Maria Margaronis | The Nation

 A cortege of pantomime bankers in black suits and masks led tens of thousands of marchers—steel workers and coal miners from Germany, shipbuilders from Poland and office workers from Belgium—through the streets of Brussels yesterday in a demonstration called by the European Trade Union Confederation against cuts and austerity measures. There were coordinated protests in more than a dozen other countries, including France, Greece, Portugal, Latvia, Ireland, Slovenia and Lithuania. Spain’s trade unions staged a general strike against the socialist government of José Luis Zapatero, which has forced through deep cuts to avoid a bailout like the one sought by Greece. Angry protesters demanded that bankers and speculators pay the price for the crisis they have triggered; John Monks, general secretary of the ETUC, took a more moderate tone, asking that national debts be rescheduled to avoid a deeper, pan-European recession.

It was an impressive show; but while the protesters chanted, waved banners and set fire to the odd car, the European Commission was announcing a tough new schedule of fines and penalties for Eurozone countries that run too-large debts or deficits. By conviction or by force, the governments of Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Romania, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and the Netherlands have all embraced the new anti-Keynesian orthodoxy, rushing to reassure “the markets” through biting austerity measures. Like true believers everywhere, they remain deaf to protest and to evidence that draining the patient of blood may not be the best way to cure an ailing economy.

In Britain (notwithstanding recent praise from the IMF) the economic outlook has deteriorated sharply since the second quarter this year; spending has fallen, as have credit flows. In Spain, unemployment is at 20 percent. In Ireland, in spite of tough fiscal measures, long-term interest rates are going up, because financiers believe that poor growth prospects put deficit reduction at risk. (The BBC estimates today that a third of the Irish economy has gone into bailing out the banks.) But the argument of no alternative is parroted by those (like Britain’s Tories) who see the cuts as a Trojan horse to dismantle the welfare state and those (like Greece’s socialist prime minister George Papandreou) whose hands are tied by Brussels and the banks. Economists from Joseph Stiglitz to George Soros have argued instead for investment and recapitalisation. Where are the European leaders wiling to challenge the dictatorship of the markets?

Thirteen years ago, I stood in our half-finished house with a toddler on my hip talking on the phone to our editor at the Nation about Labour’s landslide victory after eighteen years in the wilderness. I was elated; it was May Day; I had my red dress on. Though I knew Tony Blair’s campaign was built on spin and calculation, that the party had abandoned its old base to win back Conservative voters, that the manifesto (I wrote then) was “a pageant of small promises backlit as big ideas,” the thrill of watching the hated Tories go down in spectacular flames was delicious beyond words. Katrina put the late, great radical writer Daniel Singer on the line. “You’ll write what you want,” he said. “But I’ve seen it all before, in France with Mitterand. It’s not going to be good.”

The toddler is now a teenager, the paint is peeling again, and we’re older and sadder, too. Daniel, of course, was right. After 13 years of Labour, the gap between rich and poor has widened, civil liberties have been chiselled away, bureaucracy has burgeoned, we’ve fought an immoral war at George Bush’s behest and been complicit in illegal detention and torture. Many people feel betrayed and—worse—disconnected from politics. In the last hours before tomorrow’s general election, Labour is fighting for second place with the Liberal Democrats. The “Clegg effect” has changed the landscape, possibly for ever; for the first time in decades there is a credible third force in British politics.

But still, I am not sure which way I’m going to vote.

If I was voting in a district where a Tory might get in, I would know what to do. But in our constituency, a tired but left-wing Labour MP who opposed the Iraq War—former actor Glenda Jackson—is defending her seat against an energetic, local, progressive Liberal Democrat. The Lib Dems are to Labour’s left on many vital issues: reforming Britain’s hopelessly undemocratic electoral system, civil liberties, breaking up the banks a la Glass-Steagall Act, progressive taxation (though you’d have to crunch a lot of numbers to be sure), immigration and asylum, not renewing Britain’s antiquated nuclear deterrent.  The Guardian and its Sunday sister, The Observer, have both broken with a tradition of more than twenty years to endorse the Lib Dems, on the grounds that electoral reform is now the most pressing issue. (Most readers who commented on the endorsements were enthusiastically grateful; some spoke of “betrayal” and cancelled their subscriptions.) Why, then, am I hesitating to make the leap and vote Lib Dem myself, even in a constituency where the Tories are in third place?

For all its betrayals Labour remains the party of the poor, including the many on low incomes who don’t vote, and the party with the deepest commitment to public services. In the economic crunch that’s coming—the European Union  warned today that the UK budget deficit is set to surpass Greece’s—they are the most likely to make the inevitable cuts with some regard at least for fairness and compassion. Despite—or because of—Nick Clegg’s meteoric rise, we don’t know yet who the Lib Dems really are, or what they care about beyond electoral reform. They are part of the new, more fluid politics (which Cameron likes to pretend he also represents, though in fact the Conservatives remain the party of the wealthiest) based on issues and voter appeal instead of community interests and class allegiances. Their promises sound good, but they also feel somehow callow, as if (as Gordon Brown said in the leaders’ debates) they’d been sketched out on a napkin over dinner.

On the other hand, the Lib Dems represent (as the pundits keep on saying) a once in a generation chance to change the face of British politics—and a chance to vote for a leftish party uncontaminated by Labour’s triangulations and the compromises of power. Like many left-of-centre voters, the outcome I most want is a Labour/Lib Dem alliance: Labour for ballast, experience, commitment, Lib Dem for democracy, civil liberties, independence. Unfortunately, that isn't an option on the ballot.

Nick Clegg says we should “vote with our hearts for the change we want to see,” but in many seats the voting system makes that a risky course of action. On current predictions, we are likely to end up with a hung parliament in which the Tories have a plurality but no absolute majority. In theory Clegg could choose to side with Labour—though if Labour comes third in the popular vote Clegg won’t, and  shouldn’t, help Gordon Brown stay on in Downing Street. Or he could prop up a minority Tory government—in which case we don’t know how much ground he would give in return for grudging concessions on constitutional change.           

So I’m left second-guessing opinion polls: if Labour still stands a chance of coming second, should I back them in the slim hope of a Labour/Lib Dem coalition? Or should I vote Lib Dem on the theory that the more votes they win, the more likely it is that we’ll get the reforms we need, even if Cameron ends up in Downing Street?

Reader, for the first time in my life, I may not actually decide until I’m in the voting booth.

The drizzle of allegations that climate scientists have fudged data, drawn on dodgy sources, withheld information and frozen out dissenters has now become a downpour. Just before the Copenhagen summit there was the damaging leak of documents from the University of East Anglia's influential Climate Research Unit, revealing less than honest research practices there. In January the UN's International Panel on Climate Change was forced to retract its claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 after a piece in the New Scientist revealed that it was based on a single interview, given by one glaciologist to the science journalist Fred Pearce in 1999. The IPCC has said it "regrets" the error, but its chairman Rajendra Pachauri at first dismissed questions about the claim as "voodoo science."

This week, in an extensive Guardian investigation of the CRU emails, the same Fred Pearce (who was as surprised as anyone to find his old article taken as gospel, or at least peer-reviewed science, by the IPCC) has reported serious holes in a 1990 research paper by Phil Jones of the CRU and an American colleague, Wei-Chyung Wang. That paper, another key source for the IPCC, claimed to prove that urbanization's impact on warming is negligible, using data from 84 Chinese weather stations. But Jones and Wang have been unable to say where most of the stations are, and at least 18 are know to have moved during the study--possibly from the outskirts of a sweltering city to the breezy countryside.

So what's going on? Are these revelations part of an evil conspiracy by the deniers of man-made climate change to discredit climate science? Or do they show (as my learned colleague Alexander Cockburn argues) that anthropogenic warming is just one big snow job?

Science is a way of asking questions, but policymakers demand instant answers. On a subject as politicized as this, it's not surprising that scientists have been found guilty of hoarding data, smoothing a graph or two, shutting each other's work out of peer-reviewed journals; the same goes on in far less controversial fields, where what's at stake is only money and careers. On this topic there's pressure from both sides--from campaigners and politicians who believe that climate change is the most pressing threat to humankind and from sceptics (or deniers--all these words are loaded) who think it's a left-wing fantasy, or a threat to the oil industry, or a mere misguided manufactured panic. Many of the CRU emails have a beleaguered tone, as if the scientists clutching secrets to their chests were protecting their work from misuse or unscrupulous attack--as they well may have been. Why, they might ask, do they have to be Caesar's wife, always and impeccably above suspicion?

Unfortunately that response isn't nearly good enough. Their sloppy use of data and fudging of evidence has set back efforts to understand climate change and harmed the wider cause of sustainable development. We know that the earth is warming; the evidence convincingly suggests that human activity plays a significant part in this. (Take a look at the blog www.realclimate.orgfor informed, accessible commentary on what we know so far.) But whoever released the CRU documents just before Copenhagen knew what they were doing: nothing makes people angrier than the feeling that they've had the wool pulled over their eyes. Every research paper and data set produced by climate scientists or cited by the IPCC is now fair game for the fine-toothed comb, whether it's wielded honestly or with malicious intent. Nit-picking takes the place of conversation.

Some campaigners have called for a purge at the IPCC and heads may be sent rolling, but I'm not sure that will help, or even if it should. The deeper problem has to do with how science is practiced--not collaboratively but competitively, not following questions but seeking profitable answers--and with its skewed relationship to politics. As Professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia wrote in a Guardian forum,

"The scientific process offers a wonderful method for probing, critical and fearless inquiry into the way the physical world works. But scientific knowledge can never determine policy. Policy emerges through political processes, where interpretations, judgments and compromises are made by individuals and groups of individuals as they weigh uncertain and changing scientific knowledge against normative criteria. It is foolish to state ‘the science demands' anything. It is people who demand things, not science."

We expect scientists to be arbiters of truth instead of model makers, shrugging off responsibility for deciding what we want. Of course it matters whether warming is caused by human agency; we need to have evidence on which to base rational policies. But we can't know for sure how climate change will develop; there are too many variables. (For a glimpse of what the science might look like if it wasn't so politicized, take a look at Wikipedia's article on the Ice Age.) The experts have to open up the research, be honest about the uncertainties, known knowns and known unknowns, and the rest of us have to stop expecting them to tell us what to do. The argument over global warming stands in for conflicts about many other things: the relationship between the developed and developing worlds, the economic model of infinite growth, extractive versus sustainable use of natural resources, who pollutes and who gets polluted. There is little to lose (except, perhaps, for oil and mining corporations) and everything to gain by switching to sustainable energy, gradually consuming less, leaving the odd tree standing. It is much easier to bicker about botched graphs--important as they are--than it is to confront the politics.

Going against the European grain, Greece has voted George Papandreou's center-left PaSoK party to power in a landslide. Promising a new political culture, an end to cronyism and a 3 billion euro stimulus package for the economy, the president of the Socialist International has at last won the job that was held by his father and grandfather before him. But despite being to the manor born, Papandreou is neither a lightweight nor a populist demagogue in the style of his father, Andreas, who took such pains to be a thorn in Ronald Reagan's side. Mild-mannered, thoughtful, modest, he is a new Papandreou for the age of Obama: an American-born, European social democrat with a green conscience and a commitment to markets as well as democracy.

Nor is his victory a sign that Europe is leaning left: witness Angela Merkel's recent triumph in Germany. It is a local phenomenon, the product of Greece's recent political history. PaSoK lost power to the conservative New Democracy in 2004 after eleven years in office, during which it squeezed Greece into the Eurozone, put through a patchwork program of modernizing reforms, mended relations with Turkey, staged a grand (and exorbitant) Olympic Games, and became a byword for paybacks and corruption. New Democracy's Kostas Karamanlis (also a scion of an old political dynasty) took over with a promise to clean out the Augean stables.

But New Democracy's carryings-on made PaSoK's scandals look like minor pecadilloes. Overpriced government bonds were sold to state pension funds; cabinet ministers dreamed up lucrative property scams with abbots from Mount Athos. On Karamanlis's watch, vast tracts of the country literally went up in flames; the fire service, weakened by political interference, did too little much too late, and the promised restoration of forests, farms and villages fell victim to the usual toxic mixture of incompetence and graft. For a few days last December, violence in Athens gripped the world's TV cameras. The shooting of a 15-year old boy by a trigger-happy policeman seemed to sum up the state's indifference to a whole generation; broken promises were repaid with smashed shop windows and hopelessness with rioting in the streets.

When Papandreou became the leader of his party in 2004 he vowed to root out the corruption bred by many decades of patronage politics, a task at least as hard as persuading Americans to accept public health care. Until the economic crisis brought down property prices, much of Greece made ends meet by selling off plots of land; Papandreou's commitment to sustainable development will also require a lot of citizen re-education. (He has made an excellent start by scrapping the previous government's appalling tourism plan, which would have covered the coast with condos and diverted scarce water supplies to thirsty golf courses.) Vested interests, old behavior patterns, inertia and plain greed will rub the glow off the election promises the way they always do. But just for today, for this diaspora Greek, the relief is almost thrilling.