FIRE Brigades Union (FBU) warnings that funding cuts must be reversed to address the increase in extreme weather events make a point that holds beyond their own sector.
The world is changing, and without political change to match we are staring into the abyss.
Two years ago the brilliant film director Ken Loach told the Morning Star that global warming means today’s left doesn’t “have the luxury that earlier generations of socialists did, that we can fight the long war… the climate emergency makes all the difference. We have to act now … disaster is at the door.”
The ways in which the present order blocks action on the climate are familiar. Energy firms raking in billions from selling oil and gas have no incentive to switch to renewables, and continue to spend far more on prospecting for new deposits than on alternative energy sources.
Despite the heatwaves, the wildfires and the floods, British politics is going backwards on the environment, with Rishi Sunak making a song and dance about his love of motorists in a desperate bid to revive the Tories’ flagging fortunes.
Labour’s Keir Starmer follows suit. A narrow Tory by-election win blamed on London’s ultra-low emissions zone was enough to see him disown the policy.
The media are always briefed that these retreats are based on electoral calculation, just as Labour’s backtracking this month on social care reform was framed as part of devising a “bomb-proof” manifesto immune from Tory attack.
This is disingenuous: Starmer is more interested in appeasing big business than voters.
Even so, Labour’s steady retreat from any and all promises on climate change reflects stunted ambition as well as pro-corporate sycophancy. Its leadership lack the imagination to think beyond the Westminster bubble, so issues from air pollution to poisoned waterways are not viewed as problems to be solved, but icebergs to be navigated politically: hence its secret emails to water CEOs on how to assuage public anger on sewage discharges without nationalisation.
As the FBU warns, the refusal to take climate change seriously isn’t just blocking action on its cause (through reducing emissions) but even on mitigating its current effects.
The wildfires and floods are with us now, but four decades of neoliberalism have undermined our capacity as a society to cope with emergencies.
The neoliberal agenda is to commodify every aspect of human activity, with sectors which do not produce a profit for a capitalist seen as inherently wasteful.
In the public sector it has played out in three main ways: wholesale privatisation turning essential services into commercial activities, often wrecking them in the process, as we have seen in transport; marketisation of publicly owned services so public money is diverted into private profits, as in the NHS and a host of state functions now outsourced to the likes of Serco or G4S; and straightforward funding cuts to reduce public spending overall, regardless of need.
Cutting a fifth of all fire brigade jobs since 2010 falls into the last category. It cannot be justified based on a reducing need for firefighters. Response times have risen, and crises like Storm Babet saw the service so overstretched it was unable to respond to scores of incidents at the height of the flooding.
With a scientific consensus that climate disruption is here to stay, a rational system would place greater resources into managing it and protecting us from its effects. Climate change requires relatively higher spending on public services, including emergency services.
We do not live under a rational system but one driven by profit accumulation. That alone explains the Tory and Labour claim there is no money for public services, when corporate profit margins are through the roof and the richest are richer than ever before.
Our difficulties coping with Storm Babet are a flavour of what is to come unless we change that.
