Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Climate Change Bill: Brown's green pretensions exposed as a fraud (continued)

Socialist Resistance no44  |  page 9

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

CHANGE

NOT

There is now a three month 'consultation period' to debate and amend the new draft Bill, which is unlikely anyway to become law before April 2008.

Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups gave it a cautious welcome, but not critical enough if we are to Neither the prevent New capitalist market Labour yet again getting away with nor current weak weak and inefgreenwash and and ineffective spin.

So we need to regulation are up step up campaign- to solving the ing for a much tougher bill, with huge and urgent binding targets of

threat posed by 90% emissions cuts by 2030 and annual targets of 6%.

Business should also be required to open its books to proper scrutiny. Recent research by Christian Aid has revealed Britain's top 100 companies are responsible for between 12% to 15% of greenhouse gas emissions, and not the 2% falsely claimed by the government.

This shows that neither the capitalist market current fective regulation are up to solving the huge and urgent threat posed by climate ehange. We are going to have to build a movement ourselves, big and strong enough to challenge them.

Ron Ridenour CUBA:

ACCESS DENIED Faced with a new attacks on the legal system, solicitors have launched strike action. PIERS Blind justice leads the legal aid lawyers' protest outside the Commons Legal aid solicitors on strike for justice

these struggles, if only because of their role (ideally) in holding the judiciary and the repressive apparatus of the state to account. This work depends on legal aid which is now under serious threat. Legal aid is an unsung, but

JUSTICE to fixed fees for criminal work. This means that solicitors will always get the same fees for a given case irrespective of how difficult it is.

This is a bit like prescribing in advance that all brain surgery operations should take three hours, even though and black firms that are most committed to their clients, with strong links in the community. Professional ethos will be eroded.

Energetic young lawyers who have hitherto chosen legal aid work over high status and high pay will drift