I was in Brussels last week speaking at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (here’s my presentation on the oil-food price spike). As expected, it was a well-informed and instinctively progressive audience. But during a coffee break, I found myself doing a pronounced double-take – for there, in the flesh, was Nick Griffin.
Nick Griffin, for non-UK readers, is the head of the British National Party – the UK’s main far right political party – and a Member of the European Parliament. He started out with the National Front; after 1983 he broke away to co-found a more radical splinter called ‘Political Soldier’ which advocated a return to feudalism; he’s been convicted of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred; and he comes up with statements like this:
“I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat.”
A charming guy, then. But what on earth was he doing at a conference on peak oil and resource scarcity?
In fact, as a quick visit to Google reveals, this is a pretty long-standing interest of Griffin’s. He’s been attending peak oil conferences for at least six years, as proven by this 2005 Energy Bulletin post by someone similarly bemused to encounter him mingling with a sustainable development crowd. He’s written about it at length on his own website. And if you want a sense of where he’s coming from on the issue, try this rather rambling excerpt from an Independent on Sunday interview transcript:
This country is the most overcrowded in Europe. To some extent I would agree with the greens that its proper carrying capacity is about 30m. Particularly with the peak oil problem – which is the real problem that politicians should be addressing and not climate change which is either nothing to do with us or nothing we can do anything about or which won’t strike for another 100 years anyway – the real problem is peak oil and the implications of running out of oil for a civilisation which is built on easily available oil and the benefits it brings that this country should not have the population it has and what’s more we need the most stable, homogenous population possible because anything less than that once you subject a society to the stresses of the economic impact of the crisis which is very rapidly approaching people instead of pulling together tend to fall apart.
What Griffin’s interest in peak oil underscores is a larger point about the politics of resource scarcity: it can either be the tipping point for a decisive shift towards a recognition of interdependence and the need for international cooperation and positive sum games, or it can prompt a slide towards some very nasty zero sum political dynamics. The last few years have already provided us with plenty of examples of what the latter might look like: food export bans, landgrabs, countries pre-positioning themselves for a world of resource nationalism.
Now, we can add neofascist politics to the list. You can bet your bottom dollar that Nick Griffin will be at the very forefront of those trying to ensure that resource scarcity does indeed become the prompt for people to ‘fall apart instead of pulling together’, as he puts it. This is a man who understands very well the political strategy of being ready for shocks before they arrive. The question is whether progressives are ready to take on not just the man, but also the zero sum point of view he stands for.
We need to get engaged much more seriously in figuring out an internationalist policy agenda to deal with resource scarcity, and to start getting the solutions, strategies, messages and coalitions in place to push for it. Either we start facing up to the fair shares issues that are inherent to a world of limits – or we all find ourselves living in Nick Griffin’s dream scenario.
