Response to #RishiSunak & #UKGov #Budget2021
The quote ‘first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win’ has been modified by Ben Philips to include a penultimate line: ‘then they tell you you’ve won’. In the fast-closing window of opportunity to avoid the worst implications of climate and ecological collapse, today’s UK budget announcement consists of ‘making it sound as though climate change is being addressed’ without any evidence thereof. We are being placated and reassured that we can all return, sated with pacification, to whatever a ‘normal life’ looks like these days. But in the brutally short time we have to prevent the searing potentiality of unmitigated climate disaster, the state’s callow abuse of ‘green’ as an adjective is a cynical substitution for the feasible, rational, and necessary climate action any serious government would take.
We’ve come to expect some misalignment of word and deed from politicians, but the scope and implications of the ghastly discrepancy between the UK government’s promises and the destruction its genocidal investments will actually fuel is breathtaking. Mindless catch-phrases like ‘building back greener’ are rendered even more hollow by the gutting of £1bn from net-zero spending, slashing funding for the massively popular ‘Green Homes Grant’ scheme, and investing £4m in ‘green energy crops’ — doublespeak for ‘growing trees so we can burn wood for fuel’. True climate action would mean a ban on new fossil-fuel investment instead of seventy planned incinerators, airport expansions with their fleet of new gas-fired power stations, or the 11th consecutive cut in fuel duties (amounting to more than £110bn since 2011). It seems the most this government is willing to do is offer obfuscation, confusion, and the illusion of action instead of truth, clarity, and integrity in its evidently empty promise to ensure the well-being of its people and the planet.
Eight months ahead of hosting COP26, the UK is desperate to market itself as a ‘global climate leader’ with an ‘ambitious green industrial revolution’, but the wider political ramifications of such an egregiously harmful budget cannot be overstated. World governments will be presenting their own national plans on carbon emissions (NDCs) in Glasgow this November, and they will be closely monitoring the UK’s deeds to guide their own climate promises. Current NDCs will only result in a 1% reduction in carbon by 2030 vs. the 45% required under the Paris agreement. The climate conference will utterly fail without strict, reciprocal national plans, and rather than leading by example, today’s budget reduces COP26 to an expensive bit of taxpayer-funded political theatre, viciously sabotaging the global approach needed to combat an international emergency.
It is missing the larger point, however, to focus on budget minutiae when the fundamental issue is the political economy that has brought us to this pivotal point in the first place. The world’s money is created from debt, borrowed from our future, and slavishly dependent on infinitely-expanding growth to survive in its shaky present. The aim of the financial system is not to support, protect, or sustain, but merely to create more money, by any means necessary, to avoid collapse. In our myopic economy, a living tree, with all its benefits, is ascribed no worth until it is killed, cut to pieces, and sold on as a commodity. How can any system which does not value what is important to us or what we depend on to survive, which does not honor the nobility of life itself, ever be justly applied to the living? Our economy should exist to support us, not vice-versa, and if the grim calculations of our current system deem life a secondary priority to money, then we are free to choose from any number of better existing options. Tweaking the budget for an economic system that is — by design — extractive, inequity-increasing, and growth-addicted will solve nothing. A meta-study of 850 peer-reviewed papers has demonstrated that growth cannot be decoupled from resource use and greenhouse gas emissions, and, as such, the public-relations deceit of ‘green growth’ is a lethal oxymoron. As long as the government’s economic goal is endless expansion (which is not making us happier, healthier, or safer) over what actually matters (well-being, stability, sustainability), rearranging the deck-chairs on any budgetary Titanic is irrational at best. Callously repackaging the selfsame causes of the threats we face as alleged ‘solutions’ is a death sentence for both human and planetary life.
Not only does Rishi Sunak’s budget radically fail to address the CEE: with the exception of a few forlorn scraps of dyed-green window-dressing, it carries on as if there’s no climate crisis at all. It casts the UK Gov’s sharp hypocrisy on its own climate commitments into high relief, effectively renders COP26 an overpriced global joke, and exposes the UK as its biggest punch line. This is not just an embarrassment for the UK Government, however. It is also an outright condescension, humiliation, and cavalier disregard of every person therein, who is somehow expected to credulously choke down its morbidly mocking caricature of climate action. With this budget, what Rishi Sunak has actually announced is the UK government’s illegitimacy, its unwillingness, and perhaps even its outright inability to demonstrate the fundamental political will to safeguard life. Because however one might define a government’s purpose, surely it’s not to sleepwalk its population into disaster? Surely it’s not to divide, confuse, and abandon whilst millions of us lay dying in a still-raging pandemic? Surely it’s not to sacrifice survival by prioritising uncompromising, irrational, and suicidally-extremist financial policies? Is this what we’d choose for ourselves? Because if not, then our government’s doing so is flagrant evidence that it not only no longer represents us, but also is willing to treat us as sub-human, worthless, and utterly expendable. As such, our only reasonable option is a return to actual democracy, that does reflect our collective will, through legally-binding Citizens’ Assemblies. Because ordinary people, presented with clear evidence, would not choose short-term solutions informed by election cycles and suffused with grift, but instead make decisions on an intergenerational scale that promote the stability, sustainability, and survival that is our most basic need. Our representatives have sold out our trust, a planet’s future, and their own stunted integrity to the highest bidder. Governance is a sacred, collective civic duty that should never have been outsourced in the first place, and no less than our very survival rests upon reasserting our prodigious, inalienable power — and the undeniable, inseparable responsibility therein.
-tatiana seryán, with support from and deep gratitude to Donnachadh, Aiden, Cillian, Zoe, Paul, and Alice
