Environmentalism is stuck – factional and uncertain even of the goals we seek. But we must face facts and engage with reality In my column this week , I discussed the crisis the environment movement is now confronting. I’m using this essay to expand on the problems I mentioned there, and in particular to consider the most interesting of the responses to the crisis proposed so far, by writer and environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth . Let me begin by spelling out, at greater length, the problems we face. 1. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions means increasing electricity production. It is hard to see a way around this. Because low-carbon electricity is the best means of replacing the fossil fuels used for heating and transport, electricity generation will rise, even if we manage to engineer a massive reduction in overall energy consumption. The Zero Carbon Britain report published by the Centre for Alternative Technology envisages a 55% cut in overall energy demand by 2030 – and a near-doubling of electricity production. 2. Low carbon electricity means, to most greens, renewable sources of energy. They were never well-loved, but now, in the places in which major deployment is taking place, they are provoking something approaching a full-scale revolt. Here in mid-Wales, for example, and in the highlands of Scotland, public anger towards wind farms and the power lines and hubs required to serve them is coming to dominate local politics. While there are plenty of stupid myths circulating about the inability of wind turbines to produce electricity and about the greenhouse gases released in constructing them, in other respects the opposition to them is not irrational. People love their landscapes, and so they should. Those of us who support renewables find ourselves in a difficult position: demanding the industrialisation of the countryside, supporting new power stations, new power lines and (for the electricity storage required) new reservoirs. Even offshore power, whose landscape impacts are much smaller, means more grid connections and more storage. 3. The only viable low-carbon alternative we have at the moment is nuclear power. This has the advantage of being confined to compact industrial sites, rather than sprawling over the countryside, and of requiring fewer new grid connections (especially if new plants are built next to the old ones). It has the following disadvantages: a. The current generation of power stations require uranium mining, which destroys habitats and pollutes land and water. Though its global impacts are much smaller than the global impacts of coal, the damage it causes cannot be overlooked. b. The waste it produces must be stored for long enough to be rendered safe. It is not technically difficult to do this, with vitrification, encasement and deep burial, but governments keep delaying their decisions as a result of public opposition. Both these issues (as well as concerns about proliferation and security ) could be addressed through the replacement of conventional nuclear power with thorium or integral fast reactors but, partly as a result of public resistance to atomic energy, neither technology has yet been developed. (I’ll explore the potential of both approaches in a later column). c. Nuclear power divides our movements. Some of the most effective environmental organisations – Greenpeace for example – could not drop their opposition without falling apart. 4. Whichever low-carbon technology we embrace, we help to provide the means by which the industrial economy can keep expanding, even if it does so without a major release of greenhouse gases. This threatens to exacerbate all the other issues that concern us. To prevent this from happening, the replacement of fossil fuels should be accompanied by a transition to a steady-state economy. Professor Herman Daly and author Tim Jackson have shown us how this can be done technically. How it can be done politically is, at present, quite another matter. 5. Those who, on the other hand, advocate a return to a land-based economy and the abandonment of industrial society find themselves in conflict with the desires of most of humanity, in both rich and poor nations. They have produced no convincing account of how people could be persuaded to turn their backs on manufactured products, advanced infrastructure and public services. 6. Our reliance on the mineral crunch, which was supposed to have brought the economic engine of destruction to a grinding halt, appears to have been misplaced. The collapse of accessible mineral reserves has not occurred, and shows little sign of occurring within our lifetimes. Capitalism has proved adept at finding new reserves or (in the case of fossil fuels) substitutes for those that are depleting. This takes place at a massive cost to the environment, as exploitation intrudes into an ever wider range of habitats and involves ever more destructive processes. New mineral reserves allow us to continue waging war against biodiversity, habitats, soil, fresh water supplies and the climate. 7. We have no idea what to do next. 8. Partly as a result, we have started tearing each other apart. This is an understandable but unnecessary reaction. Those seeking to protect the landscape are not our enemies; nor are those advocating that renewables should replace fossil fuel; nor are those promoting nuclear power as the answer; nor are those opposing nuclear power. We are all struggling with the same problem, all bumping up against atmospheric chemistry and physical constraints. The enmity arises when people go into denial. Denial is everywhere. Those opposing windfarms find it convenient to deny that climate change is happening, or that turbines produce much electricity. Those promoting windfarms downplay the landscape impacts. Nuclear enthusiasts ignore the impacts of uranium mining. Opponents of nuclear power dismiss the solid science on the impacts of radiation and embrace wildly-inflated junk numbers instead. Primitivists decry all manufacturing industry, but fail to explain how their medicines and spectacles, scythes and billhooks will be produced. Localists rely on technologies – such as microwind and high-latitude solar power – that cannot deliver. Technocratic greens refuse to see that if economic growth is not addressed, a series of escalating catastrophes is inevitable. Romantic greens insist that the problem can be solved without even engaging in these dilemmas, yet fail to explain how else it can be done. We’re all responding to the same impulses, but we’re all being tripped up by denial. Denial, and a failure to see the whole picture, are our enemies. Or perhaps, as doctors say about alcohol, our false friends. I’m by no means the first to recognise that environmentalism is stuck. Paul Kingsnorth co-founded the Dark Mountain project as a means of exploring this problem. His latest essay The Quants and the Poets is a compelling and beautifully-written account of the way in which “the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers” and is now trying to save the world “one emission at a time”. Trying to accommodate a narrative of other people’s making, greens “feel obliged to act like speak-your-weight machines just to be heard.” This approach, he argues, “has left environmentalism in a position where its advocates now find themselves unable to do anything but argue about which machines they would prefer to use to power an ever-growing industrial economy.” He explains his prescription as follows: What is missing here is stories, and an understanding of the importance of stories in getting to the bottom of what is really going on. Because at root, this whole squabble between worldviews is not about numbers at all – it is about narratives. … How to reassert the importance of stories, then, is perhaps a key question now. Green poets might perhaps start by observing that worlds are not ‘saved’ by the same stories that are killing them. They might want to observe that saving worlds is an impossible business in the first place, and that attempting to do so is likely to lead to some very dark places. Or they might try and explore what it is about how we see ourselves which reduces us to this, time and time again – arguing about machines rather than wondering what those machines give us and what they take away. In his magnificent book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues in support of a poetic narrative of the kind Kingsnorth promotes. Of one thing at least I am certain: that not to take myth seriously in the life of an ostensibly “disenchanted” culture like our own is actually to impoverish our understanding of our shared world. I’m sure that’s right, as is Schama’s warning that, in embracing narratives, we do not become morally blinded by their poetic power. (He was thinking, in particular, about the old German stories of the redemptive power of the Urwald – the ancient Hercynian forest – and the national myth of the German forest character, arising from Arminius’s victory over the Romans in the forbidding Teutoburger Wald. Poetic narratives, even initially harmless ones, have a nasty habit of backfiring spectacularly.) But here too there is a problem. Green narratives have collapsed precisely because they were unable to withstand the steely quantification demanded by an attempt to get to grips with problems like climate change. Or they have been struck down by circumstance: such as the inconvenient non-appearance of the commodities crunch they predicted. If a new poetic narrative is no better able to answer questions such as how a steady-state economy can be achieved, how low-carbon electricity will be produced, how the common fisheries policy can be reformed or how, in a land-based economy, bricks and glass will be made, it too will collapse. In fact, it will never get off the ground as these questions, once formulated, won’t go away. Perhaps we are less tolerant of myth than we used to be. Perhaps we should be. Is creating new, opposing myths the best way of confronting the founding myths of neoliberal capitalism? I don’t think so. Is it not better to fight them with withering analysis, quantification and exposure? But can we do this without becoming insensible to beauty, and to the impulse – a love for the world and its people, its places and its living creatures – which turned us green in the first place? I don’t know. I do know that it’s a discussion in which we have to engage. www.monbiot.com Carbon emissions Climate change Energy Renewable energy Wind power Nuclear power Fossil fuels George Monbiot guardian.co.uk
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Lady Justice Heather Hallett delivers her verdicts at the inquest into the 7 July 2005 bombing of the London transport system 9.39am: My colleagues on the video desk have produced this film featuring interviews with the families of Philip Russell, Miriam Hyman and Fiona Stevenson, who were killed in the 7/7 attacks, and David Gardner, who survived. _ 9.30am: Lady Justice Heather Hallett is to deliver her findings today at the inquest into the deaths of 52 people on 7 July 2005, when four Islamist suicide bombers blew themselves up on London’s transport system, in the deadliest terrorist attack in British history barring Lockerbie. Hallett will almost certainly find that the 52 victims were unlawfully killed in the attacks on three tube trains and one bus. But the inquest also showed that London’s emergency services fell short in their response to the bombings. How seriously they failed will be Hallett’s duty to decide. She will also look at what the authorities knew about the bombers that might have prevented the attacks. Hallett is to make recommendations on how to avoid future deaths under her “rule 43″ powers, the only power a coroner has to make such recommendations; this is only allowed if doing so could prevent future deaths. But it is not yet clear how much scope Hallett actually has under these powers. Lawyers for MI5 argued in February that the law permitted only “brief, neutral and factual” verdicts. My colleague Esther Addley, who attended the hearings at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, summarised some of the failings of Transport for London, the Metropolitan police, British Transport police, the Ambulance Service, the Fire Brigade, and City of London police that emerged from the inquest: However unprecedented the events of that day, however complex the task of responding to multiple emergencies on the capital’s overstretched transport network and however powerful the many stories of individual heroism among professionals, again and again the inquest has heard of communication failures, command and control confusion and inadequate provision on the part of the emergency services … Survivors staggering from the Aldgate train told how they shouted at paramedics who were waiting on the platform for instructions while people were dying just a few hundred yards away in the tunnel. Fire crews did not arrive at the platform at Edgware Road until 9.44am, almost an hour after the explosion, where they waited instead of proceeding to the carriage … Ambulances from the two closest stations to the bomb site were not dispatched. The driver of the train, Ray Whitehurst, with none of his communication equipment working, rang repeatedly for help from a fixed-line phone inside the tunnel, but was ignored … Though the Tavistock Square bus blew up in broad daylight in a busy central London street, it took 52 minutes before ambulances were even dispatched. British Transport police officers who witnessed the explosion and ran to their nearby headquarters to raise help were instead prevented from leaving the HQ after being told it was in “lockdown”. Hallett may propose changes to emergency response procedures, and could criticise MI5, which had two of the bombers – Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer – under surveillance but failed to stop the attacks. A photograph that MI5 sent to US secret services of Siddique Khan and Tanweer was cropped so badly as to render Tanweer unrecognisable and cut out Khan altogether, it emerged during the inquest. Among 32 recommendations they would like to see, victims’ families want Hallett to recommend tighter restrictions on the sale of hydrogen peroxide, one of the main ingredients in the bombs. The July 7 hearings were actually 52 separate inquests, involving five months of testimony, starting last October, hearing from more than 500 witnesses either in person or through statements, and dealing with 1,173 pieces of evidence. The evidence provided a detailed picture of the lives of those killed, injured or affected by the bombings, and their relatives. The level of serious injuries came as a shock to many following the hearings. Esther has written a very interesting piece today explaining many of the things we learned from the inquest, from details about the bombers’ personalities to how far afield many of the victims came from and how heroically many responded. Also in today’s Guardian, Esther speaks to many of the victims’ families , Alexandra Topping looks at the relatives’ calls for the emergency services to be overhauled , Richard Norton-Taylor examines the role of MI5 , Shiv Malik visits Beeston, the area of Leeds where Khan came from , and Vikram Dodd looks at the government’s counter-terrorism strategy . We also have two interactives, one on the victims’ testimonies , and one on those who died . Hallett will not read out her recommendations, but they will be put up on the inquiry’s website as soon as she has made her concluding comments. The website also contains all the oral evidence from the inquiry. Hallett is an appeal court judge who was designated a coroner for this inquiry. She is one of the most senior female judges in the country. Stephen Bates has written a profile of her here . She has been praised for her work at the inquest and her sympathetic handling of the witnesses. She told Simon Ford, for example, a former fireman who took part in a £100m cocaine ring, but used his bare hands to rip back the metalwork of the Tavistock Square bus and help free survivors: Mr Ford, whatever’s happened in your life since 2005, no one can doubt the courage you displayed on 7 July 2005 … So thank you very much for all that you did that day. Thank you. 7 July London attacks London Paul Owen guardian.co.uk
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Conservationists warn blazes may have affected some of the UK’s most threatened ground-nesting birds such as the twite The spate of wildfires in parts of Britain is threatening ground-nesting birds, including the only English population of a species of finch called the twite , the RSPB has warned. It said many of the 100 pairs that nest in small colonies in the southern Pennines might be affected. The bird used to occur much more widely in England – there are greater numbers in western Scotland, The seed-eating bird – a relative of the linnet – has clung on in the area because of the relative abundance of seed-rich hay meadows. Fires have struck both its nesting and feeding sites, said the RSPB. Peter Robertson, its northern regional director and a member of the multi-agency England Twite Recovery Project , said: “Even before these fires, the twite was one of England’s most threatened birds. But blazes have possibly affected more than a third of the English population. “This could be a devastating setback for this bird. We have been working hard with farmers to help retain landscape features, like hay meadows, which are crucial to the bird. But inevitably England’s most threatened finch has been hit hard by these fires. We hope that the bird will have a future in England.” Heathland that is important for other threatened birds, including the nightjar, woodlark and Dartford warbler, has been damaged across southern England. And the fires in other parts of the UK will undoubtedly have affected ground-nesting birds, according to the RSPB. Nick Phillips, a policy officer, said: “Some of the most threatened birds in the UK nest on the ground. We are currently in the middle of the nesting season, with many birds incubating eggs or tending to chicks. Fire is a considerable risk to these birds, and other threatened wildlife, such as reptiles. “A break in the dry weather may bring a brief respite, but we are still urging people to guard against any risk of wildfire.” Birds Wildlife Conservation Animals Wildfires James Meikle guardian.co.uk
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Files seized in raid that killed Bin Laden reveal his role in planning potential terror attacks, including one on US rail system Osama bin Laden stayed in touch with his al-Qaida network from his Pakistan safe house and continued to plot potential terrorist attacks, including one against the US railway system, according to early analysis of files seized when he was killed. The special forces team who shot Bin Laden in the early hours of Monday took away a mass of digital information on computers, hard drives and storage discs, as well as paper documents. An initial trawl through the files indicate Bin Laden was not a mere figurehead for the militant group but remained closely involved in nuts-and-bolts planning, according to various US reports. As late as February last year he seemingly took part in drawing up a previously unknown plot to attack a US commuter rail network, possibly on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks or another landmark date such as Christmas or New Year, intelligence officials told US newspapers. While the plot, apparently involving an attempt to derail a train by tampering with tracks, appeared to be only speculative, the seized documents seem to show Bin Laden was in regular contact with al-Qaida operatives from his house close to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. Before the raid some analysts speculated that he had become an increasingly marginalised figure during his long presumed exile in remote tribal regions along the Afghan border. Details have also emerged about the painstaking surveillance operation which preceded the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, in which a CIA team spied on the house for months from a property they rented nearby. The officers scanned the compound using telephoto lenses and infrared imaging equipment, and attempted to listen in on conversations inside, anonymous US officials told the New York Times. The surveillance team regularly spotted a tall man walking through the compound’s courtyard, although they never confirmed whether this was Bin Laden. Such was the cost of the operation that the CIA requested tens of millions of dollars in extra funding from Congress in December last year, officials told the Washington Post . Staff at an FBI lab at the marine corps base in Quantico, Virginia, have been poring over the trove of data as quickly as possible in case they describe any imminent attacks, but as yet there have been no specific alerts. “He (Bin Laden) wasn’t just a figurehead,” one unnamed US official told the New York Times . “He continued to plot and plan, to come up with ideas about targets and to communicate those ideas to other senior al-Qaida leaders.” The department of homeland security has ordered additional security at airports and other transport hubs, and issued a precautionary note about the railway plot. “As of February 2010, al-Qaida was allegedly contemplating conducting an operation against trains at an unspecified location in the United States on the 10th anniversary of 11 September, 2001,” it said. “As one option, al-Qaida was looking into trying to tip a train by tampering with the rails so that the train would fall off the track at either a valley or a bridge.” A department spokesman told the Washington Post that the plot appeared speculative: “We have no information of any imminent terrorist threat to the US rail sector.” The documents might prove more fruitful in leading the US to other senior al-Qaida figures, including Ayman al-Zawariri, al-Qaida’s deputy leader. “We have lots of information on him,” Mike Rogers, the Republican congressman who chairs the House intelligence committee, told the Washington Post . “I can’t say it’s imminent, but I do believe we’re hot on the trail.” A day after laying a wreath to the victims of 11 September during a largely subdued visit to New York, Barack Obama is to meet the US Navy Seals who raided Bin Laden’s compound at their base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Further reports have emerged confirming that the gun battle to secure the compound and kill Bin Laden was considerably more one-sided than initially presented by US officials. “We expected a great deal of resistance and were met with a great deal of resistance,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Tuesday, adding that there were “many other people who were armed” beyond Bin Laden. Now, further anonymous briefings to the US media have confirmed that only one of the five people killed in the operation was armed, and that the shots he fired came very early in the operation. According to NBC News, the fighting was relatively brief and the Seals spent most of their time in the compound gathering computers and other data sources. Osama bin Laden al-Qaida US national security United States US military Global terrorism Pakistan Peter Walker guardian.co.uk
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Embarrassment in Scotland for Labour as Lib Dem and Conservative voters defect to Alex Salmond’s party Alex Salmond is on the brink of a landslide victory in the Holyrood elections after the first declarations and returns saw a significant swing to the Scottish National party across the country. The scale of the likely victory was underlined when the SNP won the prize seat of East Kilbride, toppling Labour’s finance spokesman Andy Kerr with a swing of 6.6%, increasing its share of the vote by 10%. The SNP also won Hamilton, defeating another senior Labour figure, Tom McCabe, with an 11% swing. McCabe had held the seat since 1999. Labour held the first seat to declare, Rutherglen. Liberal Democrats officials conceded their party could face a disastrous night, after voters deserted the party in large numbers. In the first seats to declare, their share of the vote fell 15%. With several hours before formal declarations, the Lib Dems predicted they would lose at least two of their three seats in Edinburgh after the SNP support across the city surged far more than expected. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP deputy leader, said that she was “cautiously optimistic” about holding Glasgow Southern against a strong Labour challenge. The new seat is the closest to her previous seat, Glasgow Govan, but after boundary changes was a notional Labour win. She said: “These are really truly stunning results … and they augur well for the SNP.” With Labour braced for other defeats in west Scotland, candidates and officials insisted their vote had been strong in many seats. However Iain Gray, Labour leader in Scotland, conceded that the SNP had been the greatest beneficiary of a collapse in the Lib Dem vote. His seat of East Lothian was “very tight”, adding: “I think the same thing is happening here as has happened in many parts of Scotland. What we’re seeing is a complete and utter collapse of the Lib Dem vote and a significant loss of the Tory vote as well, and that has coalesced with the SNP. That seems to be happening from the early evidence.” Annabel Goldie, the Scottish Tory leader, conceded her party was also facing losing seats with the SNP surge. Tory officials admitted that the party’s campaign director David McLetchie was under severe pressure from the SNP in Edinburgh Pentlands. “It sounds like it will be a very challenging night,” she said. The final results for Holyrood’s 129 seats will only be known later on Friday, with 56 seats decided on the regional lists which are the last to be counted. Labour’s embarrassing defeats came despite an intensive effort to mobilise its supporters on polling day. Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah were out campaigning and meeting Labour voters in two seats in the former prime minister’s heartland of Fife, Dunfermline and Glenrothes, and also in a key Labour target seat held by the SNP justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, in Edinburgh Eastern. The Browns and other senior Labour figures, including the former Chancellor Alistair Darling, joined a “volunteer army” of about 10,000 Labour activists who ferried voters by car to polling stations, visited floating voters at home and manning street stalls in key seats. The last ditch effort was organised after several late opinion polls suggested that Labour was cutting the SNP’s significant lead which had emerged over the last month. The final YouGov poll of the campaign, released on Wednesday evening, suggested the SNP would win for a second successive time and take 54 seats compared to 46 for Labour. Salmond is bullish about his chances of holding a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 or 2015, with the support of the Greens and potentially the Lib Dems. In 2007, the SNP won by a one seat margin over Labour, taking 47 seats against 46 for Labour, in the closest contest in the devolved parliament’s short history. In Wales the picture was far more encouraging for Labour. The party won back its heartland seat of Blaenau Gwent with a handsome majority. It had been held by an independent member, Trish Law, widow of the late Peter Law, who left Labour in protest at the imposition of an all-women shortlists. But, as expected, it was taken back by Labour’s Alun Davies with 12,926 votes. Independent candidate Jayne Sullivan won 3,806 votes. The Liberal Democrats did badly, with only 367 votes, while the British National party took almost 1,000 votes. Party activists were expecting further gains and an improvement on the 26 seats it held at the last assembly, but insiders accepted they may not reach the crucial figure of 31 needed to claim an overall majority. The electoral system makes it difficult for anyone to get a majority. David Davies, chair of the Cardiff West constituency Labour party, said it would be a good result if Labour could get around 29 of the 60 seats. Plaid Cymru, Labour’s coalition partner over the last four years, was preparing itself for a tough set of results. Its director of elections, Ian Titherington said he expected his party to lose seats; and, even before the results began to come in, the Plaid leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, was facing questions about his leadership. The final make-up of the assembly will not be known until later on Friday because north Wales decided not to count until the morning. If Labour does not win an overall majority, the deal-making and horse trading will begin as the parties try to find partners to work with. Scottish politics Scotland Scottish National Party (SNP) Welsh politics Wales Plaid Cymru Local elections 2011 Local politics Elections 2011 Local elections Local government Labour Liberal Democrats Severin Carrell Steven Morris guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Embarrassment in Scotland for Labour as Lib Dem and Conservative voters defect to Alex Salmond’s party Alex Salmond is on the brink of a landslide victory in the Holyrood elections after the first declarations and returns saw a significant swing to the Scottish National party across the country. The scale of the likely victory was underlined when the SNP won the prize seat of East Kilbride, toppling Labour’s finance spokesman Andy Kerr with a swing of 6.6%, increasing its share of the vote by 10%. The SNP also won Hamilton, defeating another senior Labour figure, Tom McCabe, with an 11% swing. McCabe had held the seat since 1999. Labour held the first seat to declare, Rutherglen. Liberal Democrats officials conceded their party could face a disastrous night, after voters deserted the party in large numbers. In the first seats to declare, their share of the vote fell 15%. With several hours before formal declarations, the Lib Dems predicted they would lose at least two of their three seats in Edinburgh after the SNP support across the city surged far more than expected. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP deputy leader, said that she was “cautiously optimistic” about holding Glasgow Southern against a strong Labour challenge. The new seat is the closest to her previous seat, Glasgow Govan, but after boundary changes was a notional Labour win. She said: “These are really truly stunning results … and they augur well for the SNP.” With Labour braced for other defeats in west Scotland, candidates and officials insisted their vote had been strong in many seats. However Iain Gray, Labour leader in Scotland, conceded that the SNP had been the greatest beneficiary of a collapse in the Lib Dem vote. His seat of East Lothian was “very tight”, adding: “I think the same thing is happening here as has happened in many parts of Scotland. What we’re seeing is a complete and utter collapse of the Lib Dem vote and a significant loss of the Tory vote as well, and that has coalesced with the SNP. That seems to be happening from the early evidence.” Annabel Goldie, the Scottish Tory leader, conceded her party was also facing losing seats with the SNP surge. Tory officials admitted that the party’s campaign director David McLetchie was under severe pressure from the SNP in Edinburgh Pentlands. “It sounds like it will be a very challenging night,” she said. The final results for Holyrood’s 129 seats will only be known later on Friday, with 56 seats decided on the regional lists which are the last to be counted. Labour’s embarrassing defeats came despite an intensive effort to mobilise its supporters on polling day. Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah were out campaigning and meeting Labour voters in two seats in the former prime minister’s heartland of Fife, Dunfermline and Glenrothes, and also in a key Labour target seat held by the SNP justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, in Edinburgh Eastern. The Browns and other senior Labour figures, including the former Chancellor Alistair Darling, joined a “volunteer army” of about 10,000 Labour activists who ferried voters by car to polling stations, visited floating voters at home and manning street stalls in key seats. The last ditch effort was organised after several late opinion polls suggested that Labour was cutting the SNP’s significant lead which had emerged over the last month. The final YouGov poll of the campaign, released on Wednesday evening, suggested the SNP would win for a second successive time and take 54 seats compared to 46 for Labour. Salmond is bullish about his chances of holding a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 or 2015, with the support of the Greens and potentially the Lib Dems. In 2007, the SNP won by a one seat margin over Labour, taking 47 seats against 46 for Labour, in the closest contest in the devolved parliament’s short history. In Wales the picture was far more encouraging for Labour. The party won back its heartland seat of Blaenau Gwent with a handsome majority. It had been held by an independent member, Trish Law, widow of the late Peter Law, who left Labour in protest at the imposition of an all-women shortlists. But, as expected, it was taken back by Labour’s Alun Davies with 12,926 votes. Independent candidate Jayne Sullivan won 3,806 votes. The Liberal Democrats did badly, with only 367 votes, while the British National party took almost 1,000 votes. Party activists were expecting further gains and an improvement on the 26 seats it held at the last assembly, but insiders accepted they may not reach the crucial figure of 31 needed to claim an overall majority. The electoral system makes it difficult for anyone to get a majority. David Davies, chair of the Cardiff West constituency Labour party, said it would be a good result if Labour could get around 29 of the 60 seats. Plaid Cymru, Labour’s coalition partner over the last four years, was preparing itself for a tough set of results. Its director of elections, Ian Titherington said he expected his party to lose seats; and, even before the results began to come in, the Plaid leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, was facing questions about his leadership. The final make-up of the assembly will not be known until later on Friday because north Wales decided not to count until the morning. If Labour does not win an overall majority, the deal-making and horse trading will begin as the parties try to find partners to work with. Scottish politics Scotland Scottish National Party (SNP) Welsh politics Wales Plaid Cymru Local elections 2011 Local politics Elections 2011 Local elections Local government Labour Liberal Democrats Severin Carrell Steven Morris guardian.co.uk
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Labour makes flying start to its bid to regain control of Senedd though party expects it may be ‘very tight’ to get the 31 seats needed to claim an overall majority Ousted former Plaid AM Helen Mary Jones has admitted she is disappointed with her party’s faring in the Welsh elections after losing her assembly seat. The qualified teacher was left deflated following the defeat in her constituency by Labour – which has enjoyed a flying start to its bid to regain control of the Senedd. Labour hit double figures two hours after the first result was declared, managing to hold on to seats such as Swansea East as well as snatching Llanelli from erstwhile education minister Jones. She said: “I am disappointed – especially for my team because they put so much hard work in. “What Labour have succeeded (in doing) is turning this election into a referendum on what the Conservative government is doing in Westminster. “It looks disappointing for us. We will have to learn some lessons both locally and nationally.” Labour hit the ground running after being crowned winners in the first declared constituency of Blaenau Gwent just after 2am today. It completed the hat-trick around an hour later, adding Islwyn as well as Merthyr and Rhymney. Two hours later, the party had gone into double figures, amassing around two-thirds of the total vote. Labour officials say they are pleased with the initial results – though expect it may be “very tight” for the party to get past the “magic figure” of 31 seats needed to claim an overall majority. The Liberal Democrats suffered a torrid time – trailing far-right party the BNP in a number of constituencies as well losing its deposit in Blaenau Gwent. It also lost its Montgomeryshire constituency to the Conservatives. However, the Lib Dems managed to avoid a major scalp as party leader Kirsty Williams comfortably hung on to her Brecon and Radnorshire seat – despite a 9.2% drop in its votes compared with the 2007 election. Labour’s win in Blaenau Gwent was declared just after 2.10am, with Alun Davies coming ahead of his five rivals. Davies won 12,926 votes – considerably more than second placed independent candidate Jayne Sullivan, who polled 3,806. Plaid Cymru’s Darren Jones was in third place on 1,098 with the Conservatives and the BNP trailing behind, on 1,066 and 948 respectively. The Liberal Democrats finished bottom with 367 votes – a 4% drop compared with the 2007 election. Voter turnout for Blaenau Gwent was 38.16%. The win saw Labour gain the seat – which was last won by independent candidate Trish Law, who stood down at the end of the assembly’s third term. Speaking at the count in Ebbw Vale, Davies said: “It’s a tremendous result. For too long we have had a lone voice in this constituency. “Compared with this last election, Labour has doubled its vote. I do not think you can get more emphatic than that.” The quadruple for Labour was completed over an hour later with Gwyn Price winning Islwyn and Huw Lewis holding on to Merthyr and Rhymney – before Keith Davies managed to oust Plaid’s Helen Mary Jones from her Llanelli seat. Following a recount, Davies pipped former Senedd cabinet member Jones by just 80 votes. The Liberal Democrats were dealt a severe blow after losing Montgomeryshire to the Conservatives. It was won in 2007 by then Lib Dem candidate Mick Bates – who later left the party following his conviction for drunkenly attacking a paramedic. Bates became an independent candidate before stepping down at the end of the assembly’s third term. This morning, Wyn Williams was unable to claim the seat back for the Lib Dems after the Tories’ Russell George secured 10,026 votes. Welsh elections 2011 Welsh Assembly Government Welsh politics Wales Elections 2011 Plaid Cymru Labour Liberal Democrats Conservatives guardian.co.uk
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Former Lib Dem leader Lord Ashdown turns on prime minister for ‘breach of faith’ in alternative vote campaign Liberal Democrats were facing an electoral wipeout in Scotland and the north of England early on Friday morning as Lord Ashdown, one of Nick Clegg’s closest allies, accused David Cameron of a breach of faith, condemning the prime minister’s refusal to dissociate himself from a “regiment of lies” poured out by the no to AV campaign. As the recriminations began over the almost certain defeat of the yes campaign over changing the voting system for MPs, Ashdown said Cameron’s behaviour set him apart from every British prime minister of the postwar period. Ashdown told the Guardian: “So far the coalition has been lubricated by a large element of goodwill and trust. It is not any longer. The consequence is that when it comes to the bonhomie of the Downing Street rose garden, that has gone. It will never again be glad confident morning.” The former Liberal Democrat leader was joined by the party’s deputy leader, Simon Hughes, who accused the Tory-funded no campaign of running a “fundamentally fallacious campaign that will reduce trust between the Tories and his party”. Faced by a clear rejection of the Liberal Democrat involvement in the coalition by voters, Hughes said “in future if it is not in the coalition agreement, it will not be tolerated”. Clegg’s party had to absorb crushing double-digit losses in council elections in Leeds, Liverpool, Hull, Manchester and Clegg’s adopted hometown of Sheffield, the cities that had symbolised the Liberal Democrat advance in the past decade. In Sheffield, defending 15 seats, and running a minority administration, the Liberal Democrats lost nine councillors to Labour. In Liverpool, the Lib Dems were facing wipeout, where they won only two of the 30 seats being contested. The Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition running Birmingham city council just managed to retain its grip on power, but lost a combined total of 13 seats to Labour. The Liberal Democrats saw their share of the vote in the city plunge to just 14.7%, according to initial estimates, as voters apparently railed against the national Government’s programme of cuts. One dissident Liberal Democrat MP, Mike Hancock urged Clegg to take a tougher stance with his coalition partners: “We have to make the price of our support a lot higher. We need to twist David Cameron’s arm a lot harder.” John Leech, Lib Dem MP for Manchester Withington, said: “We’ve taken a real kicking in the ballot box tonight.” In Scotland, the nationalists were heading for their best ever result in a Scottish parliament election, having gained 24 seats by 7am, which puts them in touching distance of a majority. With the backing of the Scottish Greens, they may have enough votes to push through a referendum on independence. A disconsolate Labour in Scotland said its vote share had stayed the same in the central Scotland belt, but a Lib Dem collapse had benefited the SNP. Michael Moore, the Lib Dem Scottish secretary, said: “We always knew this would be a tough gig. I am not going to duck the fact that this is a very disappointing evening for us in Scotland.” In Wales, Labour was making gains, suggesting it was close to an overall majority. The party said on the basis of early results it was making gains in Exeter, Swindon and Gravesham. The ferocity of Ashdown’s attack, made after consultations within the party, followed what looks like certain defeat in the referendum on the alternative vote due to be announced on Friday. Senior figures in the yes campaign were predicting a 60%-to-40% defeat on a desultory turnout. Ashdown is furious with the no campaign for personalised attacks on Clegg that accused him of broken promises on tuition fees and spending cuts, and arguments that AV was a “Lib Dem fix”. Ashdown said: “The bottom line is that Liberal Democrats are exceedingly angry. We believe there has been a breach of faith here. If the Conservative party funds to the level of 99% a campaign whose central theme is to denigrate and destroy our leader, there are consequences for that. “What that means is that this is a relationship that is much less about congeniality, it becomes a business relationship, a transactional relationship, and maybe it will be all the better for that.” He went on: “David Cameron is the prime minister. He sets the tone of politics in this country. It is an unhappy fact that when he was asked to dissociate himself from a campaign that was run on the basis of personalisation and personal attacks, and messages that were far more than some subtle bending of the truth, he refused to do that. “I have to say that he did not dissociate himself from a campaign whose nature I believe every previous British prime minister in my time would have disassociated himself from. That is a grave disappointment. This is a triumph for the regiment of lies. We live with pretty strenuous political campaigns in Britain, but these were downright lies.” Ashdown also accused Cameron of panicking after demands from his backbenchers to step up the referendum campaign. “In backtracking, to use no stronger a word than that, on what was a private agreement he had with Nick Clegg about the way this campaign was conducted, I think the prime minister panicked in the face of his rightwingers. I regret that.” Ashdown said it would be right if his party now highlighted its differences within the coalition. He insisted the Lib Dems would not leave the coalition until the end of the five-year parliament, saying: “We have set our hands to this task and now it must be completed so the purpose of the coalition has not altered, but the mood music, the atmosphere of the coalition most assuredly has as a result of what has gone on in the past three weeks. “I think we should be much more straightforward where we disagree. That is not a criticism of Clegg. “I have always said when asked I did not think the result of the referendum could affect the coalition, but I did think the way it was fought could.” He seemed to imply that the party’s willingness to enter another coalition with Cameron may be affected. “I am very clear that the nature of this coalition and the way that it ends, the mood between the two parties when it ends and therefore what happens afterwards, may well be affected by this.” Ashdown said: “The central proposition of this parliament stands: ‘Is George Osborne’s economic judgment right?’ I believe it is. The whole of British politics now rests on that single proposition. The fortunes of the coalition, the fortunes of the two parties in the coalition and the fortunes of the Labour party rest on that.” Ashdown also challenged Cameron to show that he was the reformer he had claimed to be, by pressing ahead with an elected House of Lords. Liberal Democrats Elections 2011 Paddy Ashdown Local elections Liberal-Conservative coalition David Cameron Scottish politics Local politics Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
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As the coroner delivers her verdicts on the victims of 7/7 Esther Addley talks to some of the families they left behind At around 9.45am one sunny morning in July 2005, John Hyman took a call from his daughter Miriam. There had been some sort of problem at King’s Cross, she said, and she had been evacuated from the tube. She was fine, though, and he wasn’t to worry. Her father suggested she find a coffee shop and wait until things calmed down. In the hours and days that followed the terrorist attacks on London, the Hyman family clung to that phone call like a lifebuoy, desperately telling themselves the call had come after 9.49am, the moment when 18-year-old Hasib Hussain blew himself up on the upper deck of a number 30 bus to Hackney. Four days later, after touring the capital’s hospitals, putting up posters and making appeals via the media, they were at last told by a police family liaison officer that Miriam had been identified by her dental records. She had been sitting directly in front of Hussain at the moment of explosion, and was blown from the bus and on to the pavement, where she died very shortly afterwards. Almost six years later, Esther Hyman, Miriam’s older and only sister, has found a way of talking about the family’s loss without being overwhelmed by it, but there is a heavy sorrow as she sits in the garden of her parents’ home in north London, where she and Miriam played as children and smoked as teenagers. Miriam was 32 when she died, a freelance picture researcher who, thanks to a brief contract at News International, was claimed as “Sun girl Miriam” by the newspaper, a title which, her family delightedly note, would have amused and appalled her in equal measure. She was known at work, says Esther, as “the smiley one”. “A gentleman came up to me at her funeral and said: ‘I met Miriam only once but I loved her.’ And that’s what she had the capacity to do, to really make a direct connection with people.” Like her mother, Miriam was a talented artist, and had been planning to start a greeting cards business when she was killed. Mavis Hyman had come from Calcutta in the 1950s, and both her daughters delighted in their mixed-race heritage, says Esther. They loved music, and the weekend before the bombings they had gone together to an Elvis Costello concert on Hampstead Heath, and danced all the way home. “I will always treasure that and be grateful for that.” Philip Russell was also evacuated at King’s Cross and also boarded the No 30 bus, in an attempt to get to his banking job. His parents had seen him the previous weekend, when his sister Caroline’s baby daughter had been baptised in their village in Kent. Philip’s birthday was round the corner, on 11 July, and the family had given him a DVD player. “The last time I saw him was walking across the footbridge at the station, carrying his birthday presents,” recalls his father, Grahame. It was on the Monday following the bombings, the day he was due to turn 29, that his parents learned that he, too, had been murdered by Hussain. Though they were a very close family, Grahame and Veronica Russell have been a little surprised by some of the things they have learned about their son since his death. Philip was a very quiet and reserved young man, says Grahame. “He was no problem at all. One thing about Philip, he was never a problem.” He had a large and close circle of friends, they knew, but they hadn’t appreciated the extent to which Philip was the quiet centre of his social circle, or how fondly he would talk, at work, about his parents and sister, and his two adored nieces. His employer, JP Morgan, set up a book of condolences; “he’s got articles in this book, people have written from New York, Chicago, Hong Kong. And they have all put something in that makes you proud to know that he was your son.” Those same bleak few hours and days after the attacks – the slow realisation that something was awry, the frantic hunt for information, the agonising wait for their fears to be confirmed – were being repeated many times around the country, and much further afield. Andrea Watson lives just over the Welsh border, not far from Chester, and so when the first reports emerged of explosions in London – “London is quite far away for a lot of people here” – it didn’t really occur to her colleagues to be sensitive about the fact that her father and sister both worked in the capital, and that neither were answering their phones. ‘So me and my mum kept on trying, we emailed everyone we knew, and slowly friends started clocking in to say ‘Yes, I’m fine.’” Her dad got in touch eventually; he’d been stuck in a building where he couldn’t get a phone signal. But still nothing from her big sister Fiona Stevenson, a criminal solicitor. “I wasn’t even worried about her, because I thought, Fiona will be at court. Fiona is just jammy like that. She blags her way out of things like that. She’s just jammy.” Shortly afterwards she had a cup of tea with a friend, “and I remember … just shaking, and I didn’t really know why”. The following morning, she and her husband drove south to her parents’ home in Essex. “And I remember having this very strange memory, that at the time I was packing I thought, so calmly, well I’d better put in some black trousers, in case there’s a funeral.” It was more than a week before they were told that Fiona had been killed on the underground at Aldgate. Though she had always been committed to a career in law, perhaps specialising in human rights, Fiona, who was 29, hadn’t found it easy to find work, says her sister; as a result she worked incredibly hard, spending weekends and evenings doing paperwork or at police stations with clients. “But at the same time, she would always have the energy to then go on to a party or to a ball, and then go on after that or to a leaving do. She always managed to squeeze everything in.” She was headstrong, full of energy, very kind. A family memory has toddler Fiona warming cotton balls on the radiator for her baby sister’s nappy change. “That was the kind of relationship that we had.” Both sisters phoned their parents most days, and on the night of 6 July Fiona spoke to her mother, Emer, about her new flat in the Barbican, and her plan to come home at the weekend, “a normal family occasion, as they would normally have”. She had recently returned from a three-month sabbatical in Belize, says Andrea, where she had been working with the government on developing the law around child protection, a trip that came as a revelation. “I think Fiona suddenly realised what she wanted to do with her life. When she came back, she was not only tanned and lovely, but she also had a mind clarity, in a way.” The next chapter of her life was about to begin. Fiona Stevenson, Philip Russell and Miriam Hyman had never met, but for their mourning families, as the inquest process draws to a conclusion, there is one important factor in common, namely that all are believed to have died very quickly after the bombing, without regaining consciousness. The Russells were reassured relatively soon after 7/7 that Philip had died immediately. For the other two families, however, the inquest has offered important and precious answers. “We have been told that Fiona wouldn’t have felt any pain,” says Andrea Watson. “I suppose, listening to some of the other survivors talking, it would have been like a light going off. That is something we really wanted to hear, because some of the other people weren’t as lucky as that.” The Hyman family made an even more striking discovery. They had been contacted, two years after the bombings, by Clive Featherstone, who had been working in Tavistock Square when the bomb went off, and who had held Miriam’s hand in her final moments. “At first we didn’t get back in touch with him … [But] since then we’ve become very close with him.” It was only during the inquest process that they discovered the existence of another man, a passerby called Richard Collins, who had gone to Miriam’s side after Featherstone had been told to move along by a policeman. Initially they thought he must have been mistaken and confused Miriam with another victim, but no. “Richard told us afterwards: ‘I would have felt a bit silly if it had turned out not to be Miriam, as I actually had her initials tattooed on my chest.’ It’s his only tattoo but it turned out that he had been so moved that he had this indelible mark put on himself. We find that exceptional.” The loss doesn’t get any easier, says Grahame Russell. “[Philip] appears when you talk about things, Something will come up and you’ll say, do you remember when we did this … Sometimes you’re remembering a young lad, sometimes you’re remembering him as a boy, or a guy.” But you learn to accept, he says. “It doesn’t work all the time, because certain things will suddenly come back and bite you. But you accept it. The thing is, it changes … If anyone has lost a child, they know that it changes their life for ever.” For all three families, it has helped, a little, to invest in establishing a legacy for their loved ones. JP Morgan helped set up a travel bursary at Kingston University, Philip Russell’s old college, for students who propose a project that will in some regard help others; his parents sit on the panel that awards the prize each year. Andrea Watson and her parents, unsure at first how best to use the financial donations given after Fiona’s death, talked to the charity with which she had travelled to Belize and learned about the number of young children who die from drowning each year. It seemed fitting, given her love of diving, to set up a memorial scheme to teach children to swim. This year 200 poor children will graduate from the scheme, which will also offer lifeguard training to 100 young people to help them find work in the tourist industry. Friends hope through fundraising to develop it further. Miriam Hyman’s family used donations , and the compensation they were awarded, to fund an eye hospital in India at which 20,000 people have been treated since 2008. They are also working on an ambitious education project, in collaboration with Copthall school, where Miriam and Esther studied, that they hope will teach citizenship and non-violence, “hopefully to minimise the chances of UK citizens ever feeling the need to take arms against their fellow citizens in this way again”. Many other bereaved families, during the inquests, have spoken of their own legacy projects working with individuals spread throughout the world, like little points of light in the darkness. What does the end of the inquest process mean for them? The past six years, says Andrea Watson, have been about waiting. “We waited to find out if she was dead, we then waited to find out information. We then had to wait for different criminal cases to happen in the courts; we waited for a memorial. We spent a lot of time waiting for things. I don’t know what happens after this, but from our viewpoint, we’re not then waiting for anything else. “I still have to explain to my daughter why she doesn’t have an aunt, and I don’t know how I am going to go about doing that. So I don’t think the feelings will ever stop, or the grief. It’s more that the waiting is over.” 7 July London attacks UK security and terrorism Crime London Esther Addley guardian.co.uk
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Information found at scene shows ‘aspiration’ to attack American trains, says Department for Homeland Security The first intelligence from the treasure trove of computers and hard drives found during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway has prompted a warning that al-Qaida wanted to attack the US rail network. The Department of Homeland Security sent a warning on Thursday to American law enforcement officials that material dating back to February 2010 had detailed an al-Qaida aspiration to derail trains in the US by damaging the rails at a valley or bridge so they would crash, the Associated Press and NBC news reported. Other material suggested a desire to attack mass transit hubs; a fact long known by terror experts. The idea was apparently at the “aspirational” stage and had not developed into anything concrete. The information appears to be the first widely circulated intelligence pulled from the 1 May raid on Bin Laden’s secret compound. After killing Bin Laden, Navy Seals took computers, DVDs and documents from his house. Intelligence experts are combing through the material searching for any signs of current or future al-Qaida activity. Security officials in the Obama administration have repeatedly warned of the ongoing threat posed by al-Qaida in the wake of the death of its leader as well as the prospect that it could be plotting revenge attacks for his demise. One of the reasons behind the decision not to publish a photo of Bin Laden’s body was the idea that it could provoke retaliation from Islamist militant sympathisers. But officials have also stressed that they have no knowledge of any specific imminent plot or threat. “We have no information of any imminent terrorist threat to the US rail sector, but wanted to make our partners aware of the alleged plotting. It is unclear if any further planning has been conducted since February of last year,” said Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. Osama bin Laden Global terrorism al-Qaida United States Paul Harris guardian.co.uk
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