Italian demonstration against right-wing government

This Associated Press video says about itself:

(9 Feb 2019) Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Rome to protest against a budget reform that was approved by the Italian Lower Chamber and Senate in December 2018. The demonstration was organised by three Italian trade unions, bringing people from all over the country to the capital city.

By Marianne Arens:

Italy: Mass demonstration in Rome against right-wing government

14 February 2019

On Saturday, February 9, the first major national demonstration against the right-wing government of Lega and the Five-Star Movement took place in Rome. According to the organizers, 200,000 participants marched through Rome under the slogan “A future for work”. The three trade union umbrella organizations CGIL, CISL and UIL had called the protest.

… The large number of participants shows that the international class struggle is also awakening in Italy. The march was supported by angry workers, retirees and groups of school students who wanted to fight the government’s right-wing course. Some of the banners read: “Hands off pensions”, “Less state [attacks] against social networks—more welfare state”, and “stop racism”.

…

The Conte government, which took over government in June last year, is the most right-wing Italian government since the fall of the fascist regime of Mussolini in 1945. It is pursuing a chauvinist, xenophobic course, expanding the military and the police state and driving tens of thousands of migrants into illegality.

The government wants to begin paying its so-called “citizens income” shortly before the European elections in May. However, this is far from providing an unconditional basic income for all, as was promised in the general election campaign. Like the Hartz IV welfare and labour “reforms” in Germany, the “citizens income” of €780 maximum, which applies only to Italian citizens, serves the state as a whip to force the needy to undertake any work offered and to lower wages overall. As a result, the government has met with increasing resistance among working people.

…

Together with these union bureaucrats and representatives of former PD governments, employers and a president of the business association Confindustria also participated. Ermanno Bellettini, head of Confindustria in Romagna, criticized the government’s halting of several projects, such as oil and gas exploration off the coast of Italy, justifying the collaboration with the unions by saying, “We too are equally concerned.”

…

These were not the words of a representative of the working class but of the Italian ruling class. The close partnership of the three big trade union federations—CGIL, CISL and UIL—with representatives of Italian capital and the PD camp has a long tradition. It made possible the social attacks of earlier governments and paved the way for today’s Lega/Five-Star government.

In a TV interview in 2016, former Prime Minister and EU Commissioner Mario Monti confirmed the crucial role the unions played in the introduction of the hated Fornero pension reform, reversing in one fell swoop the old-age security that Italian workers had fought for after the fall of fascism in 1945. When he introduced the pension reform by decree in December 2011, union leaders did not seize the opportunity for social revolt. “No other country has implemented such a drastic pension reform so easily”, Monti gleefully noted.

The rise of the Five-Star movement from nothing is a result of this class collaboration …

… As long as they suppress the working class’s preparedness to fight and divert it into the dead end of class collaboration, the right-wing can benefit from growing disappointment and anger.

This was shown the day after the demonstration in Rome, in the results of the regional election in Abruzzo, which had been shaken by devastating earthquakes in 2009 and 2016. The right-wing camp won the election with 49 percent and its top candidate, Marco Marsilio of the fascist Fratelli d’Italia, is the new regional president.

The Lega, which supported Marsilio’s candidacy, was the strongest single party, with 27.9 percent. In contrast, the votes of the Five-Star Movement halved. At 19.3 percent, it did not receive half as much as in the last regional election in 2014 (40 percent). The so-called “centre-left” alliance under the leadership of the Democratic Party (PD) received only 31.2 percent, the PD alone just 11 percent.

A year ago, Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star Movement had risen to become the country’s strongest single party. It won the parliamentary election in 2018 with almost a third of the vote. But despite claiming to be “neither right nor left”, it entered a governing coalition with the far-right Lega, who have used it as a stepping-stone for its further advancement. Meanwhile, the Lega is by far the strongest single party.

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French-Italian conflict on Libyan oil

This 4 September 2018 video says about itself:

Oil, so much oil… France & Italy battle for influence in Libya

Some 400 people have reportedly escaped from a prison in a suburb of the Libyan capital Tripoli. The area has been engulfed in heavy infighting between rival militias for days. A state of emergency has been imposed in the city.

Read more here.

By Alex Lantier in France:

France recalls its ambassador to Italy

8 February 2019

Yesterday, for the first time since World War II, the French Foreign Ministry announced the recall of its ambassador in Rome. … The communiqué made clear, however, that far broader international conflicts are involved.

“For several months,” it wrote, “France has been targeted with repeated accusations, unfounded attacks, and outrageous declarations that everyone knows and recalls. It is unprecedented since the end of the war. To have disagreements is one thing, exploiting them for electoral purposes is another. The latest interventions constitute a further and unacceptable provocation.”

While calling for “a relationship of friendship and mutual respect” between France and Italy, it added: “All these actions have created a grave situation that raises questions as to the intentions of the Italian government in its relations with France. In light of this unprecedented situation, the French government has decided to recall the French ambassador to Italy for consultations.”

Paris’s recall of its ambassador—a move typically signaling the danger of a collapse of diplomatic relations, or war—underscores the collapse of relations in the European Union (EU) flowing from the relentless incitement of nationalism and militarism by the European ruling class.

Clashes between Paris and Rome have become ever more bitter, as they vied for influence in the EU and backed rival factions in the civil war in Libya that followed the 2011 NATO war. Two years ago, Macron nationalized France’s naval shipyards to keep Italy’s Fincantieri corporation from buying them. When Italy’s far-right government took power, Macron postured as the spokesman of an enlightened Berlin-Paris axis hostile to neofascism, attacking it as “spreading leprosy.”

More recently, Italian officials have increasingly lashed out at France. After organizing with Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro the rendition from Latin America of former Italian leftist Cesare Battisti, who had initially fled from Italy to France, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini attacked Paris over Libya last month. “In Libya, France has no interest in stabilizing the situation, probably because its oil interests are opposed to Italy’s”, he said.

While setting up its own concentration camps for refugees in Libya, a former Italian colony, Rome has kept attacking France’s neocolonial wars in Africa. “Europeans, and the French in particular, have never ceased colonizing Africa,” di Maio said last month. He denounced the CFA franc, aligned on the French currency, used in many of France’s former African colonies: “There are dozens of African countries where France prints a currency, the colonial franc, and with this currency it finances France’s public debt.”

Rome also criticized the US-led coup in Venezuela,

The biggest party in the Italian government, the ‘neither left nor right’ Five Star movement of Di Maio, did. The other government party, the far-right Lega of Salvini, supports Trump’s coup in Venezuela; as stated by the Foreign Affairs Undersecretary of the Lega party Guglielmo Picchi.

which Paris has strongly supported—criticisms French papers attributed to Rome’s sympathies for Russia and China, who support the Venezuelan regime.

It is not for nothing that the French Foreign Ministry reached back to World War II to find a situation comparable to the current crisis between Paris and Rome. Today, over a quarter of a century after its founding in 1992, the EU has not resolved any of the fundamental inter-imperialist conflicts that prompted Italy to attack France on June 10, 1940.

Italian and French troops clashed in the Alps as the Nazi Wehrmacht crushed the bulk of the French army in the north. After the armistice, Hitler negotiated with Nazi-collaborationist dictator Marshal Philippe Pétain, French agriculture and industry were redirected towards German and Italian requirements for war with the Soviet Union. Berlin and Rome militarily occupied much of France’s colonial empire in North Africa, and Rome was authorized to occupy parts of southeastern France.

The similarity in foreign policy between 20th century fascist Europe and European imperialism today is unmistakable. After a quarter century of imperialist wars since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the threat of war against Russia and China, the struggle for domination in Europe and the plunder of ex-colonial regions is reaching extraordinary intensity.

In 2011, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, London and Washington launched a war in Libya, despite objections in Germany and from significant forces in Italy, the WSWS warned of the implications the imperialist war drive would have in Europe:

The common front of what former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld derided as “Old Europe” has broken apart. However, it is not to be assumed that Obama has fully worked through the implications of his support for Sarkozy’s schemes. By participating in a war publicly opposed by Berlin, Washington has all but repudiated its decades-long policy of maintaining the political and military unity of Western Europe. It is exacerbating intra-European tensions on a continent already riven by conflicts over economic policies. As has happened in the past, Germany—fearing that it has been outmaneuvered and isolated by its historical adversaries—will look for other means to protect its interests. Once again, Washington has set into motion events which will have disastrous consequences.

This warning has been vindicated. In 2014, Berlin launched a campaign to remilitarize its foreign policy, and the Brexit vote and Trump’s election in 2016 brought to the surface the profound breakdown of the NATO alliance. Now the European powers are all pouring hundreds of billions of euros into their military machines. While Macron said last year that Europe must be ready to fight Russia, China or the United States, the European powers are also preparing to fight each other.

As Britain prepares to leave the EU next month, the EU is in chaos. Bitter divisions persist in Berlin, the dominant EU power, over foreign policy. While Chancellor Angela Merkel is associated to an alliance with Macron, last year saw calls in both the German and Austrian ruling classes for a Berlin-Vienna-Rome “Axis”, reprising the name of World War II-era alliance between Berlin and Rome. Under these conditions, Macron’s sudden decision yesterday not to attend next month’s Munich Security Conference is another sign of deep crisis.

None of the imperialist powers in Europe have anything to offer to the working class, which cannot let itself be drawn behind any of the contending camps. All of them stand for social austerity, militarism, and the defense of the legacy of 20th century European fascism—from German militarist professors seeking to rehabilitate Hitler, to far-right ministers in Italy who hail Mussolini, to Macron, who declared his admiration for Pétain.

The critical issue is the struggle to unify the European and international working class against war on a revolutionary, socialist program.

French-Italian governments’ conflict on refugees

This 18 February 2018 video says about itself:

Italy: Protesters rally at French-Italian border in solidarity with refugees

Some 150 activists protested at the Italian-French border town of Ventimiglia, Sunday, to demonstrate against the heavy French police presence in solidarity with migrants.

The protest, organised by left-wing group ‘No Borders’, was entitled ‘We tread [on] the border’ (Calpestiamo il confine). The protesters climbed up the hills to the border fence, repeating the route that a number of migrants have travelled in order to reach France.

According to the report, 13 people died in the mountains attempting to cross the border, which is now separated with a chain fence and barbed wire.

Protester (Italian): “This border is not only represented by this physical frontier, but also what happens everyday in Ventimiglia and nearby areas. We are here to stress the fact that we don’t recognise this border. We don’t consider it as a real border. Freedom of movement for everybody.”

Dutch NOS TV reports today that the French Macron administration has recalled its ambassador from Italy because of conflicts between these two governments.

The right-wing Macron government and the Italian government, a coalition between the extreme right Lega and the ‘neither left nor right’ Five Star Movement, accuse each other viciously. The paradox is that in these accusations by both governments there is some truth, but also much hypocrisy.

The Italian government says that the cause of the refugees trying to cross the Mediteranean is ‘French colonial policy’. That is definitely partly true. Until the 1960s, big parts of Africa were French colonies. Much violence, economic exploitation. With consequences till today. After the 1960s, French colonialism changed to neocolonialism. Though the ex-colonies were now officially independent, French governments kept supporting pro-French local dictators and invading African countries for uranium or other resources every now and then. In 2011, French President Sarkozy was a major instigator of the NATO war on Libya. Because he wanted French oil corporation Total to grab Libyan oil wealth; and because he wanted to cover the tracks of payment of his presidential election campaign by the Libyan Gadaffi administration.

That Libya war never stopped, and led to a country in ruin: healthcare destroyed, women’s rights down the drain, slavery brought back after its 19th century abolition, torture, ISIS, bloodshed everywhere. And from Libya at war, the violence spread to many other African countries. Which led to more French neocolonial invasions and war crimes. And this way, indeed, to more refugees.

So, why is the Italian government not just partly correct, but also hypocritical? Because, like France, Italy has a bloody colonial past and a neocolonial present in Africa. Fascist dictator Mussolini, praised now by Italian Deputy Prime Minister Salvini, and his predecessors caused horrible bloodbaths making Eritrea, Ethiopia and ‘Italian’ Somalia Italian colonies. Mussolini’s soldiers and concentration camps in Libya killed hundreds of thousands.

After Italian colonialism came Italian neocolonialism. Eg, by Silvio Berlusconi, participating in the NATO war on Libya to grab some oil and letting the refugees of that war drown or imprisoning them. And by later Italian governments, with their harsh anti-refugee policies and their handing over of Italian taxpayers’ money to torturers and slave traders in Libya to stop refugees from coming to Italy. So, Italian politicians, like French ones (and US American ones … and British ones … etc.), have definitely contributed to the refugee crisis.

The Macron government in France criticizes the Italian government because of its anti-refugee policy. Again: there is truth in that. But also much hypocrisy.

Because the French government violently attacks refugees in Paris, Calais and elsewhere.

Because the French government violently, including with torture of children, tries to stop refugees from crossing the French-Italian border. European Union or no European Union.

Talking about the European Union: that is another reason for conflict between France and Italy. The Macron administration wants a centralized European Union. The government in Rome wants decentralisation. The logical consequence of centralizing the European Union is: making national borders ‘soft borders’. However, ‘pro-European’ Macron is inconsequent; making the French-Italian border a very ‘hard’ border.

The French National Assembly voted overwhelmingly on Monday to approve President Emmanuel Macron’s “anti-riot” law, undermining the right to protest and further expanding police powers: here.

Naples helping refugees, defying right-wing Italian government

This 3 January 2019 video says about itself:

Naples is ready to defy Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and let in a charity-run ship carrying 32 migrants that is blocked in the stormy Mediterranean, the city mayor said today.

His offer adds to a growing challenge from opposition politicians to Salvini’s far-right League [party], which has vowed to bar migrants and make life difficult for those already here.

Both Italy and Malta are refusing to let the Sea-Watch 3, a ship operated by a German non-governmental organisation (NGO), dock and set down the migrants who were rescued off Libya on Dec. 22. …

Naples’ centre-left mayor Luigi de Magistris said Salvini was playing politics with peoples’ lives. “To leave people and children in the middle of cold and stormy seas is a crime — not simply indecent, immoral and appalling”, de Magistris told Radio Crc. “I hope that this boat approaches the port of Naples because, unlike what the government says, we will launch a rescue operation and we will let it enter the port,” he said.

“I will be the first to lead the rescue.” …

Malta overnight allowed the boat into its waters to sail closer to land where the seas are less choppy, but is refusing to let it dock.

Several local politicians from opposition parties have defied Salvini’s anti-migrant policies. On Wednesday, the mayor of the Sicilian capital Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, said he would join other cities in ignoring a new security law because it abolishes asylum protection for many migrants. Salvini on Thursday threatened mayors with legal action. “Anyone who helps clandestine migrants hates Italians. … ” Salvini tweeted. …

On taking office last year, Salvini barred NGO boats and moved to help Libya

Which of the warring governments and paramilitaries in Libya?

prevent people leaving its shores.

Translated from Dutch daily De Volkskrant today:

Naples wants to allow migrant ship Sea-Watch 3 in, ‘whatever the government says’

The Italian city of Naples is prepared to admit the ship Sea-Watch 3 to its port and to accommodate the 32 migrants on board. Mayor Luigi de Magistris said on Thursday. He thus expressly opposes the line of the Italian government, which believes that there can be no question of admitting them. …

The ship Sea-Watch 3, sailing under the Dutch flag, has been floating around the Mediterranean for almost two weeks. On 22 December, 22 migrants from countries such as Sudan, Congo and Mali were picked up from the sea off the coast of Libya by the German NGO Sea-Watch, which manages the ship. They have been wandering since then. None of the countries around it wants to let the migrants in. Italy, Spain and Malta keep their ports closed. …

According to the center-left mayor De Magistris, this is an inhumane attitude. “To leave people, including children, in the middle of the cold and stormy sea is not only indecent, immoral and terrible, it’s a crime”, he said in front of the radio. “I hope the ship will come to Naples because, whatever the government says, we will start a rescue operation and allow it in the harbour.” …

Among the crew of the Sea-Watch 3 are seven children: four teenagers without their parents and three small children, including a baby.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

Naples wants to allow the ship the Sea-Watch 3 with 32 migrants on board to land. The left-wing mayor of Naples said that. With this he defies the right-wing Italian Interior Minister Salvini, who does not want any migrants at all.

In Italy there is increasing opposition to the harsh anti-immigration policy of Salvini and his right-wing Lega party. Mayors from several large Italian cities have announced that they will not comply with Salvini’s law on security and immigration. …

The Netherlands is said to be willing to allow a maximum of six people in. They would then enter the ordinary asylum procedure, so it would not be certain that they can stay. …

Malta has allowed the Sea-Watch, under pressure from the Netherlands, to shelter close to the coast for a storm that has been going on for days. Many people on board have become seasick. But the ship is not allowed to moor in Malta. …

The Sea-Watch saved the migrants before Christmas in the vicinity of Libya and since then has been trying unsuccessfully to find a port where they are welcome. According to a Sea-Watch spokesperson, they are traumatized and weakened.

Saving drowning people, a crime?

This 13 August 2018 by the (right-wing) Daily Mail from Britain says about itself:

Rescue ship Aquarius saves 141 migrants off Libyan coast

More than 140 migrants rescued by an aid group as they drifted in the Mediterranean have claimed five ships passed them by without plucking them to safety.

According to international law, all ships are obliged to save people at sea in distress.

The migrants, including 67 unaccompanied minors, were mainly from Somalia and Eritrea and were believed to have been at sea for about 35 hours on a small wooden boat that had no motor.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

Ship Aquarius stops its Mediterranean rescue missions

The rescue ship Aquarius is no longer operating in the Mediterranean. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) who manage the ship together with partner SOS Méditerranée reports this.

Since 2016, tens of thousands of migrants on their way to Europe have been rescued from the water or from often not seaworthy boats.

Ideally, Médecins Sans Frontières would like to continue with the Aquarius, but the organization says that Italy has made it impossible. “The Italian government, supported by other European countries, has labeled our aid as illegal, smeared it and blocked it by withdrawing the registration of the ship, so the Aquarius can not sail.”

So, apparently, the xenophobia of Mussolini-loving Italian deputy Prime Minister Salvini of the extreme right Northern League party is the ‘new normal’ of the European Union.

‘Black day’

Director Nelke Manders of Médecins Sans Frontières calls this a black day. “Stopping the Aquarius means that people will die avoidably at sea”, she says.

The Aquarius was the last rescue ship to sail off the coast of Libya until September. Last year there were five organizations with ships active in that area. The Aquarius has been in the port of Marseille since October, because the ship lost its Panamanian flag registration.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says that more than 2000 people drowned in the Mediterranean this year.

There are still ships stopping refugees’ small boats in the Mediterranean. However, these are not the Aquarius or other rescue ships. They are warships of Salvini and his NATO allies. They will either let the refugees drown, contrary to international law; or bring the refugees back to Libya. Back to the Libyan hell of slavery, torture prisons and militias killing each other and civilians.

More than 250 immigrants have drowned in the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year. The Italian government and European Union’s (EU’s) policies bear direct responsibility for this grim record. Last weekend alone, no fewer than 170 people lost their lives while crossing the Mediterranean. On Saturday, the crew of Sea-Watch 3 managed to rescue 47 immigrants, including eight children, from a shipwrecked boat. The Sea-Watch 3 is currently the only NGO rescue ship still active in the Mediterranean. The Maltese government has refused to allow crews to be changed on another ship, the Professor Albrecht Penck owned by Sea-Eye, effectively preventing it from carrying out its work: here.

Tony Blair-Italian racist pipeline collusion

This 26 October 2018 video says about itself:

Anya Parampil examines criticism of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for his refusal to cut ties with Saudi Arabia in the face of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.

Blair has been paid nearly $12 million by the Saudi kingdom for “consulting” services since he left office. Former Member of U.K. Parliament and presenter in the documentary The Killing$ of Tony Blair, George Galloway, joins In Question to discuss Blair’s legacy.

By Ben Cowles in Britain:

Thursday, November 29, 2018

What do Blair and the Italian far right have in common? A commitment to destroying the environment

Despite the global epiphany that climate genocide is only 12 years away, a controversial gas pipeline is set to go ahead, writes BEN COWLES

MOST of the British corporate press covered a meeting between Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini and Tony Blair in September after the far-right leader posted a picture of himself with the former PM on Twitter.

“Tony Blair has ‘friendly, positive meeting’ with Italy’s Matteo Salvini,” was the headline to the Guardian’s report on the story, which focused on the rank hypocrisy of Blair — who now runs a charity aiming to combat “populism” and restore faith in the political “centre” — meeting with the far-right “populist.”

As this blog has explained again and again, ‘populist’ is a wrong term for extreme right racists. So, it is correct that in Cowles’ article ´populist´ is between snigger quotes.

This is not the first time Blair is on excellent terms with an Italian far right politician. Before this, he was the buddy of then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, not only a Mussolini lover like Salvini, but also involved in child prostitution, the Mafia and corruption.

And while the irony of that is somewhat interesting, the story glossed over the much more intriguing point mentioned in the subheading: “Far-right minister believed to have discussed Azerbaijani gas pipeline project with ex-PM.”

Seeing how my flatmate is a political refugee from Azerbaijan, this immediately had me wondering what this pipeline project is and why Blair, who seems to spend all of his time attacking Jeremy Corbyn these days, is talking to a fascist wannabe about it?

The project in question is called the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), a 2,200-mile enterprise costing around £34 billion bringing fossil gas from Azerbaijan to Italy. It links two pipelines to one currently under construction.

The first piece of the project is called the South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP). It begins under the Caspian sea, runs through Azerbaijan and Georgia and finishes at the Turkish border.

The second part is the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (Tanap), which runs the length of Turkey and under the Marmara Sea.

The final piece of the project is the as yet unfinished Trans Adriatic Pipeline (Tap), which will run through Greece, Albania and end in Italy.

So what’s Blair got to do with any of this? His involvement goes back to 2014 when BP hired him as a consultant, a fitting position for a man who reopened Iraq’s oil fields to Western corporations

and to the South Korean oil corporation which paid Blair millions.

BP is the lead partner in a consortium of dodgy oil companies — including the fantastically corrupt State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (Socar) — drilling up the fossil gas from underneath the Caspian Sea and essentially running Tap and the SCP.

According to a September article in the New Civil Engineer magazine, the reason Blair met with Italy’s far-right leader was “to lobby Salvini over the benefits cheaper gas would bring to Italy.”

There has been fierce opposition to Tap in Italy, particularly in the southern town of Melendugno where a Unesco-protected olive grove with 500-year-old trees stands in the way of the pipeline.

In November last year, the Italian government used a Mussolini-era law to put the entire town on lockdown to prevent the people from protesting against the pipeline.

Salvini and his anti-migrant, anti-”globalist” League party appear to be fully onside with the pipeline. In a television interview last month Salvini said: “We need Tap because energy will cost less for Italian families.”

However, Salvini is but the deputy prime minister and his League is the minority party in Italy’s coalition government. The largest party, the Five Star Movement, campaigned on protecting the environment and initially opposed Tap.

Late last month, however, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte approved Tap’s construction saying it was “no longer possible to intervene in this project,” and that his government has “done everything we could but now the time has come to take the necessary decisions.”

The SGC is now due to start pumping Azerbaijani fossil gas into Europe by 2020.

Surely, given the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warning that we only have 12 years to stop a climate catastrophe, the EU should now be giving up on fossil fuels and investing in renewable energy. And, surely, British newspapers should stop giving Blair a platform, hold him accountable for the bloody consequences of the Iraq war and focus on climate change.

So far humanity has released an estimated 2.2 trillion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, causing average global temperatures to rise 1°C.

This rise has already begun to melt the polar ice caps, raise sea levels and drastically alter weather patterns; cause extreme storms, blizzards, heat waves and droughts; set arctic forests on fire; kill off entire species; acidify the oceans; displace people from their homes and much more.

So, how does the EU justify increasing its reliance on yet more polluting fossil gas and striking a deal with the human rights abusing government of Azerbaijan?

Well, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t even bothered to address the latter, though it falls over itself to thrust money at Azerbaijan. In February this year the European Investment Bank lent €1.5bn (£1.3bn) to Tap, and followed this up in March with €932 million (£822m) to the Turkish section, Tanap.

In July the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development lent Tap a further €500m (£442m).

The EU classifies the SGC as one of its Projects of Common Interests, which the bloc defines as “key infrastructure projects […] that link the energy systems of EU countries.”

These Projects of Common Interests, it claims, “are intended to help the EU achieve its energy policy and climate objectives,” which are “affordable, secure and sustainable energy for all citizens, and the long-term decarbonisation of the economy in accordance with the Paris Agreement.”

Remember the Paris Agreement? The governments of the world are supposed to be limiting “the rise of global average temperatures to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C,” as Article 2 of the agreement states, by 2030.

Our planet is currently on course to warm up by an apocalyptic 3.4°C by the end of this century, according to Climate Action Tracker, an independent project tracking global government progress to stick to the Paris Agreement.

The EU is sort of attempting to kind of stick to the Paris Agreement, though Climate Action Tracker currently ranks its efforts as “insufficient.” Its low-carbon economy roadmap is looking at (but not planning or implementing) “cost-efficient ways to make the European economy more climate-friendly and less energy-consuming.”

The roadmap aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030, 60 per cent by 2040 and 80 per cent by 2050.

How does the SGC project fit into the EU’s low-carbon economy roadmap? Well, it doesn’t.

According to a January 2018 study by the environment and human rights campaigners Bankwatch, no climate impact assessment has been made public by any EU institution involved in the SGC’s promotion or financing.

In fact, the Bankwatch’s analysis shows “a high risk that the gas from the [SGC] would be as climate-damaging as coal” — the dirtiest fossil fuel — and its annual carbon dioxide emissions would be “comparable to the annual emissions of Bulgaria.”

The SGC is a dangerously short-sighted project. Not only will the EU’s financial support for the project enrich fossil fuel companies and prop-up awful governments of Azerbaijan and Turkey, it will also lock the continent into decades of fossil fuel dependence.

But as the UN’s scientists point out we don’t have decades. We have 12 years.

Italian filmmaker Bertolucci, RIP

This is a scene of Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1976 film Novecento. Police attack striking workers and poor farmers; as working class women sing ‘La Lega‘.

Another well-known film by Bertolucci is The Last Emperor, on China in the twentieth century.

Bertolucci died on 26 November 2018.