Barry signs joint-letter stating economic response to the crisis must be in line with global sustainability goals

Barry signed a joint letter-letter which was published in the Independent. You can read it below:

The coronavirus crisis has prompted the biggest state intervention in the market in history. Around the world governments have earmarked more than $8tn (£6.4bn) in a bid to keep the global economy moving. The spread of the pandemic has shown the strength of investing in companies putting people and planet first. Green stocks have outperformed others by almost 8 per cent since the start of the crisis.

As world leaders look to the economic recovery, short-term carbon-intensive solutions are not the answer. Instead creating an economy where resources are only used if they are 100 per cent recyclable or reusable represents our best route to a better future.

Indeed, the European Commission estimates investing in a circular economy could create some 700,000 jobs by 2030 in Europe alone, invigorating sectors that will deliver long-term prosperity without trashing our natural world. A real circular economy could once and for all realise the vision of a world free from the connected problems of runaway climate change and the global-waste crisis.

Now more than ever before the future belongs to companies that work with nature, not against it. The economic response to the crisis must be executed in line with our global sustainability goals and put green stimulus measures front and centre.

Lucy Siegle, chair of the Real Circularity Coalition
George Monbiot, author and environmental activist
Alviina Alametsa MEP, Finland
Ernest Urtasun MEP, Spain
Prof Jeremy Faludi, department of design engineering, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Prof James Elliott, materials science & metallurgy, University of Cambridge
Prof Raimund Bleischwitz, director, The Bartlett School of Environment Energy & Resource
Dr Nick Taylor Buck, faculty of science research manager, University of Sheffield
Bella Lack, ambassador, Born Free Foundation
Julie Anderson, global CEO, Plastics Oceans International, USA
Hugo Tagholm, chief executive, Surfers Against Sewage
Sally Uren, chief executive, Forum for the Future
Dr Becky Gates, founding director and trustee, Fidra
Caroline Lucas MP, Green, Brighton Pavilion
Barry Gardiner MP, Labour, Brent North
Ben Lake MP, Plaid Cymru, Ceredigion
Claire Hanna MP, Social Democrat and Labour, South Belfast
Claudia Beamish MSP, Scottish Labour, South Scotland
Prof Peter North, alternative economies, University of Liverpool
Dr Patrick Pomeroy, senior research scientist, school of biology, University of St Andrews
Ray Georgeson MBE, director, Ray Georgeson Resources
Prof Rupert Ormond, centre for marine biodiversity & biotechnology, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh
Dr Oliver Bragg, geography and environmental science, school of social sciences, University of Dundee
Neil Garrick-Maidment FBNA, founder, The Seahorse Trust
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington, Liberal Democrat
Baroness Lister of Burtersett, Labour
Baroness Walmsley, Liberal Democrat
Lord Grantchester, Labour
The Rt Hon Lord Naseby PC, Conservative

How Brent Council used dedicated coronavirus care home to stop residents infecting each other – Barry speaks to The Telegraph

Barry spoke to The Telegraph over the weekend regarding the work Brent Council have been doing despite Government inaction on care homes. Brent Council ensured they spent £1.5 million PPE in February before the height of the pandemic. As well as this Brent Council ensured elderly patients discharged from hospital were quarantined in a separate care facility and not put back into care homes with residents who hadn’t contracted Covid-19

There have been over 10,000 care home deaths across the U.K. from Covid-19, Brent Council has one of the lowest rates and as Barry outlined, their swift and decisive action almost certainly saved many lives.

The article is behind a paywall but you can take up a free trial to read it in its entirety here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/23/brent-council-used-dedicated-coronavirus-care-home-stop-residents/

Barry writes an article in LabourList on the upcoming Trade Bill

Barry wrote an article in LabourList regarding the upcoming Trade Bill. You can read Barry’s article at https://labourlist.org/2020/05/the-tory-trade-bill-threatens-parliamentary-sovereignty/.

As a former shadow Secretary of State for International Trade, Barry knows only too well the numerous concerns that this Bill propagates. Concerns such as our rights and liberties, our labour standards, environmental protections, food safety regulations, animal welfare laws and the capacity of our public services to continue to operate in the public sector.

To bring it back at this time of crisis – knowing that in normal times it would engender considerable public concerns – is inexcusable. If this bill goes through unamended, the government will have afforded itself unchecked powers to lock the UK into binding obligations under international law that may profoundly impact upon each of these areas. Parliament would have no say.

Heating our homes – a word in the business chairperson’s ear – Barry writes for LabourList

Barry wrote an article for LabourList  before the election of the Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee as a word in their ear.

Barry wrote about how we have to think differently about heating our homes and energy efficiency. The article can be read in its entirety at the following link.

https://labourlist.org/2020/05/heating-our-homes-a-word-in-the-business-chairpersons-ear/

Barry writes an open letter to Dominic Raab published in Eastern Eye

Below you can read Barry’s open letter to the First Secretary of State, published in Eastern Eye. Barry identifies that Covid-19 is disproportionally affecting ethnic minorities and poor people. Indeed, Brent North which has in some ways been the epicentre of the pandemic in the UK is also in the most diverse borough in the country.

Barry thanks the NHS

Barry joined with other North West London MPs to record a special message for those current working against the Covid-19 pandemic.

Barry meets Finnish Minister in Parliament

Barry recently sat down recently with his Shadow International Trade colleague, Bill Esterson to meet Ville Skinnari, Minister for Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade for the Finnish Social Democrats. 

Both team’s delegations discussed the current issues in international trade and our common interests as well as their shared approaches to international trade and the underpinning of rules between both countries.

It’s time for the government to show real leadership on COP26: Barry writes for The New Statesman

Barry wrote for The New Statesman this week on the Governments lack of leadership and strategy at regarding COP26, which the U.K is due hold later this year in Glasgow. The article can be read in its entirety below;

So the government has fished around and finally found a President for COP26. Perhaps it’s now time to be even more adventurous and come up with a strategy.

Success at the climate conference in Glasgow this year is essential if we are to keep alive the realistic hope of a world in which every child alive today does not have to live through climate catastrophe.

But success requires careful planning and diplomatic choreography. It requires an understanding not only of the science, but of the political blockages and differing national interests that can prevent us keeping within the 1.5 degree threshold that science has now set as the safe limit of global warming.

The job of COP26 was set out five years ago in the Paris Accord. Then the world had agreed a 2 degree target and countries pledged emissions reductions to achieve it. But even then they knew that all their pledges would not keep within their 2 degree target – let alone the 1.5 degree target that the Intergovernmental Panel has now established as the true tipping point.

The first goal of COP26 therefore was for countries to increase the amount of emissions reductions they were prepared to promise. Four figures tell the story. Paris projected business as usual: 59 gigatonnes of CO2 a year by 2030. Each country’s Paris pledges: 53 gigatonnes of CO2 a year by 2030. Below the two degree threshold: 40 gigatoness of CO2 a year by 2030. Below 1.5°C threshold: 24 gigatonnes of CO2 a year by 2030.

At Paris in 2015 the world pledged to reduce its annual emissions by just 6 gigatonnes – from 59 to 53. To stay below the 2 degree threshold we need to more than triple that ambition. To stay below the 1.5 degree threshold we need to increase our effort by six fold. And COP26 is when we need to do it.  That is just to give us a better than 50-50 chance of meeting these targets. Ask yourself if you would cross a bridge with only a 50-50 chance of getting to the other side.

If this were not daunting enough, COP26 will inherit the failure of last year’s COP25 to agree how countries can cooperate by trading emission reductions or helping each other to reduce theirs. It will have to address the issue of double counting of reductions that immediately puts countries like Brazil, Russia and China at odds with the EU and many of the Least Developed Countries.

As hosts the UK will be expected to show real domestic leadership. The government must therefore secure cross party support for the policies that will deliver  its own carbon budgets for 2027 and 2032 and for setting the UK on track to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. This is necessary, but simply secure its own base; a strategy must sit on top.

It is essential to identify the alliances that will be able to effect political movement. Countries that were once key allies like Mexico are now less committed to swift emissions reductions and the UK will need to seek much broader cooperation with like-minded countries in Europe, Africa and Latin America and countries of the Climate Vulnerable Forum. The group known as the High Ambition Coalition played a critical role in Paris and it should form the bedrock alliance from which the presidency should reach out.

The ghost at the COP will be the USA as it leaves the Paris Accord and the next US president is elected. But the dominant figure at the COP will be China. Only real action by China will be able to prevent other countries looking at the US exit and asking: “If America is not prepared to cooperate, then why should I?”

That is why the EU-China Summit in Leipzig this September is so vital. The European Green Deal, proposing carbon neutrality in Europe by 2050 must be leveraged to bind China in and encourage her onto a pathway to Net Zero. Our climate diplomats should already be hard at work with both the EU and China to deliver this partnership.

To that end it is important to remember that China is hosting her own COP only a month before Glasgow. This is the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP15 in Kunming. It will be the biggest international conference China has ever hosted and is tasked with setting the global biodiversity strategy and targets for the next decade.

We must do all we can to ensure their COP is a success. In this respect it is worth noting that the UK has not increased its contribution to the funding mechanism for the CBD since 2010. Now might well be the time to double the relatively small amount – £210million – we pay to the Global Environment Facility! Such a gesture would not go unnoticed; nor I suggest, would it go unrewarded by cooperation in Glasgow.

Persuading countries of the global south to increase their ambition will require realism about their financial capacity. The Green Climate Fund was established to provide that support to enable countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The $100billion a year target has seen a total of just $19.2billion pledged since 2014 of which only some $6billion has yet been allocated to projects.

The UK is recognised as a leader in green climate finance and must press for global reform of the sector and the incorporation of climate risk onto both private and public sector balance sheets. If mitigation and adaptation is to happen at the pace and scale required, private sector finance must play a huge role. Green bonds and other financial instruments must be part of the strategy that a UK presidency is well placed to develop.

21 years ago, when John Prescott was negotiating the Kyoto Agreement, it was recognised that countries had “common but differentiated responsibilities”. The full meaning of that phrase is still being worked out. Countries like the UK or the USA, which have benefited from polluting our planet for 250 years, need to recognise that other countries who are poor are now suffering existentially. Payment for “loss and damage” is a key demand for many of the Least Developed Countries. They want to see rich nations recognise the damage they have caused and compensate them for it. If the UK made the first financial contribution towards loss and damage, that might just be the game changer that could unlock the politics.

A full link to the article can be found here https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/02/its-time-government-show-real-leadership-cop26

Geopolitics and the Energy Transformation: Barry writes for The Times Red Box

Barry wrote for The Times Red Box last week and appeared in Thursdays edition. The article was titled; “Renewable energy will power new era of foreign policy.” The article can be read in its entirety below.

From coal and whale oil to crude and shale, the geopolitical map has been moulded by the need to control energy supplies. Distribution pinch points such as the Suez Canal or the Strait of Hormuz have been flashpoints for conflict and the projection of global power has relied upon the ability to maintain security of supply.

Nobody who recalls the past 50 years of statecraft as it has responded to the 1973 Opec oil embargo, successive wars in the Middle East, or Ukraine’s dispute with Gazprom of Russia, would doubt that fossil fuel has dominated the trade and power relations between nation states and been a root cause of geopolitical instability and conflict.

All that is changing. The transformation in energy that is seeing the world move from fossil fuel to renewable technologies will bring with it new power relations that will profoundly shape our century.

The inevitability of this shift is not simply a matter of the rapidly declining cost of renewables — the latest auction of solar power in Saudi Arabia recorded an all-time low of $17 per MW/hour — which are now outcompeting oil and gas prices without any subsidy. Nor is it simply a matter of the health and climate problems associated with fossil fuels. The World Health Organisation estimates that air pollution kills seven million people each year.

Unlike fossil fuels, renewables are widely available in many forms in most countries, promoting domestic self-sufficiency. Renewables are not stocks that are used and then depleted; they are flows that are constantly recharged and are therefore less vulnerable to choke points. They can be deployed swiftly and easily at a local community scale and are compatible with decentralised energy production and consumption, and have marginal costs. Solar and wind have cost reductions of approximately 20 per cent every time capacity is doubled.

Control of the energy resources enables a country to protect vital domestic production and leverage political interests abroad. So just as the geographic concentration of coal, oil and natural gas has moulded our political landscape since the industrial revolution; it is the dispersed nature of renewable energy that will erode those traditional patterns.

States that have been historically energy rich nonetheless start the energy transformation with significant advantage. Countries such as the UAE are investing the wealth of their oil reserves to develop the infrastructure for a renewable future alongside the other elements of social and physical infrastructure that are part of a developed economy.

But renewables are also turbo charging emerging economies such as India which is predicating a growth in renewables of 50 per cent of its entire generation capacity in just four years. In sub-Saharan Africa the reduction of fossil fuel imports will have a double benefit in the reduction of import costs and in the creation of new jobs and opportunities in the domestic production of solar, wind and hydro power.

The democratising impact of this should not be underestimated. As local communities become self-sufficient in electricity, countries can leapfrog the model of a centralised fossil fuel grid that would take years to connect every community and rural village.

As the world becomes less reliant on fossil fuel, Russia, which generates 40 per cent of its fiscal revenues from gas and oil, is not positioned well to compete against its Chinese neighbour, which accounts for 40 per cent of the total global investment in renewables. Latest figures show Russia had less than 15,000 patents in energy renewables; the United States had 100,000, while China had 165,000.

Oil and gas exporting countries such as Iran, Iraq and Nigeria could see their economies devastated by a rapid decline in fossil fuel rents because they have not adequately prepared for the transformation in energy. Their resilience is poor precisely because they have not sought to use their historic wealth to diversify their economy or invest in other forms of socio-economic development.

For countries such as Iran and Nigeria where fossil fuel rents represent 10 per cent of GDP such a loss of revenue could bring with it domestic political instability. Subsidies and services that citizens have come to expect may no longer be affordable as government revenues decline. Subsoil assets should have been transformed into surface assets of human, social and physical capital. In too many countries they have not.

Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg have long argued for a better understanding of the specific financial risks of climate change and the energy transformation in the work of the Financial Stability Board. They have alerted the world to the potential shock to the global financial system from a sudden shift away from fossil fuels that would create stranded assets. It is often said that the Stone Age did not end because of a lack of stone and the fossil fuel age will not end through a lack of oil, gas or coal. It will probably end with stranded assets.

The map of the modern world, its trade routes, the power of its nation states and its military battles have all been fashioned by the exploitation of fossil fuel energy. New renewable technologies do not rely upon these geographically concentrated stocks and for that reason they can disperse power and create new alliances as every country taps into the geothermal, hydro, solar, tidal, wave and wind energy it possesses. Managing this energy transformation is the fundamental issue of international relations in the 21st century.

Barry Supports Halt to the Planned Deportation Flight to Jamaica

I am supporting this important campaign to halt the planned deportation charter flight to Jamaica, scheduled for Tuesday 11th February 2020. I have signed the  letter below that demands that this flight and all subsequent charter deportation flights are suspended until the Windrush Lessons Learned Review has been published and acted upon and the Government has provided answers to the questions below.

I have seen first-hand the devastating effects of the Windrush scandal. Over the past few years I have helped a number of my constituents to resolve their situations with the Home Office. Some have lived lawfully in the UK for up to 60 years, with decades of qualifying years paying National Insurance contributions, then suddenly stripped of their residency, employment, pension rights and told to leave the UK. We have searched NHS archives, tried to trace the records from schools that have been demolished decades ago, in an attempt to prove that the person is legally in the UK. All because of the Hostile Environment policy that all to late demanded a commonwealth citizen provide a document that they were never given.

I will continue to support my constituents effected by the Windrush scandal in obtaining swift and fair compensation for the destruction this scandal has caused to them and their family’s lives.