Each week we will feature a blog from this amazing journey, which includes People & Planet students.

Who are we?

We are a team of Welsh & Mongolian young people who are passionate and optimistic about our future. 8 of us are young people from all over Wales, we have 3 fantastic youth workers and the rest of the team we will meet when we get out there.

What are we up to?

We are embarking on a journey to Mongolia by train, brought together by a shared passion for positive youth action whatever our backgrounds.

Why?

By taking on issues head on we believe that outbursts of frustration, like the riots we have just seen, can be avoided and empower young people to feel more able to participate in decision making and in their community.

How?

In Mongolia we will be sharing our collective skills with the Mongolians keen to start a youth environmental movement in a country already affected by climate change.

Us Welsh lot will have a unique opportunity to see the effects climate change first hand which we will use when we get home to inspire others to take action and get involved in the sustainable development projects of Dyfodol (our parent organisation).

Also, we are an organisation core funded by the Welsh Assembly Government so we are trying to use our contact with the Welsh Environment Minister to benefit the young Mongolians relationship with their Government and Environment Minister…..we’ll see!

We’ll be blogging individually, some in Welsh some in English, and if you want more info on Dyfodol or our other projects check out www.dyfodol.org

Isabel, Anna, Kyle, Rosie, Melody, Sannan, Twm, Kirsti, Robin, Taliesin and Anthony

Police battle riots in London

David Cameron said yeaterday that some parts of society are “sick”. Well it may have taken riots on the streets for him to finally acknowledge this but many of us have known this for a long time. The trouble is he just doesn’t have a clue which parts of British society are truly sick and which parts are just angry and opportunistic.

Certainly those who looted and started fires over the last few days are in general not sick, rather they are the disaffected, unheard parts of society, victims of the spectacular success of commercialism with a total disregard for their community and values that others hold dear.

Firstly we must define what he means when he uses the word sick. Disturbed, sinister, pre meditated. Maybe appalling is too mild a word. Is he describing the people involved? Or does he mean that society is unhealthy? If he means society then he could claim a genuinely remarkable (for a politician) and timely insight and awakening. For society is profoundly sick. And if he is about to do something about it then lets hail him.

However it is easy to fear that his word sick was directed at the rioters and not society. So instead of showing wisdom and true awareness he just reinforces his own education and training. That of deflective recrimination of an easy target. He leads those who actually listen to him, or follow a word he or any of his team-mates says, along the lethal path of either not being truly aware of societal and human needs or, more sinisterly, knowing about them but being deliberately misleading about them.

He seems to think that these rioters are sick whilst being totally unaware of the true sickness that has enveloped our modern society. Mr Cameron has grown up to be coldened and hardened to the true injustices carried out and inflicted on so many sectors of society both domestic and international. Conditioned to accept the brutality and “sickness” of profit first and everything else somewhere else. Hence he is brainwashed to think that attacks on posessions, material goods, glass and ultimately profit are sick whilst remaining cold to the children fighting wars and working in the diamond mines in many Southern African nations and the scores of people back home for whom neo-liberal capitalist markets create no future or hope.

At worst the riots traumatised local communities, and this is reprehensible. Families trying to sleep whilst in fear of the unknown, what is going to happen next? Strike a familiar note? Like the same feeling inflicted upon countless families in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years. Of course the leader of a people should have as his number one concern his own people. But to do it to someone else and then expect to be able to complain about it happening to your own people puts you on decidedly dodgy moral ground.

And that’s if his primary focus is on the well being of his own people. Which it isn’t, as has been shown by the actions of the current coalition and the past actions of countless governments in their ambivilence and couldn’t care less attitude to many sections of society. Actions speak louder than words. We’ve heard empty spin and rehtoric for years. So if those who terrorised innocent people during the riots this week are sick, are those who sanctioned the terrorising of innocent families in Iraq and Afghanistan sick also? If he means that the people are sick, then surely so.

Is closing hospitals sick?

What about the ongoing privatisation of healthcare and the pension cuts? Bringing uncertainty and anguish to millions of his own people. To take an institution that was designed to care for people and to run it for profit? To put profit before his own peoples welfare. If the rioters, by putting their own profit, in this case looting, before the wellbeing of their community are sick, then what does it say when, on a massive scale, profit from peoples health is made paramount to the health of the nation? The institutions of health and educational security are being looted at the expense of the wellbeing of the majority of society. If we are going to be crtical of looters filling their shopping trolleys and running of down the streets the we must also be critical of the companies rubbing their hands with glee at looting Britain’s world famous and admired welfare system.

If we look at the stores that were targeted by this weeks looting we can see what they were after. The goods that are sure to enhance our lives and make us feel good. So succesful has the marketing been in influencing the vulnerable psyche of people that people are being pitted against each other in a great aggressive struggle of consumerism. Exactly the point capitalism is trying to acheive in creating and encouraging people to be competitive to the extent that they must have this product or that. Preying on the weaknesses of people.

So successful has advertising become that this weeks riots could not have happened without it. Pitting people against people in a race for commercial nirvana. Is this not sick? And if you think not then realise this aggressive consumerism is also targeted at children as young as 4 in the UK. Get them while they’re young, aggressive little consumers will grow into perfect adult consumers. A well known marketing tactic, all too obvious to parents. Advertising to children is illegal in many European countries.

So this generation has grown up with a culture of want want want, the ideal dream of commercialism. If they cant get it through buying they seem to think that they will just steal it. So powerful is the success of the advertising and indoctination that they simply have to have it, whatever the cost.

Nike workers protest

If this weeks 24 hour news extravaganza was the biggest example of overt looting in a 100 years the what about the grandest theft this land has ever seen? The enclosure acts and clearences when the people of this land were looted of their land and their rights to use its resources. The effects of which created the urban sprawl of landless people that make up modern cities in the first place. Maybe with their committed actions and a bit more focus the rioters could have looted our land and morality back.

On the 13^th of September the biggest arms traders in the world, many of them British, will assemble to show off their latest technology of high tech killing equipment, designed to butcher 10’s of 1000’s over the next few years, in London. Armed with the aim of selling them to whoever will buy them and use them to kill whoever they want, all for a good profit, they will be lauded and applauded by Cameron and his mates. If those who steal a T.V. And loot a t-shirt on Peckham high street are sick, are those who, with presicion planning and ruthless premeditation, are stealing and looting the innocence, peace, limbs and futures of countless people around the world also sick?

What about the immorality of British corparate crime? There’s no room for morality in business as the transnational grand looters will gleefully tell you. If we create a society where the dog eat dog world of business is held up as a virtue and caring welfare state is regarded as expendable then we shouldn’t be suprised if society at different levels grows to reflect this. When the destruction of material possessions brings about more headlines than the destruction of peoples bodies and of communities and societies then something really is sick.

And it’s not just David Cameron who seems to have no grasp of the reality of the real world, blinkered by business ideology and blind to the effects of the world that consumerism has created. Clegg can’t do anything but spin. He dosen’t really know what to say. He spins so obviously that it’s cringeworthy, recalling tired edited lines that show complete detatchment from people standing 2 metres away, like he’s not even listening, to busy thinking about which line may gently spin him out of this one. He must be getting dizzy by now. Boris seems to attack the situation with gusto but neither does he really know what to do except criticise. Sentences repeated and rearranged including the words, unacceptable, punished, more police, law, Blatantly unable to grasp what is going on. Tottenham is a different world to what all of them know. And not a world they ever had any intention of wanting to know. So conditioned are they to the business mentality.

If he really cared about society and not profit Cameron would not be using taxpayers money to bail out banks and to bomb people on the other side of the world whilst cutting essential services at home. He would be frogmarching the bankers, international businessmen and warmongers into the overnight magistrates not disaffected kids breaking stuff. But he is from the same stable as those who are truly sick. The same stable that wrote the laws that demonise nicking trainers and eulogise selling guns.  And he really doesn’t understand what is genuinely sick. It’s probably not his fault. He’s been brainwashed since a child to think that international arms trading is delightful and noble whilst angry kids must be crushed as a threat to the wonders of silent consumerism.

On Facebook I was invited to repost a speech by Jimmy Reid a Glaswegian trade unionist and activist who died one year ago today.

This is a copy of the  speech that he made to students of Glasgow University where he was made rector in 1971. It’s very moving, and so much of it is as relevant today as when it was first delivered. Given current events, his words on alienation seem very apt. It’s long but very much worth reading.

Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has, however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It’s the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies.

Many may not have rationalised it. May not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it. It therefore conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation expresses itself in different ways by different people. It is to be found in what our courts often describe as the criminal anti-social behaviour of a section of the community. It is expressed by those young people who want to opt out of society, by drop outs, the so-called maladjusted, those-who seek to escape permanently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of course it would be wrong to say it was the sole reason for these things. But it is a much greater factor in all of them than is generally recognised.

Society and its prevailing sense of values leads to another form of alienation. It alienates some from humanity. It partially dehumanises some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony is, they are often considered normal and well adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than anyone else.

They remind me of the character in the novel, Catch 22, the father of Major Major. He was a farmer in the American Mid West. He hated suggestions for things like Medicare, social services, unemployment benefits or civil rights. He was, however, an enthusiast for the agricultural policies that paid farmers for not bringing their fields under cultivation. From the money he got for not growing alfalfa he bought more land in order not to grow alfalfa. He became rich. Pilgrims came from all over the state to sit at his feet and learn how to be a successful non-grower of alfalfa. His philosophy was simple. The poor didn’t work hard enough and so they were poor. He believed that the good Lord gave him two strong hands to grab as much as he could for himself. He is a comic figure. But think, have you not met his like here in Britain? Here in Scotland? I have.

It is easy and tempting to hate such people. However it is wrong. They are as much products of society and a consequence of that society, human alienation, as the poor drop out. They are losers. They have lost essential elements of our common humanity. Man is a social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women.

The big challenge to our civilisation is not OZ, a magazine I haven’t even seen let alone read. Nor is it permissiveness, although I agree our society is too permissive. Any society which, for example, permits over one million people to be unemployed is far too permissive for my liking. Nor is it moral laxity in the narrow sense that this word is generally employed ~ although in a sense here we come nearer to the problem. It does involve morality, ethics, and our concept of human values. The challenge we face is that of rooting out anything and everything that distorts and devalues human relations. Let me give two examples from contemporary experience to illustrate the point.

Recently on television I saw an advert. The scene is a banquet. A gentleman is on his feet proposing a toast. His speech is full of phrases like “this full-bodied specimen”. Sitting beside him is a young, buxom woman. The image she projects is not pompous but foolish. She is visibly preening herself, believing that she is the object of this bloke’s eulogy. Then he concludes - “and now I give … ” then a brand name of what used to be described as Empire sherry. The woman is shattered, hurt and embarrassed. Then the laughter. Derisive and cruel laughter. The real point, of course, is this. In this charade, the viewers were obviously expected to identify not with the victim but with her tormentors.

The other illustration is the widespread, implicit acceptance of the concept and term, the rat race. The picture it conjures up is one where we are scurrying around scrambling for position, trampling on others, back-stabbing, all in pursuit of personal success. Even genuinely intended friendly advice can sometimes take the form of someone saying to you, “Listen, you look after number one”. Or as they say in London, “Bang the bell, Jack, I’m on the bus”.

To the students I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a giveaway. It’s more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society. The power structures that have inevitably emerged from this approach threaten and undermine our hard-won democratic rights. The whole process is towards the centralisation and concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. The facts are there for all who want to see. Giant monopoly companies and consortia dominate almost every branch of our economy. The men who wield effective control within these giants exercise a power over their fellow men which is frightening and is a negation of democracy.

Government by the people for the people becomes meaningless unless it includes major economic decision making by the people for the people. This is not simply an economic matter. In essence it is an ethical and moral question for whoever takes the important economic decisions in society ipso facto determines the social priorities of that society. From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants’ books.

To appreciate fully the inhumanity of this situation, you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man suddenly told he is redundant without provision made for suitable alternative employment, with the prospect in the west of Scotland, if he is in his late forties or fifties, of spending the rest of his life in the Labour Exchange. Someone, somewhere has decided he is unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.

The concentration of power in the economic field is matched by the centralisation of decision making in the political institutions of society. The power of Parliament has undoubtedly been eroded over past decades with more and more authority being invested in the Executive. The power of local authorities has been and is being systematically undermined. The only justification I can see for local government is as a counterbalance to the centralised character of national government.

Local government is to be restructured. What an opportunity, one would think, for decentralizing as much power as possible back to local communities. Instead the proposals are for centralising local government. It’s once again a blueprint for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented, in a few years when asked “Where do you come from ?”, I can reply: “The Western Region”. It even sounds like a hospital board.

It stretches from Oban to Girvan and eastwards to include most of Glasgow conurbation. As in other matters, I must ask the politicians who favour these proposals - where and how in your calculations did you quantify the value of a community? Or a community life? Of a sense of belonging? Of the feeling of identification? These are rhetorical questions. I know the answer. Such human considerations do not feature in their thought processes.

Everything that is proposed from the establishment seems almost calculated to minimise the role of the people, to miniaturise man. I can understand how attractive this prospect must be to those at the top. Those of us who refuse to be pawns in their power game can be picked up by their bureaucratic tweezers and dropped in a filing cabinet under “M” for malcontent or maladjusted. When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet.

If modern technology requires greater and larger productive units, let’s make our wealth producing resources and potential subject to p1ublic control and to social accountability. Let’s gear our society to social ~-need, not personal greed. Given such creative re-orientation of society, there is no doubt in my mind that in ” few years we could eradicate in our country the scourge of poverty, the underprivileged, slums, and insecurity.

Even this is not enough. To measure social progress purely by material advance is not enough. Our aim must be the enrichment of the whole quality of life. It requires a social and cultural, or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country. A necessary part of this must be the restructuring of the institutions of government and where necessary, the evolution of additional structures so as to involve the people in the decision making processes of our society. The so called experts will tell you that this would be cumbersome or marginally inefficient. I am prepared to sacrifice a margin of efficiency for the value of the people’s participation anyway, in the longer term, I reject this argument.

To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people, I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It’s a social crime. The flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone’s development.

In this context education has a vital role to play. If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change. The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, ne solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with, and in service to our fellow human beings can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.

Universities must be in the forefront of development, must meet social needs and not lag behind them. It is my earnest desire that this great University of Glasgow should be in the vanguard initiating changes and setting the example for others to follow. Part of our educational process must be the involvement of all sections of the university on the governing bodies. The case for student representation is unanswerable. It is inevitable.

My conclusion is to reaffirm what I hope and certainly intend to be the spirit permeating this address. It’s an affirmation of faith in humanity. All that is good in man’s heritage involves recognition of our common humanity, an unashamed acknowledgement that man is good by nature. Burns expressed it in a poem that technically was not his best, yet captured the spirit.

In “Why should we idly waste our prime,” he writes:

“The golden age, we’ll then revive, each man shall be a brother,

In harmony we all shall live and till the earth together,

In virtue trained, enlightened youth shall move each fellow creature,

And time shall surely prove the truth that man is good by nature”.

It’s my belief that all the factors to make a practical reality of such a world are maturing now. I would like to think that our generation took mankind some way along the road towards this goal. It’s a goal worth fighting for.

This is a cross-post from my other blog where I posted a few thoughts about the riots happening just now.

To Riot or Not to Riot?

Hello there, People & Planeters! My name is Lisa and I have just joined People & Planet as the Climate Change Campaign Intern. I’ll support all of you as you run your amazing campaigns and events over the next year.

My main focus will be Go Green Week: the annual national week of action on climate change in schools, colleges and universities that takes place 6 - 11th February 2012. I will also be working on the well respected People & Planet Green League. We’re currently deciding how to advance the Going Greener campaign in the next year – please help us by feeding back your ideas here.

I used to head up the Bristol UWE People & Planet Group and I was the South West Regional Rep in 2009 and loved every last minute! For the last year I have been working in Austria for Salzburg Global Seminar, working to create more sustainable universities.

Happily, I have returned and you can contact me on facebook and email lisa.tozer@peopleandplanet.org. Over the next year I hope to get to know many of you but in the meantime please contact me if you need any resources, information or to let me know what you’re up to! I look forward to speaking with you soon!

Hi everybody, I’m Lev. I’ve just joined Jim on the Buy Right team, so I’m looking forward to a year of taking on the sweatshops and fighting for workers’ rights around the world.

Lev

Before this, I studied at Warwick University, where I did a lot of campaigning and rabble-rousing. Over the last year, I’ve been on the National Union of Students’ LGBT Committee and worked for Yes to Fairer Votes in May’s referendum campaign.

This year, get in touch with me about any of our campaigns relating to corporate power and social justice. In particular, we’re going to be doing a massive push to promote the Worker Rights Consortium – an independent monitoring board for labour rights around the world.

You can get in touch with me any time on Facebook, Twitter or by e-mail: lev.taylor@peopleandplanet.org

Make sure to add me.  I’m sure I’ll be meeting many of you soon!

Hello Everybody!

I’m Anna and I will be the Student Activism Coordinator over the coming year. I’ll be working alongside Adam and will be on hand to support your student group and help you to plan successful actions on your campus. I was previously a member of The University of Birmingham group for three years and primarily worked on the Redress Fashion campaign whilst it was running.

For the last year I have been working at a housing and mentoring agency in Birmingham and am very much looking forward to getting back in campaigning with People & Planet.

You can contact me about booking workshops at your university as well as the key training events over the year, such as Shared Planet, Summer Gathering and the student activism weekends. If you’ve got any ideas about the kind of training you would like or specific workshops you would like to be delivered it would be great to hear from you.

You can contact me on: anna.loosley@peopleandplanet.org or by calling 01865 245678. I’m also on facebook.

Hi there! My name’s Liz Ely, and I am the new Education Co-Ordinator intern working in Schools and FE Colleges for People & Planet. I am here to support young people to achieve positive changes through workshops and longer projects I have just moved down to tropical Oxford from Edinburgh, where I was a youth worker. In the past I have supported a girls’ group to deliver their own anti-racist workshops in the north of Scotland and helped a group raise money for YWCA Kenya . I will be available to deliver workshops on a wide range of topics over the year, as well as getting involved with longer projects– which I’m really excited about!

If you want to get in touch with me to arrange a workshop, or discuss work in your school or college you can email me at liz.ely@peopleandplanet.org, give me a phone on 01865 245678.

This is me, stood next to another member of People & Planet staff (can you guess which one?)

Nicholas Messet was today driven away in shame from the international conference on West Papua at Oxford University, UK.

After the conference had started, whilst the Papuan, British and international attendees were all already inside Mr Messet attempted to gain entry despite insistence from the Human rights workers that he would not be allowed inside.

Due to his well known history of implication in the murder and torture of Papuan civilians the British human rights workers decided that he had no place at a conference discussing peace, justice and the truthful resolution of the

Nicholas Messet being driven away from the conference, 2nd August 2011.

long lasting and ongoing political problems in Papua.

Enquires were made as to whether he could be arrested by British police for his alleged crimes and the human rights workers confirmed that investigations will be made into whether he can be formally arrested and charged should he ever attempt to return to the UK. Other European embassies have been informed of his presence in Europe. It is reported that he has flown straight back to Jakarta.