Ninety-Nine magazine - October 2020

Challenging the power of the

Issue 18 - October 2020

Climate Justice Now Global inequality and the climate crisis

Also in this issue Stop financing fossil fuels How trade deals drive climate breakdown Teaching race, migration, empire

ISSUE 18: October 2020 03 Campaign news 06 Global news 08 Stop financing fossil fuels

Climate justice is the fight of our lives

10 Trade and climate 13 Global Justice Now supporters 14 Teaching race, migration, empire 16 The case for climate justice 18 Coronavirus in Kenya 19 Reviews

Ninety-Nine is published three times a year by Global Justice Now Global Justice Now campaigns for a world where resources are controlled by the many, not the few.

We champion social movements and propose democratic alternatives to the rule of the 1%. Our activists and groups in towns and cities around the UK work in solidarity with those at the sharp end of poverty and injustice.

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Dorothy Guerrero Head of policy In order for the Covid-19 recovery to be just and green, we need to ensure that the world doesn’t go ‘back to normal’. For too many people, ‘normal’ has meant death.

Glasgow will host the 26th UN Conference of Parties on climate change (COP26) in 2021. This gives us a focus and a responsibility to educate people about the true nature of climate politics. Climate change is built into the global economy, and without major transformation, we have no hope of limiting the damage.

The COP process has failed to deal with this reality, because it isn’t, in practice, about states negotiating on an equal footing. Egged on by corporate lobbying, COP reflects the power dynamics which govern our world. Too often this means a handful of former colonial powers trying to maintain their economic dominance while dodging their responsibility for global warming.

That doesn’t mean we can ignore it, or accept ‘that’s how things are’. The COP is a space where we must campaign for a very different type of politics.

So over the next year we will mobilise for COP, using the opportunity to explain the changes we need to the public, and countering the power of big business over the debate.

The UK is not the global leader that it pretends to be.

We must make this clear as COP26 comes to Glasgow.

We need to show how the UK is not the global leader that it pretends to be. It is the world’s fifth worst greenhouse gas emitter, and hides more emissions by ‘offshoring’ them. Its use of public funds to support fossil fuel expansion in the global south must end, as Daniel Willis argues on pages 8-9. We must also counter the narrative that a few tweaks to the global trade system will unleash a green revolution, as Nick Dearden points out on pages 10-12. Climate change is hard-wired into our 'profit first' economy and only radical change will stop that, as our new climate justice booklet explains (see pages 16-17).

In this issue we also consider the Black Lives Matter protests. This might seem unconnected, but it isn’t. Just as the dehumanisation of people made the horror of slavery possible, so it allows us to turn a blind eye today to the suffering being experienced by those on the front lines of climate change.

Unless we can make their voices central, we will fail to pursue sufficiently transformative policies.

So we have much work ahead – but it is the fight of our lives. Glasgow will simply be the latest chapter.

CAMPAIGN NEWS

Corporations and nationalism impeding vaccine search As trials for potential Covid-19 vaccines progress around the world, rich countries have been competing to buy up advanced supplies. This scramble to hoard vaccines will deplete global stocks, leaving poorer countries without access to a future vaccine. This is not only an equity and solidarity issue, it is also a public health problem. Leaving most of the world without an effective vaccine will delay our ability to end this global pandemic.

Global Justice Now has been urging the UK government to stop fueling vaccine nationalism and instead to join the World Health Organisation’s global technology pool. This aims to overcome patent barriers and facilitate the sharing of knowledge and science to ensure that all countries can openly access the health products that they need to tackle Covid-19. Launched in June, the pharmaceutical industry has snubbed the initiative and is instead going ahead with business as usual.

The US company, Moderna, has already said that it will not offer a zeroprofit price for its vaccine and instead it has been reported it could charge up to $60 for a vaccine course. This vaccine has had substantial public funding and companies should not be profiteering during this pandemic.

Thousands of people have backed our call to Moderna to lower its price and to join the WHO’s global pool.

In July, a trial patient from the Oxford University Covid-19 vaccine trials approached us to support our campaign. Luigi Ceccaroni has written

an open letter to Oxford University and British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, who will make the vaccine, to ask them to publish their secret deal and to share this publicly-funded vaccine with the world through the WHO global pool. Thousands of Global Justice Now supporters have co-signed Luigi’s letter to help build pressure to ensure © David Mirzoeff that publiclyfunded vaccines reach all who need them.

Email Moderna and co-sign Luigi’s letter via: globaljustice.org.uk/covid-19

© Free the Vaccine coalition

Free the Vaccine protest in London in July to demand potential Covid-19 vaccines are patent-free.

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CAMPAIGN NEWS

Opposition to the US trade deal is deepening and broadening

© Karl Nesh/Shutterstock

Partial win on US trade papers as pressure builds against deal The movement to stop the high risk US trade deal has grown rapidly over the summer, as concerns over the deal continue to mount. Four rounds of negotiations have taken place so far, with officials trying to negotiate at speed ahead of the US presidential election. Global Justice Now has been working to push the secret negotiations into the light, as well as highlight the full range of threats from the deal.

In September, we recorded a partial success in our legal challenge over hundreds of pages of blacked out trade documents we received following freedom of information requests. The case brought together evidence from academics, trade negotiators and even a former civil servant, who characterised the British government’s approach as “at the far end of the secrecy spectrum”. The court demanded that the Department for International Trade release more information about its trade talks, though

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it also gave significant leeway for much critical information to continue to be denied. However, the judge was damning about the government’s lack of interest in transparency, accusing it of showing a “clear inability to provide answers on many points of detail”.

This was an important step forward, and adds to growing pressure on parliament to reform the rules. Next step is the House of Lords, where amendments to the Trade Bill are due to be discussed as Ninety-Nine goes to press, setting the stage for another parliamentary battle on this issue.

Meanwhile, the US negotiations themselves have continued to be highly contentious, with farmers across the UK and even the Daily Mail arguing

against the deal’s likely attack on food standards. The US deal can help expose the inequities of trade rules more generally, and beating this deal puts us in an excellent position to force a transformation of UK trade policy. A

day of action against the US deal (coronavirus allowing), will take place on 24 October.

Get involved in the day of action at: globaljustice.org.uk/24oct

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab is now in charge of all UK aid spending. © Pippa Fowles / No10 Downing Street

Covid-19 could lead to wave of claims in corporate courts

CAMPAIGN NEWS

For several years Global Justice Now has been campaigning against corporate courts – the investor-state dispute settlement system embedded in hundreds of trade and investment deals around the world. We fear there is likely to be a new wave of corporate court cases as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Government actions to deal with the pandemic are unprecedented in recent years. The need for these actions to save lives and protect jobs is clear, but from a very narrow perspective, they could lead to corporate court claims. Law firms have been advising clients on the potential, with reports that this could be the ‘beginning of a boom’. Peru and Mexico have already been threatened with possible cases.

We took a lead in coordinating a global civil society letter in the summer signed by 630 organisations from over 90 countries calling on governments to suspend and restrict the use of corporate courts in light of the pandemic, and in the longer term to get rid of ISDS completely.

Read more: globaljustice.org.uk/ISDS-letter

Foreign Office aid takeover will accelerate corporate hijack

© ingae/Shutterstock

The long rumoured ‘merger’ of the Department for International Development into the Foreign Office was completed in September, despite mass public opposition including over 200 civil society organisations and 15,000 Global Justice Now supporters. When the plans were announced suddenly in June, we argued in the media that it was “a terrible decision that takes us back two decades to when UK aid was subservient to the interests of British business”.

Control of UK aid spending now lies with the new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which officially opened on 2 September.

As our own research has highlighted, DfID’s record on development in recent years was far from perfect. Increasing amounts of aid has been contributing to the privatisation of public services, exacerbating the climate crisis (see pages 8-9) and going into corporate coffers. But the aid record of the Foreign Office, which already managed the highly controversial Prosperity Fund and Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, is even worse. Our latest briefing, 'The Future of Aid', looks at the kinds of shocking projects that we can expect to receive more funding in the coming years – unless we stop them.

Read the briefing at globaljustice.org.uk/future-of-aid 2020 Ninety-Nine 5

GLOBAL NEWS MOVEMENT NEWS

Black Lives Matter protests cascade around the world

© Felipe Beltrame/NurPhoto

A protester with a sign saying ‘racism is a virus’ in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in June.

A global wave of Black Lives Matter protests, sparked by video footage of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May, has started a renewed conversation about action to oppose systemic racism not just in the United States, but in countries across the world.

In the UK, protests have highlighted the UK’s record on policing of black

communities, with the prominent slogan ‘The UK is not innocent’. Further demands have focused on education and the curriculum (see pages 14-15), ending the hostile environment for migrants, and exposing the unequal impacts of Covid-19.

The toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June also prompted reappraisals of many

prominent statues glorifying British figures involved in the slave trade and British colonialism. Sadly too much of the global economy today replicates the injustices of colonialism, not least the debt system and global trade rules, which perpetuate poverty and inequality. If Black Lives Matter, we also need a radically different global economic system.

Anger over new IMF shock doctrine in Ecuador An international group of academics has raised concerns over attempts by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to use the Covid-19 pandemic to enforce further austerity and neoliberal reforms on Ecuador. The letter, published in the Guardian in September, argues that conditions attached to IMF loans have led the government to “prioritise advance

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payment of foreign debt servicing over basic care for its citizens”.

The South American country has the 7th highest death toll per capita in the world, with a collapsing public health system and morgues unable to accommodate the dead. This has exacerbated an already dangerous political and economic crisis which saw protests erupt last October

against the neoliberal reforms enacted by President Lenín Moreno.

Those reforms (including significant cuts to public health) were related to a 2019 loan given to Ecuador by the IMF, with further ‘structural adjustment’ conditions attached to another emergency loan given to Ecuador in May this year.

GLOBAL MOVEMENT GLOBAL NEWS

NEWS SHORTS Refugees in Lesbos demand freedom

South African movements adopt Climate Justice Charter

The Greek government faced mounting demands in September from refugees in Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos after devastating fires and a Covid-19 outbreak. More than 12,000 people have been living in the camp, which was originally built for 3,000, as European governments argue over who can accept them.

A bottom-up participatory process, including movement consultations and online meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic, has seen South African movements generate a wide-ranging Climate Justice Charter, which was adopted in late August through a mass online assembly.

On 16 October, climate justice movements together with allies in the country will demand the South African parliament adopt the Charter through a national day of action to end hunger,

Australian teenagers sue government for coal plans

A class action launched by eight teenagers “on behalf of young people everywhere” sought an injunction in September to stop the Australian government approving an extension to the Vickery coal mine in Whitehaven, New South Wales, arguing it will break their duty of care for young people by exacerbating climate change.

thirst and climate harm. The Charter is the result of more than six years of campaigning and discussions and benefitted from grassroots input from water-stressed communities, the media, trade unions, faith-based communities, youth, climate scientists, academics, women’s organisations, environmental and social justice organisations, as well as think pieces by leading activists.

Read it at: www.safsc.org.za/climate-justice-charter

Czech climate protests target coal

Bolivia blockades demand end to election delays

Indigenous groups and trade unions established widespread roadblocks and labour stoppages across Bolivia in July and August in protest at repeated delays to presidential elections, now due to take place in mid-October. The interim government led by Jeanine Añez took power last November after former president Evo Morales stood down amid disputed allegations of vote rigging.

© Peter Tkac/Flickr

Activists occupy the Vršany coal mine in the Czech Republic in September.

Climate justice activists in the Czech Republic took part in a weekend of action against coal in early September in the biggest Czech mining region of north Bohemia, near the Czech-German-Polish border. Hundreds of activists occupied the Vršany mine, which supplies the nearby Počerady power plant, the dirtiest power plant in the country, demanding the government imposes appropriate limits on emissions and chanting “We are the limits”.

The Czech government has recently

set up a coal commission to debate a phase-out of the fuel, but it has been criticised for being stacked with coal industry representatives and sympathetic politicians, with no climate scientists or community representatives. The activists are demanding a just transition to a sustainable energy system, including “a fair transformation of coal regions, dignified and clean jobs for people working in the coal industry and a healthy environment and sustainable future for everyone”.

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CLIMATE

Stop funding fossil fuels Despite its climate rhetoric, the UK continues to give billions of pounds of finance to fossil fuels overseas – including aid money. But it’s finally feeling the heat, writes DANIEL WILLIS Left: Boris Johnson is under pressure to end all UK funding for fossil fuels ahead of COP26.

Right: The Global Climate Strike in Johannesburg, South Africa, September 2019.

Time after time, the role of obscure UK public finance institutions in fueling the climate emergency overseas has been exposed. Figures from UK Export Finance (UKEF), which uses public money to support British businesses exporting overseas, have shown that 97% of its energy support went to fossil fuel projects between 2010 and 2017. Now a new Global Justice Now analysis highlights the government’s use of the UK aid budget to exacerbate climate change, with £668 million of UK aid given to fossil fuel infrastructure since the Paris Agreement was signed.

Despite this, the government has so far resisted calls to end this fossil fuel support, while trying to give the impression that it

is taking the problem seriously. In January, 90% of the energy deals made at the UKAfrica Investment Summit were for fossil fuel projects, despite the Prime Minister pledging to “support African countries in their transition to cleaner energy”.

The UK development bank CDC Group announced in July that it would stop financing fossil fuels – only for their strategy to reveal that they would still invest in oil and gas in some circumstances. Now it is rumoured that the PM, embarrassed by increased scrutiny of the UK’s climate credentials during its presidency of COP26, will soon announce an end to fossil fuel support via UKEF – but this might not include gas-fired power stations.

© Andrew Pa

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CLIMATE Nonetheless, sustained pressure from civil society organisations and activists is working. After being derided for signing off on UKEF’s latest investment, a $1 billion loan to a disastrous gas project in Mozambique, it seems that Boris Johnson may be on the brink of accepting our demands and ending the UK’s fossil fuel support before the COP climate talks take place in Glasgow next year. The devil, however, will be in the detail.

THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM Understanding the complete picture of how UK public finance supports fossil fuels in the global south is complex, because it happens via so many channels. Broadly speaking, the

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signed alone. About two-thirds of this support was given by CDC Group, the government’s development bank, including investments in gas power in Bangladesh, Ghana and Cameroon, oil burning power plants in Guinea and Kenya, and infrastructure for the transport of fossil fuels in Gabon and South Africa.

UKEF, however, has given even more money to climate-busting projects, amounting to £3.3 billion in the years 2016-19. What’s more, 96% of the gifts and hospitality accepted by UKEF staff in the past two decades were from fossil fuel corporations, including some of the world’s biggest polluters such as Gazprom and Saudi Aramco.

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two areas of interest for campaigners have been support given by UKEF and the multiple forms of support given via the UK aid budget.

Our analysis found that £668 million of the UK aid budget had been given to fossil fuels in the four years since the Paris Agreement was

DEVIL IN THE DETAIL At the time of writing, reports suggest that an announcement on UKEF is imminent ahead of COP26. However, campaigners will be paying close attention to any such announcement to ensure that loopholes and exclusions do not allow damaging

investments to continue.

One possibility is that investments in gas power will still be allowed. In the past, the government has argued that gas is required to expand energy access across the global south, while also being cleaner than coal. But this is hotly contested by climate experts, who argue that gas power will lock in high carbon emissions for years to come. Put simply, gas power will make the task of limiting global warming to 1.5OC impossible. Research by CAFOD and the Overseas Development Institute has shown that renewable energy is anyway the most costeffective route to providing energy for two-thirds of the world’s population.

But even if the government does commit to end UK financing of fossil fuels ahead of COP26, that will only be part of the solution.

There is also a need to rapidly step up climate finance, not just for the necessary just transition to renewable energy, but also to compensate for the loss and damage suffered by frontline communities and for the historical emissions by major polluters in the global north (especially the UK).

Increasingly there is support for a “Global Green New Deal” which tackles global inequalities and climate crisis simultaneously. Laying the groundwork for this platform and rapidly stepping up climate finance commitments from global north nations must be a key goal for COP26 next year. Ending fossil fuel finance won’t achieve this by itself, but it is an important step on the road to justice.

Daniel Willis is campaigns and policy manager on aid and climate at Global Justice Now.

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TRADE

How trade deals fuel climate breakdown The kind of changes to our economic model needed to tackle the climate crisis are completely at odds with the model of corporate globalisation embedded in global trade deals. As we prepare for the postponed COP26 climate summit, we need to bring together these two struggles, writes NICK DEARDEN. © B ec ke

We are living through a climate emergency.

If we don’t get a grip on this crisis, our future on this planet is in jeopardy. But this is not simply a question of individuals changing their lifestyle. Climate change is driven onwards by the rules of the global economy. Trade rules and trade deals have played a significant role in exacerbating this crisis.

At one level, the very nature of trade liberalisation is problematic. The production and transportation of goods is largely dependent on fossil fuels. Promoting the movement of more and more goods around the world has meant environmental destruction. It has exacerbated the extraction and burning of fossil fuels on an unprecedented scale. The free trade Economist Intelligence Unit admits: “Universal tariff reduction has increased trade in carbon intensive and environmentally destructive products, such as fossil fuels and timber, more than it has for environmental goods. In some cases [free trade agreements] can also shrink the ‘policy space’ available to countries to pursue environmental goals.”

If we took a fundamentally different approach to trade deals, then trade could potentially help disperse renewable technologies and carbon-efficient

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production methods – but at present trade rules actually ban many measures to encourage the spread of green technologies.

We also need to keep in mind that renewable technologies in themselves can only do so much. A totally renewable economy based on neverending growth would still quickly exhaust the world’s metals and minerals, and exacerbate global inequalities. Replacing every petrol car on the planet with an electric car would not in itself create a sustainable or fair global economy. The only answer is to fundamentally rethink our economies, including trade liberalisation.

Damage to the environment is hard wired into the current trade system. The idea that trade liberalisation is a solution to climate change is very wide of the mark.

©

Protesting the climate consequences of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the TransPacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement. © National Maritime Museum, London

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© Juliu s Cruickshank/ Wiki

TRADE

A US DEAL WOULD EXACERBATE THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY

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emissions. Some modern trade deals even encourage trade in dirty fossil fuels.

This is notable in recent US deals like the renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and A trade deal with Mexico (now known as USMCA), which a climate denying makes it cheaper for oil corporations to leader like Donald export more Canadian tar sands oil. The Trump poses a preliminary US deal with China requires very specific and China to import US fossil fuels. And Canada urgent challenge used the negotiations for the EU-Canada for Britain’s attempt deal CETA to insist that the EU should import to reduce carbon more tar sands oil, overriding a regulation emissions. After that would have prevented that. all, the US is due to Even when a trade deal does not withdraw from the specifically promote fossil fuels, so called agreement this year.

This matters for the ‘energy neutrality’ clauses can stop countries from treating fossil fuel energy same reason that differently to renewable energy. That low food standards means, for example, it would not be matter: competing possible to against goods made to charge lower lower standards, whether tariffs on they are animal welfare or 'Energy neutrality' renewable carbon emission standards, energy or gives an advantage to those clauses in trade punitive employing lower standards, deals can stop ones on fossil enabling them to produce fuels. One cheaper goods at the countries from leaked energy expense of the environment. treating fossil fuel chapter of the But it now shelved doesn’t energy differently US-EU deal TTIP end there. had just such a to renewable Because rule included. modern energy.

To tackle trade the climate deals, crisis, we need especially between strong binding regulation that can shift us developed countries, out of decades of inertia.

Yet trade rules are as much about are written to prioritise voluntary selfregulations as they are regulation by corporations – something the reducing tariffs. As with US is particularly keen on, but exactly the the contentious issue approach that has resulted in continued of chlorine-washed inaction. chicken, this means Campaigners are already aware of a trade deal would the downward pressure a US trade deal directly interfere with would put on food standards. The way we regulatory efforts produce our food also has a big impact on to reduce carbon Canadians/Flic kr

© Cou ncil of

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TRADE international climate change. Emissions from agriculture climate account for between 19% and 29% of total obligations. emissions. The increasing trend towards It’s highly industrial-style food production is a major likely that driver of climate change, involving more any trade animals, more chemicals, more monocrop deal with plantations. Further fuelling this trend will the US would hamper our ability to halt climate change. increase Meanwhile, Trump is taking an axe to carbon chemical regulation in the US, with some emissions. The of this deregulation certain to affect the government climate. has admitted Finally there’s the fear that a corporate as much, court, or investor state dispute settlements and named mechanism (ISDS) will be included in the US ‘energy’ as deal. Such courts have been regularly used one of the to challenge environmental protections. likely growth Canada has been a particular target, for sectors instance being challenged under NAFTA under a for trying to remove dangerous chemicals deal. Leaked papers Corporate courts, or investorfrom petrol, and from the US talks underline state dispute settlement (ISDS), are regularly used to for placing a how seriously this deal Corporations challenge environmental moratorium on threatens the fight to protections. have even started fracking while halt climate change – US assessing its safety. negotiators told Britain challenging In 2008, a that it’s not even possible governments in corporation called to mention climate Bilcon brought change during the talks, ‘corporate courts’ a case against and that it won’t be for phasing out Canada after mentioned in the final the government deal, saying climate coal power in refused to grant change is a “lightning rod line with their an extension issue” for them. to a quarry Stopping a US trade international project when an deal would make a environmental obligations. key contribution to the review found that climate struggle. In the it would cause significant damage. Bilcon UK especially, we must bring these two “Brilliantly written claimed $300 million and even argued that agendas together in the months and years and lucidly argu ed” Jason Hick el Canada should never have carried out the ahead. review. Although Bilcon won, one arbitrator Nick Dearden is director of Global Justice Now. disagreed with the finding, stating: “a chill will be imposed on environmental review panels which will be concerned not to This is an excerpt from Nick Dearden’s book give too much weight to socio economic The truth Trade Secrets: The truth about the US trade considerations or other considerations of about the deal and how we can stop it, published the human environment in case the result is US trade deal in August 2020. Read online, download a claim for damages under NAFTA.” and how we the ebook or order in paperback at: More recently, corporations have even can stop it globaljustice.org.uk/trade-secrets started challenging governments for

TRADE SECRETS

phasing out coal power in line with their

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NICK DEARDEN

Thank you for making a difference With your support, our campaigns have been able to adapt and thrive during the pandemic.

Pharmaceuticals Heidi Chow Pharma campaigner

When it became clear that the world was facing a global pandemic, we immediately refocused our campaign to fight for fair access to any future Covid-19 vaccine. An effective vaccine will be crucial to ending this pandemic but we cannot allow the usual big pharma monopolies or nationalistic governments to prevent fair distribution of vaccines across the world. People like you have played a big part in pressing our demands on the government and shaping the debate.

We have also been calling for the secret deal between Oxford University and drug company AstraZeneca to be made public and for their publicly-funded vaccine to be free of any monopolies. A massive thanks to all of our members and supporters for making all of this possible.

Climate Daniel Willis Climate and aid campaigner Despite the postponement

of the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow until 2021, we have continued to expose the impact of the global financial system on the climate crisis. Our members and supporters have played a crucial role by holding virtual meetings and writing letters to your MPs on the UK's role in financing fossil fuel projects overseas.

This hard work has begun to have an impact. Despite signing off a $1 billion loan to a new gas project in Mozambique over the summer, the government looks increasingly likely to stop giving financial support to fossil fuels overseas before COP26 – a big campaign win if we can get it over the line! But we need to keep the pressure on to push the UK to take an ambitious approach to COP26 overall.

Aid The past few months have been a turbulent time for UK aid. While there was good news internationally that the World Bank is freezing its private education investments in response to Covid-19, in June the government announced the merger of the Department for International Development with the Foreign Office. We have been able to highlight our fears that this move will accelerate the corporate hijack of UK aid.

We must now turn towards building a movement for a new, radical approach to

development and global solidarity. With the vital support of our members we have already begun this work, so a sincere thank you to all those who have written to your MP, shared social media content, hosted local meetings and more.

Trade

Jean Blaylock Trade campaigner

To stop the high-risk US trade deal, we need people all across the country to speak out and take action.

A public outcry can force the government to u-turn. Our members and supporters are at the heart of this – it’s people like you who give voice and life to our campaigns and take them out into the world.

We're working in a changed world, and we're all figuring out how to deal with that. Earlier this summer, we held our first ever online activist gathering.

More than a hundred and fifty people managed to have productive discussions about how to campaign on trade in new socially distant ways, and came up with creative ideas.

The willingness and commitment from thousands of people to tackle new challenges is truly inspiring.

EDUCATION

Teaching Race, Migration and Empire Transforming how we’re taught about the past has emerged as a key UK demand following the Black Lives Matter protests.

KIMBERLY MCINTOSH on what needs to change. suggestions. At primary school, the only statutory topics related to migration are the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Scots and Vikings. At Key Stage 3, only the Holocaust is compulsory.

Flexibility for teachers is a good thing. But there are institutional challenges with this curriculum structure that limit the scope for change. Firstly, it makes it difficult to track what is being taught in schools. In 2014, the Department for Education admitted it didn’t know how many schools were teaching Britain’s involvement in the slave trade.

Second, teachers tend to teach the history they’ve been taught at school and university.

What they don’t know, they don’t teach. Many of us who went to school in England may remember learning about the Henrys but little else. And there are few training opportunities to assist teachers who might want to teach migration and empire but do not feel confident doing so.

In our survey of teachers, 78% wanted training on teaching migration and 71% on teaching empire.

THE CURRICULUM: AN INCOMPLETE STORY To be taught widely, these subjects need to Migration and empire are central to Britain’s be made a compulsory part of the curriculum national story. Yet despite their centrality to our at Key Stage 3. And to ensure it’s done well, history, the teaching of race, migration and high quality training and support for teachers empire is a lottery in schools, leaving the story we must be in place before the changes are made. tell incomplete.

We can learn a lot from the University College Until the 1960s, the curriculum implicitly London Centre for Holocaust Education, which supported the merits of empire and remained provides a national programme of Initial Teacher evasive on its exploitative or violent realities for Education for early-career teachers, as well as colonised people. Further, how race, migration online materials and resources. and empire have been taught in schools The fight for racial justice in the present requires and represented in textbooks has shifted with an understanding of our past. The global changes in government. inequalities of today, and the racist beliefs Today, the National Curriculum states that that were used to justify much of them, have students must learn how Britain has influenced not gone away. Now is the time for a global and been influenced by the wider world as reimagining. But before we move forward and part of the history curriculum before age build back better, let’s learn from our past. fourteen. There is a lot of flexibility, which allows teachers to cover Black British histories, migration Kimberly McIntosh is Senior Policy Officer at the Runnymede Trust. and empire. These are, however, optional 14 Ninety-Nine 2020

© Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images

The global resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests has renewed interest in the movement and its demands. As a result, calls for reform of the school curriculum have gained greater urgency. Youth-led grassroots groups are at the forefront, like All Black Lives UK, which organised protests in London, Manchester, and most famously Bristol, where the statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down and pushed into the harbour. They demand that “a historically accurate account of colonialism and Black British history is taught in schools.”

At the Runnymede Trust, we’ve been working on this issue for over a decade. Energised by the momentum that the toppling of Colston’s statue spurred, we joined with others to start a new campaign, #TeachRaceMigrationEmpire, to give tangible actions for allies who agree that teaching these histories is vital. But what’s actually on the curriculum and what needs to change?

EDUCATION Right: A Black Lives Matter protest in London in 2016. Campaigners are demanding the latest wave of protests leads to changes in the way Britain's history is taught.

ACTIONS FOR ALLIES GET EDUCATED To fill in any gaps in your knowledge, there is a plethora of open access resources now available online, including crowdsourced free materials for teachers, students and researchers on race, migration and empire at tinyurl.com/runnymede-resources. The Our Migration Story website features the stories of the generations of migrants who came to and shaped Britain: ourmigrationstory.org.uk.

Books such as David Olusoga’s Black and British: A Forgotten History, Colin Grant’s Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors: The Untold Story and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race are a good way to learn about Black British histories.

WRITE TO YOUR MP AND THE SCHOOLS MINISTER Ask your local MP to call for empire, colonialism, migration and Black British histories to be statutory topics in the history curriculum, with high quality training provided for teachers.

WRITE TO YOUR SCHOOL GOVERNORS In the current National Curriculum, schools have the flexibility to choose these topics. Ask your local primary school to include them at Key Stage 2, and your local secondary school to include them at Key Stage 3 and to select similar GCSE and A Level units.

Template letters are at tinyurl.com/ runnymede-actions.

FOLLOW AND USE THE HASHTAG Share any action you take using the hashtag #TeachRaceMigrationEmpire on social media and follow it for updates.

2020 Ninety-Nine 15

CLIMATE

System change, not climate change With climate breakdown threatening to exacerbate many of the inequalities of our world, it is more important than ever to put people at the heart of our vision. Global Justice Now’s new booklet sets out the case for climate justice.

Order your copy: globaljustice.org.uk/climatebooklet Illustrations by Jacob V Joyce Graphic design by Matt Bonner

Š Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

16 Ninety-Nine 2020

CLIMATE XXX

2020 Ninety-Nine 17

COVID-19

Pandemic inequality NJOKI NJEHU on the impact of Covid-19 in Kenya, and how successive World Bank and IMF interventions have left people more vulnerable.

Covid-19 has affected every country, but for countries like Kenya, the impact comes on the heels of decades of restructuring and austerity.

In fact, the very two things that you really need to fight Covid-19 – access to water to wash your hands, and access to healthcare if you get infected – are the two things that for decades the World Bank and the IMF have insisted that countries in the global south must decimate, by limiting how much governments could invest in them and pushing their privatisation model.

arguments we have been making for a long time.

However, the Kenyan government has refused to take the debt relief that is on offer, saying it wants to keep access to capital markets open. For what purpose? Whose interests are you serving by saying that?

Now, we find ourselves very vulnerable as we try to respond to the pandemic. Covid-19 also comes after locust infestations and flooding this year. It is a terrible situation.

I am part of an autonomous women’s network, working around women’s land rights, gender justice and food rights. We work in the community – being able to meet © mjb/Flickr face to face is essential, and of course that has not been possible.

On the ground, we are staying in touch and responding to everyday basic needs people have, whether that is water service, food packages, sanitiser or sanitary towels for young girls who are out of school.

We are also campaigning on the structural issues as part of the Fight Inequality Alliance. We have seen policies and proposals that we have had as progressives, which six months ago would have been laughed out of policy conversations, being put on the table. We have seen the G20 offer a debt moratorium – we can talk about the quality of it and what it doesn’t do, but these are

18 Ninety-Nine 2020

Testing for Covid-19 here has been very expensive – at one point it was $100 per person (it has come down, but not completely). We are calling for free testing for everyone who needs it, and free treatment as well.

We need to remember that globally, we are only as safe and as strong as the most vulnerable amongst us.

Njoki Njehû is a grassroots organiser with organisations including Natural Justice, UAF Africa and Daughters Of Mumbi and Pan-African coordinator for the Fight Inequality Alliance.

She was interviewed as part of Global Justice Now’s ‘Southern perspectives on the coronavirus pandemic’ interview series, see globaljustice.org.uk/pandemic-south.

REVIEWS

Reviews TRADE WARS ARE CLASS WARS Matthew C Klein and Michael Pettis Yale University Press, 2020 Donald Trump sees trade as a zero-sum game: I win when you lose. While misunderstanding how trade actually works, Trump’s strategy is not irrational.

It convinces the American public that China (not Trump) is the source of all of their problems, and it helps Trump bully other countries into giving in to his unreasonable demands.

AZADI: FREEDOM, FASCISM, FICTION Arundhati Roy Penguin, 2020 I once said to a friend that reading anything by Arundhati Roy feels like a simultaneous punch to the stomach and the warmest hug. This collection of essays is no different.

Reflecting on the meaning of freedom (azadi) in a world of growing fascism, Roy provides her shocking (and beautifully penned) commentary. From the violent stifling of Kashmiri struggles for independence from Indian occupation to mass protests against Hindu nationalism, these words are not written to appease. Every line brings a horrendous realisation of the barriers to freedom. These are the punches.

But through snippets of her fictional writing you begin to imagine how it could be different. ‘The Pandemic Is a Portal’, written as coronavirus halted life as we know it, is a rallying call for hope and resilience. This pandemic “is a gateway between one world and the next”. We must be "ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it".

And there's the hug.

Radhika Patel

Klein and Pettis’ book helps activists see through this strategy. Even though they occasionally fall into an anti-China narrative themselves, a sign of how entrenched this position is even on the American left, their starting point is extremely helpful, namely that the vast problems with the global economy are

generated by enormous inequality within countries, be they the USA or China. The trade system has as much to do with tax dodging, corporate power and financialisation as with traditional trade in goods, and the book points to the transformational national policies necessary to generate a more stable and equal international economy.

Nick Dearden

LESS IS MORE: HOW DEGROWTH WILL SAVE THE WORLD Jason Hickel William Heinemann, 2020 When New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Arden, announced that her government would deprioritise economic growth in favour of improving wellbeing, she generated considerable excitement. As Jason Hickel lays out in Less is More, economic growth is not only driving us ever closer to the breakdown of the natural systems on which we depend, but beyond a certain level it actually adds nothing to human wellbeing, and can even reduce it.

Yet while Arden’s new government spending priorities are certainly welcome, there’s a reason why it has been anathema to reject growth among mainstream politicians for many decades. As Hickel eloquently

explains, our economic system is hard-wired for growth not by accident, but because it is how the powerful accumulate wealth. The change we need, then, is more fundamental.

Hickel’s alternative is ‘radical abundance’ – redistributing income and investing in public goods, while reducing the material throughput of the economy. It’s a clear and compelling case for a post-growth economy.

James O’Nions

“This book demonstrates with clarity and authority why trade deals matter to all of us: it’s not only our social and environmental standards which are at stake, but the nature of our democracy itself. Read it, then take action.”

Caroline Lucas MP

“This book explains in painstaking detail how the proposed trade deal means the transformation of the the UK economy into a mirror image of that of the United States.”

Walden Bello, author, Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash

“Brilliantly written and lucidly argued, this book is the most important thing you’ll read about the US trade deal, by Britain’s leading expert on the topic.”

Jason Hickel, economic anthropologist and author of The Divide

“I have long placed my trust in Nick Dearden’s sound analyses and forensic examination of trade deals. My hope is that he becomes your trusted guide too.”

Ann Pettifor, award-winning economist and author of The Case for the Green New Deal

Paperback | ebook | web | PDF

globaljustice.org.uk/trade-secrets