want to be able to feed their children, heat their homes and pay their rent.

Fighting for these people is what the Labour Party is for. It is a disgrace that Boris Johnson and his cabinet are now lining up to describe them as “reckless and wanton” and to brand them as “militant Marxists”. Those are the words of a Prime Minister desperate to blame the economic mess he has presided over on the very people who are its victims. The way to avoid strikes is to pay people a fair wage for the work they do. Instead, many companies have used Covid to pick fights with their own workforce: bypassing consultation and negotiation, adopting a nuclear option and threatening to fire workers unless they stayed silent and did as they were told while their pay and conditions were cut beneath them.

We have seen disputes at Weetabix, Clark’s Shoes, Tesco, British Gas, Go North West, ASDA, Sainsbury’s, Brush Electrical, JDE, Goldsmith’s College, Richmond Upon Thames College, The Girls Day School Trust. Workers in all these companies are not ‘trying to hold the country to ransom’. They are conscientious, decent people who are struggling in an economic crisis that is not their fault and have been told they must suffer even more: more wages lost, worse terms and conditions. They’re not trying to ‘strangle the economy’. They simply want the economic pain to stop.

The Conservative strategy is clear: blame the victim. The Labour Party response must be even clearer: we will always support the workers’ right to withdraw their labour in order to keep their families warm, fed and secure.

Where the government has got it badly wrong on the UK-Australia trade deal

This is from an article written for Labourlist which can be found here Where the government has got it badly wrong on the UK-Australia trade deal – LabourList

G’day mate!

When it comes to Australia, it seems the place just cannot stay out of the British news. A whitewash in the Ashes series, a ban on Novak Djokovic, and now Liz Truss commandeering her own aircraft to go down under and “advance freedom and democracy around the world” – yes, she really did say that.

But the big Aussie news is not in bats, balls or aircraft – it is in tariff rate quotas, product specific safeguards, and sanitary and phyto-sanitary controls. These are the things that have prompted the NFU, the Livestock Meat Commission and the NI Food and Drink Association to criticise the government for negotiating a trade deal that will damage UK farming, resulting in more food miles and less food security. On e Tory MP even said it was as “one-sided” in Australia’s favour as the Ashes series!

It has been more than 40 years since the UK last negotiated its own free trade agreements. The UK-Australia FTA is therefore a benchmark of what is to come. Other countries will look at this deal to gauge what concessions they may be able to extract from the UK when they sit down to thrash out their own deal.

Currently more than a third of the beef we consume in the UK is imported (362,000 tons), but only 4,000 tons of it (1.1% of imports) comes in free of tariff. In year one of the trade deal, Australia will be able to import up to 35,000 tons tariff-free. Within a decade, that figure will be 110,000 tons almost exactly 10% of all the beef we consume each year.

“But that will never happen”, say the government impact assessments: Australian beef exporters get a higher price for their beef in the Asian market than they do from us, so they have no reason to switch their customer base. The mistake is to think it’s about switching. They may decide to increase output to supply both markets. Operating at a profit margin differential in different markets has long been a feature of global supply chains.

The other mistake made by the modelling is to assume that everything else remains the same. Given the current tense state of diplomatic relations between Australia and China, and the various disputes they currently have within the World Trade Organisation, a Chinese shutdown of Australian beef imports could precipitate a crisis for Australian farmers who would be desperate to refocus their exports into the UK.

Farming in Australia is about scale and NFU president Minette Batters has warned that the prospect of their farming firepower being unleashed on the UK market could result in “the slow withering death of family farms” here in the UK. Perhaps the clearest example of this is in their national flock of sheep. Currently rebuilding from a historic low, it still has 68 million, and that is projected to rise to about 104 million when fully restocked. 40% of our sheep production in the UK is from small family-based upland farms, where profit margins are tight. Yet in the next decade this market will be opened up, tariff-free, to Australian sheep farmers.

Competing toe-to-toe against livestock produced at high volume and finished on a pasture-based system will not only put unsustainable pressure on these family farms, it could damage the whole of the UK tourism industry. The landscapes of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales have been fashioned over centuries by sheep. To think they will remain the same when the sheep are gone is fanciful.

Eat breakfast before reading the next two paragraphs – because the Australian’s attitude to animal welfare is not quite the same as ours either. They feed their pork with ractopamine, which causes severe cardiovascular stress in the animals and can cause similar health problems for people consuming the meat. So Australian pork will not legally enter the UK market under the trade deal. But there are other issues of animal welfare and environmental policy that this trade deal has simply failed to address. The RSPCA has a long list, from hot branding to the lack of slaughterhouse CCTV. The most controversial, though, is “mulesing”.

Mulesing is where at six months the lamb’s buttocks and the whole area around its anus are literally skinned alive with a pair of shears. This is done so when the scar tissue forms, no wool grows in that area which might collect faeces and attract fly strike infection. Often, the process is conducted without any anaesthetic! Yes, there are alternatives. And we do not allow mulesing in the UK, but there is no requirement for Australian meat imports to meet our animal welfare or antibiotic use standards.

Australia is also the second largest exporter of raw sugar in the world. Here in the UK, we produce 50% of our own consumption from our beet growers, and previously imported the balance equally from beet farmers in the EU and cane farmers from the Caribbean and least-developed countries. The government’s own impact assessment admits that the displacement effect of Australian cane sugar being able to come into the UK market tariff-free might not only impact on our beet farmers, but could see preference erosion of African and other LDC producers: Guyana is projected to lose £21.3m; Belize £24.3m.

The lesson here is that trade policy must be integrated with our development policies, our stance on human rights and social justice, and our environmental and animal welfare policies. This is why I developed Labour’s ‘just trading’ principles and launched them at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva back in 2018. I haven’t heard them referred to recently, but it would be good to know that the Labour frontbench is still committed to them.

My piece for the B&K Times- Blisters and Confidential Data

As I type this my feet are sitting on top of two blue ice gel packs from the freezer. After my 26 Mile marathon walk for Alzheimer’s Society on Saturday, my feet are more blisters than feet and if you see me hobbling around Wembley over the next few days then you will know why! Sympathy is always in short supply in the Gardiner household – so a friendly beep of the horn or wave in the street would cheer me up nicely. A huge thank you to everyone who supported me from the community here in Brent. To date I have raised £4,740 and the just giving page is still open for a few late donations if anyone would like to try to round it up to a cool £5,000.

The link is https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/barry-gardiner-trek26

Now as I contemplated my pathetic little blisters, I thought of those poor families living with the terrible pain of a loved one affected by dementia. It struck me what a very private thing the pain and grief of illness is, and how lucky we are in the UK to have a health service that is focussed on sorting the problem and not on monetising the treatment. And of course that got me thinking about NHS Digital’s new scheme for taking confidential patient data from GP records.

We are told that this data is for planning purposes. But I suppose the real question is whose planning? If the data is wanted solely for planning NHS Services why do the government refuse to ensure the data is anonymised, so it can never be tracked back to me and my blisters or some poor family suffering with dementia? Why indeed does the government say that the data collected and passed to NHS Digital will not be used “solely for commercial purposes”? That seems to me to be very clear that it CAN be used “partly for commercial purposes”.

Now I am guessing that 99.9% of people reading this column do not know that their own confidential patient data will be taken from their GP records by NHS digital, unless they have specifically opted out before the 23rd of June – just over 2 weeks time – and said they want to keep their personal medical data private.

The bond of trust between patient and GP has always been the gold standard of our NHS system. What we tell our doctor is part of that confidential GP/patient relationship. That trust, that confidentiality, will be undermined if millions of patients across Britain discover that their sensitive, personal information – their blisters and diseases – have been taken without their say-so in such a way that it can be monetised for commercial gain.

Please, don’t everyone rush to complain to your GP. They simply have not been given the support or the funding to inform all their patients or administer a proper consent process. The government should have designed a scheme where data was totally anonymised and could never be traced to an individual. They should have prepared a proper information campaign to explain to the public what was going on. But that would have meant designing a scheme where your personal medical data was not available as a commercial resource.

What is it the tech companies say? If you are not paying for the service -- you ARE the product.

Barry's article for the B&K times- "Toilet Talk"

 There are certain things we British just don’t like to talk about.

Poo is one of them.

Few of us bother to think what happens when we flush and walk away. As long as the air freshner is at hand and the toilet is left clean we think it is someone else’s problem now.

So the recent Panorama documentary that revealed that water companies released raw sewage into our rivers more than 400,000 times last year, was quite a disgusting shock. And it’s not just poo -- residents in one part of London now call the stretch of the Thames riverbank in their area the ‘Great Wet Wipe Reef’.

This matters! In fact it stinks: both physically and metaphorically. That’s why last week I was grilling witnesses to the Environmental Audit Select Committee to get to the bottom of the problem – if you will excuse the pun!

The Water companies say they are operating within the law, and any spills are rare, minor and unintentional. But that’s not the data which we were given. It is clear that these are not spills – spills are what happens with a cup of tea – these are deliberate discharges of hundreds of tonnes of raw sewage into our rivers and brooks. Despite being legally required to seek  a permit to use storm overflows and dump sewage, and then only allowed to do it during periods of exceptionally high rainfall, our local sewage treatment works down at Mogden appears (along with others) to be doing it on a daily basis.

We heard that there is a lack of transparency about how often water companies illegally dump sewage and the volume of untreated sewage that they dispose of at a time. This is hindering enforcement by the Environment Agency and only 4 water companies were actually prosecuted for illegal dumping in the last year. That is 400,000 illegal dumpings of raw sewage but only 4 prosecutions!

The Victorians took this shit seriously. The famous engineer Joseph Bazalgette built an amazing sewar network for London 150 years ago that was able to cope with 10 times the volume of sewage the city was producing then. He knew that the city’s population would expand. But now that Victorian network is literally bursting at the seams. Government must act to get the water companies to invest properly into this creaking infrastructure. These are the companies that have paid out £60billion to their shareholders whilst polluting our rivers and coastlines.

Our rivers are not supposed to be open sewers. They should be places where people can fish and swim and picnic and play. At the moment they are a health hazard, and our committee heard reports from swimming groups and canoeists and anglers about people who had experienced all too close encounters with sewage and contracted serious diseases from their contact with polluted rivers.

It may seem incredible that there is only one river in the whole of England that has secured certified Bathing Water status. That should be a cause not just for national shame, but for action. Prosecutions must follow. Infrastructure must be modernized and our rivers restored to the beautiful places for nature and recreation that they once were.

Barry writes for LabourList- Earth Day: For real action, we need the climate and ecological emergency bill

Another Earth Day, another government announcement. Barry’s latest article for LabourList can be found by following the link below.

Barry writes for the B&K Times- 'Creeping control over our NHS by American companies'

As excuses go, “I was just following orders” became bankrupt in 1945.

So it has been extraordinary to hear health chiefs claim (wrongly) that they have no option but to do what NHS London tells them, and rubber stamp the take over of 48 GPs surgeries in London by the American owned company Operose Health Ltd.

Most patients will never have heard of Operose. They will probably not even have heard of the company AT Medics, which currently provides their GP services in Brent through the Wembley Practice in Chaplin Road and the Burnley Practice in Willesden; and in another 46 practices in 18 other London Boroughs.  Yet without public consultation last November a decision in principle was taken to allow the transfer of the medical services contract by the Brent Primary Care Commissioning Committee (BPCCC) at Part 2 of its meeting.  The Part 2 is important: it is the secret part of the meeting. And this Wednesday NHS London have told them they must ratify it in the open session of the meeting to make it legally binding.

They should refuse.

They should reject this sell-off of London’s primary healthcare and fulfil their obligation to conduct appropriate scrutiny over the transfer and award of contracts that will affect hundreds of thousands of Londoners. The Committee should ask whether a company that has acquired a reputation for ruthlessly exiting contracts, including one in Camden where a practice was reputedly run down and closed with patients given only four weeks’ notice to find another GP, is fit to be a trusted provider for vulnerable patients here in Brent.

The other matter the Committee should be concerned about is the financial backing of the company whose accounts appear to reveal losses of almost £6.5million. Operose’s American parent company, Centene, have invested more than £9milllion into Operose despite it showing year on year losses since 2017. This of course could be an extraordinary generosity and concern for the welfare of British citizens; but some might suspect that it is a way of paying no tax in the UK whilst offsetting these losses against the global income of the US company for American tax purposes. If this were indeed the company’s objective then it would constitute a very unreliable partner for Brent patients indeed.

I have made my views clear to Dr MC Patel as Chair of the CCG and asked him to facilitate a conversation with the lay Chair of the Committee ahead of the meeting on Wednesday. I pay tribute to all those on Brent Patient Voice  who have raised this matter with me and believe that it is essential that those who can see what is being done to our health service do not just “follow orders” issued by NHS London, but honestly weigh up the likely repercussions of such creeping control over our healthcare by American companies with no ultimate loyalty to the health of British patients.

The old structure of Primary Care Commissioning Groups (PCCGS) is being done away with – the government would say “consolidated” -- and so this will likely be one of the last critically important decisions the Brent PCCG will take before it is “consolidated” into the new North West London grouping. That means nobody will be left to carry the can for the decision they take.

They must not let this abomination be their legacy.

Barry writes for LabourList- Illegal practices, proper pay, low prices. 3 unfashionable questions about fashion

https://labourlist.org/2020/12/illegal-practices-proper-pay-low-prices-3-unfashionable-questions-about-fashion/

Question 1. How do you get a Tory government to ignore illegal practices in the fashion industry? Answer. Make sure you have 93 official investigations and a select committee report on the problem.

As the environmental audit committee (EAC) launched its new investigation recently, it is worth noting that inquiries into the UK fashion industry have been running at the rate of ten a year for almost a decade since the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary in 2010. Every time, the same facts have emerged: worker exploitation and failure to pay the national minimum wage. Yet recommendations for better resourcing of inspections, due diligence checks across supply chains and financial penalties for non-compliance with the Modern Slavery Act have all been ignored by the government.

It is this inaction that encouraged manufacturers to capitalise on the Covid crisis. Companies like Boohoo seized on the opportunity presented by the surge in online sales that saw growth of 44% in the first quarter of the year. And it is this inaction that meant it was workers in places like Leicester that paid the price of that growth. Factories have operated at 100% capacity with little or no social distancing measures, and there are even reports of workers being forced to come in to fulfil orders despite testing positive for Covid: ‘Just don’t tell the others you’ve got it!’.

Question 2. How do you fix fashion? Answer. Outrageous things, like paying workers properly and regulating your supply chain.

Purchasers such as Boohoo drive prices down by bringing all the competing suppliers into the same room and holding a bidding war, asking: ‘Who can make this dress for less?’. It is a reverse auction where the manufacturers compete to supply the garment for an even lower price than each other. The result is that the ‘winning’ manufacturer is forced to drive down wages and conditions in their factories in order to meet the contract.

With such cutthroat practices, the government should hardly be surprised to find that workers are operating in unsafe conditions and paid below the minimum wage. What should be a surprise is that there has been no additional monitoring and enforcement by HMRC’s national minimum wage inspections, which still give manufacturers two weeks’ notice in writing before they attend the factory.

Boohoo and others should be obliged to publish their list of suppliers and subcontractors, at the very least, and to commit to robust auditing and transparency throughout their supply chains. Fiona Gooch of Traidcraft Exchange is one of the people who has been leading the campaign for a ‘garment trade adjudicator’ to bring much needed regulation to fashion retailer purchasing practices. She told the select committee that, due to the enormous power imbalance between retailers and suppliers, the disruption to trade as a result of Covid has meant retailers have simply not paid for £12bn worth of clothes and at least £2bn is owed in wages. The International Labour Organisation has estimated that 86 million workers in the garment industry worldwide are now in severe hardship.

Boohoo director Andrew Reaney, in charge of “responsible sourcing”, admitted to the EAC inquiry that the company had recently been alerted to an unauthorised subcontractor in Pakistan. He did not say whether it was the one in which a recent investigation found workers were being paid just 29p per hour.

Question 3. What has any of this got to do with me? Answer. Who do you think is buying all this crap, and who do you think is paying for it?

If the only thing we are interested in when we go online or into a store is how to get the item we want at the lowest possible price, then we are hypocrites when we point the finger at companies like Boohoo. It is we, the consumers, who fuel the race to the bottom. The more we drive down price, the more we drive down wages and conditions in factories.

The public are certainly more environmentally conscious now than when allegations of illegal practices in the garment trade first surfaced in 2010, but demand for fast fashion continues unabated. On Black Friday, Boohoo was offering up to 99% off their clothes – with one little black dress going for just 8p.

Imagine the transformation in the industry if, instead of searching the label for the price, we searched for a mark telling us this garment was made by a unionised workforce. At our inquiry, the Boohoo Group’s executive chairman was asked whether he would agree to repeated requests from Usdaw to meet and discuss union representation. His reply was either astonishingly ignorant or disturbingly arrogant – or perhaps both. His exact words were: “What I would like to say is that I personally do not want to join a union so I do not want to meet them.”

Exploitation of workers is not new. The refusal of management to engage with unions is not new. The imbalance of power makes it difficult for workers to secure their rights without the unity and solidarity that is difficult to achieve in a global supply chain where one group is pitted against the other. That is where consumer power can work to redress the balance. We have the power to not purchase. We have the power to boycott Bohoo. Read the ‘Fixing Fashion’ inquiry report here and watch the follow-up hearing here.

Barry writes for B&K times- "Government Must Wake Up and Smell the Novocaine"

Toothache is a pain.

Before Covid it was easy to fix.

Just go along to your local friendly dentist and they would get it sorted in no time.

But since the lockdown in March we have all heard the gruesome stories of people in agony, resorting to pliers to take out their own offending teeth. Dentists have had to take stringent precautions to keep their patients and themselves safe and have simply been unable to do the same amount of work as before.

Many NHS dentists have only done 20% of their usual treatments. And emergency treatment for those in pain is having to take priority over the everyday running repairs. What this means is that anyone who needs a crown or a bridge or simply needs to get their broken dentures repaired is finding it very difficult to get the work done.

Rarely do we think about the people behind the dentist’s surgery: the Dental Laboratory technicians – but these are the people who keep us all with functioning mouths, happy smiles and able to enjoy real food with false teeth. These NHS laboratories manufacture 80% of all crowns, bridges, dentures and implants and they are now in danger of having to close down because their work stream has dried up.

At the end of August, a Department of Health Review recommend a number of packages of support for these Dental Labs but a month later nothing has happened. We should all be concerned.

Government must wake up and smell the novocaine! It is of course right and vital that dentists themselves are supported to take care of their patients through this crisis. Dentists are the front line. But no army works without its supply chain and the dental laboratories and their technicians provide the logistical backup that keeps our dentist able to provide a full service that is about more than pain relief.

Hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country rely on this Cinderella service. Budget cuts in the NHS over the past decade have already hit their sector hard. When we eventually come out of Covid there is going to be a huge backlog of denture repairs and crowns that need to be manufactured. If we do not speak up and support them now, then this skilled workforce will simply no longer be there. Dentistry as part of the NHS could well become a thing of the past.

And that will not just be a pain in the mouth, but “a pain in the proverbial” for all of us.

Barry writes for Times Red Box- 'Labour should get behind the government on climate'

Barry has written in the Times Red Box. You can read his article in full below.

As the worst wildfires on record rip across California, and scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that this summer was the hottest in the northern hemisphere, we need strong international co-operation on climate change more than ever. In the role of host and president of the COP26 Climate Conference we also need to show strong domestic co-operation.

No nation can claim to be a “climate leader” without acknowledging this simple truth: the key to tackling the climate crisis is stopping the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The Stone Age did not come to an end because of a lack of stone and the Fossil Fuel Age will not come to an end because of a lack of oil. It will end as nations put in place rapid and socially just plans to end our dependency on oil and gas and to create a new green-energy economy.

For years, I have called out our government as a villain in the climate story. I have pointed out how UK Export Finance has given 99.4 per cent of its energy support to fossil fuels. I have railed at them for using billions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money to support fossil fuel projects across the globe: oil refineries in Bahrain, coal mines in Russia, gas projects in Mozambique and deals with Saudi oil barons. While claiming domestic success in reducing our emissions, the UK has used public money to worsen the climate crisis and lock other countries into fossil fuel consumption for decades to come.

Now, I may have to change my tune. Word is that the prime minister may soon sign off a policy that will end this shameful practice. Opposition is about scrutiny and holding government to account. But if and when government responds to criticism and changes policy, the job of the opposition is not to continue to oppose. So if the UK is indeed about to end export finance for fossil fuels then we in the Labour Party should be gracious enough to commend them for it.

One proviso: there must be no loopholes. Some have suggested that finance for gas projects could continue as a transitioning fuel as countries move away from coal. It cannot be right though, as we aim for net zero globally by the second half of this century, to be locking developing nations into gas infrastructure for the next 30 years. There must be no gas loophole.

It was never credible for the UK to boast about its domestic emissions reductions while it continued to export fossil fuel projects around the world. But action by the UK to end fossil fuel finance is not just about aligning our domestic and international policy. As the host and president of COP26, such action assumes a much bigger status by the message it sends to other countries before the Climate Change Conference in Glasgow next year. This is what climate leadership looks like.

In the run-up to the historic Paris Agreement in 2015, the French government stretched every diplomatic sinew to build confidence before the Paris summit, making its own unilateral climate pledges and pushing other countries to match them, or go further. By the time the summit took place, enough confidence and goodwill had been built to create the right conditions for a historic success.

So far, the British government has not built the same pre-conference confidence that the French did in 2015. Yet this is the most important climate conference since Paris, where the nations of the world must agree to strengthen their climate targets. It needs to be a success.

To help to build ambition, the government should throw down the gauntlet to other countries and invite them to join the UK in ending their public finance for fossil fuels too. Together, a growing club of countries could build confidence before the summit.

Not only would this be good for the chance of success in Glasgow, it would have a more direct impact on markets. The International Energy Agency has reported that investments in energy are “increasingly underpinned by governments”. This means that as government finance turns away from fossil fuels, the private sector, unwilling to shoulder the increased risk, will shy away too.

Tipping points are often referred to in conversations about climate change: the melting of the permafrost, the acidification of the oceans and coral bleaching. But there can be good tipping points as well. If government action can prompt large financial institutions to move their money away from fossil fuels, this could start a self-reinforcing cycle, cutting off the flow of money to the global fossil fuel industry and bringing about the rapid change we need.

Brent North MP welcomes widening of the inquiry after police officers allegedly took selfies of murdered sisters in Kingsbury

Brent North MP Barry Gardiner has welcomed the widening of the inquiry which he called for after inappropriate photos that were taken of the crime scene following the murder of sisters; Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in Fryent Country Park. 

 Mr Gardiner spoke to Commissioner of The Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick during a Zoom Call on August 6th and made his concerns clear. He pointed out that the officers must have assumed the photos would be positively received by the other members of the Whatsapp group and called for the inquiry to be widened to include all the police officers that had received the photos in the private messaging service.  

Commenting on yesterdays developments Mr Gardiner said; 

“This was a depraved and sickening thing to do and I welcome the news that the inquiry is being widened to the other officers. But it must go further. When I spoke with Dame Cressida Dick I pointed out that it was highly likely that the callous racism that had manifested itself here, might have resulted in prejudiced behaviour and unfair arrests in previous situations with these officers. There must now be a backwards look at these officers records to ensure that members of the public have not been subject to unsafe prosecutions.”

Campaigners Thank Local MP, Barry Gardiner, for Championing Community Energy

Today campaign group, Power for People, thanked local MP, Barry Gardiner, for supporting a new Bill in Parliament that would help rebuild local economies whilst increasing clean energy generation.

The proposed new law, known as the Local Electricity Bill, is supported by 187 MPs. If made law, it would create a new ‘Right to Local Supply’ of energy that would empower communities to sell locally generated electricity directly to local households and businesses.

Currently customers can only purchase electricity from nationally licensed utilities. The Bill’s supporters say this means money people use to pay their energy bills is not helping to rebuild local economies and local clean energy infrastructure.

Campaigning group, Power for People, are calling for MPs and the government to make the Bill law and are leading a supportive coalition of organisations including Community Energy England, Community Energy Wales, Community Energy Scotland, WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB. 44 local authorities have also pledged their support.

Power for People’s Director, Steve Shaw, said, “We thank Barry Gardiner for supporting the Local Electricity Bill. If made law, the Bill would unleash the huge potential for new community-owned clean energy infrastructure and for this to boost local economies, jobs, services, and facilities in communities across the country.”

Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent North, said, “The Local Electricity Bill will empower and enable new community energy companies to sell energy that they generate directly to local people which will help strengthen local economies. This is urgently needed given the economic shock of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Bill will also help accelerate our transition to clean energy, which is critical in avoiding the potential economic and ecological devastation of climate change. I will do all I can to ensure it becomes law.”

Barry writes for Eastern Eye- “Choosing to Make Black Lives Matter”

Choosing to Make Black Lives Matter

We are moulded by our background, our family, our ethnicity. They all contribute to who we are. But they do not define us. We have the power to think not only of how things are, but of how they ought to be. What defines us as human beings is the power to imagine – tochoose a different future.

I am a white man, living in a wealthy country. I am a Member of Parliament, constantly needing to look beyond the privilege of my own identity to try to define that different future. I must understand what it is like not to be me. I must choose, not the decisions that maintain my privilege – but the decisions that others who are not privileged, require.

Last week thousands of young people demonstrated outside the House of Commons to call out racial injustice and to protest at the murder of George Floyd. They were not alone. All over the world similar protests and marches have taken place. All with the same message: Black Lives Matter. Some have cynically asked why we are protesting in London about the treatment of a man in the United States. I think the answer is that either human rights are universal, or they are meaningless.

And the idea that we in Britain are divorced from racism in America was debunked almost two centuries ago when de Tocqueville reminded us that “No African came in freedom to the shores of the New World”. Unless we understand the pain that racism is causing people of colour in Britain today, then we will never understand why protesters pulled down the statue of Edward Colston at the weekend in Bristol. It is not possible to erase history – and we should not try. But we must not ignore the violence and the pain of our colonial past and understand its links to present suffering.

In the UK some like to claim that racism here is not as bad as racism in America. How distorted must our thinking be to believe that there is such a thing as an acceptable level of racism? Last June the inquest into the death of the electrician Darren Cumberbatch whilst in the custody of Warwickshire Police reported that he had been punched 15 times by officers who used tasers and batons in what amounted to “excessive” force. The Independent Office of Police Conduct promised to review the findings of its initial investigation, but in the intervening 11 months it has not even bothered to obtain a copy of the transcript of the inquest.In 2018 Vijay Patel was murdered outside his own shop after he refused to sell cigarette papers to under-age youth. Yet, in Britain,the name of George Floyd is better known than either Vijay Patel or Darren Cumberbatch. We need to ask ourselves why.

When I took 10 minutes outside of the gates of the House of Commons to join last week’s protest, I took a knee as a mark of respect and paused with those remarkable young people to reflect on the racism faced by so many people of colour not just in the US but here in Britain too.I did not set out to break the social distancing rules, but the number of people protesting made it impossible to observethem and I straightaway acknowledged that I had broken them.

I am acutely aware of how much people have suffered to keep each other safe. I have strictly observed the social distancing rules for 10 weeks and have not been able to meet my new granddaughter who was born at the end of March.The evening before the protest I received a negative test result. I am therefore confident that I did not infect anyone with whom I came into contact. And since the following morning I have self-isolated and not left home.

The rules are important in overcoming this pandemic and I do not want my action to undermine people’s willingness to maintain social distancing. But racism is a pandemic too.

Of course, I have an obligation to observe social distancing rules. But I also have an obligation to call out racial injustice and to stand in solidarity with the very people who because of that injustice are twice as likely to die from the coronavirus. I had a choice. It was not a facile choice – either way had consequences. I made mine.

It was Martin Luther King who said, “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Why I joined the protest yesterday

Yesterday I joined thousands of young people marching against racial injustice and in protest at the murder of George Floyd. I took a knee as a mark of respect and paused with those remarkable young people to reflect on the racism faced by so many people of colour not just in the USA but here in Britain too.

The number of people protesting made it impossible to observe the social distancing rules which I have strictly observed since March. I know how much people have suffered to keep each other safe and I apologise to them for the hurt my failure to observe the rules has caused. On Tuesday evening I received a negative test result. I am therefore confident that I did not infect anyone with whom I came into contact.

I know I had an obligation to set an example. The rules are important in overcoming this epidemic and I do not want my action to undermine people’s willingness to maintain social distancing. My obligation as an MP is also to call out racial injustice and to stand in solidarity with the very people who, because of that injustice, are so much more likely to die from coronavirus.

The anger generated by my breach of the social distancing rules must not be allowed to detract from the vital message that Black Lives Matter and that we all have an obligation to fight racism. The killing of George Floyd must be a catalyst for action.

Post-Brexit trade deal with Brazil must not destroy the Amazon – Barry Gardiner responds

Shadow International Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner MP has today called on the government to guarantee that any future trade deal with Brazil in the event of a No Deal Brexit does not further contribute to the destruction of the Amazon.

Warning of the possibility of a future trade deal leading to more imports of Brazilian food produced in the areas of the rainforest being burned, Gardiner said, “We cannot risk our planet to buy cheap beef.”

This comes in the wake of International Trade Minister Conor Burns posing for pictures and drinking champagne with Brazilian minister Marcos Troyjo in recent days and describing him as ‘superb’. Marcos Troyjo explicitly backed Bolsonaro’s policy of deforestation of the Amazon last week.

Fires in the Amazon rainforest have been linked to Brazilian farmers clearing space for cattle and crops, encouraged by the country’s far right President Jair Bolsonaro.

Reports by environmental groups have shown links between beef imported from Brazil and sold in UK supermarkets and deforestation in the Amazon.

The Amazon is a key carbon sink for the world’s carbon emissions and its destruction has a major impact on the global effort to tackle climate change. In addition the Amazon is home to an estimated 10% of the world’s species.

Barry Gardiner, Shadow International Trade Secretary, said:

“While the Amazon rainforest burns to clear space for cattle and crops, the Conservative government is cosying up to Brazil’s far right President Bolsonaro.

“Any post-Brexit trade deal with Brazil must guarantee that the UK is not further contributing to the destruction of the Amazon. We cannot risk our planet to buy cheap beef.

“The Amazon is our planet’s great shield against climate change and we are wilfully destroying it. The homes of indigenous people and millions of plant and animal species are under threat.

“Boris Johnson’s vision for Britain after No Deal Brexit seems to be that we sell off the NHS to Trump’s America, trash the Amazon with a deal with Bolsanaro and fuel war by selling arms to the Saudi dictatorship.”

UK-Mexico trade failure – Barry Gardiner responds

Barry Gardiner MP, Labour’s Shadow Trade Secretary, responding to the publication of the summary of public responses to the government’s consultation on prospective trade agreements with Australia, New Zealand and the United States including potential accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, said:

“The British public have been completely clear: they want government to protect our NHS in any future trade agreements and they want to see our UK standards, rights and protections upheld.

“In the past people have seen trade agreements negotiated behind closed doors that have tried to whittle away the very things people value most – this is not acceptable.

“The government must set out precisely how they will ensure that there cannot be any lowering of our food, environmental, health, animal safety or labour standards as a consequence of future trade agreements.

“People have sent a powerful message to the government: our trade agreements must be negotiated with appropriate transparency and the full engagement and scrutiny of Parliament.”