Because this article came out on Christmas Eve, and seems unbelievable, the outrageous things it reveals have been a bit buried. So I’m giving it a new push. With the government’s help, key sectors of the economy are being handed over to organised crime. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
My guess is that there are now upwards of a million people in the UK working in organised criminal networks, with almost no fear of prosecution, facilitated by successive governments' wildly irresponsible deregulation. This is a fantastically hazardous situation.
As crime networks embed themselves in the economy and gain political power, we could slide towards the kind of Mafia state seen in the US during Prohibition, and in Russia, Italy, Mexico and Lebanon today. I can’t see any effective measures being deployed to stop this happening.
On the contrary, regulators and investigators have had their budgets slashed and been told, in effect, to sit on their hands. They are now so demoralised and weak that they could be knocked over with a feather. Organised crime is walking all over them.
You can see this as the dénouement of neoliberalism: remove all regulatory constraints, roll back the state, leave it to the mythical being they call the Invisible Hand, which they worship as avidly as any religious cult, and honest businesses are elbowed aside by the Mafia.
Incidentally, the Environment Agency’s register of waste contractors, that I found so easy to exploit, has now been online for seven years. But it’s still the Beta version, so full of glitches as to be scarcely usable. And meaningless anyway, as no one is checking.
There's a similar level of chaos almost everywhere you look. After my article was published, a reader wrote to tell me about an entry he'd found in the government's register of businesses, Companies House. Here it is. There are many others like it.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

4 Jan
To allow gamekeepers to kill crows and jackdaws to "protect" pheasants and partridges, the pheasants and partridges are classed as livestock. But you aren't allowed to shoot livestock for sport, so when pheasants and partridges are being shot, they're classed as wildlife.
Thread/
But you aren't allowed to round up wild animals at the end of the shooting season, and trap them in enclosures, so when the survivors are being rounded up, they become livestock again.
But if a pheasant flies into a car during the roundup, and causes a crash, you're not legally liable, because, for this purpose, it becomes wildlife again.
Read 11 tweets
2 Jan
This is a hazardous topic to discuss, as you immediately get accused of all sorts of things, but here goes.
I think the boundaries of free speech in this country are in the wrong place.
Thread/
Civil law in the UK goes to great lengths to protect people’s *reputations* against free speech, often with oppressive consequences, as the outcome of some recent defamation suits show. But the law does little to protect people’s *lives* against free speech.
There are exceptions: namely hate speech and the Cancer Act. But, to give one example, the outrageous lies told by certain influencers about vaccines kill people: those who believe them and therefore avoid vaccination have been more likely to die of Covid-19.
Read 7 tweets
1 Jan
Happy New Year everyone. Here’s our 2022 to-do list:
1. End the pandemic ASAP, so we can get on with the other stuff. So:
a. Encourage hesitant friends to get vaccinated
b. Demand ventilation systems in schools and venues, public test and trace and a properly funded NHS.
Thread/
2. Demand a commensurate response to the climate and environmental crisis: ie a WWII-sized industrial transition and global mobilisation.
I think the most important component is a complete transformation of the global food system (Regenesis, out in May, seeks to map this).
3. Fight tooth and nail against the new authoritarianism, embodied in the UK’s Police Bill, that would ban effective forms of protest, while legislatively cleansing Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. Demand that Labour opposes it in the Lords (instead of abstaining, ffs).
Read 7 tweets
31 Dec 21
Now it's winter wildfires in the US. How far do things have to go before governments recognise that crucial Earth systems might be reaching their tipping points? If so, we need to respond not with slow and steady carbon reduction plans, but with sudden and drastic action.
Otherwise, it's like announcing a plan, after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, to bail out the banks by 2050.
I'm going to keep saying this until it lodges:
If Earth systems are approaching their tipping points, current plans are far too little, far too late.
It's really hard to imagine what crossing a major Earth system threshold (a tipping point) would look like. But:
1. It will be orders of magnitude worse than anything we have ever experienced.
2. If one system tips, it could trigger a chain reaction, tipping other systems.
Read 4 tweets
30 Dec 21
Last night I watched #DontLookUp. It was like seeing my adult life flash past me.
Even down to the morning TV show where I totally lost it while trying, for the 1000th time, to explain what climate breakdown would do.
All the anger, the frustration, the desperation: I feel it.
I'm not proud of what happened on that show, but I'm not going to run away from it either. After 36 years of the most important of all issues being marginalised in favour of fatuous news about celebrities, it was bound to catch up with me.
The film got it dead right. The Great Wall of Denial erected by the media. Money and political games taking precedence over the survival of life on Earth, the endless trivial nonsense on our screens that sucks our brains out through our eyes.
theguardian.com/environment/20…
Read 4 tweets
29 Dec 21
I won't apologise for supporting Jeremy Corbyn. While he got some things wrong (as we all do), his policies offered us the best chance we've had in decades of escaping from the cage of neoliberalism.
I find it phenomenally depressing that, in almost-2022, so many people are asking "what's neoliberalism?" and see me as some pointy-headed loon for mentioning the word. It's the dominant ideology of the past 40 years, that now affects almost every aspect of your life.
It should be as familiar to us as communism was to the people of the Soviet Union. But the greatest success of this tremendously powerful ideology is its anonymity. And by heck, has it succeeded. theguardian.com/books/2016/apr…
Read 5 tweets

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