Anthony Barnett (London, OK): In a tremendous Guardian column today, George Monbiot calls on everyone who can to stop the new coal-fired plant planned for Kingsnorth Kent, by joining the climate camp "Everything now hinges on stopping coal". He quotes one quite extraordinary episode, which it seems to me shows we have barely any government worth the name at all:
In January, Gary Mohammed, a civil servant at the Department for Business, emailed E.ON to ask whether he should include CCS [Carbon Capture and Storage] as a condition for approving its new coal plant. (This gives a fascinating insight into how government works: companies are asked to write their own rules.) E.ON replied that the government "has no right to withhold approval for a conventional plant". Six minutes later Mohammed answered thus: "Thanks. I won't include. Hope to get the set of draft conditions out today or tomorrow."
It seems to me that both the civil servant and the person from E.ON who wrote the reply should be charged with treason for subverting the fundamentals of democracy. I don't agree with Solzhenitsyn on the Enlightenment (though I do agree that a person's life should be judged by their moral growth not their accumulation of wealth, I don't see this as anti-Enlightement). However, reading the extracts from the Russian writer's Harvard address printed in openDemocracy, it is hard not to reflect on this passage:
Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.
Monbiot complains about the lack of courage in the government. It is not just about individuals, even if no one resigned over 42 days. There is a larger subservience to what is believed to be the "new thinking" of corporate globalisation which turns them into angels of destruction.
