Follow up to yesterday's posts

After I blogged on the Respect Fighting Unions conference yesterday it now seems that more first hand reports are appearing about the weekend event. Dave Osler links to a number of reports from his blog Dave's Part. Suffice it to say that most commentary outside the SWP and allies is not complimentary..........

My other blog entry yesterday gave useful links to sites scrutinising media spin, contrarians and corporate lobbyists. Over at the Guardian Comment Is Free site George Monbiot has a marvellous pugnacious article laying into the latest darling of the climate change sceptics and contrarians, Viscount Monckton. Over the last week or so green bloggers and commentators have endured the tedious triumphalism of the naysayers and dupes praising Monckton's Sunday Telegraph "expose" of climate change ( apparently it is all a hoax and left wing conspiracy working through the UN - it is only a matter of time before these so-called sceptics start ranting about "black helicopters" and "contrails".) I even had someone quoting it at me and the similarly environmentally concerned secretary at a local community meeting.

Monbiot wipes the floor with Monckton - a man with few scientific credentials to justify his intervention on the topic, but with a family connection to the Telegraph. The contrarian-right gadflies who cluster around Monbiots blog comments page are left spluttering now their hero is exposed as arguing a load of nonsense. Most of them are reduced to the usual smears and abuse about greens and environmentalists being "priggish, moralistic and hair shirt" (the equivalent level of argument to saying "don't listen to them, they smell of wee!") and that we are -horror of horrors- socialists! Guilty of that in my case, though the type of ecosocialism that I and Green Left tend to favour has nothing in common with the totalitarian caricature that the conspiracist right love to wheel out. Our efforts are towards promoting a democratic and libertarian politics equal to the intellectual challenge presented by triumphant neo-liberalism, not some rehash of bureaucratic failure or Stalinist nightmare. We ecosocialists have an audience, but even I must admit that the influence of socialist ideas in the green movement as a whole, (let alone the broader consensus of scientific and political opinon around this particular issue) is as yet rather modest.........
Still, stick it to 'em, George!