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February 2010 Archives

February 5, 2010 - Time to press the panic button?

Apologies for the six weeks blog-oliday. Put it down to Copenhagen blues!

I’m still reeling from the surreal sight of Lord Whacko Monckton (the climate contrarians’ eccentric of choice), captured on Newsnight last night doing an imitation of Al Gore at a public meeting in Australia. Frightening stuff.

Whenever I see Monckton at work, it reminds me just how desperate people must be to have their doubts and prejudices about climate change affirmed by some public figure – indeed, by any public figure at this stage of the debate.

The politics of climate change in Australia are even worse that they are here in the UK. That may well be, paradoxically, because changes in their own micro-climates over the last 10 years have been so much more visible. And painful. And this has polarised the debate about whether these changes are primarily a consequence of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, or primarily natural climate variability. The end result is that the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, might have to call a general election to break the impasse on his proposals for a carbon-trading scheme.

Could it get that bad here in the UK? Very improbably, but the whole tenor of the debate has deteriorated so badly, so rapidly, that it's now a serious political headache, rather than a minor irritant.

The combination of the ‘climate gate’ fiasco at the University of East Anglia and the growing concerns about the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), broader concerns of the whole peer review process (the so-called ‘Gold Standard’ of scientific research), and the utter failure of Copenhagen has transformed the climate debate here in the UK.

Where they were once thought as contrarian outliers, both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are now thought to be closely aligned with public opinion. Ed Miliband (the Secretary of State in the Dept of Energy and Climate Change) must be in despair.

So should we be pressing the panic button? I think we should. The damage done to the credibility not just of climate science but also of the UK’s entire approach to climate change is already serious – and getting worse. This could be extremely problematic in the run up to the general election.

So if I was Gordon Brown, I would be asking David Cameron and Nick Clegg to issue a joint invitation to Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society, asking him to convene a high-level Scientific Panel to comment on ‘the state of the science’ two years from the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report at the end of 2007.

Does it still stack up? What should people make of all these recent revelations? Is the Climate Change Act (to which all three political parties have signed up) still based on robust scientific foundations? Can people still have confidence in the way climate science drives climate policy?

Martin Rees would be asked to recruit three or four top scientists (reflecting different shades of opinion), a couple of business people (like James Dyson or Richard Lambert of the CBI), and a couple of scientifically-literate ‘pillars of the community’ in whom the general public has absolute trust. No NGOs, let alone campaigners!

Give them two months. Bang out a short, sharp report written for lay people, not for scientists. Blitz the media. Run a full-page ad in the Mail and Express for weeks on end – instead of today’s highly questionable ‘Act on CO2 ‘ ads.

Overkill? Possibly. It seems ludicrous that what is still by any standards a rock-solid scientific consensus should have to be shored up by such extreme measures. But if we don’t, might we be looking at an Aussie-style meltdown in public opinion in the near term?

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on February 5, 2010 4:27 PM | | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

February 12, 2010 - Lesson from Kraft's Cadbury takeover

So the first blow has fallen on Cadbury’s from its new owners, Kraft.

The Keynsham plant near Bristol will close, despite the fact that Kraft promised to keep it open (that was actually a bit weird, as Cadbury itself had announced that Keynsham would be closed at some stage in the future).

And the fear, of course, as much in the mind of Peter Mandelson as in the minds of all Cadbury’s workers, is that this is just the first of many cuts that will be brought forward during the next few years.

I haven’t written about this since the takeover. Apart from the odd sardonic chuckle as the process unfolded (with that arch-globaliser Mandelson shedding a few crocodile tears at another ‘great British company’ being gobbled up by ‘predators’ like Kraft – or Warren Buffet (who owns about 9% of Kraft) complaining that it’s a really bad deal for Kraft shareholders, however good a deal it might be for Cadbury shareholders), it’s been too bloody miserable.

The optimists would have curmudgeons like me cheer up a little. They point to the pledges made by Kraft to stick by Cadbury’s ethical and Fairtrade commitments. Just before the Cadbury’s Board accepted the bid it announced that Green & Black’s would be moving its entire range to Fairtrade by the end of 2011, which elicited the following emollient words from Kraft:

“We strongly support certification as a way to improve sustainability in cocoa farming, so we welcome this step by Green & Black’s. Cadbury and Green & Black’s have proud histories in ethical sourcing, and if our offer is successful, we look forward to maintaining this heritage.”

Just so long as you ignore the unmistakable sound of grinding teeth behind the reassuring words, perhaps that really is something to be optimistic about.

But it is still a wretched outcome. And surely a complete failure on the part of Cadbury’s shareholders to tell the difference between ‘a good price’ and ‘lasting value’.

Roger Carr, who has just stepped down as Chairman from Cadbury, having felt ‘obliged’ to recommend to shareholders the offer of £11.7 billion (up from the opening bid of £9.8 billion in September last year) has now weighed in with some ‘radical ideas’ to ensure that something similar doesn’t happen again. He has suggested raising the ‘victory margin’ from 50% plus one share to 60% plus one share, and that simultaneously there should be a rule that those who bought shares during the course of any takeover battle would not be permitted to vote until the battle was over.

Useful ideas. But the lack of any genuinely radical ideas during the takeover battle was very noticeable. “This is just the way it is with markets”, as one commentator put it. Indeed! Which is why we go through the same nightmarish process with every single takeover proposal.

Why don’t we, for instance, have more John Lewis look-a-likes in the UK? The John Lewis Partnership is hugely admired even by people in the City – even if they don’t really approve of its ‘bizarre’ employee benefit Trust. But this example has been followed by very few companies over the years. As is the case with Scott Bader (a successful chemicals company), and Tullis Russell (a successful paper company in Scotland).

But there is still Royal Mail, which currently has only one shareholder (the Government), which would make it easier to think of some kind of employee ownership basis. Allan Leighton, Royal Mail’s Chairman, has indeed hinted at the possibility of some kind of employee share-ownership.

The interesting thing is that employee-owned companies regularly outperform those in the FTSE All-Share Index. Over the last 17 years, employee-owned companies have outperformed FTSE All-Share companies each year by an average of 10%. In the third quarter of 2009, for instance, employee-owned companies’ share prices were up 27.6% compared to FTSE All-Share companies share prices, which were up 21.3% over the quarter.

But we are still so stuck in our wretchedly unsustainable ways when it comes to ownership structures within the capitalist economy.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on February 12, 2010 12:44 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

February 22, 2010 - The Marmot Review: health and inequality in the spotlight once more

I spent last Friday at the launch conference for the Marmot Review – a report on health and equality and what we should be doing about them here in the UK.

It’s a really good report and powerfully reminds all those who see themselves as active in the ‘sustainable development community’ of the overlap with the public health/health and equalities community, and the importance of working much more effectively together than we’ve sometimes been able to in the past.

I won’t bang on about those synergies, two graphics in the Review illustrate these well. (See Fig 4.6 on cycling on page 127 or Fig 4.7 on green spaces on page 130 of the Review)

Some people say that this is all old hat. The Black Report, the Acheson Report, the Wanless Report. And now the Marmot Report. Same old, same old.

In some instances, that’s true. But there are many completely new insights in this report, building on new evidence. For instance, the principal recommendation (‘give every child the best start in life’) is based on new research looking at what happens between birth and the third year of any child’s life.

Just looking at the difference between the most advantaged and the least advantaged on indicators like birth weight, post-natal depression for mothers, regular bed times, being read to every day, breastfeeding and so on, you can see why this is the critical point of intervention. After the age of three, a lot of future interventions may well be far less impactful. And by the age of five, brighter, poorer kids have been overtaken by less bright kids from families that are better off.

Intriguingly, the most inspiring talk of the day came from the Deputy Chief Fire Officer from Merseyside. The Fire and Rescue Service on Merseyside has been running a community engagement and advocacy programme for the last 10 years, providing advice in the first instance on fire prevention, but then helping local residents think much more about all those things that exacerbate health inequalities (smoking, alcohol, drugs, poor quality housing, poor diets and so on), whilst simultaneously increasing fire risk – if only indirectly. His officers are now putting out 50% fewer fires than 10 years ago.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer didn’t bring this out explicitly, but his presentation provided a powerful analogy for the whole day. Shift the effort (and the investment) upstream – into prevention and brilliant public service interventions in people’s lives – and the downstream costs can be progressively reduced. But if you don’t do that, there’ll be no reductions downstream.

The vast majority of health practitioners are well aware of that. But the truth of it is that after 30 years of talking about prioritising prevention and public health, practically nothing has been done about it. Just 4% of total health spending in the UK goes on prevention and public health.

The Marmot Review doesn’t make a particularly strong case on that score. But the truth of it is that all its recommendations may well make no more progress than the recommendations of its predecessors unless that imbalance is addressed.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on February 22, 2010 11:57 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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