Letters

‘Troubling’ advertising

I was astonished to see New Internationalist carry an advertisement for the GMB union, [what I consider to be] the most right-wing trade union in Britain.

In 2018, I and probably other NI readers were engaged in resistance to fracking in northwest England, and NI provided some coverage. The GMB issued a call for police to ‘crackdown on fracking activists’ who’d been blocking fracking sites. It was a wholesale adoption of language Margaret Thatcher had used 30 years earlier against trade unionists themselves, and felt like a betrayal to environmentalists like me who had stood up for trade unions.

GMB also supported the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system, and in 2020 an internal inquiry concluded that the union was ‘institutionally sexist’.

In other words, it is a union which is entirely at odds with the values of New Internationalist.

---

Demystifying taxation

Jason Hickel’s article ‘Who should pay for public services?’ (NI 557) made brilliantly clear what the real role of taxation should be. I’ve always thought that the very rich were harmful and that taxation needed to make them less rich, but never understood explicitly before that this was necessary to free up resources for public projects. It follows, although Hickel doesn’t spell it out, that taxes should also deter the global super-rich from investing in property in Britain, and push them to sell up and leave.

If I understand Hickel properly, Brexit is an irreparable disaster. In the world as it is, Britain needs to be in the EU, regardless of what we think of it. But it seems likely that a condition of rejoining will be to adopt the euro whether we want to or not. Then the British government ceases to be an independent currency issuer, so the policy advocated in the article becomes impossible. I think that’s worth discussing.

---

How the left lost its way

Re: (Big Story, NI 557)

The rise of the right wing is, unfortunately, inevitable when the left has assimilated into the capitalist system. In doing so, the left has paved the way for raw individual interests to prevail and can no longer champion the common good. As a result, the masses have turned away from it and placed their hope in the demagogic right wing, which, instead of international solidarity – a concept that for the Western masses suggests only sacrifice – promotes old values like ‘God, homeland and family’ and pushes nationalist rhetoric. The consciousness that the world’s problems can only be remedied by the cooperation of all peoples, through common, compromising and ‘win-win’ solutions, and with a complete rejection of armaments and warfare, has been lost.

---

Correction

We regret that the photographs in ‘No-one can make it alone’ (NI 557) were mistakenly credited to Josefina Salomon. They were in fact taken by Patricio A Cabezas.

---

The editors write

Ned Molloy’s letter entitled ‘Bigger fish to fry’ (NI 557) in response to (NI 555) stated that the ‘three minerals you focused on – lithium, nickel and cobalt – account for only 0.13 per cent of the total metals mined each year’. The three (of 37-50 critical minerals) we focused on were actually copper, lithium and cobalt. Copper is the fourth most mined metal in the world and accounts for between 10-12 per cent of all mined industrial metal. Demand for copper is set to rise by 40 per cent by 2040, and most of this increased demand comes from the energy transition (only 0.5 per cent comes from other, more traditional applications). Having said that, mining for iron (for making steel) vastly outweighs all other mining, but is more widely spread around the world.

---