VOTE SSP

We have no millionaire backers and no giant billboard ads denouncing our political rivals.
We do, however, have six flagship policies for transforming Scotland into a country where people are the priority, not profit, and where we make war on poverty, not the peoples of distant nations.
Ours are radical ideas, built on hope, not fear, and we will fight for them in the Parliament and with community campaigns.
We have an unrivalled track record for saying what we think, and doing what we say, and you can hold us to that.
A free, expanded and fully integrated public transport system, to get Scotland moving and out of its cars, to combat poverty and social exclusion whilst curbing climate change.
A simple, cost-effective anti-poverty, pro-environment measure whose time has come.
Abolition of the iniquitous Council Tax, which penalises the working poor whilst barely tickling the rich. We seek to replace it with a progressive, local income tax - the Scottish Service Tax - that will unburden the low-paid and pensioners, and see the wealthy contribute their fair share for local services.
100,000 new council homes, to enable grown children to leave home and start their own lives; vital service workers, such as teachers and nurses, to live in the communities in which they work; and families to escape the scourge of barely habitable housing and temporary B&B accommodation.
Free, nutritious school  meals for every state school child in Scotland, to teach the lessons of good eating to the young, and help defuse the obesity timebomb that threatens our upcoming generations.
It’s time to kick the junk food pushers out of our schools!
A referendum on independence within twelve months, to give the people of Scotland the right to decide whether they want to remain part of the UK, or move towards  an independent state with the power to pull Scottish troops out of Iraq, end dawn raids, and get rid of nuclear weapons.
Carbon rationing, to reduce carbon emissions without resorting to ‘green taxes’ - from congestion charges to road tolls - which hammer the poor and encourage the rich to ‘pay to pollute’.

POP STARS WON’T SAVE THE PLANET

New report confirms global warming is real and happening now

by Roz Paterson

The world’s poor are on the brink of catastrophe. Who’s coming to the rescue? Madonna? The United Nations Security Council? The G8?
Yup, starvation in Africa - the hippest celebrity concern of 2005 - has given way to climate change and its likely devastations on the world’s poorest people as the BIG WORRY afflicting our rich pop stars and international statesmen and women.
So do expect some gruesome Band Aid sentiments and meaningless global policy pledges, but don’t expect something to be done about chronic water shortages across sub-Saharan Africa affecting between 75-250million people or major floods, landslides and hurricanes sweeping through communities least able to deal with extreme weather events because poverty makes building protective infrastructure an impossibility.

Wreaking havoc
If this sounds grim, then try reading the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the international body comprising thousands of scientists and climatologists - confirming that global warming is real, happening as we speak, and already wreaking havoc across the planet, in tens of thousands of great and small ways.
This report, borne of five years’ work and 29,000 individual pieces of physical data testifying to changes in aspects of the natural world, is most certainly not “arm-waving with models”, to quote Martin Parry, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II, who put the report together.
And it makes the climate change deniers, almost all of whom are in the pay of fossil fuel-driven corporations or half-wits writing for the Daily Mail whose last experience of real science was reading the cartoon Life of Thomas Eddison serialised in World of Wonder, look increasingly like the raving flat earthers they truly are.
The report predicts that, by 2020, water supplies will become dangerously scarce across vast regions of Africa, leaving millions with neither water to drink nor feed their crops. Crops dependent on rainfall could be down by 50 per cent.
Agriculture will also be affected in Asia.
By 2020 again, crop yields could increase by as much as 20 per cent in east and southeast Asia, but this will be more than cancelled out by a 30 per cent decrease in central and south Asia.
And, if temperatures rise by between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees above pre-industrialisation levels - so far, they’ve climbed more than 0.6 degrees  - 20-30 per cent of all plant and animal species could be wiped out.
In general, it is 99 per cent likely that there will be fewer cold days and many more warm spells and heatwaves than previously. There will also be more heavy rain events, more drought, rising sea levels and more intense tropical cyclones.
The report is unequivocal, though the summary may be a little less so. This is due to the fact that the IPCC has a unique modus operandi, in that its reports are drawn up by scientists, working independently of governments, yet its summaries are agreed between these same scientists and government delegates.
It creates no little amount of tension and last week saw unprecedented scenes which, at one stage, threatened a scientist walkout as delegates from the US, Russia, China, India and Saudi Arabia - all heavily entrenched in the global fossil fuel economy - throwing all their diplomatic weight at the IPCC to have the wording watered down.
In short, the ‘very likelys’ replaced with ‘mights’.
This has always been a problem for the IPCC, and has enabled climate change sceptics to claim, rather ludicrously it has to be said, that political pressure leads to too strong wording.
If anything, the wording is always too weak.
Martin Parry says the drawbacks of this approach are outweighed by the benefits - “[because] governments buy in... otherwise it would be just another report.”
That the UN Security Council are due to debate the security implications of climate change, for the first time ever, and the G8 are also scheduled to give global warming their due consideration would seem to prove him right.
But does it?
In truth, the world’s richer nations will consider climate change in only one light - how it affects them, their security and their economies. The indigenous peoples trying to dig themselves out of a mudquake in Central America won’t bother them much. Did I say ‘much’? I meant ‘at all’.

Profit
Capitalism only exists to perpetuate capitalism, not to help impoverished people who have failed to turn a profit.
Look at it this way - if G8’s bid to tackle poverty in Africa two years ago is anything to go by, then the nations due to get it in the neck from climate change have every reason to be mortally afraid.
Furthermore, as some northern nations may actually benefit from climate change - in modestly increased crop yields for instance - and in any case, can afford to build infrastructure to protect themselves from its worst ravages, the motive for change is marginal.
Equitable, global solutions are desperately needed, such as the contraction and convergence model of carbon rationing, which would see us all reduce our carbon emissions to an agreed, world level that kept the lid on temperature rises.
The IPCC is due to publish another report, in May, this time focussing on solutions to climate change, of curbing greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature rises.
They are unlikely to recommend that multimillionaire singers gather in stadiums to promote their flagging careers while pretending they really care deeply about the declining parrot population in the Amazon basin.
It will be interesting to read what they have to say about governmental action - and just how hot it gets when they start discussing how to sum it all up.
Meantime, let’s get out there and push for free public transport like there’s no tomorrow.

YOU HAVE TO BE RED TO BE GREEN

Capitalism is killing the planet, through its reckless squandering of finite resources and its culture of over-consumption. Can we make it a bit nicer, and save the Earth into the bargain? Can we hell.
To tackle climate change, and the chaos it may unleash, we must tackle the causes of climate change, and that means giving up on economic growth and the pursuit of profit in favour of sharing our resources, and living in harmony with the Earth and each other.
Here, we contemplate a world beyond carbon, how free public transport and public ownership of energy utilities can help us get there, and why nuclear power is an idea whose time is up.

Carbon rationing: forget profit - let’s fight global warming

Last weekend saw hordes of us descend on beaches and parks to soak up a midsummer come two months early. “It’s gorgeous, we’re so lucky,” one young woman in London said to a BBC reporter.
But why aren’t we worried?
This summer is already anticipated as one of the hottest on record, thanks to a combination of accelerating global warming and this being an El Niño year, which will exacerbate warming trends.
Which means not just hot, lazy days in deckchairs for the lucky few who can take from now until August off work, but possibly also water shortages, a surge in energy demand as air conditioning systems switch on across Europe, and further melting of the polar ice-caps and the chaos this entails.
As Michael Moore noted, in Stupid White Men, of the joyous reaction to the mercury hitting 70 degrees one day in February 2000 in Chicago - what should have been one of the coldest months in one of America’s coldest cities - “Why on earth are [people] happy about this?... This isn’t right, folks; something is terribly wrong... We ought to be demanding actions from our representatives, and swift retribution against those responsible for these climate changes.”
In fact, last weekend, tens of thousands were.
Across the US, some 1300 demonstrations were staged, as part of the Step It Up 2007 campaign to demand Congress legislate for an 80 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050.
The campaign, led by Bill McKibben, author of 1989’s The End of Nature, one of the first books ever to tackle the hot issue of global warming, eschewed a large-scale national demo in favour of small, local events, to ensure protesters didn’t burn up carbon to attend a demo demanding an end to the burning of carbon.
Thus, in Maine, a group of climbers reached the summit of Cadillac Mountain just as dawn broke, this being the first spot in the US hit by the rising sun, thousands assembled in New York’s Battery Park, and around 200 scaled a steep canyon to reach the famous Hollywood sign in Los Angeles.
Unlike the ersatz environmentalists we see in the ranks of the Labour and Tory parties, who wag their fingers at the hapless citizens who shop at Asda rather than the farmers’ market and still haven’t got a micro-turbine on their roof, genuine environmentalists know that climate change is borne of capitalism, a system that puts economic growth before every other consideration, including human survival, because it would collapse if it didn’t.
The connection between rampant consumerism, the fuel of capitalist growth, and environmental degradation is well established, yet there remains a stubborn clique of scientists that denies it.
This clique is wedded, ideologically if not actually, to the cult of neo-liberalism.
Known as neo-Darwinism, it cleaves to the ‘survival of the fittest’ model, as do neo-liberal economists.
That is, only the best and toughest will make it, driving the rest to extinction.
This, they believe, is the natural order.
Clearly they are choosing to ignore the fact that human society, for millennia, has functioned successfully on principles more akin to symbiosis and cooperation than competition and greed.
And that nature does not thrive when thrusting monocultures take root and push everything else out
Diversity, in human society as in nature, is strength, and the vast majority of scientists support this view. And urge a drastic reduction in carbon emissions, by as much as 80-90 per cent, if we are to avert catastrophe.
To do this, we have to establish a system of living that doesn’t require economic growth. An alternative to capitalism, in other words.
Thus, socialists and environmentalists have common cause - you cannot be green without also being red.
No-one really knows what will happen if we don’t act to curb climate change - or what will happen if we do.
Not taking action will likely lead to higher temperatures, water, food and land shortages, violent weather and drought, vast armies of displaced persons trying to find somewhere to live, perhaps met by vast armies deployed to ensure they don’t come and live here.
In all, a nightmare in which Africa is a dead zone, grass grows over Greenland, and people scrabble for dwindling resources in a climate of pronounced economic and political instability.
There’s worse. The Earth could become a planet incapable of supporting any kind of life.
So if no action is not an option, what can we do?
Actually, a great deal, and even the gloomiest of climatologists - with a few notable exceptions - believe there is time to turn this situation around and, quite literally, save the world.
We must cut carbon emissions to the bone, and as quickly as possible.
There are two ways this can be done.
The first is to allow price to dictate. If oil and gas is rendered costly through green taxation, our carbon usage will certainly fall.
Wealthy people will be able to live life as normal but the non-wealthy will find themselves priced out of not just foreign holidays, but also cars, heating, possibly also electricity in general and even food.
Many will undoubtedly die, reducing our carbon footprint even further.
Not like that option?
Luckily, we have an alternative.
Rather than let the markets take charge, why don’t we? We can share the world’s resources - there are still enough to go round and we can manage them sustainably - through schemes such as carbon rationing.
Carbon rationing is not to be confused with carbon trading, an EU scheme that enables corporations to buy and sell carbon on the open market while doing nothing to actually reduce carbon usage.
Carbon rationing involves giving everyone a fair share of what’s left, just as food rationing during WWII ensured that everyone got enough to eat during a time of scarcity.
To implement such a system, we would need to establish an independent commission to work out how much the UK (or Scottish) carbon emissions total would be for, say, 2008, with a view to reducing this total every year until we reached a sustainable level.
This total would then be divided up per capita, with a substantial proportion reserved for industry and public sector usage.
It’s a system that would need support, from 100 per cent grants to make homes energy efficient, to a free, expanded public transport network, to enable almost everyone to live without a car.
At the moment, carbon rationing is just a theory, though an increasingly talked about theory.
On a voluntary basis, activists are trying out low carbon living, through all kinds of initiatives, from communal living to LETS schemes to Carbon Reduction Action Groups (CRAGs). Their bid being not just to lessen their individual impact, but also to make political waves, and establish what kind of changes we will have to make in future.
In this low-carbon future, we’ll likely travel less, and thus live closer to our work and families, eat more locally grown food, throw away less and buy less.
In a fairer, less competitive world, we may also find ourselves living with less violence, less war, and less loss.
But this can only happen if we are the architects of our the future, not the corporations and capitalists who have brought us to this impasse and, far from searching for a way out, are busy working out how to make a profit from it.

Just say ‘no’ to nuclear

The SSP is opposed to the construction of any new nuclear power stations, not least because of the risks of a devastating, Chernobyl-like nuclear accident, the ongoing problem of radioactive contamination, spelled out in leukaemia clusters and dying marine life, and the million-year migraine of how to dispose of hazardous nuclear waste, still unresolved some 50 years after the nuclear industry was established in the UK.
However, some environmentalists - including James Lovelock, the scientist and founder of the Gaia theory of the earth as a self-regulating mechanism - argue that nuclear power, for all its dangers, is the lesser of two evils in that at least it’s carbon neutral and offers a steady source of energy that won’t contribute to global warming.
But it’s a blind alley. Nuclear power is not the clean, green energy source it’s cracked up to be, and people like Lovelock should know better.
For a start, nuclear power generates electricity, which accounts for only 16 per cent of total carbon emissions.
According to the Sustainable Development Commission Scotland, even if we doubled our nuclear capacity, we would only cut our carbon emissions by 8 per cent by 2035, and not at all by 2010.
Secondly, nuclear power generation is by no means carbon neutral. In fact, the nuclear power industry consumes vast amounts of fossil fuel through mining and enriching uranium, and then transporting it halfway across the globe.
On top of which are the CO2 emissions generated during construction and decommissioning of power plants.
According to a study by Germany’s Oko Institute in 1997, when you considered the full life cycle of various energy technologies, nuclear power had nearly twice the CO2 output of wind power. Since then, uranium has become much scarcer and harder to mine, and what is available is of poorer quality, requiring more energy to refine. All of which means that the CO2 cost of nuclear energy has increased fivefold on the Oko estimate.
There are further drawbacks to nuclear power.
It’s notoriously expensive. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd has been bailed out to the tune of billions by the UK taxpayer, proving that it cannot compete in the marketplace without massive public subsidy. So it’s neither green nor cheap.
Plus, if we build a new generation of nuclear power stations, as the government is proposing, it locks us into a centralised energy distribution system for decades to come.
Yet micro-generation and local distribution could be key to energy security in the future.
There’s also the tiny problem of nuclear proliferation.
If we don’t want Iran to have a nuclear power industry, for fear it could lead to Iran having a nuclear bomb industry, what on earth are we doing expanding our nuclear industry?
Given how close we are, in global terms, to a nuclear conflict, surely this is not the time to start raising the stakes?
Lastly, nuclear enthusiasts are guilty of perpetuating the myth that we can carry on a normal, in terms of energy consumption, so long as we get the right technology in place.
This is not so. We need to cut our energy use, and the nuclear lobby’s propaganda is just irresponsible time-wasting.
We cannot afford nuclear power, on any level, and it’s time to move the debate on.

Ditch the car - get around free

A new report by the TUC’s young members forum has found that the rising cost of public transport has impacted badly on young people looking for work, with a quarter of people aged between 16 and 25 reporting that lack of transport is a major reason for them being out of work.
The research - published last week and entitled Unfare! - found that around half of 16 to 18-year-olds struggled to meet the cost of transport.
With the global warming alarm bells ringing, we all know we’re supposed to use cars less. But many don’t have a choice.
In the last ten years, the cost of motoring has fallen in real terms, while deregulation and privatisation has seen the average cost of journeys on trains and buses pushed up by a third.
And running public transport for profit means that bus routes which are life-saving for some people, but not enough people to make tasty revenue for corporate shareholders, are scrapped.
The Scottish Socialist Party has put the call for free public transport for all at the heart of its election campaign. We’d start with treating public transport like the essential service it is, by taking it out of the hands of millionaire profiteers, and bringing it under the democratic control of elected, public boards at local and national level.
Then we could get moving on a programme of expansion, so Scotland has the public transport network we desperately need, and make it free to use.
It’s a radical step to tackle the climate change crisis - but it’s not an outlandish one. In fact free public transport has already been running, with roaring success, in the Belgian city of Hasselt for ten years. The mayor of San Francisco is considering it for his city, and Hawaii has set up a free public transport zone.
The tourist board Visit Scotland has mooted the idea, as a way of getting more holiday-makers to Scotland, and getting those of us who live here moving round the country rather than jumping on the EasyJet to Prague.
Including the cost of public ownership and expanding the network, scrapping transport fares in Scotland would cost around £1billion a year. That’s the same amount the Scottish Executive have been prepared to commit to one new five-mile stretch of motorway through the southside of Glasgow, which will only succeed in channelling more exhaust fumes through one of the poorest localities in the country.
In fact congestion costs the Scottish economy £1billion every year, and we reckon making public transport free will do more to cut congestion than any other plan on the table.
Road tolls and congestion charges hurt the poorest hardest - and when public transport is already too expensive, that means not travelling at all, further exacerbating the problems found by the TUC’s youth forum.
Free public transport will make Scotland a green world leader in combating climate change - and it is a tremendous anti-poverty measure, which will generate jobs and end the days where people are cut off from work, training or education, not to mention the more fun things in life, by the cost of getting from A to B.

It’s time to kick out the power profiteers

The Scottish Executive adverts remind us to switch off the lights when we leave a room, and never leave your telly on stand-by. We’ve all got to do our bit to save energy.
That’s only right and proper, but in 650,000 homes across Scotland, people aren’t swithering over whether to make the long trip across the living room to press the off switch on the TV - they’re worrying whether they can afford to switch anything on at all.
That’s how many households in Scotland live in fuel poverty, according to Energy Action Scotland - meaning that the cost of heating their home to an adequate standard takes more than 10 per cent of their income.
Fuel poverty means cold, damp houses, with dire effects on health, and that in winter thousands have to choose between turning on the heating or eating a hot meal.
Struggling to pay gas and electricity bills more often than not means ending up on pre-payment meters, which cost more than normal power bills.
And if you run out of money, you run out of power, saving the supplier the bother of coming round to cut you off and any associated bad publicity.

Price hikes
This time last year, Scottish Power announced annual profits of £675million, almost a 50 per cent rise on their previous year.
At the same time they hiked up the price of their gas by 15 per cent, and announced an 8 per cent rise in electricity costs for household customers. With a breathtaking brass neck, the said the price rises were “unavoidable”.
Scotland is still rich in traditional energy resources, and has the capacity to be at the forefront of developing renewable energy through wind and wave power. But at the moment our oil and gas is siphoned off for private profit, and the windmills that top our hills birl to make cash for corporations.
The Scottish Socialist Party campaigns for a publicly owned and fully accountable energy utility. Through this we could make a properly co-ordinated national energy plan which could match investment and expansion of sustainable energy, according to what we need and not what makes profit, with energy conservation, such as 100 per cent grants for home insulation.
Kicking out the power profiteers means we could rip out the pre-payment meters, so no family is ever left without heat or light for want of a fiver for a power card.

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