The chancellor, George Osborne, at a EU finance ministers’ meeting, in Brussels, three years ago. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex/

George Osborne will today deliver a stark warning to Britain’s European partners that the UK will leave the EU unless it embarks on whole-scale economic and political reform.

The chancellor’s comments come as the Tory leadership tries to regain the initiative on Europe, after 95 MPs signed a letter calling for the dismantling of the core principles of the EU.

In a speech to a conference organised by the pro-reform Open Europe thinktank and the Fresh Start group of Tory MPs, Osborne will say: “There is a simple choice for Europe: reform or decline. Our determination is clear: to deliver the reform, and then let the people decide.”

Tory backbencher Bernard Jenkin won the support of about 100 MPs for a letter to David Cameron calling for the British parliament to be given a veto over all EU laws.

Such a move would dismantle the rules of the European single market which were drawn up by Margaret Thatcher’s ally, Lord Cockfield, to prevent France imposing protectionist measures by denying member states a national veto.

Jenkin suffered a blow when Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the Commons Treasury select committee, said he had been wrongly listed as a supporter. But Osborne will make clear that Cameron will push for wide-ranging reforms if he wins the general election next year with a mandate to renegotiate the terms of British membership.

Osborne will tell the conference: “The biggest economic risk facing Europe doesn’t come from those who want reform and renegotiation – it comes from a failure to reform and renegotiate.

“It is the status quo which condemns the people of Europe to an ongoing economic crisis and continuing decline.”

Osborne will say the EU suffers from a chronic lack of competitiveness and that the European economy has stalled over the last six years while the Indian economy has grown by a third and the Chinese economy by 50%.

He will say: “Make no mistake, our continent is falling behind. Look at innovation, where Europe’s share of world patent applications nearly halved in the last decade. Look at unemployment, where a quarter of young people looking for work can’t find it. Look at welfare.

“As Angela Merkel has pointed out, Europe accounts for just over 7% of the world’s population, 25% of its economy, and 50% of global social welfare spending. We can’t go on like this.”

Osborne is expected to say that Cameron will press for a realignment of the rules of the single market to ensure the 18 members of the eurozone cannot outvote the 10 EU members, such as Britain, which have not joined the single currency.

Tory divisions will be highlighted at today’s conference as MPs from the Fresh Start group challenge Jenkin’s letter.

Mats Persson, director of Open Europe, said the Tory party risks “becoming its own worst enemy” as the likes of Jenkin table unrealistic demands.

Persson said: “There is a huge debate in Europe about what the EU’s defining mission should be in future – the single market or the euro?

The chancellor should clearly set out that the UK cannot accept an EU dominated by euro countries preoccupied with shoring up their currency at the expense of those who cannot join for democratic reasons. If the EU becomes a political extension of the euro, it’ll be hard for the UK to remain a member.

“As our conference clearly shows, there’s growing momentum for reform across Europe. However, the Tory party risks becoming its own worst enemy when it comes to achieving a new settlement in Europe.”

David Mowat, the Tory MP for Warrington South, who will address the conference, said that the Fresh Start group was proposing a constructive set of proposals to help the prime minister in his negotiations if he won the election. “The letter is a different initiative,” he said.

The Fresh Start group, led by the No 10 policy board member Andrea Leadsom, will focus on three areas of reform at the conference.

The areas include delivering Cameron’s proposal to keep Britain apart from moves to create an “ever closer union” in the EU; completing the single market, especially with services; and delivering William Hague’s plan of bumping up the EU’s “yellow card” system to a “red card” one.

This would mean that a third of national parliaments could block EU laws if they can reach an agreement.

Euro-enthusiasts can’t quite hide their contempt for the masses – Telegraph Blogs

December 30, 2013 3:08 pm / Leave a comment

Euro-enthusiasts can’t quite hide their contempt for the masses – Telegraph Blogs.

Anti-slavery campaigners were also written off as cranks and gadflies

How do you get a poll to register a large majority in favour of EU membership? Easy. Confine your survey to quangocrats, charity heads, civil servants, CEOs of multi-national corporations and the like. The pro-EU lobby group, British Influence, has been trying to get people excited about its poll of “leading figures” – that is, 700 bien pensantmetropolitans of whom, sure enough, 69 per cent want to stay in the EU. Indeed, the only surprise is that, of a demographic specifically selected for pro-Brussels bias, 31 per cent don’t agree.

Not that I blame British Influence: when every poll of the general population shows an anti-EU majority, you have to clutch at whatever support you can find. Nor am I saying that all, or even most, of the people surveyed are beneficiaries of the Brussels racket. They don’t have to be. When enough NGOs get money from the Commission, even those that don’t tend to be inflected by the Euro-enthusiasm of their peers. When a large number multinationals and megabanks have invested in lobbying to get rules that suit them, other corporates get carried along by the groupthink.

Let’s run over some of the other things that all these “leading figures” have favoured over the years, shall we? State planning, prices and incomes policies, the SDP, the ERM. Almost without exception, the “leading figures” trotted out by British Influence to argue for the EU were, a decade ago, making precisely the same arguments about joining the euro: we’ll lose influence, overseas investment will dry up, blah blah fishcakes. If they were forecasters in the private sector, they’d have been sacked long ago. But because they represent the goody-goody consensus, they can always be sure of a sympathetic hearing from the BBC.

For as long as I can remember, the European debate has involved an element of snobbery. Supporters of the project are not so much pro-EU as anti-Eurosceptic, seeing themselves as defenders of moderate, decent, civilised values against Blimps, oiks and football hooligans. I’ve lost count of how many people in Brussels have said to me, “You know, Hannan, you’re very broadminded for a Eurosceptic”. They mean to be nice, but they reveal their narcissism.

Well, let me be broadminded now. It may be true that the Eurosceptic movement has more than its share of eccentrics. You know what? The same is true of every movement that takes on the orthodoxy. You can’t read history without being struck by how many oddballs and misfits were attracted, in the early stages, to the campaign against slavery, say, or the campaign for a universal franchise. Any movement that challenges the status quo will attract, as well as principled reformers, people who are simply grumpy about life in general. But this doesn’t make them wrong.

The Chartists and the Suffragettes were attacked by their opponents in exactly the same terms as Ukip today: as a bunch of mavericks and obsessives. When the vote was extended to all adults, the moderate men, the sensible men, the men of bottom and judgment, suddenly remembered that they had favoured the idea all along. The same will happen with Brexit. Just watch.

Tory anti-environment advocacy protects corporate, not public, interests | Nafeez Ahmed | Environment | theguardian.com

November 6, 2013 8:02 pm / Leave a comment

Tory anti-environment advocacy protects corporate, not public, interests | Nafeez Ahmed | Environment | theguardian.com. (source)

Tory anti-environment advocacy protects corporate, not public, interests

Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Telegraph screed supports Cameron’s contempt for green policies at our expense

$Cuadrilla fracking site at Balcombe$

Cuadrilla has doubled the height of its security fences and installed razor wire at its Balcombe site. Photograph: Wpa Pool/Getty Images

Yesterday Jacob Rees-Mogg, member of parliament for North East Somerset, wrote an article in the Telegraph claiming that the fundamental cause of the UK’s “high energy prices” is “climate changealarmism.” His piece coincided with Prime Minister David Cameron‘sannouncement that to tackle rocketing gas and electricity bills he would “roll back” green levies on energy bills and subject Britain’s “Big Six” energy giants to a “competition test.”

Even the Tory’s own lead environmentalist MP, Zac Goldsmith, was appalled. “In 2010, leaders fought to prove they were the greenest”, he said. “Three years on, they’re desperately blaming their own policies on the other. Muppets.”

But Rees-Mogg’s piece illustrates the insidious nature of the anti-environment economic ideology that has been so influential in the Tory party, and that has derailed the potential for meaningful environmental policy. Energy companies have announced prices rises against the background of government regulation and “green taxes”, he writes, because concern over climate change has led to unjustifiable opposition to coal and fracking:

“In the 2010s it is not the price of bread that is falsely and unnecessarily inflated by obstinate politicians but that of energy. There are cheap sources of energy either available or possible but there is a reluctance to use them. Coal is plentiful and provides the least expensive electricity per megawatt, while fracking may provide a boon of shale gas.”

He is wrong on both counts – laughably so. A number of recent scientific studies in major journals such as Fuel, Energy, the International Journal of Coal Geology – to name just a few – have projected that a peak in world coal production is only a few years away, followed by production declines and spiraling prices.

As for fracking, its capacity to provide cheap shale gas has beenquestioned by leading independent experts who point to steep production declines at wells, along with overinflated industry reserve estimates that have led to a “bubble” that could burst in the next five years.

At the core of Rees-Mogg’s obfuscation on energy is an ideology that paints corporations as the key to prosperity for all:

“As the Government has made the price higher so the energy companies put a margin on top. High prices are almost expected.”

But this is also false. The fundamental cause of the high energy prices consistently dampening prospects for economic growth is the peak and plateauing of cheap conventional oil production since around 2005, which has ramped up oil prices and compelled a deepening dependence on increasingly expensive unconventional sources like tar sands, oil shale and shale gas. This is not particularly controversial – even Shell’s CEO has warned that shale gas will not reduce prices, and evidence submitted to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee by Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows that shale gas “will not be a panacea for bringing down gas and electricity bills” as costs will be “50% to 100% higher than in the US.”

Rees-Mogg then flirts unabashedly with climate denialism, arguing that the effect of carbon dioxide emissions on the climate “remains much debated”, and that climate models are inaccurate because it was “computer modelling” that led to the 2008 global banking collapse of 2008. Notwithstanding the obvious fact that climate models are completely different from the quantitative models that justified the reckless debt-expansion behind the global financial crisis, the former are only inaccurate in being too conservative – whereas the latter wererigged by financiers to maximise profits at taxpayer’s expense.

Rees-Mogg’s other case for inaction is that we are not responsible for climate change. Britain emits only “2 per cent” of the world’s CO2. What he ignores here is that the UK is still in the top ten of global emitters – and that if every country decided on inaction because it only contributes by itself a small percentage of emissions, then what we have is a recipe for abject failure.

Rees-Mogg would have us believe he is motivated by the plight of the poor, whom he says are “most particularly” punished as a “matter of choice not of necessity…. This can be stopped by ending the environmentalist obsession and delivering cheap energy.” But one might be forgiven for concluding that his real concern is corporate profiteering. The solution to high energy prices, he says, is “to free the market” – the same “free” market that led to the 2008 crash, the Eurozone crisis, and so on – “not to control prices which will simply reduce supply.”

This is hardly surprising. Rees-Mogg is a founding partner at Somerset Capital Management (SCM), a global asset management fund where hecurrently works as a macro specialist while also being an MP. Among its many investments, SCM specialises in emerging markets, including in the energy industry. Its largest holdings include oil majors such as the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) – which for instance is spearheading multibillion dollar deals to access the North American shale gas market – and Russia’s OJSC Rosneft Oil Company.

According to its interim report published in March this year, the fund pulled out of some energy projects on the basis of declining rates of profitability “due to the rising cost of production”, but viewed CNOOC’s recent ventures to exploit US fracking as “favourable.” In other markets such as India, China and Brazil, economic prospects were mixed as “both domestic consumption and exports put in lacklustre performances.” The overall assessment was uncertain, with the report noting that emerging market economies are “cooling”, and that “The market has periodic rallies but these show no real conviction.”

While Rees-Mogg’s firm profits from fracking abroad, Rees-Mogg himself uses his own parliamentary privilege to advocate fracking at home, while promoting a kind of free market extremism. In a speech last month during a Private Member’s Bill proposing amendments to the Deep Sea Mining (Temporary Provisions) Act 1981, Rees-Mogg reportedly urged for greater deregulation to permit British companies to explore the potential for off-shore and deep sea resources:

“That’s what this is really about: exploring these resources that could add to the wealth not only of the nation but of the globe at large; because as we’ve seen the emergence of the new economies – China, India, Brazil and of Russia – so we have seen demand for resources grow extraordinarily.”

“I would urge the Bill to have a more deregulatory ambition within it”, he added.

“It’s obviously wise to extend it purely for metals to include gas and to include liquids, because there may be all sorts of exciting things at the depths of the sea. There may be endless supplies of gas, there may be oils spurting out as if Saudi Arabia is on the seabed.”

Ironically, these are precisely the sorts of policies that could indirectly benefit corporate players like Somerset Capital Management, its holdings, and its clients in emerging markets and beyond. Indeed, SCM’s own indifference to environmental challenges is plainly stated on its website, where it declares:

“… we makes [sic] no claim to using environmental, social and governance concerns as tenets of ethics in the fashioning of investment returns.”

That might be all quite acceptable in its own context, but when this cavalier attitude becomes evident in public advocacy by our so-called political representatives, it’s time to start asking questions about the extent to which politics is being hijacked in the name of unaccountable corporate power.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

Labour Reform Up For Debate At Tory Convention

October 31, 2013 8:27 am / Leave a comment

Labour Reform Up For Debate At Tory Convention. (source)

A number of labour reform proposals on the agenda at this weekend’s Conservative party convention could be signs that the party is shifting further to the right, political observers say.

At least nine resolutions for amendments to the Conservative party’s policy book seek to crack down on the power of organized labour. The labour reform proposals are sponsored by various riding associations in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta.

Many call for an end to union political involvement, but one amendment seeks a more radical change to the Rand formula, a staple of Canadian labour relations that requires all employees in a unionized environment to pay union dues regardless of whether they join.

The number of proposals and the radical nature of a few of them suggest that the party is taking a cue from the American right wing, said Peter Woolstencroft, a political science professor at the University of Waterloo who focuses on the history of the Conservative party.

“In the Conservative party in the last little while there has been regard for what’s happening in the United States,” he said. “Right to work and other pieces of legislation or actions have been pointing towards cutting back on the power of unions.”

Some Conservatives, notably Ontario’s Tim Hudak and MP Pierre Poilievre, have been vocal in their support for U.S. “right-to-work” style laws since last December, when Michigan became the 24th state to make compulsory union dues illegal.

Such laws have become increasingly popular since the 2008-2009 recession as a means to lure businesses into economically depressed states but have also attracted criticism. U.S. President Barack Obama has said the title is a misnomer for laws that really mean “the right to work for less money.”

The Conservative association of Poilievre’s riding is one of the most overt in calling to end mandatory union membership. The Tory government has previously shot down suggestions the Conservatives are considering such legislation and Labour Minister Kellie Leitch declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Leitch said earlier this week that the Minister would not “speculate on the potential outcomes of the convention”.

The Perth-Wellington electoral district association in southern Ontario was the only one actually to mention right-to-work by name in its proposal. Its amendment seeks Conservative support for “right-to-work legislation to allow optional union membership including student unions.”

The amendment proposed by Poilievre’s Nepean-Carleton riding near Ottawa says that “unions should be democratic and voluntary,” that labour laws should provide workers with “protections against forced union dues for political and social causes that are unrelated to the workplace”. It also says labour laws should respect the UN Declaration on Human Rights article stating that “no one may be compelled to belong to an association.”

An equally aggressive amendment comes from the Alfred-Pellan electoral district association, whose head office in Laval is calling on the party to support a restructuring of the “legislative protection of the Rand formula so as to provide full and effective protection to the right of all workers not to associate with broad political positions they deem oppressive of their respective personal identities.”

Story continues below slideshow:



States With The Weakest Unions





1 of 11

AP





Next

The proposals are not out of the Tory blue. Issues such as right-to-work and elimination of the Rand principle have always been discussed in party circles but have not necessarily made it onto the agenda until now, Woolstencroft said.

However Woolstencroft believes that the most radical proposals are likely to be left on the convention floor.

“The bulk of the party knows that they have a PR game that they’re playing, and they don’t want to be easily castigated as anti-this or anti-that,” he said. “So what they’re going to do is move incrementally.”

In any case, resolution at the federal level would mostly be paying lip service to the elimination of mandatory union dues. Labour laws, are provincially administered and regulated outside of federally regulated businesses and federal public sector employees.

Still, the nine labour-related initiatives have already successfully passed the scrutiny of the party’s national policy committee, where national and political wings of the party debated and whittled down a list of 274 proposals. That signals that the party’s policy wonks believe the proposals are at least worth consideration.

The initiatives will be voted on during closed-door sessions. If any receives a majority of delegate votes, it could be included in the 10 policy resolutions placed on the plenary agenda. In the plenary session, the proposal can be adopted into party policy if it gets enough votes.

The Tories seems to be seizing on a moment when unions are vulnerable amid declining membership and loss of public favour, Woolstencroft said.

Canada’s two largest unions, The Canadians Auto Workers and Communication, Energy and Paper Workers Union, merged into a super-union in September, acknowledging that the labour movement needs more heft if it wants to survive. And the newly created Unifor union wasted no time in declaring its political intentions. At its founding convention, Naomi Klein spoke of ousting Prime Minister Stephen Harper and one of its first acts was to endorse NDP MP Olivia Chow for mayor of Toronto.

Perhaps it is no surprise then that a common thread among the convention proposals is preventing unions from becoming politically involved.

One proposal from Edmonton-Sherwood Park asks the party to amend its labour policy to include the belief that “the government should prevent mandatory dues collected by unions from being diverted to fund political causes unrelated to workplace needs.”

One submitted jointly by Mississauga East-Cooksville and Sudbury says that “union dues paid by members should not be donated by the union to third-party organizations without the consent of the members.”

Many proposals dealt with increasing union transparency, similar to the controversial Bill C-377 that was blocked in the Senate in June. The bill aimed to make it mandatory for unions to file annual public financial statements and has now been sent back to the House.

None of the riding associations were available to comment on their proposals.

New Democrat labour critic Alexandre Boulerice says he has noticed an anti-labour shift in the Conservative caucus, and he believes they are contemplating “right-to-work” legislation.

“The Progressive Conservatives were not anti-union at all,” he said, “But now we can feel that they want to break the backbone of the labour movement in Canada.”

Boulerice believes the Prime Minister’s office intends to whittle away at union rights. He points to Bill C-525, which was introduced in June and would make the union certification process more onerous for federal employees.

Peter Coleman, president of the National Citizens Coalition, believes the Conservatives are sensing a change in public thinking about the role of unions and are acting, through bills such as C-377, to curtail their power.

While some of the convention proposals are “just pie in the sky,” he said, they indicate that Conservatives are more willing at least to discuss anti-union moves, even if they are not likely to be adopted as party policy.

“They throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks and see what the moderate, temperate voices come up with,” he said.

“I do believe there’s a lot of work in the Conservative party at the federal level to get some of these things brought forward.”

Tory anti-environment advocacy protects corporate, not public, interests | Nafeez Ahmed | Environment | theguardian.com

October 26, 2013 10:42 am / Leave a comment

Tory anti-environment advocacy protects corporate, not public, interests | Nafeez Ahmed | Environment | theguardian.com. (source)

Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Telegraph screed supports Cameron’s contempt for green policies at our expense

$Cuadrilla fracking site at Balcombe$

Cuadrilla has doubled the height of its security fences and installed razor wire at its Balcombe site. Photograph: Wpa Pool/Getty Images

Yesterday Jacob Rees-Mogg, member of parliament for North East Somerset, wrote an article in the Telegraph claiming that the fundamental cause of the UK’s “high energy prices” is “climate changealarmism.” His piece coincided with Prime Minister David Cameron‘sannouncement that to tackle rocketing gas and electricity bills he would “roll back” green levies on energy bills and subject Britain’s “Big Six” energy giants to a “competition test.”

Even the Tory’s own lead environmentalist MP, Zac Goldsmith, was appalled. “In 2010, leaders fought to prove they were the greenest”, he said. “Three years on, they’re desperately blaming their own policies on the other. Muppets.”

But Rees-Mogg’s piece illustrates the insidious nature of the anti-environment economic ideology that has been so influential in the Tory party, and that has derailed the potential for meaningful environmental policy. Energy companies have announced prices rises against the background of government regulation and “green taxes”, he writes, because concern over climate change has led to unjustifiable opposition to coal and fracking:

“In the 2010s it is not the price of bread that is falsely and unnecessarily inflated by obstinate politicians but that of energy. There are cheap sources of energy either available or possible but there is a reluctance to use them. Coal is plentiful and provides the least expensive electricity per megawatt, while fracking may provide a boon of shale gas.”

He is wrong on both counts – laughably so. A number of recent scientific studies in major journals such as Fuel, Energy, the International Journal of Coal Geology – to name just a few – have projected that a peak in world coal production is only a few years away, followed by production declines and spiraling prices.

As for fracking, its capacity to provide cheap shale gas has beenquestioned by leading independent experts who point to steep production declines at wells, along with overinflated industry reserve estimates that have led to a “bubble” that could burst in the next five years.

At the core of Rees-Mogg’s obfuscation on energy is an ideology that paints corporations as the key to prosperity for all:

“As the Government has made the price higher so the energy companies put a margin on top. High prices are almost expected.”

But this is also false. The fundamental cause of the high energy prices consistently dampening prospects for economic growth is the peak and plateauing of cheap conventional oil production since around 2005, which has ramped up oil prices and compelled a deepening dependence on increasingly expensive unconventional sources like tar sands, oil shale and shale gas. This is not particularly controversial – even Shell’s CEO has warned that shale gas will not reduce prices, and evidence submitted to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee by Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows that shale gas “will not be a panacea for bringing down gas and electricity bills” as costs will be “50% to 100% higher than in the US.”

Rees-Mogg then flirts unabashedly with climate denialism, arguing that the effect of carbon dioxide emissions on the climate “remains much debated”, and that climate models are inaccurate because it was “computer modelling” that led to the 2008 global banking collapse of 2008. Notwithstanding the obvious fact that climate models are completely different from the quantitative models that justified the reckless debt-expansion behind the global financial crisis, the former are only inaccurate in being too conservative – whereas the latter wererigged by financiers to maximise profits at taxpayer’s expense.

Rees-Mogg’s other case for inaction is that we are not responsible for climate change. Britain emits only “2 per cent” of the world’s CO2. What he ignores here is that the UK is still in the top ten of global emitters – and that if every country decided on inaction because it only contributes by itself a small percentage of emissions, then what we have is a recipe for abject failure.

Rees-Mogg would have us believe he is motivated by the plight of the poor, whom he says are “most particularly” punished as a “matter of choice not of necessity…. This can be stopped by ending the environmentalist obsession and delivering cheap energy.” But one might be forgiven for concluding that his real concern is corporate profiteering. The solution to high energy prices, he says, is “to free the market” – the same “free” market that led to the 2008 crash, the Eurozone crisis, and so on – “not to control prices which will simply reduce supply.”

This is hardly surprising. Rees-Mogg is a founding partner at Somerset Capital Management (SCM), a global asset management fund where hecurrently works as a macro specialist while also being an MP. Among its many investments, SCM specialises in emerging markets, including in the energy industry. Its largest holdings include oil majors such as the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) – which for instance is spearheading multibillion dollar deals to access the North American shale gas market – and Russia’s OJSC Rosneft Oil Company.

According to its interim report published in March this year, the fund pulled out of some energy projects on the basis of declining rates of profitability “due to the rising cost of production”, but viewed CNOOC’s recent ventures to exploit US fracking as “favourable.” In other markets such as India, China and Brazil, economic prospects were mixed as “both domestic consumption and exports put in lacklustre performances.” The overall assessment was uncertain, with the report noting that emerging market economies are “cooling”, and that “The market has periodic rallies but these show no real conviction.”

While Rees-Mogg’s firm profits from fracking abroad, Rees-Mogg himself uses his own parliamentary privilege to advocate fracking at home, while promoting a kind of free market extremism. In a speech last month during a Private Member’s Bill proposing amendments to the Deep Sea Mining (Temporary Provisions) Act 1981, Rees-Mogg reportedly urged for greater deregulation to permit British companies to explore the potential for off-shore and deep sea resources:

“That’s what this is really about: exploring these resources that could add to the wealth not only of the nation but of the globe at large; because as we’ve seen the emergence of the new economies – China, India, Brazil and of Russia – so we have seen demand for resources grow extraordinarily.”

“I would urge the Bill to have a more deregulatory ambition within it”, he added.

“It’s obviously wise to extend it purely for metals to include gas and to include liquids, because there may be all sorts of exciting things at the depths of the sea. There may be endless supplies of gas, there may be oils spurting out as if Saudi Arabia is on the seabed.”

Ironically, these are precisely the sorts of policies that could indirectly benefit corporate players like Somerset Capital Management, its holdings, and its clients in emerging markets and beyond. Indeed, SCM’s own indifference to environmental challenges is plainly stated on its website, where it declares:

“… we makes [sic] no claim to using environmental, social and governance concerns as tenets of ethics in the fashioning of investment returns.”

That might be all quite acceptable in its own context, but when this cavalier attitude becomes evident in public advocacy by our so-called political representatives, it’s time to start asking questions about the extent to which politics is being hijacked in the name of unaccountable corporate power.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed