batshit bat tunnels and authoritarian COPs
fieldnotes, entry one, w/c 4th November
Brief notes of things that have prompted my thinking this week, across a variety of mediums. Low levels of proof reading, moderate levels of fact checking, high levels of yapping.
HS2 Bat Tunnel
This thread from Dan Tomlinson MP, on the now notorious HS2 ‘bat tunnel’, and what it tells us about the relationship between planning reform and infrastructure in Britain. There are often very good reasons to retain a healthy skepticism of the start up founders favourite linkedin mantra - ‘move fast and break things’. But equally, tending this far to the opposite end of the spectrum (don’t move at all, wrap everything you own in cotton wool, and try not to breathe lest your exhale put your belongings at risk somehow) is patently harmful to the ability of Britain to function, and our economy to grow. How do we measure the trade off between the potential harm caused by something like HS2 disturbing a bat population, and the potential harm caused by 10 years of delays, and millions of pounds worth of outlay that could have been spent elsewhere? Right now it feels like we only cost one of those harms.
“Workers are £10,700 *a year* worse off than if wages had grown in-line with pre-financial crisis trends.”
Outstanding questions:
Concretely - how do British government departments cost risk and harm. It doesn’t fit within the OBR framework, and the NAO doesn’t require costing potential harms in the way outlined above. Is this being considered in any tangible way at all? If not, why not, and what’s the best mechanism for changing that?
Success as an anomaly
During a discussion this week with a NH guest about the barriers to skills reform in the UK (we have the evidence, we know what works, it’s ostensibly a political priority, but still somehow isn’t happening), they opined that ‘programmes, inventions and innovations that succeed are actually the anomaly’. The norm is failure, or poorly performing products, and we’ve just learned to accept that as tolerable. A better question to ask (regarding policy, and other metrics), is what has actually worked and why. I need to spend far more time thinking about how this applies to the questions I’ve been asking about political solutions recently, but the circa two hour long list of examples was compelling, and I think worth using to reframe questions in this space.
Has COP irreparably crossed the green-washing lexicon
Prompted by long standing conversations with fellow climate activists surrounding the host choices for COP conferences - the UNFCCC’s annual conference for international climate negotiations. My first COP was in Poland, in 2018, followed by Madrid and Glasgow. Since then however, COP has taken myself and other young climate activists to Egypt (where protestors in the COP zone who had expressed sentiment critical of Egypts mass imprisonment of pro democracy activists online were hassled and monitored throughout by Egyptian security services), the UAE (where it was headed by the CEO of Adnoc, a petroleum firm, and political protests were shut down), and now Baku, Azerbaijan, an authoritarian petrostate whose land and sea borders have been closed for over four years now, and who stand (credibly) accused of violent ethnic cleansing against Armenians in border regions within the last year. In fact Azerbaijan only stands as host because Armenia agreed to lift its UNFCCC veto against their candidacy in return for the release of Armenian political prisoners held by the Azerbaijani regime - many of whom are still imprisoned regardless.
I was deeply uncomfortable about attending the last two COPs, but through various justifications and representations decided it was worth opting in (with caveats) for the broader importance of the UNFCCC process. I can no longer justify the weight of that importance. I won’t be attending Baku. There are many many questions around the COP process more widely, and I don’t envy the tightrope walked by the UNFCCC as they try to seek consensus on some of the most contentious but necessary questions in the field of international climate policy, but the pretence that we ‘need’ to allow authoritarian regimes to host COP as a metric for ‘regional’ representation is no longer credible nor tolerable.
The now
Things I’m doing/thinking/reading this week - more frequent updates for this here
Reading: Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Capturing the World by Tom Burgis
Dark Data: Why what you don’t know matters by David J. Hand
Listening to: Sick Parade: A crisis at Catterick Garrison, by Tortoise media.
Writing: A long-form piece on long term illness and Britain’s productivity puzzle (prompted, in part, by a recent rereading of this Guardian piece from earlier this year)
Working on: Amendments various pieces of legislation (the data bill, the employment rights bill, etc) that allow for better conditions for workers across the UK.