 First of all, thank you to Shirar for coming and joining us today. We will appreciate taking time to come and discuss these very important issues with us. I think it is an important issue. There is often an unfair criticism made of Marxist that all we care about is discussing the economy and revolution and class struggles and things like that. As we have discussed over the course of this weekend, Marxism is a very broad set of ideas that looks at the broader, wider questions, and I think the environment is one of the most important questions. It is the future of the planet and humanity. In fact, we can apply a Marxist analysis to the question environment to help us understand the problem and the solution. Actually, the lessons we learn from looking at economic crises, from looking at the class struggles going on today, I think actually help us understand how to analyse and solve the environmental problems. What we can definitely see for sure so far is that capitalism has been completely unable to solve environmental questions, particularly obviously the enormous issue of climate change, which is the focus of today's discussion. I would say not only can capitalism not solve these things, but it is actually really responsible for them in the first place. First of all, we should say what we mean by capitalism. Capitalism, from a Marxist perspective, is a system of private ownership over the technology and the means of production in society. It is a system where basically production is for profit rather than for social needs, where everything is left to the market to decide, the anarchy of the market. There is no overall plan of what is produced, of how we produce, and really it is this anarchy, this competition that forces the different capitalists, despite the best of intentions they may have or what their personal morality is. Despite their individual characteristic, it forces all the capitalists, Marx points out, in capital, to cut their costs at all costs, to drive down not just wages and living standards, but obviously get rid of any regulations, any standards that get in the way of the profits. It is a real race to the bottom really, not only in terms of living standards, but obviously environmental conditions also. So far we see today that the market mechanisms, the attempts to find a solution within capitalism have completely failed. The attempt to commodify carbon and turn carbon dioxide and emissions into a commodity themselves. You have had the complete collapse of trading schemes like the EU emissions trading scheme, where they have attempted to turn carbon dioxide into a tradable commodity. On the one hand there was a massive oversupply of carbon credits because of lobbying and pressure by big business, but on the other hand the recession caused a massive slump in demand and basically the price of these carbon credits collapsed and they have become basically completely worthless and meaningless. Again shows you the anarchy of the market really unable to solve these problems. At the same time I would say we see a complete failure of basically international leaders to be able to do anything. We are constantly meeting at these global climate summits where you fly across the world emitting carbon dioxide to get there, sit in nice air conditioned rooms and then waffle away producing a lot of hot air in the process. All they ever really seem to end up doing is agreeing that they need to agree on agreeing sometime in the future and then when they come to actually try and make a decision they end up disagreeing over how they are actually going to do this. So you see nothing really come of this and I think a lot of people in the climate change movement today can see the complete impotence of these political leaders to address something that is an international problem. All of these leaders ultimately I would say are tied down by one of the fundamental limits of capitalism which is the nation state, the fact that all these different countries are trying to basically protect the profits of their own individual capitalist and trying to export the crisis, not only the economic crisis but the environmental crisis elsewhere, make others pay for the environmental crisis. So you see people talking about how carbon emissions have been reduced in Britain since the early 90s but a large part of that is basically moving production elsewhere and then blaming those countries actually for being high polluted such as China obviously being the obvious case. We pay countries like Brazil or Indonesia to stop chopping down their trees but only so that the main capitalist powers here can carry on polluting. In other words what we have is really an international problem but a barrier of the nation state that means that it can't resolve these very problems. Nation states haven't always existed we should point out, they were a creation of capitalism and it's the creation of nation states to basically their role was to protect and it still is to this day to protect the profits of their own capitalist and if you ever think that globalization has gotten rid of this problem then just ask yourself in 2008 what did the different political leaders do? They basically saved the local capitalists, the big bankers, the big car companies, all of these came running to the protection of the local state and government in order to bail them out. But not only do we see the failure of the market, we also see even the failure of the attempts for governments on a capitalist basis on a top down kind of Keynesian basis if you like to try and resolve the problems. You see green deal politics not really taking anything forwards, Keynesian style measures of taxation spending regulation in order to promote green industries and green jobs and so far this is not really taking off in any meaningful way. The reason is that these kinds of Keynesian green policies suffer from the same problems that Keynesian policies in general do which is that capitalism is in crisis. There has been an enormous transfer of private debt into public debt and governments are already up to their eyeballs basically in this public debt so there is nothing for them to be able to spend on the green technologies and green jobs that we need. So far from being able to invest and spend, actually governments at this time as we see across Europe and in Britain of carrying out massive austerity are being told by the market that they need to chop, chop, chop. Fundamentally it comes down to the problem that governments don't really have any money of their own, they've only got what they can raise in taxes and therefore it comes down to a simple question as with the economic crisis. It's a question of who pays, a class question in that respect, who is going to pay for the things that we need to do in order to avert climate change. Now so far it sounds like I've painted a very pessimistic picture capitalism hasn't done this, capitalism hasn't done that, well fair enough but what's the alternative, what's the solution. Now if you read Marx in particular there's a good quote in his contribution to a critique of political economy where he says quote, Mankind inevitably sets itself only such tasks is able to solve since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In other words what Marx is saying here is we only have a really perceived of a problem in society when already the material conditions have grown within society to go about solving that problem. In other words today in regards to the environmental question and climate change in particular it's only when we actually started realising the problems of climate change that capitalism by that point had already created the means by which we could solve these very problems. We have a knowledge now of the problem facing us but we also now have the technologies and the wealth in society to actually go about addressing these problems. For example take the example of money, I've said governments don't have the money to solve this problem but the point is obviously the wealth does exist out there but it's concentrated in the hands of a tiny few of private individuals. One only has to look at the staggering statistics of inequality produced by charities like Oxfam where 85 billionaires I think it was in 2013 controlled as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's population. Obviously that wealth that exists out there and could be used will only be used under capitalism if it can be invested to make a profit. Currently you have something like 600 billion worldwide spent by fossil fuel companies in searching for new sources of oil, gas and coal and so forth and there's 600 billion more actually spent by the capitalist governments across the world subsidising these very industries. That's not to mention obviously the trillions being spent worldwide on military and weapons where what do we do with these? We go and invade countries which have enormous amounts of deserts where we could be putting solar panels but instead we drill below the sand to get the oil underneath and spend millions on the military means in order to invade the countries to do so. And on top of that I would say even more fundamental within capitalism is the fact that there is trillions sitting idle in the bank accounts of these big businesses of the rich that isn't being used, that isn't being invested, that isn't being put to productive use and to solve these societal problems. You have 750 billion in the bank accounts of big business in Britain, you have something like $2 trillion in the US that sits idle, Apple alone sits on $200 billion that it doesn't invest. So the point is under capitalism the money is there, it just sits idle because of the lack of profitability for the capitalist. And I should also say as someone who used to be involved in environmental engineering research, my previous history if you like before being full time revolutionary was as an environmental engineer and I can tell you for a fact that the technology exists to solve these problems. But again it's not a scientific problem, it's the real problem is the question of ownership, it's the barrier of private ownership. Obviously there's the private ownership of ideas themselves, intellectual property rights whereby different companies basically again because of competition different companies are set against each other to create technology and they can't share what should be a global resource, the ideas that humanity has created and rather than coordinating investment and coordinating efforts and intellectual efforts to solve these problems instead companies are set against each other and the only people who ever benefit from that really are the lawyers who make billions in the court cases when these different companies sue each other. The other thing you should add in terms of technology, there is no one technology, there is no one silver bullet that's going to solve these problems rather there's multiple technologies that if integrated together as part of a plan of production could go about solving these things. Whether it's combining renewable energies where obviously the sun doesn't always shine at the same time as when you need energy in your house but if you were integrating houses with electric cars with renewable energies you could store these things and there'd be an integrated plan that could be far more efficient than what we have at the moment. Obviously such an integrated plan requires a plan and how can that be possible under private ownership, under the competition and anarchy of capitalism where everyone is set against each other, all these companies are involved in competition with one another. So the means to solve these problems obviously exists, it's not a question actually of scarcity in society, there's clearly enough food for example in the world to feed the world's population but as Mark's pointed out it's not a problem of production but of distribution. Mark's notes in the Communist Manifesto for example he says the famines we see under capitalism are unique in the history of mankind because there are no longer a case of famine where there's not enough to go around but rather there's too much over production, too much commerce, too much industry, too much means of subsistence. In other words there's poverty amidst plenty, that's the only situation that capitalism knows because capitalism doesn't recognise social needs when it talks about demand, what it means is the ability to pay, the money that's in your wallet, not the needs of the belly and that sense the famines we see today for example are not natural disasters, they're entirely man made and in fact most of the time when you see famines it's actually in countries that are net exporters of food. More precisely they're not man made, they're capitalist made I should add and in fact I would go so far as to say there's no such thing really in society today as a natural disaster, obviously there are certain accidental events in a whoopsie daisy sort of way but as in accidental in the sense of whether a climate event happens here or there or any particular time we can't predict these things. With any particular accuracy but obviously the fact that there are climate related events hitting the planet all the time whether it's flooding or droughts and so forth but the impacts they have are not natural, the impacts they have on society are entirely due to economic development. How is it that you've got a country like Bangladesh where millions of people are at threat of drowning and flooding all the time but a country like Holland is half underwater and no one even seems to notice. The point is it's a question of economic development, the countries like Bangladesh through centuries of colonialisation of imperialism, of capitalism have been kept underdeveloped whilst obviously the advanced capitalist countries are able to resolve these problems more easily as they arise. So the thing I'm trying to emphasise here is that the problem really isn't financial, it's not scientific, the money and the technology exist. The question is as I said earlier a question of private ownership, it's a class question about who owns and controls the wealth and the technology in society. At the end of the day you can't plan what you don't control and you can't control what you don't own. So I would say as a Marxist and Marxist say in general the fundamental question has to be eliminating this barrier. The barrier of private ownership has to be about the fundamental demand has to be to take the wealth and technology that exists out of private hands and put it under a common rational democratic plan of production. This is what we mean as Marxist by a revolution. It means a fundamental transformation of society, a revolutionary change in how we run and organise and plan society. Now there's many good intention climate scientists and environmental activists I would say in the movement today, but the problem is a lot of the time you see the whole approach, the whole strategy of these people is to imagine that we can persuade the capitalists and the world leaders that are out there through kind of motive or moral language and arguments. Basically fundamentally we've got to appeal to people on the idea that an urgent appeal, if we don't act now then it's going to be too late in the future. This is the whole tone of if you read even the official reports from the UN, the international panel of climate change, the latest report is all along this line of we've got to do something now. We urgently need to act an urgent appeal to the world leaders and the ruling class. But the problem is with this approach is that you can't expect to have a rational debate with people who defend an entirely irrational system. I mean look at the irrationality of capitalism that confronts us every day. We have a system whereby we have homelessness alongside empty mansions. We have a system whereby there's mass unemployment alongside people who have to work two or three jobs and 50 or 60 hours a week. We have austerity on the one hand alongside clearly seeing that the rich are getting richer and there's enormous amount of wealth in society. The point is, as I said, capitalism isn't about morality, it's not about rationality even. It's about benefiting the tiny few. We can't persuade really these people with such arguments and even I would go further to say you can't persuade such people with economic arguments either in the sense that you read reports like the Stern report from about a decade ago and other ones such similar recently. It's all about costs and benefits of averting climate change. If we do something now, how much money in terms of impacts would it save in the future? But the problem is that, again, the ruling class doesn't listen to such rational economic arguments. In fact, this was pointed out even by one of the scientists on the international panel of climate change who got admonished for speaking out on his views. But he said, it's a guy called Professor Richard Toll, he's at the University of Sussex. He said, look, you're not going to persuade people with economic arguments about the impacts of climate change because the governments you're appealing to are already making even worse impacts on living standards to their populations through austerity than even the worst predictions of climate change. In other words, how are you going to go and tell the government in Spain, for example, about the dramatic effect of climate change? How are you going to convince them otherwise about the economic costs of climate change when these very same government that for the benefit of the capitalist is already cutting living standards far worse than even these worse impacts? So we can't expect apocalyptic scenarios to divert the actions of the capitalist. In fact, it's by looking at what's going on in particularly, for example, in Greece, that we can see this very problem. At the end of the day, it's not even the governments really who are in control. When we look at Greece right now and the events taking place this very moment, we can see that the governments aren't in control of their own economy, of the lives of their own people, that it's all being left down really to the real dictatorship, which is the dictatorship of the bankers, of capital, who really decide all the policies and the real decisions in society, particularly over, obviously, questions of job and investment. Again, you can't control what you don't own. Really, to sum it up, we can't expect to be able to persuade the capitalist to save this planet because they already live on an entirely different planet from the rest of us. They already live in a world of air-conditioned mawls, of sunny beaches and private islands, where they're not going to be affected by these things at all. In that sense, there's really no such thing as responsible or green capitalism. The cuts and austerity we see today aren't ideological. It's not just a question of neoliberalism or the nasty Tories here in Britain. All of the austerity we see across the world today, and Britain as well, is no exception to this. All of this flows from the laws and the logic of capitalism itself. It flows from the question of private ownership, of competition, production for profit, and if you accept capitalism, you have to accept the laws and logic of capitalism. You have to accept the austerity that flows for it. It's excellent, I would say, that the Greens have risen in popularity and membership. It's an excellent development because it shows that there's people looking for something far to the left of labour. Obviously, the popularity of leaders like Jeremy Corbyn for labour is a similar example. It shows that an anti-austerity programme that's aimed at making the rich pay for the crisis. It shows that that is an extremely attractive programme for young people today, and it shows that people are looking for a real left alternative. Obviously, the huge turnout last weekend, which was supported by the Green Party, which itself had an enormous turnout, all of this shows the radicalisation that exists and the people looking for a genuine alternative to austerity and to capitalism. I would also say that a true friend points out the problems that lie ahead. As I said, there can be no responsible capitalism, and we need to go beyond demands for just taxing the rich, which in any case just leads to a capital strike and a strike of investment. We need to be putting forward, as I said, demands to actually take real control over the economy, to nationalise the banks, put these under democratic control, to open up the books on big business to see who really isn't paying their fair share and to put these industries under workers' control in order to do so. The fact is you can't just regulate industry. In fact, Ed Miliband saw that before the election when he tried to regulate the energy industry, promising energy price freezes. What was the result? It was actually the opposite of what he intended, where actually suddenly all the energy companies said, well, if you do this, there'll be no investment in energy and the lights will go out, or we'll just raise the prices before you even get into power. In other words, you see the attempts to regulate capitalism and try and reform it actually just end up leading to the opposite of what it intends to. We need to be putting forward demands to take control over the main levers of the economy and to use these to implement a green plan of production, and that means transport, construction, housing, energy and obviously the banks which have the money to fund them. It's not just about taxing the rich to redistribute the wealth. It has to be about taking over the means by which the wealth in society is created. So we can go about tackling the crisis of living standards and obviously the climate crisis and the crisis of the environment also. I'll leave it there. Thanks very much for inviting the Green Party to speak today. I'm very much looking forward to doing so and to the ensuing debate, and Adam has already provided much food for stimulation and reflection. There are three main areas that I want to cover in this short presentation. Firstly, I'd quite like us to remind ourselves what exactly the environmental stroke climate change problem is and how urgent that's become. Secondly, I'd like to look a little bit about what I might describe as our current social dysfunction, particularly in the guise of overconsumption. And thirdly, I'd like to suggest or have us think about what social transformation might look like. So firstly on climate change itself, I think it's notable that we don't have here on the panel our friend the climate change denier or if we're lucky the climate change skeptic, which isn't quite the same proposition. That's a kind of false bias that the media like to entertain and wheel in. There is a scientific consensus about the happening of climate change, of man made, person made, but generally as men who are responsible for a lot of it, overconsumption and climate change impacts, particularly post industrial revolution. And you can look at the graphs either they're exponential or very exponential in terms of temperature increase and carbon production levels globally. And it's often said that we need to keep ourselves within a two degrees increase, two degrees Celsius increase. Some say that if we stop to all carbon production now, carbon consumption, carbon production, there's enough lag in the system that we're already going over that mark anyway into the future. If somehow the human race regrettable though that would be were wiped out now, we might still already be heading for that greater than two degrees C increase. So the problem is pressing, it's pretty much urgent. I think worth mentioning now under this head is how one central way in which the Green Party differs from a lot of other political parties is our long termism. Our visions, our vision and values are such that we don't think that politics is just about looking after number one. Important that that might be. We're not saying that the well being of the individual in society isn't important, but it's a very limited conception of what politics has to offer. Even moving beyond the individual to their immediate family, we're about a lot more than that. We're about social justice and all that that entails for the quality of lives of our near neighbors, our far away neighbors and the 21,000 people dying a day roughly of malnutrition and preventable disease around the world. Let those plikes of those individuals and what we can do to do to improve their lives or what we're failing to do, let those questions weigh in our consciousness as politicians would be politicians or members of society who give a damn. But it's not just about human beings, it's about other than human animals who at the moment we're using human civilisations are using unrelentingly for their agricultural production or in animal experimentations. We don't think that animals can be put solely to the use of human beings and that they have value in their own right. Not simply that they have the capacity to feel pain but they're sentient creatures and we should be thinking about our treatment of them as well. And moreover, the countless other species that we share this beautiful planet with, that's what politics has to engage with as well. In fact biologists can't put a number on the number of species on the planet but we know that given a fairly modest figure of 10 billion or so and a 0.01% extinction rate that we're responsible for as a race, as a species rather. That contributes towards some tens of possibly millions of species extinction a year and some of those species maybe we don't fancy being around much longer like the Ebola virus but there are plenty of others I think which we should care about and would have some intrinsic value. Climate change as I've already been suggested is a justice issue so let's just see what that means. People UN regularly produces figures now showing what the climate change impact is on particularly those in low lying coastal areas like Bangladesh. They are at the sharp end of the negative consequences of the west's overconsumption activities and there's a double injustice there. Firstly these people are least responsible for those climate change impacts. They don't have or enjoy that right to over consume or that entitlement. They're not the ones engaging in rights as the superstores on Black Friday ahead of Christmas and moreover they are least able to afford the remedial action required to contend with those negative impacts so there's a double injustice there if ever there was. Just to take issue which I hope there will be an opportunity to because although we're to some extent amongst like minded individuals it's good to have a little bit of dissent. In so called I think Adam put it advanced capitalist societies like the United Kingdom know we aren't very good at protecting ourselves from the climate change impacts that we've already been experiencing. Chukesbury and Boss Castle try and saying that to them in terms of the investment in levees or flood defences we're not doing that either. So climate is a justice issue. Stern which I think was although it might feel like a decade I think it's half a decade now. Stern did try and frame the issue in terms of expense expenditure. The economic system and what it would cost to carry on like businesses usual scenario and how it would be not just more profitable but good for the bottom line to pursue a path of sustainability. I put it to you that that is a false way of framing the issue. It's not radical enough and I'll come to that in a moment. So what is our biggest secondly problem in western societies and there's also a question here about what rights we have to suggest to others in the so called developing countries not to pursue our same economic development that developmental pathway. There's a risk of being neocolonialist or postcolonialist in suggesting to other people even China and India that you can't pursue this path of economic growth like there's no tomorrow which is a kind of American dream that we've been sold a lie about. And why is that a lie? Because even public attitude survey in this country arranged information. If you ask people about their earnings they'll tell you that the more they earn the more they think they can't afford what they really need. Now the more you earn the more you think apparently you can't afford what you really need. It can't be because you don't have more capital with which to buy more stuff. It's just that you find that when you get that stuff that you've satisfied your desire and you just generate and create ever more insatiable, more increasingly difficult to satisfy desires. And that's the kind of a trap which capitalism and overconsumption gets us into through advertising and all the rest of it. But moreover the lesson there is that these goods don't actually make you happier by your own admission. They just have a tendency to keep you dissatisfied. And that's something worth bearing in mind. And if anything it's not that we're asking others not to pursue our development path because it's good. It's hopefully that we're in a position to say it ain't as good as you've been told. That's the lie. It's not something which is better than your current developmental path or that you aren't already managing to achieve quality of life that is without this kind of economic system. If you look at the recent joiners to the European Union for example, even going far back as Poland, there are many farmers there who had their lands then taken over by multinational supermarkets and all the rest of it. And they then found themselves more impoverished because they weren't able to earn enough to be able to afford to buy back food that they themselves were able to grow on their own land to feed their families. And that is just shows up the ridiculousity, the preposterousness of our economic system, that it's not actually enabling people those basic needs in society, which is what social justice socialism is and should be about. Now to bring in maybe even Marx at this point and I think many of the things that Marx talks about and the way that political theorists and contemporaries and people before him, Hobbes, Rousseau and others, the way that they frame their debate is not just one in terms of political legitimacy and due accountability of our leaders and the structures which they, God forbid, seek to impose upon us, but it's also entailing human nature assumptions and there's a great line in Marx actually, which I think gets overlooked and he talks about this. The more you find value in external things, the less you find value in yourself. The more you find value, I tend to see today to repeat myself when I think something's very important. So the more you find value in external things, the less you find value in yourself and I think that's a great psychological insight actually. And it does bear out in current society the kind of emptiness, I know that's a kind of a metaphor for what people can feel, but you do find that amongst people, even those who are presumably rich and very able and capable of insulating themselves from the so-called antisocial behaviour of society and the crime and all the rest of it through gated communities, how are they actually living? They're living a kind of an asocial existence, an atomised existence, we're at risk of becoming like them if we think that they're worth imitating. But that's an emptiness about life and that, our economy encourages that because it commodifies and it fails to value things according to their true worth. We can talk about negative externalities as somehow our helping ourselves to all the goods that nature has to offer without paying nature back. There's no way at the moment in which those goods are properly recorded. We're not going to be paying our debt back to planet earth. But the real problem here, another constituency of interest if you will, spoken about our immediate neighbours, people half way around the world, other human animals and other species, another constituency of interest is future human generations. People who aren't around yet, 50, 100 years into the future, we can't identify them, we can't name them but we know that if they're lucky there'll still be a home for them on planet earth and there'll be a set of people like you and me if the genetic engineering hasn't had its way. But what are we leaving behind for them? Are we leaving as Locke might put it as much and as good for them? We have finite resources on the planet, land being one of them. How are we carving it out? How are we distributing it? Are we concentrating that wealth effectively a convention, a power elation in the hands of a few, the 1% as opposed to the 99%? That's exactly what we're doing. So overconsumption I think is a trap, it's a trap of our own making, it's something that in our better moments we actually realise it doesn't make us happier and the things, the common or garden things that we all need, those basic needs, health, housing and education, those rights, the things that build our personality and character and make us appreciate the things that are really important are not valued through capitalism. The sight of a beautiful sunset, all the things which can assail our senses on a good day that we increasingly find ourselves insulated from, we're destroying at a rate of knots. So what then finally is our predicament. As I say, however you want to put it I could be at risk of sounding alarmist but I think that's the wrong word. Alarmist sounds like an exaggeration but these are just facts, these are just facts about our human situation which may be alarming but that's quite different. That's objectivity. We need to be objective about a situation so that we can overcome it. I think a common response unfortunately to the gravity of the situation which we are co-responsible for is to deny it and there are many ways of denying it. You can invent a kind of a carbon offsetting regime for example which manages to solve your consciousness whenever you take a flight or in Cameron's case you can go and do a photo op with a husky in the Arctic. God knows whether that piece of ice is there anymore. Some years ago he became leader and that's his way of showing that he cares but he doesn't. So there are many artifices, ways of denying and saying that there's business as usual like there's no tomorrow but somehow we actually need to get a grip with it. If I can just add here, this is not necessarily green party policy, it's just my own thought at this point about how I think we get into this trap of denying and for sure that's a common problem. I think there's a kind of a tendency to over-psychologise our predicament to say somehow that it's too painful to admit it and what we're doing then is a kind of a post Freudian tendency to reduce everything including the problems that we ourselves have caused in the world to reduce it to a kind of subjective state in us. That then allows us to beg off on our responsibilities and say well it's too painful for me to deal with and in my world I'm just going to have to ignore it or forget about it. But what we're really doing there and what we have to get better at is to say no, that isn't going to prevent us, the fear of listening or understanding what we're co-responsible for. That difficulty, that psychological difficulty isn't going to stop us from telling it as it is and moreover it isn't going to prevent us from tackling the problem which we ourselves are responsible for and what really have we become that we're prepared to say that it's too difficult to look at, that it's too difficult to see the consequences of our actions compared to the negative impact and deaths that it's actually causing today. So the economy then, I'm sure you wouldn't dissent from this but I think it's worth debating how we change it. The economy is a convention as far as I'm concerned. It's a piece of paper sometimes, it's a trust, it's a bond with the state and it's something which depending on how that economic system is organised the Bank of England may be more or less politicised and be instructed to print some more money, call it quantitative easing if you want, sounds good, it's going to trickle down and help those who are most impoverished, not at all. But it's a convention. You can't eat a string of zeros or a string of debt zeros, you can't eat that even though it might be concentrated in the hands of a few, it's not going to get to you when you most need it. You can re-establish that convention, you can reform it. If you look at transition town movements, which is where I'm going to get to in a minute in terms of where is the politics of the day and what kind of transformation do we require to turn this around. If you look at transition town movements such as in Lewis or even in Brixton, some of them have inaugurated their own note. Have you heard about the Brixton pound note? Now I'm not sure how that's been going lately. I think one of the potential mistakes that they made at the outset was they allowed, somehow they must have had a relationship going with the Bank of England, they allowed the Bank of England to back up that currency. For sure I think that did make it a far less bolder statement and a far less bold initiative. What you really needed to do was to say that in this community we're going to accept this piece of paper authenticated as it is as our means of bartering. We're going to say we're not going to accept this. This note is not going to be accepted amongst a certain set of multinational companies so you can't pay there. We're going to decide which group of independent retailers or whatever sustainable retailers that we're going to be able to shop with. It's got nothing to do with the Bank of England and from there we proceed and we have some trust in what this is worth and we have some knowledge. But it's all a convention. It's a linguistic convention, it's a social convention, it's an economic convention and at the moment the convention isn't working for us, it certainly ain't working for the planet. So finally, there is a gross lack of political will. I don't think that the solution is technological as such although there are things that we can be doing to actually improve our energy generation in terms of use of renewables, wind, wave, solar and this country although it's on paper at least maybe the six richest country is bottom five in the league table across the EU for use of renewables and that's deplorable. But we also need to fix our overconsumptive habits that are necessarily going to be easy particularly when we've got other people around us carrying on like there's no tomorrow. But that takes a certain amount of will, political will. And some of that can be brought about through leaders and we don't think the Green Party does believe there is a role for sure for electoral politics if only because at the moment it's like one step forward, two steps back or less or sorry more that's become fairly ludicrous situation. But the political will that I think ultimately is going to get us out of this trouble is social. When we look at the Occupy movement, when we look at the vitality of all generations getting involved in that having critiques, having set up lectures outside St Paul's and other places and to say post election for example to say that enough is enough and that we need to ensure that we have a society which governs for the good of all. That politics is where the vitality is. That's where the social change and transformation is going to come from. We can look to the Paris talks in December but remember how we looked to Copenhagen it was in 2009 and where did that get us? We must not and we cannot get sucked into this perpetual postponement as James Lovelock has put it actually although we don't agree with all his politics in terms of renewable energy and just trying to buy time through the use of nuclear we don't think that should be an option either. James Lovelock has described it as a war footing. That's the kind of situation that we're faced with. So it's not about just finding better ways of generating energy. It's about reducing our consumption. It's about energy efficiency. It's about a green new deal, green jobs, trying to roll out energy efficiency but also living within our means and having a proper reckoning of what that means. So I hope there's plenty to debate there not just in terms of our vision and value which I hope is reasonably persuasive and something that I think we need to be able to do to try and overcome the current mess and for sure crisis that capitalism has contributed to in the planet. Very interesting discussion. I think I should just not correct but qualify. I don't think I was claiming and I couldn't have because I was saying how woefully inadequate our use of renewable energies was. So I do want us to invest in wave wind and solar and that does require technology. I think the thing that I was criticizing was an assumption which perhaps Adam didn't mean either but when he opened up with the idea about technology that tends to ring alarm bells for me and here's why because technology is often used as a kind of way of carrying on business as usual. Whether you're talking about fracking, for example, as a more actually energy intensive fossil fuel industry, it's a way of buying time or carrying on business as usual. And so and I also I don't withdraw from the claims about overconsumption being the problem because although I will challenge this idea that it's marginalizing the poor, I think that's a ludicrous connection to want to make. The trouble with overconsumption, whether it's in built redundancy or us being made to feel that our mobile phones need replacing, gone are the days when the mobile phone would actually ring when you needed it, so I keep telling my life, but the thing is is that overconsumption requires raw materials. In addition to the energy which you're expending to put to bind those things in addition to the plastics which you're using, those technologies are being used wholesale and if we're trying to find other means of energy generation and we're trying to develop technologies which allow us just to carry on at that level of consumption and carbon consumption, then anything that we've saved in one area through the actual energy generation is going to be lost through the continued consumption. And I think we do need to bite the bullet about how much is it actually affecting the quality of our lives deep down when we are carrying on in that way and aren't we actually alienating ourselves from the things that give quality to our lives. And again, I don't think that Marx, although he may carry on to talk about in his own day those particular class problems, a lot of which still persists today, I don't think that the generalisation he was making was not by him intended as one about human nature and that's what human nature assumptions and generalisations generally are. There are problems about us as a species in how we think psychologically and the difficulties that we're prone to succumb to. So I think you're selling Marx short there by claiming that we can't generalise his claims and in terms of this kind of battle that we're facing, this struggle, again I don't think that you want to think of it even imaginatively as turning everything upside down as such. I've said, you know, if you went through what I've been saying, I probably talked about social transformation quite a lot. I even alerted you to it right at the beginning and by that I do not mean turning society on its head. No, that's not good enough. That's not enough and that just reproduces and replicates a different kind of inequality. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to do that? I think at the heart of what I'm saying here is that people, everybody, you and I, people in groups who are currently misguided pursuing wealth at the expense of others who need help, they're misguided. I don't think that they're morally unreachable. I might even be persuaded to shake Tony Blair's hand if I think it might save one Iraqi life or bring short, cut short bombs raining upon innocent's heads. So no, I think we need to be more radical than that. We're not just talking about, so how is it social transformation to turn things upside down? All you're doing is you're changing the position of people in society. Egalitarianism, social equality, even as such that I have the model that I gave you about carbon quotas, it's not saying that you can't fly necessarily. And for sure we'd want to try and develop technologies which reduce those carbon emissions. It's saying that it's not okay for some people in society to enjoy such obscene wealth that they can go and they can fly at the expense of the rest of the planet as much as they like. So it's egalitarian in that sense, but it is putting the responsibility in the right place. It is saying, unfortunately, we might all have to look not just as a society but as individuals at our carbon consumption. So technology, it does have a use but we have to be careful. It's not, the point I was making is that for me right now it's not about trying to develop and harness new technologies. Even the renewable technologies are still here. It's about political will. Even tackling global poverty, that's the question of political will. Well, we have the biomass there. We choose to feed it to cattle in order to eat meat due to our addiction to meat. How many of you, if you're walking the walk, are fond of coffee? Do a little bit of research about how people, farmers around the world are at the clutch of the West's addiction, the West's addiction and overconsumption of coffee. So, you know, we're all responsible here, as ethical consumers if you like, but more than that, structurally, we need to be clear that it's not simply about changing position with people. And that's where the idea potentially of envy comes in. It's not to do with changing position and having some other people below us. Why would we want to do that? That's not enlightened. What we want is to create a society which everybody can agree upon is fair. Wherever you were in that society, if you were, if it's unknown to you, you didn't know your position in that society. Where you were born, that you would happen to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, you would want to make it guaranteed for everybody who was about to be born that they would have able to live a minimally decent life. Finally, there's so many questions. Oh, green tie. Yeah, I'm glad you knew about that. That was pulled, and I think there's a problem here. In the same way, there's a conflict. I agree. Come to green tie in a minute. But we're producing literature, general election literature during the election. We're putting stuff and things through people's doors. Parties tend to think there's a bit of a correlation between the amount of literature they stick through your door and the number of votes they like to get. That's unfortunate, because every time, whether it's for sustainable resources or whatever, we are using paper when we do that. You might say, well, that's not pure enough. That's not pure enough for the Green Party, yes. You shouldn't be using any paper at all. Just stick to social media, internet, all the rest of it. But we do. So there's a compromise. So I think what we're, the problem that you, sorry, was it you about the green tie? I think that the problem there with, you might say we shouldn't be using paper whatsoever because it's contrary to our principles. The problem there is that, okay, we'll use it spherently. We won't go overboard with it. Same with raising funds to be able to launch a credible campaign. You might say that we shouldn't be going to donors who happen to have money that they want to commit to us and trying to get them to a meeting. I think the main problem, a dinner, the main problem with that and there was a lack of proper, I think, internal communication on that one and that's why we pulled that event. But I agree with that. I agree with the pulling of the event because one of the things, and it's not just a PR thing. It's not just that it would look bad. The very idea that you would have people coming to a meeting like that and potentially having greater access to key people in the party. I'm not sure whether I was even invited, but anyway, that's another story. But I think the thing is, is that, yes, you're right. But we need to think. It's not easy. It's not easy yet. You may have to get your hands dirty to some extent. I think the real difficulty in politics is to work within a system which we know is bankrupt and failing us and to try and reform it from within, without ourselves getting tarnished, not just tarnished, but corrupted. That is the real danger. That is how power corrupts. We've seen it in the best of people. I think I tend to hold, I quite have quite some esteem for Tony Blair, Tony Ben. Not Tony Blair. Tony Ben, yes. Well, Tony Blair even actually, if you read his book, you should, a journey. It should be called entitled, subtitled, The Man Who Lost His Way. Here's somebody who was engaging in deep debate philosophical data, I think, with Gordon Brown in his university days, which of course he had fees waived and all the rest of it. You can see how, you can see it happening. It's almost like you've got insight, you know, you're a psychoanalyst. And I read it because I'm constantly calling for Blair's try being on an international criminal court. And I just wanted to check from the man himself that he wasn't going to produce some argument or something that I had missed. And it's quite interesting because, you know, he's got a brain, he's got a political brain. It was probably him pulling the string that asked the camera and all the rest of it. So it's insightful in terms of how politics worked. But when it got to that point, I was partly relieved. I wanted him to be able to say something and he had the intellectual capacity to produce an argument, but he didn't. But at that point I thought, at least I would now not, I would not foreclose the option of speaking to the man at some stage and saying, look, by your own likes, with your own rationality and empathy, do you not see? Do you not see as George Galloway might have put it? You would have seen the guilt written on his face as they went to Iraq. It seems there's something deep down. That's what I'm interested. I don't think that people, we should think of people as morally beyond reach. We want to use our rationality and persuasive skill to say, you need to come with us as well. This is a journey, this is a journey unlike him, the man who lost his way, that we need to pursue together. So back to Tony Ben, Tony Ben, the late Tony Ben. He often said that this is not a protest. Have I got ten minutes left? I already have ten minutes. Wow, I wasn't even planning to have ten minutes, so that's great. This is not a protest. This is a demand. That's the kind of fatality we need back in politics. Through you, I don't know if many of you may be at university. A university is not about the more you learn, the more you earn. It's about the more you learn, the more you learn. Because what you bring to your minds and to your vision of the world, that's incredibly more important than your bank balance. Because that will enable you and people, your contemporaries and people after you, to change society for the common good. I just want to thank Shirar again for coming. I think it's been an excellent discussion and of course it's a discussion that's ongoing. I hope to see you on a panel again at future events. The main question I want to come back on is not so much the overconsumption thing. Let's put to the side whether it's us in this room who are responsible for living beyond our means as it was put. Even if we accept that fundamental premise, which I actually disagree that we are the ones responsible, that we're the ones living beyond our means. But let's put to side that first premise and say, say we are, say all of us here are living beyond our means, all of us in the advanced capitalist world are responsible. How do we go about resolving this? How do we go about actually tackling that problem? How do we go about deciding what is produced, how it is produced and in what quantities and what living standards we have? How do we decide who gets what and how much of it they get? And I think that is the fundamental problem that we face, is that we who might be the ones who might be, let's suggest it's true, might be the ones who are over consuming. How do we go about actually tackling that problem? And I would say the key barrier in this respect is the question of ownership, it's the question of private ownership, it's the fact, and that is a class question at the end of the day, that even if we wanted to do something about our living standards, even if we wanted to do something about changing the way in which we lived and the way in which production was run and so forth, we have no control over that process, we have no say in that whole element of society. The only real decision making we can do as individuals is what we buy and who we vote for, really, at the end of the day. That's the main decisions we have in capitalist society. And on the question of what we buy, well, I mean, if we were to all just consume less, then that's basically a recession. Under capitalism, if we all decided to stop consuming tomorrow, then what would happen? You'd have a load of factories closed down, you'd have a load of people being unemployed. Basically, the minute all these commodities that capitalism is churning out aren't sold, that is basically a recession, that is capitalism going into crisis. So we wouldn't actually feel the benefits of it and if anything we would send society into just a bigger slump. I agree that we should have an economy where the goods that are produced, basically the amount they're produced and how much they cost should reflect the environmental pollution and so forth that's contained within them. But under capitalism, that isn't the case. Under capitalism, capitalism is a system where production is for profit, where the commodities that are out there, the prices, it's a race to the bottom, as I said earlier. It's competition driving down costs, actually, and trying to pollute more where it means making cheaper. So really the only way to have this economy where things are based around their actual environmental destruction would be to fundamentally transform the whole laws of the economy, which is obviously what socialists call for. But the key problem with choosing by how much we buy is obviously the fact that it's not an equal choice. Those who have more, or in terms of wealth, obviously get a lot more say in society. So what's the other way in which we can decide? Well, we can choose who we vote for. But as I said earlier, the problem even then is, even if you vote in a government that wants to really make a difference and even has the best of intentions on the environment and any other social questions, we see that actually it's not governments that control industry and finance, but it's industry and finance that control governments. I mean, point to one point in the programme of Syriza, a radical left party whose programme on the surface of things isn't that dissimilar from the Greens, actually, in terms of living wage, key questions of pensions and housing and so forth, public services doesn't fundamentally differ at the Syriza leadership from that of what the Green Party puts forward in their manifesto. But they haven't been able to carry out a single one of those demands in Greece because at the end of the day they have held by the throat by the bankers, by the people who really control society, which is the bosses and the bankers. So how do we go about really deciding then what our means are and who gets what? I think, for a start, go back to even that premise. Again, I would refute it because 90% of landfill, for example, 90% of waste that goes to landfill is not produced by households, it's produced by industry, it's produced in mining and all these basically giant corporations over which we have absolutely no control. There is obviously many people living below the decent living standard in terms of 5 million people on fuel poverty, but if we wanted to reduce the amount of energy we consume in our homes, what would that mean? It would mean a mass investment in insulation, a mass investment in energy efficiency technologies and who's got the power to do that? Most people can't afford to spend the thousands that are needed to reduce those energy costs from their homes. If we all wanted to take public transport in order to reduce emissions from transport, well, again, how can we do that when actually prices of public transport are going up when there's less and less investment in public transport and all these things? In other words, all the key questions of how we could actually go about reducing our energy consumption, of how we could go about tackling this problem of overconsumption if indeed it even existed, all of these are actually beyond us as individuals because we fundamentally are not in control of our own lives of society and I think it goes back to a point that Cheryl made actually about the fact that we are alienated. We are only basically connected in society through commodities, through prices, through the market. We relate to each other and to the whole of the world around us as money basically, as commodities. We're completely divorced from our world. We're alienated from our surroundings and the way to tackle it is to give people a sense of control all over their own lives and that means a sense of economic control. I mean, just a couple of anecdotes, actually. I was in Egypt just after the Arab Revolution had taken place and I spoke to some people into Heir Square and they said to me, what I thought was very profound actually, they said, you look around today and to Heir Square is very clean, it was very tidy, there's no litter anywhere, no graffiti other than revolutionary murals and things like that. And they said it wasn't always like this, this city used to be filthy, it used to be disgusting because it wasn't our city, it didn't belong to us, we had no control over it, we didn't feel like it was where we lived even though obviously it was them who suffered from all the pollution, the litter, the traffic and so forth. But they said what the revolution, because of those weeks they spent into Heir Square, it became their city, it became their square and they took ownership over it. They started to self-organise, to clean the communities, to keep a tidy environment to live in because it was fundamentally them who were suffering but it was that revolutionary act of coming together of consciousness changing through struggle that gave them a sense of overcoming that alienation. You see the same thing in occupied factories, in Venezuela for example, there was a factory that made ceramics and the ceramics factory used to pollute the entire surrounding village and again it was the working people in that factory who had to suffer it and their families because of this dust that caused all sorts of diseases and health problems. But that factory was closed down, the owner said it wasn't profitable, the workers took it over, they occupied it as part of the wave of factory occupations as part of the Venezuelan revolution and what it did was it profoundly changed consciousness. The first thing those people did when they occupied was tackling the pollution, was tackling the dust because again it was affecting their communities whereas the rich, the previous bosses lived in entirely different mansions far away from the pollution. In other words once you give working class communities, once you give ordinary people the actual ability to go about solving these problems they do it but the first thing is required is actually giving them the control and the ability to do so. That's why as Marxist we call for the fundamental question has to be this question of private ownership, has to be tackling that problem because we're not saying that after a socialist revolution everything's going to be green the next minute that we're going to solve all the problems. We'll have resolved the fundamental problem that stands in the way which is the class struggle and the question of class ownership but we'll still obviously have that contradiction of man versus nature, we'll still have to overcome the problems of scarcity where they exist, we'll have to overcome the problems of environmental destruction and pollution where they exist and after the first time we'll have removed that barrier that stops us now from overcoming those problems and Cheryl made one comment about supporting small businesses and local producers and so forth and I would just say well yes obviously we need to support those middle classes who've been impoverished by capitalism who are crushed by big business but I think the way to go about it is not to boycott the big businesses but rather to say let's take these businesses over, let's put them under a rational plan of production where we can actually go about solving problems there's already an enormous level of planning within these firms the only problem is at the moment it's used so that they make bigger profits whereas we would use it to address social needs to get rid of the anarchy of the market to get rid of the competition of capitalism and to once and for all be able to set about on a path where we can actually solve the real fundamental problems facing humanity