Any report of yesterday’s conference needs to start with acknowledging the huge debt to its principal organisers Martin Empson and Roy Wilkes who coordinated the arrangements from their Mancunian fastness and gave up several Saturdays to travel to London for organisational meetings.
Maybe it is too early to say definitively but the event felt that suddenly a section of the trade union movement in Britain has decided that climate change is an issue that it has to make an urgent priority. There were at least three hundred people present and the majority of them were neither part of the far left nor any of the established environmental groups.
The morning plenary was chaired by the Green Party’s Jean Lambert. First up was Frances O’ Grady who you’ll probably know has been TUC Deputy General Secretary since January 2003. In common with the accounts that follow this summary is based on my scrawled attempts at note taking so apologies to all those who feel that I haven’t done justice to some of the nuanced subtleties of the discussion. She began by saying that the battle against climate change is part of the the struggle for global justice because the poor and vulnerable of the earth, those who have been responsible for the lowest amount of carbon emissions will be the most severely affected. You can’t argue with that.
Apparently Adair Turner of the Confederation of British Industry has said the this very fact creates a moral duty on the rich to mitigate and reduce their emissions.
Willie Walshe of British Airways took the advice to heart and has planted eighty trees in his back garden. He’s also using his Mercedes less. I urge all readers of this site to do the same.
Addressing the employment consequences of creating a low carbon economy Frances called for training, re-employment and investment in future technologies. She also proposed a windfall tax on profit making energy companies to offset fuel poverty and pointed to the challenge of recruiting and organising young worker to meet the challenge of climate change.
Caroline Lucas of the Green Party returned to the theme of employment in a low carbon economy and explained that it would be labour intensive, requiring people to work on recycling, repairing and reusing products rather than just manufacturing disposable commodities. Referring to Green Party policy Caroline put the case for contraction and convergence and what she called a “border tax adjustment” which is a tax on imports from polluting countries (I think).
Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union began from a fire and rescue perspective. His union’s research suggests that there has been a double digit percentage increase in heath and grassland fires in recent years. Ninety percent of Ilkley Moor was destroyed by fire. Along with fire his service has been responding to major floods in parts of the country. He made the case that these events can be planned for but need to be properly funded and that many of the new flood defences are inadequate.
According to Matt he overheard a government minister say that climate change is the most serious case of the market’s failure imaginable.That’s a New Labour minister.
Unusually for him Matt got a bit radical towards the end. He told the audience that only the organised intervention of the working class movement can stop climate change and went on to say that a sustainable future does not require the working class to pay the price. The needs of ordinary people have to be put before profits. God knows where he picked this stuff up!
“The deeply unjust capitalist order is responsible for climate change driving the world’s poor to death and destruction!” 
The surprising radical of the day was Michael Meacher who, if memory serves, was the first speaker to mention the war. He gave a well informed speech looking at energy use in power generation, transport and homes. One nugget he shared was that the waste heat from the power generating system in the United States would supply the energy needs of all Japanese industry. Blimey!
There were five workshops. I went along to the one given by Jutta Kill of FERN. She achieved the impossible and managed to make a talk on carbon trading comprehensible and interesting. I’m going to nick some of what she had to say for our Socialist Resistance meeting on Wednesday. You can get some idea of what she had to say in this New Internationalist article.
The workshop on sustainable cities was delivered by Glyn Robbins, our assistant deputy catsitter. My take on the discussion that followed was that it showed how little understanding of the issue there is. Lots of people were able to talk with some fluency on the subject of council housing and the meeting rarely got beyond this level to talk about transport, energy use or water. We all still have a bit of learning to do.
Jonathan Neale opened the second plenary. His delivery reminded me of Orson Welles’ sermon in John Huston’s version of Moby Dick. That is a compliment. The style matched the subject. The data from the Greenland ice sheet indicate that that previous global warming events happened very abruptly following a longish period of slow rises. The action that is required has to happen in his lifetime and he is fifty nine. The earth needs to be covered with systems to generate wind, wave and solar power.
It’s not enough to lobby and persuade governments. This situation requires a global mass movement to force them to take action or that will replace them. Scientists have told the world what is happening but now we need to move beyond the scientists, NGOs and environmentalists. The engagement of millions of ordinary people is required and unions are the way in which they can be mobilised.
John McDonnell gave a description of his admiration for the Heathrow Climate Camp and an appeal for people to get involved in direct action that makes you wonder how he can bear to remain in the Labour Party.
Derek Wall can give a fuller account of his contribution for himself. Two points that stuck out for me were his call for an economy based on use values and his illustration of some example of eco-industrial action when building workers in Australia refused to build environmentally destructive homes.
If you want to find out what Tony Kearns had to say listen to the video of his talk at the Bethnal Green meeting on Thursday.
You’ll have noticed from reading this partial account that there was quite a spectrum of the British labour movement participating in the event. There were some significant absentees too, in particular from the transport, manufacturing and constructions sectors. Tony Kearns make the point that t
here are two types of trade unionist at the moment. Those who take climate change seriously and those who don’t yet. All will soon have to start getting involved in it because very soon it will start affecting every one of their members’ jobs, environments and way of life. Yesterday’s conference was the arrival of the organised working class in the struggle against climate change.
Roy Wilkes adds…
294 delegates registered, and in addition there were workshop speakers and stall holders, so there were a little over 300 people in all.
At the October planning meeting we discussed the idea of the conference adopting a Trade Union Charter on climate change. Martin brought a proposal for a charter to the January planning meeting, but the meeting decided that there wouldn’t be enough time to adequately discuss such a detailed proposal. In particular Phil Thornhill, the national organiser of the CCC, was uncomfortable with us adopting a detailed policy which went so far beyond the aims of the CCC. So instead it was agreed that we would put a much simpler enabling motion as a means of committing ourselves to continuing the process of organising within the unions – both to build the campaign itself and to encourage unions to adopt effective policies relevant to the industries in which they organise. The procedure we agreed was that I would draft a motion which would be discussed via the email list (which at that stage already had over 200 members) prior to it being put to the conference itself. We felt that the conference should vote on something just as a way of expressing the view that this conference was not an end in itself but merely the start of a process which needs to continue. If we hadn’t put anything to the vote it might have appeared as simply a one off educational event.
So, I put a proposal out to the list, several people submitted amendments, which I composited to the original motion (with the agreement of those who submitted them.) I then put the final version out to the list a week before the conference. So far so good. Then Workers Power sent me a further amendment on Tuesday, i.e. 4 days before the conference. There was nothing wrong with it (it just called for unions to build the next national climate march, although it added nothing to the original motion, which already called for unions to build all the actions of the CCC;) except it was problematic in practical terms since the delegate information leaflet had already gone for printing with what I thought was a finalised motion. We were worried that if we accepted this amendment at the conference others would want to put further amendments, and we knew that there simply wouldn’t be time to discuss them properly.
But we wanted to be as inclusive and open as possible, so the conference planning group met on Saturday morning and decided on a procedure, which was that we would invite amendments to be submitted, and that we would meet as a conference arrangements committee at 2pm to try to composite amendments to the main motion.
At 2pm we met and decided to accept the Workers Power amendment but that the others either would take too long to properly discuss or else would go beyond the remit of the conference, so we decided to invite the movers to speak in the final plenary but not put their amendments to the vote.
With the benefit of hindsight, my view now is that we should have put it to a vote to remit the amendments for further discussion at a recall conference.
There is however an issue that needs to be discussed both by the CCCTU group and by the CCC as a whole, which is about how we build the broadest possible united front while also advancing meaningful solutions to climate change. Phil Thornhill’s view is that the CCC, or indeed any section of it, should not adopt any policies on specific solutions to climate change, but should merely gather together the broadest possible alliance to demand an effective international treaty. This isn’t really tenable, since people do want solutions and rightly so. But we couldn’t resolve that issue at yesterday’s conference, although we will need to resolve it somehow.
So, where do we go from here? The working group set up by the conference (which is open to anyone who wants to come, so come to it) will meet at 11am on 1st March at ULU to continue to organize; for example we are aiming to hold CCC fringe meetings at as many union conferences as possible. But we also do need to discuss in detail how we develop working class solutions to this crisis. I agree with Bill that we should start planning a recall conference, and one which has fewer platform speakers and much more time for discussion and debate.
If you want to be added to the e-list send me your email address to roywilkes59@talktalk.net
Liam redux 
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