Oddly, given that I am focusing on local issues for my Council by-election campaign in North London, globalisation has been on my mind a lot in the last week or two.
A long time ago, I was first enticed into political activity by the anti-globalisation protests that started in the late 1990s. Working in Bloomsbury, I passed through Russell Square one evening in the summer of 1999 and found a flyer telling me to go to a mysterious ‘carnival against capitalism’ at Liverpool Street station a few days later.
Curious, I hopped on the tube at lunchtime and arrived to find what appeared to be a colossal party taking place. Colourful people in masks were drumming loudly and the crowd was bouncing a huge inflatable globe around above their heads. I didn’t know anyone there except the Big Issue seller from Archway, but I wandered around and picked up a lot of flyers before heading back to work. One of these was from the Green Party, funnily enough, although it took another couple of years before I finally joined up.
Now the freshness of those early years of the anti-globalisation movement has faded, but several things recently have brought some of the more basic issues we were concerned about then back to the front of my mind.
The first was the publication of the Stern review two weeks ago. I was on spokesperson duty for the Greens and had to appear on both Sky and BBC news on the Sunday morning before the report came out. The conclusions had been extensively leaked, and it was pretty clear that Stern was going to say that climate change represented a failure of the current global market system that would lead to recession and hardship for billions if we didn’t act soon.
“At last,” I told the disembodied cameras in the booths at Millbank studios, “a report that talks about climate change in a language George Bush understands – that of hard cash.”
Of course Green economists have been warning of the financial consequences of climate change for several decades now, and I had some pretty excellent policies at hand to promote. A major theme of our response is to re-localise our economies, meeting our basic needs for goods and services from as close to home as possible. Why, for instance, are we transporting staple goods across the globe when this is naturally going to be less efficient in the use of energy and carbon (and make for less healthy and stable local economies) than providing for ourselves locally?
We don’t insist that international trade should be done away with altogether, but that it should be reserved for items that cannot be provided at home, such as the trade in tropical spices which has gone on for millennia.
One result of globalisation struck me when reading through the Green Party’s submission to the Stern review that weekend. This concerned the carbon dioxide emissions embodied in all the goods we import into the UK. Figures from Best Foot Forward show that were we to include emissions due to imported goods in our own carbon tally, the UK’s footprint would be 24% larger.
A common objection I encountered to Stern’s conclusions was ‘Well, it would be nice for us to do something, but we’re only responsible for 2% of global emissions and we really need to look at China instead’.
But in the context of all the embodied carbon we import from China, pointing the finger at them seems a bit harsh. And it’s not just carbon dioxide they are taking off our hands but a whole package of problems we have consigned to our own history.
In the UK we take a certain amount of pride in the fact that we’ve put the days of dark, satanic mills behind us. Our workers have a minimum wage and health and safety laws, waterways are gradually being cleaned up and pollution, sometimes well above safe limits, is nowhere near as appalling as fifty years ago. Land contamination is taking longer to deal with, however. A long-gone Victorian metal-plating factory is still blighting the back gardens of several streets near my home in Kentish Town with contaminants that make anything grown there too toxic to eat.
But overall improvements aren’t happening in the places that provide cheap goods for our shopping.
By coincidence, I’ve just reached the chapters on China in Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive’, and they bring up some uncomfortable facts about how the global market is changing things there.
We are all aware of the vast factories with dodgy working practices in the Export Processing Zones that provide many of our consumer goods, but the environmental problems China is creating for itself thanks to the huge economic boom of recent years are also on an enormous scale.
Pollution-intensive industries, such as pesticide production, are rapidly being transferred to China. Seventy-five percent of China’s lakes are now polluted, and lead levels in the blood of Chinese people in cities are double those that can cause brain damage in children.
Waste imports are growing every day as well-behaved local authorities in the West, including my own in Camden, find that the only place with demand for the materials collected by recycling services is China, where they are sent unsorted for people on poverty wages to pick through.
Chinese imports of hazardous electronic waste, including old TV sets, fridges and computers, increased from 1 million to 11 million tones a year during the 1990s alone.
Our pride in tidying up our own backyard, while going through disposable packaged goods and non-repairable household gadgets as fast as we can, would not survive if the disaster facing China was common knowledge.
Personally, I’m getting on pretty well at the moment without an i-pod, toaster, microwave, dishwasher or washing machine, but I have been wondering if I should replace my 25-year-old cathode-ray TV set with something more energy-efficient. I’m now inclined to stick with it a while longer.
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