Glasgow COP26
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The party has secured an official pitch for a street stall at Royal Exchange Square, right in the heart of Glasgow City Centre, during the COP26 Conference currently taking place.
The stall will be up and running from Monday until Wednesday next week, from 10am until 5pm each day. With Comrades travelling from across the UK in order to help spread the party case for Socialism, while at the same time explaining the root cause of the environmental mess we find ourselves in.
We’d like to say thank you and extend a warm Glasgow welcome to @GretaThunberg
Camaraderie and solidarity to all school strikers marching with @FFF_Glasgow we will be proudly joining you on the 5th Nov
With climate justice and social justice, there can be no-one left behind pic.twitter.com/nguZwCkbnC
— Glasgow GMB (@GMBGlasgowCC) October 27, 2021
"It is no secret that COP26 is a failure."
Climate activist Greta Thunberg describes the climate summit in Glasgow as a "PR event where leaders give beautiful speeches and announce fancy commitments".#COP26: https://t.co/KoFOW3h7l7 pic.twitter.com/nplpkRS3Ed
— Sky News (@SkyNews) November 5, 2021
This wee lassie has made more sense in a few words than all the guff of the liars and goons at Cop-Out 26. Let’s hope she wakes up. To the solution.
I have tried with little success so far to find a decent video of Vanessa Nakate’s speech from yesterday’s march.
Greta Thunberg declined to speak on Saturday so that attention could be upon others like Nakati but to no avail, it seems.
Was it unintended racism that Nakati was ignored by the media? Or merely because she was not the star of the show but an under-study?
The Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate said to the crowds “The climate and ecological crises are already here. But so are citizens from around the globe. Leaders rarely have the courage to lead. It takes citizens, people like you and me, to rise up and demand action. And when we do that in great enough numbers, our leaders will move.”
I doubt it was colour prejudice that was behind not reporting what she said. It is more likely because she wasn’t saying anything particularly arresting — just about bringing more pressure on “our leaders” to do something.
It was the same at the march in Oxford yesterday that three of us leafletted. The placards, banners and leaflets called on “world leaders” or the government to “act now” and “do more”. They just disagreed on how to get governments to do this. Some favoured mass street demonstrations, others civil disobedience, others (the Trots) mass working class mobilisation. There was even one calling for a general strike. But all, as I said, directed to governments. The main slogan chanted during the march was “what do we want?”response: “climate justice now”. But that’s so vague that there won’t be anybody that doesn’t want it.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that governments are constrained in what they can do by the economic system they are governing within. That governments are not doing what is needed not because they don’t care or are traitors but because they can’t.
The good news is that of the two leaflets we were handing out, one headed “Climate on Collision Course” and the other “End Capitalism”, is was the second that the more favourably received.
That’s the way to go — reinforce the view of many of them that capitalism is to blame. Then we can try to get them to consider the alternative to capitalism instead of some vague “climate justice”.
The Juice Media’s “Honest Government Ad” on Net Zero by 2050.
I think we have to define for them what “anti-capitalism” means. That is our responsibility as proponents of world socialism and how exactly we do it is our dilemma.
In her speech, Nakate explained, “Individuals are not responsible for the climate crisis, it is the decisions of governments, it is the decisions of businesses, it is the decisions of large corporations that are responsible for the climate crisis.”
She also told the crowd, “People of colour are on the front lines of the climate crisis and it is important for us to tell our own stories and it is important for the world to listen to our stories. The global south is on the front line of the global climate crisis, of the food crisis, but it is not on the front pages of the world’s newspapers.”
I think we should have seen and heard via the media put her own message out in her own words and her own way. As for the repetition of cliches, I think the media is far more guilty of that transgression than Nakate has ever been.
She has already had the media crop her out of promotional photos at the Davos Conference last year, so my suspicions aren’t without some cause, ALB.
The People’s Summit for Climate Justice has commenced.
Here is who is behind the leaflet handed out in Oxford by those calling for a global strike against firms that are causing global warming. Can’t work out who is behind them.
They are also organising a meeting in Glasgow which our comrades going there could cover as well as the one just mentioned:
Still true, though, that if people are not prepared to vote to end capitalism they are not likely to strike to do this.
ps. Just discovered who is behind Free Our Unions if not Earth Strike. It’s a front for the Trotskyist AWL. Should have guessed it would be something like that.
A strike will not resolve the problems, as always the Trotskyists are the front runners of reformism
Monbiot explains
“…We have the technology required to replace fossil fuels. There’s plenty of money, which is currently being squandered on the destruction of life on Earth. The transition could take place in months, if governments willed it. The only thing that stands in the way is the power of legacy industries and the people who profit from them. This is what needs to be overthrown. The handwaving, the complexity, the grandiloquent distraction in Glasgow are designed above all for one purpose: not to accelerate this transition, but to thwart it.”
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