Yesterday, 26th April marked the 29th anniversary of the worst nuclear disaster in world history – the Chernobyl catastrophe. 

And unfortunately, it’s not over yet: preventing further major releases of radioactivity into the environment seems to be a race against time.

As a new Greenpeace report detailing the efforts at the sight shows, there are no real solutions in sight.

Nearly three decades after the start of the Chernobyl disaster, its atomic legacy is a stark and ominous reminder that nuclear power can never be a safe energy source.

In 1986, two explosions destroyed Chernobyl reactor unit 4, located in the Ukraine. Its graphite core burned for ten days. The radioactive releases heavily contaminated what became a 2,600 sq.km exclusion zone – which included 76 cities, towns, and villages.

Due to the power of the explosion, fire, and reactor core meltdown, radioactivity was projected to high enough altitudes that the plume was carried thousands kilometers away, sweeping across the whole of Europe and contaminating vast tracts of land.

In terms of radioactive caesium (Cs137), a total of at least 1.3 million sq.km of land was contaminated to varying degrees – an area roughly twice the size of France. And this contamination will last for many generations, given the 30-year half-life of Cs137.

Hundreds of thousands of citizens and cleanup workers were exposed to significant levels of radiation – at least 300,000 of these workers received radiation doses that were 500 times the limit for the public over one year.

The catastrophe continues

Twenty-nine years later, people continue to suffer from the affects of the accident, with well-founded scientific estimations in the range of many tens of thousands of cancers and deaths.

One of the increasing concerns at the site is the integrity of the building structures. The explosion in 1986 caused serious damage. And, due to the high radiation levels, work on the damaged building after the accident had to be scrapped.

Ageing and corrosion have only further deteriorated these structures. In addition, some that were damaged in the accident, for example by cracking, are only now being discovered due to the inaccessibility of the site.

A collapse of the sarcophagus, leading to a release of radioactive substances into the environment around the site, cannot be ruled out. And this could pose serious problems.

There are more than 1.5 million tonnes of radioactive dust inside the ruins. If the sarcophagus were to collapse, a high volume of radioactive material would be released, and could lead to an exposure to radiation as far as 50 kilometers away.

There are also nearly 2,000 tonnes of flammable materials inside the sarcophagus. In the event of a fire, even without a collapse, heat from the fire could cause the release of a high level of radioactive dust particles.

Containment remains underfunded

In order to help minimize this risk, the Shelter Implementation Plan was agreed to in 1997. The cornerstone of this medium-term proposal is the New Safety Confinement (NSC) – a massive, self-supporting, domed, hall-like steel structure: 257 metres wide, 165 metres long, and 110 metres high.

It cannot be assembled directly above the destroyed reactor due to high radiation levels. However, it is currently being assembled in two parts to the side of the damaged reactor. These will be joined together, and then slide over the reactor on a hydraulic lifting system – a process that will take three days to complete. When it is completed, it will be the largest movable structure on earth.

The total cost of the Shelter Implementation Plan is currently estimated at €2.15 billion. Due to delays and significant cost increases, there is now a shortfall of hundreds of millions of euros.

This week, an international conference hosted by the German government will focus on the on-going threats from Chernobyl. The nations who have funded this project will discuss how to fill these enormous deficits.

The shelter itself is designed with the exceedingly limited goals of preventing further water leaking into the destroyed reactor and becoming contaminated – as has happened as the current sarcophagus has deteriorated – and to contain radioactive material in the event of the total collapse of the existing reactor sarcophagus.

It is projected to last for only 100 years.

No plans to remove the fuel that represents the main hazard

As the author of the new Greenpeace report concludes, “a major drawback of the SIP, however, is that recovering the fuel-containing material is not part of the project, although the greatest threat to the environment and people comes precisely from these fuel-containing, highly radioactive substances.

“While the protective shell is designed to make it possible for this fuel-containing material to be recovered at a later point in time, the financial means to actually implement fuel containing material recovery are not provided by the SIP. Thus, the long-term threat posed by the destroyed reactor block will not have been averted by the current efforts underway.

“In short, it must be stated that 29 years after the worst nuclear disaster the world has yet seen, the damaged reactor is still a danger. A real solution to the situation is nowhere in sight.”

As with the more recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, there is no foreseeable solution for Chernobyl. Despite the continuing decline of the nuclear power industry worldwide, hundreds of ageing nuclear reactors continue to operate, while new reactors are being built – which increases nuclear risks significantly.

No such thing as ‘nuclear safety’

Almost certainly whenever the next accident happens in the 21st century, efforts will still be underway to contain and manage the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi sites.

What Chernobyl, Fukushima, and hundreds of smaller nuclear accidents have clearly shown is the inherent risk of the nuclear technology: there will always be an unforeseen combination of human failure, technology error, and natural disaster that could lead to a major reactor accident and massive release of radiation.

The lessons are clear – there is by definition no such thing as ‘nuclear safety’. The only way to make sure that the next Chernobyl and Fukushima does not happen is to phase nuclear out.

Kendra Ulrich is a senior global energy campaigner with Greenpeace Japan.

This article was originally published by Greenpeace International.

The European Parliament has today agreed new EU laws to limit the use of crop-based biofuels – potentially saving thousands of endangered wildlife species in tropical rainforests around the world.
 
EU law makers ruled that biofuels can compete with food production, contribute to climate change, and put pressure on land use – and so have set a limit on the quantity of biofuels that can be used to meet EU energy targets of no more than 7% of transport energy.

The EU Commission has also stated that it intends to scrap all future targets and support for ‘food based’ biofuels after 2020, and future renewable energy targets for transport.

With Europe the world’s biggest user and importer of biodiesel – from crops such as palm oil, soy and rapeseed – the vote will have a major impact around the world – notably in the EU’s main supplier countries Indonesia, Malaysia and Argentina, where millions of hectares of carbon-rich, biodiverse forests are being destroyed to make way for biofuel plantations.

According to Robbie Blake, Friends of the Earth Europe’s biofuels campaigner, the move signals the end to the expanding use of food crops for transport fuel: “Let no-one be in doubt, the biofuels bubble has burst.

“These fuels do more harm than good for people, the environment and the climate. The EU’s long-awaited move to put the brakes on biofuels is a clear signal to the rest of the world that this is a false solution to the climate crisis. This must spark the end of burning food for fuel.”

After ten years campaigning, the tide has turned

This decision brings to an end to ten years of debate in the EU over the highly damaging effects of biofuels production on food prices, hunger, forest destruction, land consumption – and climate change.

The expected ‘business as usual scenario’ was for biofuels of 8.6% of EU transport energy by 2020. Current usage is at 4.7%, having declined in 2013. And given that no minimum level of use has been set, biofuel consumption could now decline further.

The Commission and fuel suppliers must also report on the indirect greenhouse emissions released by expanding biofuels production, increasing the transparency of the impacts of biofuel use.

Member states should set a 0.5% ‘non-binding target’ to use so-called ‘advanced’ biofuels – such as those derived from straw, household waste, forest and agricultural residues. The Commission has also signalled that this should rise to 1.25% by 2020.

“The people of Indonesia will be relieved to hear that the EU has taken some action to limit Europe’s demand for palm oil for biofuels, which has escalated deforestation, land grabbing, and conflicts in Indonesia”, said Kurniawan Sabar, campaign manager for WALHI / Friends of the Earth Indonesia.

Now the challenge is Indonesia itself

Around the world, 64 countries have or are considering increasing the amount of biofuels used in transport fuel, including most recently Indonesia – itself the source of much of the world’s supply from its ever-expanding palm oil sector.

The Indonesian government is currently planning to offer producers extra subsidies, and set a mandatory target of 15% biofuel blended into diesel fuel. WALHI is among the environmental groups that have criticised this decision as “a mistake”.

“The Indonesian government should take note and abandon its own plans for new subsidies to expand biofuels plantations in Indonesian forests”, commented Sabar.

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Friends of the Earth International’s food sovereignty coordinator, added: “The EU has had to backtrack on its harmful biofuels policy and this should be a lesson to other countries considering similar toxic targets for biofuels.

“While it has not gone far enough to stop the irresponsible use of food crops for car fuel, this new law acknowledges a reality that small scale food producers worldwide know – that biofuel crops cripple their ability to feed the world, and compete for the land that provides their livelihood, and for the water that sustains us. “
  
The production and consumption of biofuels grew dramatically from 2008-2009 when two EU directives – on Renewable Energy (RED) and Fuel Quality (FQD) – were adopted that included binding targets for 10% of transport energy to be derived from renewable energy by 2020.

Ironically, the laws were passed in order to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases as a response to climate change. But it is now clear that they have the opposite effect, driving deforestation that makes their indirect emissions many times greater than burning petroleum fuels – as well aswiping out countless wildlife species such as Orangutans.

Friends of the Earth is now calling on EU countries to phase out the use of food for biofuels completely – something they are allowed to do under the new law.

Source: Friends of the Earth International.

Australia has again declared war on its Indigenous people, reminiscent of the brutality that brought universal condemnation on apartheid South Africa.

Aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years.

In Western Australia, where mining companies make billion dollar profits exploiting Aboriginal land, the state government says it can no longer afford to “support” the homelands.

Vulnerable populations, already denied the basic services most Australians take for granted, are on notice of dispossession without consultation, and eviction at gunpoint. Yet again, Aboriginal leaders have warned of “a new generation of displaced people” and “cultural genocide”.

Genocide is a word Australians hate to hear. Genocide happens in other countries, not the ‘lucky’ society that per capita is the second richest on earth.

When “act of genocide” was used in the 1997 landmark report Bringing Them Home, which revealed that thousands of Indigenous children had been stolen from their communities by white institutions and systematically abused, a campaign of denial was launched by a far-right clique around the then prime minister John Howard.

It included those who called themselves the Galatians Group, then Quadrant, then the Bennelong Society; the Murdoch press was their voice.

The ‘Stolen Generation’ was exaggerated, they said, if it had happened at all. Colonial Australia was a benign place. There were no massacres. The First Australians were victims of their own cultural inferiority, or they were noble savages. Suitable euphemisms were deployed.

‘Dispossession by abuse and propaganda, coercion and blackmail’

The government of the current prime minister, Tony Abbott, a conservative zealot, has revived this assault on a people who represent Australia’s singular uniqueness. Soon after coming to office, Abbott’s government cut $534 million in indigenous social programmes, including $160 million from the indigenous health budget and $13.4 million from indigenous legal aid.

In the 2014 report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Key Indicators, the devastation is clear. The number of Aboriginal people hospitalised for self-harm has leapt, as have suicides among those as young as eleven. The indicators show a people impoverished, traumatised and abandoned.

Read the classic expose of apartheid South Africa, The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond, who told me he could write a similar account of Australia.

Having insulted indigenous Australians by declaring (at a G20 breakfast for David Cameron) that there was “nothing but bush” before the white man, Abbott announced that his government would no longer honour the longstanding commitment to Aboriginal homelands. He sneered, “It’s not the job of the taxpayers to subsidise lifestyle choices.”

The weapon used by Abbott and his redneck state and territorial counterparts is dispossession by abuse and propaganda, coercion and blackmail, such as his demand for a 99-year leasehold of Indigenous land in the Northern Territory in return for basic services: a land grab in all but name.

The Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion, refutes this, claiming “this is about communities and what communities want.” In fact, there has been no real consultation, only the co-option of a few.

Cuts driven by hatred, greed and populism

Both conservative and Labor governments have already withdrawn the national jobs programme, CDEP, from the homelands, ending opportunities for employment, and prohibited investment in infrastructure: housing, generators, sanitation. The saving is peanuts.

The reason is an extreme doctrine that evokes the punitive campaigns of the early 20th century ‘chief protector of Aborigines’, such as the fanatic A. O. Neville who decreed that the first Australians “assimilate” to extinction.

Influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis, Queensland’s ‘protection acts’ were a model for South African apartheid. Today, the same dogma and racism are threaded through anthropology, politics, the bureaucracy and the media. “We are civilised, they are not”, wrote the acclaimed Australian historian Russel Ward two generations ago. The spirit is unchanged.

Having reported on Aboriginal communities since the 1960s, I have watched a seasonal routine whereby the Australian elite interrupts its ‘normal’ mistreatment and neglect of the people of the First Nations, and attacks them outright.

This happens when an election approaches, or a prime minister’s ratings are low. Kicking the blackfella is deemed popular, although grabbing minerals-rich land by stealth serves a more prosaic purpose. Driving people into the fringe slums of ‘economic hub towns’ satisfies the social engineering urges of racists.

The 2007 ‘intervention’ – a deliberate attack on Aboriginal self-determination

The last frontal attack was in 2007 when Prime Minister Howard sent the army into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to “rescue children” who, said his minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, were being abused by paedophile gangs in “unthinkable numbers”.

Known as “the intervention”, the media played a vital role. In 2006, the national TV current affairs programme, the ABC’s Lateline, broadcast a sensational interview with a man whose face was concealed. Described as a “youth worker” who had lived in the Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu, he made a series of lurid allegations.

Subsequently exposed as a senior government official who reported directly to the minister, his claims were discredited by the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists. The community received no apology.

The 2007 ‘intervention’ allowed the federal government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands in ways with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty reported, a 40% lower mortality rate.

It is this ‘traditional life’ that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on Indigenous organisations.

The homelands are seen as a threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia. It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a spectre on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.

Australia richest state turns against its poorest people

The current political attack was launched in the richest state, Western Australia. Last October, the state premier, Colin Barnett, announced that his government could not afford the $90 million budget for basic municipal services to 282 homelands: water, power, sanitation, schools, road maintenance, rubbish collection.

It was the equivalent of informing the white suburbs of Perth that their lawn sprinklers would no longer sprinkle and their toilets no longer flush; and they had to move; and if they refused, the police would evict them.

Where would the dispossessed go? Where would they live? In six years, Barnett’s government has built few houses for Indigenous people in remote areas. In the Kimberley region, Indigenous homelessness – aside from natural disaster and civil strife – is one of the highest anywhere, in a state renowned for its conspicuous wealth, golf courses and prisons overflowing with impoverished black people.

Western Australia jails Aboriginal males at more than eight times the rate of apartheid South Africa. It has one of the highest incarceration rates of juveniles in the world, almost all of them indigenous, including children kept in solitary confinement in adult prisons, with their mothers keeping vigil outside.

In 2013, the former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me that the state was “racking and stacking” Aboriginal prisoners. When I asked what she meant, she said, “It’s warehousing.”

In March, Barnett changed his story. There was “emerging evidence”, he said, “of appalling mistreatment of little kids” in the homelands. What evidence? Barnett claimed that gonorrhoea had been found in children younger than 14, then conceded he did not know if these were in the homelands. His police commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, chimed in that child sexual abuse was “rife”.

He quoted a 15-year-old study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. What he failed to say was that the report highlighted poverty as the overwhelming cause of “neglect” and that sexual abuse accounted for less than 10%.

The ‘fatal burden’ of being born indigenous

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a federal agency, recently released a report on what it calls the “Fatal Burden” of Third World disease and trauma borne by Indigenous people “resulting in almost 100,000 years of life lost due to premature death”.

This ‘fatal burden’ is the product of extreme poverty imposed in Western Australia, as in the rest of Australia, by the denial of human rights.

In Barnett’s vast rich Western Australia, barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited communities for which his government has a duty of care. In the town of Roeburne, in the midst of the booming minerals-rich Pilbara, 80% of the indigenous children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media that causes deafness.

In 2011, the Barnett government displayed a brutality in the community of Oombulgurri the other homelands can expect. “First, the government closed the services”, wrote Tammy Solonec of Amnesty International.

“It closed the shop, so people could not buy food and essentials. It closed the clinic, so the sick and the elderly had to move, and the school, so families with children had to leave, or face having their children taken away from them. The police station was the last service to close, then eventually the electricity and water were turned off.

“Finally, the ten residents who resolutely stayed to the end were forcibly evicted [leaving behind] personal possessions. [Then] the bulldozers rolled into Oombulgurri. The WA government has literally dug a hole and in it buried the rubble of people’s homes and personal belongings.”

In South Australia, the state and federal governments launched a similar attack on the 60 remote Indigenous communities. South Australia has a long-established Aboriginal Lands Trust, so people were able to defend their rights – up to a point. On 12 April, the federal government offered $15 million over five years.

That such a miserly sum is considered enough to fund proper services in the great expanse of the state’s homelands is a measure of the value placed on Indigenous lives by white politicians who unhesitatingly spend $28 billion annually on armaments and the military.

Haydn Bromley, chair of the Aboriginal Lands Trust told me, “The $15 million doesn’t include most of the homelands, and it will only cover bare essentials – power, water. Community development? Infrastructure? Forget it.”

Australia’s non-people

The current distraction from these national dirty secrets is the approaching ‘celebrations’ of the centenary of an Edwardian military disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 when 8,709 Australian and 2,779 New Zealand troops – the Anzacs – were sent to their death in a futile assault on a beach in Turkey.

In recent years, governments in Canberra have promoted this imperial waste of life as an historical deity to mask the militarism that underpins Australia’s role as America’s ‘deputy sheriff’ in the Pacific.

In bookshops, ‘Australian non-fiction’ shelves are full of opportunistic tomes about wartime derring-do, heroes and jingoism. Suddenly, Aboriginal people who fought for the white man are fashionable, whereas those who fought against the white man in defence of their own country, Australia, are unfashionable.

Indeed, they are officially non-people. The Australian War Memorial refuses to recognise their remarkable resistance to the British invasion. In a country littered with Anzac memorials, not one official memorial stands for the thousands of native Australians who fought and fell defending their homeland.

This is part of the “great Australian silence”, as W. E. H. Stanner in 1968 called his lecture in which he described a “cult of forgetfulness on a national scale.” He was referring to the Indigenous people.

Today, the silence is ubiquitous. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales currently has an exhibition, The Photograph and Australia, in which the timeline of this ancient country begins, incredibly, with Captain Cook.

The same silence covers another enduring, epic resistance. Extraordinary demonstrations of Indigenous women protesting the removal of their children and grandchildren by he state, some of them at gunpoint, are ignored by journalists and patronised by politicians.

More Indigenous children are being wrenched from their homes and communities today than during the worst years of the Stolen Generation. A record 15,000 are presently detained ‘in care’; many are given to white families and will never return to their communities.

Apartheid, Australia-style

Last year, the West Australian Police Minister, Liza Harvey, attended a screening in Perth of my film, Utopia, which docmented the racism and thuggery of police towards black Australians, and the multiple deaths of young Aboriginal men in custody. The minister cried.

On her watch, 50 City of Perth armed police raided an Indigenous homeless camp at Matagarup, and drove off mostly elderly women and young mothers with children. The people in the camp described themselves as “refugees … seeking safety in our own country”. They called for the help of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

Australian politicians are nervous of the United Nations. Abbott’s response has been abuse. When Professor James Anaya, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People, described the racism of the “intervention” , Abbott told him to, “get a life” and “not listen to the old victim brigade.”

The planned closure of Indigenous homelands breaches Article 5 of the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP).

Australia is committed to “provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for … any action which has the aim of dispossessing [Indigenous people] of their lands, territories or resources”. The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is blunt. “Forced evictions” are against the law.

An international momentum is building. In 2013, Pope Francis urged the world to act against racism and on behalf of “indigenous people who are increasingly isolated and abandoned.” It was South Africa’s defiance of such a basic principle of human rights that ignited the international opprobrium and campaign that brought down apartheid.

Australia beware.

John Pilger can be reached through his website.

This article previously appeared on CounterPunch.

Ask a particularly extreme proponent of the free market how they see the future, and they might conjure up schools run by Coca-Cola and education programmes administered by Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Or they might see hospitals operated as companies by nurse-entrepreneurs who compete for private equity funds.

To the rest of us, this sounds like a nightmare. But it is a vision of society which is not far off in parts of Africa and Asia, brought to hundreds of thousands of people – thanks to British aid money.

Turning basic needs into commodities to be bought and sold for profit takes a long time in a country with an established welfare state, where people are proud of their NHS and comprehensive school system.

It’s easier in countries where public provision has been destroyed by decades of savage austerity imposed by western-controlled institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

It’s in those countries that our government has used the development budget – another aspect of public provision we should be proud of – to test out ultra-free-market ideas. Our new report exposes the Department for International Development (DFID) as a world leader in spearheading this push towards privatisation of education and healthcare.

DFID’s private education partners: PWC, Coca-Cola, Pearson

In one example, DFID is spending £355 million on a project called the Girl’s Education Challenge which is managed by British multinational Price Waterhouse Coopers. Key to the initiative is the promotion of private provision of education, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nepal and Uganda.

One partner in the Challenge is Coca-Cola, which is working in Nigeria to promote “the economic empowerment of 5 million female entrepreneurs across the global Coca-Cola value chain.” So Coca-Cola doesn’t simply see this as an opportunity to ‘greenwash’ its brand, but a direct commercial advantage.

Another key partner is education multinational Pearson. Not only is Pearson involved in intensive school testing in the UK, it is a massive global player in the ‘low cost’ schools’ market targeted at the poor.

DFID is supporting that effort and it’s a cosy relationship – senior Pearson executive and former Blair advisor Sir Michael Barber also works as a DFID education representative in Pakistan.

Pearson believes that “low cost private schools offer quality education solutions.” In fact research suggests that low cost schools often rely on classroom scripts, very large classes and poorly prepared teachers. At one such school in Ghana teachers were found to be earning roughly $3 per day, which is 15-20% of what public sector teachers earn.

No wonder the UN special rapporteur Kishore Singh has publicly stated that governments “should not allow or promote low-cost private schools” which fuel inequality and exclusion. He argues that private education companies are “capitalising on the inability of governments to cope with rising demands on public learning.”

Public-private health care – it’s a disaster here, so why promote it it Rwanda?

DfiD is pushing similar policies in relation to healthcare, sometimes through intermediaries.

One such programme in Rwanda aims to establish ‘Health Posts’ that “follow a Public Private Partnership model and operate as a franchise, with each Health Post being owned, operated and managed by a nurse as a small business.”

Another DfID partner aims at “removing barriers impeding efficiency in global markets for essential commodities (for instance, in health and nutrition).”

One way or another, aid is being used a tool to convince, cajole and compel the majority of the world to undertake policies which help Western business, but which undermine public services from emerging or thriving.

One DfID scheme aims to ‘help’ governments “improve the regulatory environment for private provision of education” and support officials who “lack the skills and experience to effectively negotiate and manage public private partnerships” – surely a joke given the British Government’s own record negotiating disastrous PFI contracts.

Driven by an outdated ‘free market’ ideology

These schemes are driven by an outdated ideology to turn the world into a giant marketplace and our basic needs into commodities to be bought and sold.

Access to services and the quality of services we can use will depend upon the amount of money we have, which often depend in turn upon race, class and gender. It is a world of entrenched inequality and privilege.

We should look to a different tradition to guide aid spending. The introduction of universal education, the increasing length of compulsory education, the creation of comprehensive schools, the foundation of the NHS – these are some of the greatest social achievements we have ever made, and we remain rightly proud of them. The aid budget could be used to help others to achieve these vital components of a decent society.

To do so, we need to push for a progressive and democratic vision of development. The Conservative-Lib Dem government does not have a monopoly on supporting privatisation with aid money.

The last Labour government did so too, albeit in a less extreme fashion. Today, Labour’s election manifesto shows almost no vision for what progressive development should look like.

We cannot defend aid spending that does more harm than good!

Neither are they pushed by anti-poverty campaigners, who either benefit from the privatisation schemes or are so concerned with protecting aid spending against a narrow minded and inward looking minority, that they forget what they are defending.

There’s no doubt that those who want to abolish or slash aid would take the public discussion backwards, and make genuinely redistributive policies even more difficult to enact. We have seen some of these politics on display as part of the election campaign.

But we also need to be honest. Unless we turn our minds to challenging the political consensus which currently exists around aid, we will end up with something which cannot be defended and is not worth defending.

We will have won the most empty of victories.

The report: ‘Profiting from poverty, again‘.

Nick Dearden is director of the Global Justice Now (formerly World Development Movement), and former director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign.

This article is an updated version of one first published by Global Justice Now.

The largest ever public survey on whether Eurasian lynx should be re-introduced to the UK has revealed overwhelming public support.

Of over 9,000 people who took part in the survey, 91% supporting a trial reintroduction and 84% believed it should begin within the next 12 months.

The survey was carried out by the Lynx UK Trust (LUKT) with support from the University of Cumbria, and the Trust has today released its results.

“We’ve been blown away by the level of interest and support from the public”, comments chief scientific advisor to the project, Dr Paul O’Donoghue.

“This is by far the biggest survey of its kind ever carried out in the UK, with almost five times the feedback of the original beaver reintroduction survey in Scotland which recorded an 86% approval rating.

“That led to government approval for the trial reintroduction, so we’re expecting to see a consistent response from Scottish Natural Heritage and hope for similar in England and Wales.

“The UK public have spoken. People overwhelmingly want these animals to be given the chance to come back and we’ve got an extremely capable team to deliver it.

“We are in a very positive and collaborative dialogue with both Natural England and Scottish Natural Heritage and are working towards an introduction before the end of 2015. We are also considering introduction sites in Wales and expect to be making a formal approach to the Countryside Council for Wales.”

A 1,300 year absence

The Eurasian lynx is the UK’s native ‘big cat’ that was once a sgnificant predator of deer, wild boar, foxes and other large wildlife species.

“Typically 85% is the Eurasian lynx’s diet is deer, so ecologically a huge benefit to Britain to bring the species back as we are suffering form chronic deer overpopulation”, says O’Donoghue. “The British countryside is suffering badly and lynx could be its saviour.

Lynx have been successfully reintroduced across Europe, with the best managed programs constructing whole new eco-friendly industries such as wildlife tourism around their presence, breathing new economic life into remote rural communities.

Now the LUKT team hope that reintroduction here will provide a valuable natural control on the UK’s overpopulated deer species, leading to forest regeneration and a boost to the entire ecosystem.

“Lynx have proven themselves across Europe to be absolutely harmless to humans and of very little threat to livestock”, says O’Donoghue, adding that their reintroduction would bring “huge benefit to rural economies and the natural ecology, including species like capercaillie which face some serious problems in the UK.

“Lynx also prey on foxes so you could say they are the gamekeeper’s best friend. I predict a net loss of livestock loss where lynx are introduced – exact opposite of what the farming lobby fears.

“It’s wonderful that the general public want to see lynx given the chance to do the same here. With no natural threats and bringing a great range of benefits to humans, the time is perfect to bring back the lynx to the British Isles.”

Over half of the people who filled in the survey were from rural communities, returning a level of support only 5-6% lower than urban communities, showing that this project has considerable support from people who live and work in the UK countryside.

Support confirmed by opinion poll

Critics could argue that the survey was not representative of the UK as a whole as participation was elective – giving a stronger represeantation to people with extreme views on either side of the argument who chose to commit time to responding.

So to gauge the broader spread of public opinion LUKT commissioned a further survey using traditional opinion polling techniques. Just over 1,000 people representatively spread across age and social demographics were selected, and a support level of 70% for the principle of lynx reintroduction was recorded, with 60% supporting it with 12 months.

The results of the survey and poll were analysed by Dr Ian Convery and Dr Darrell Smith of the University of Cumbria. “As with the pro-active online survey, this representative sample shows very strong support for lynx, again at rates comparable with that for beavers, and with those against lynx reintroduction numbering very low”, said Dr Convery.

As for the main survey, he said, “It’s an impressive sample size of people who feel really strongly about lynx reintroduction, and consistently all of the results and analyses are extremely positive.”