Firstly, we will be holding a Pre-AGM meeting on the evening of Monday 14th September, in advance of the Annual General Meeting in mid-November. This is an opportunity for members to help set the agenda for the upcoming AGM, and review the Chairperson’s framing statement: Register here.
Secondly, we have launched registration for our webinar on the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. We will be hosting 3 knowledgeable speakers to discuss the political, environmental and global security implications of the deal, in which the ailing British submarine industry is central.
That’s right – the UK government is pursuing multiple obscenely expensive nuclear submarine programmes, perhaps for decades to come, at the same time as warning its own citizens to stockpile food and water due to impending, catastrophic food shocks.
British farmers say 2026 has been the worst harvest on record. This combined with shortages of fertiliser due to the US war on Iran and compounded by the upcoming super El-Niño in 2027 will almost definitely lead to food shortages.
The climate crisis is biting now – not by the mid-century. This means there will only be more annual deaths due to heat, only more wildfires every summer, only more intense drought and worse conditions for food production.
But the British government thinks ‘national security’ has something to do with touting weapons capable of ending civilisation, instead of food sovereignty, reliable water supply and homegrown clean energy.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister’s first foreign visit has been to Ukraine, where he rubber-stamped the provision of classified missile blueprints to support continued strikes on Russia, and accepted Ukrainian tech assistance in clamping down on protests at British military bases.
Russian officials have warned Britain could face consequences for assisting Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russia. Some of these, like Russia’s own airstrikes in Ukraine, have targeted civilian energy and retail facilities.
And a new conceit is being prepared by the British media, which is to lump in ‘war with Russia’ with ‘climate change’ as overlapping security threats. This conceptual trick will be employed so that spending billions preparing to fight an apocalyptic war with the former becomes conceptually interchangeable with fighting the latter.
The article linked above from The Guardian is a case in point of this media spin, in which it explicitly links the need to stockpile food to both extreme weather events AND hostile states.
Of course, climate-related shocks and supposed ‘adversary threats’ have little to do with one another, and massive re-armament is entirely incompatible with properly addressing the climate crisis.
That would require dramatic upgrade of the national electricity grid to better accommodate renewable electricity, nationwide replacement of gas boilers with heat pumps, enormous investments in food sovereignty initiatives and vast expansion of public transport networks to reduce reliance on costly and polluting personal vehicles.
But the resources required to pursue such a security agenda in the UK are currently being directed towards nuclear weapons, which are soon to consume a full quarter of the UK’s Defence budget.
We cannot have true national security in the era of climate crisis while buying into the “nuclear deterrence” con. A safer future for our families means climate resilience must be prioritised over preparation for nuclear war.