The Westminster elections are over and the environment issue will inevitably move down the list of concerns. Politicians, even the Greens, merely paid lip service to the subject during the party campaigns.
Now the vote is over the environment will again have as much political relevance as the forgotten posters that hang from overlooked lampposts. The UK is barely a thick line in the bar graph of global polluters, but it is a representative example of how politicians the world over put re-election over the destruction of the planet.
Who can blame them when we, the voters, conspire in the con.
We know that our lifestyles are polluting the planet and exhausting natural resources, yet we are convenience junkies who are willing to lose many of the world’s species as long as our short term wants are accommodated.
Without irony we trample over carbon footprint reductions in a stampede to observe disappearing animals in their shrinking habitat. Last year’s faux concern for single use plastics has already been buried under a landfill mountain, generated by the consumer orgy that is best described as Christmas. A five pence charge on plastic bags dramatically reduced their use and misuse. That is how easy (and cheaply) we are to manipulate. Similar charges or deposits and other fairly simple changes which would reduce plastic pollution (and others) to a fraction of the present levels are ignored. Still it is much easier to shed a tear at the latest David Attenborough documentary than go to a water tap for a drink or carry a single use cup for a daily coffee.
We first worlders are planetary parasites who suck the world dry while crying crocodile tears for the starving and the diseased.
People who can’t wait to lock themselves in fake cocoons of mind numbing entertainment and gluttony where the suffering of animals and our fellow humans is of less relevance than the winner of the latest reality TV show or the cost of a takeaway. We need to change for our own sake. The world could be used up within a few generations and our children would be the ones starving for food or water – cursing us for our short-sighted greed.
When the next election comes take more interest in the politicians asking for your vote than the BBC during Strictly Come Dancing.
GERARD HERDMAN
Belfast BT11
Corbyn’s tenure sabotaged by anti-social elements within party
Claire Simpson’s analysis (December 23) of the British Labour Party performance is typical of those who ridicule anyone who attempts to challenge the awful class-ridden system that exists in Britain today.
She referred to the 1983 “disastrous” run of Michael Foot “which offered similar promises to renationalise the public services” giving the impression that those services in private hands are somehow a success story.
What Ms Simpson fails to tell us is that like Jeremy Cobyn’s tenure Michael Foot’s leadership was constantly sabotaged by anti-socialist elements within the party. Indeed four leading lights went off to form a new party which eventually died the death it deserved.
She also fails to mention that in the 2017 election Corbyn came within a whisker of forming a government on a, by British standards, radical manifesto despite the opposition of those elements in the party, Labour received the biggest percentage of the vote since 1945.
In the recent election, Labour under Corbyn achieved a bigger share of the vote than Kinnock in 1987, Brown in 2010 and Milliband in 2015, The problem Corbyn had was that friends and enemies alike foisted a policy on the EU on him that spelled defeat, the jettisoning of the respect for the 2016 decision being one of them.
As regards Alan Johnson, he is just another Blairite who abandoned the working-class ages ago.
ERNEST WALKER
Belfast BT15
Unfair criticism
The regular columns penned by Brian Feeney are always worth reading, being thought-provoking, usually entertaining and often informative.
In a recent piece (November 26), however, on the geographer and archaeologist, the late E Estyn Evans, he was quite wrong and downright unfair. Describing Professor Evans as a ‘blow-in’ from Wales, Dr Feeney characterises him as a man who attempted to create an artificial Northern Ireland identity, manufacturing one different from that prevailing in the rest of the island. This is certainly not what Evans tried to do. The first book of his I bought – and arguably his best, first published in 1957 – was titled Irish Folk Ways, not Ulster Folk Ways. Evans was instrumental in setting up the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University, not the Institute of Ulster or of Northern Ireland Studies. He always regarded Ulster as a province of nine counties, not of six, and some of his most revealing and fascinating studies were on Donegal, a county he loved. Was Evans wrong when he did write about (and attractively sketched) distinctive Ulster styles of building, furnishing and tool-making? I think not. Government funding surely explains why the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum (where his advice was so important) had artefacts almost entirely drawn only from Northern Ireland. As a young lecturer at Queen’s, Evans played a pivotal role in persuading the then minister of home affairs, the monocular, single-identity obsessive Sir Richard Dawson Bates, to cooperate with Eamon de Valera’s Dublin government in collaborating with the Harvard Archaeological Mission to Ireland in the 1930s. As a result, Ireland north and south benefited from the most professional and extensive archaeological investigations the island had yet experienced.
JONATHAN BARDON
Author of A History of Ulster, Belfast
Meeting human need
If we can have full, global, satellite, wi-fi coverage why can’t we have full global housing for everyone, food for everyone, jobs for everyone, access to education for everyone, full coverage medical health care for everyone, etc?
The reason is that it isn’t profitable to house everyone and feed everyone... etc. Industry, money and resources chase the profits and largely neglect needs. Is the solution to make providing for human need profitable or is it to design a system of society where human need is met regardless of profits?
Whichever avenue of endeavour we choose, we should remember that ‘profit’ is a calculation on a financial balance sheet and doesn’t in itself necessarily supply any human need whereas a society based on satisfying human need should surely go some way to doing just that.
LOUIS SHAWCROSS
Hillsborough, Co Down
