I was delighted to read this email from the Good Law Project yesterday:
In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court has today found that United Utilities can be held to account for the damage caused by unauthorised sewage discharges into the Manchester Ship Canal.
This judgment has massive implications, setting a precedent which breaks the shield around polluting water companies – leaving them open to apotential deluge of legal action.
The case started in 2018, when United Utilities tried to stop the Manchester Ship Canal Company suing them over sewage dumping.
When this case reached the Supreme Court, the Manchester Ship Canal Company looked at the watertight legal arguments we had assembled and asked if they could hire our barristers. The case was so important that we also decided to support an intervention from the Environmental Law Foundation.
This case marks our second major victory in the campaign for clean waters, after we forced the government to expand its plan for tackling sewage dumping last year.
There is change happening in our society, and it is not coming from within politics, which at best lags far behind. Instead it comes from within civil society.
At the end of a period of over-exposure to politics it is easy to be depressed by how dire the offerings of the major parties are. We need to take hope from the fact that they are dinosaurs, and just as the Tories now look to be in their death throes, so will this iteration of the Labour Party be so soon.
And it is in the basis of what happens in civil society - including taking on big corporations - that change happens. That is why I have always chosen to be in civil society.
And this is great work by the Good Law Project (who I support) and a massively important precedent to secure.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
I too was delighted to see this very important decision and like you congratulate and support the work of the Good Law Project.
I have spent the last few weeks submersed in the world of Independent Parliamentary candidates and will say more when we get the results.
But what I have found is a growing underswell of action by what you call Civil Society, and the start of coalescing of these local groups into a loose “alliance” across the country.
A common theme is that many were intending to grow support over the Summer in preparation for an Autumn election, and that the July date truncated those plans.
I do wonder if it was an understanding of the size and scope of this activity (along with his wife’s desire to leave Number 10 before the Summer) that helped prompt his decision.
Well done to the Manchester Ship Canal co for taking the case as far as they have
The very fact that this case has had to be heard at all simply confirms the extent to which government, whatever branch, has been captured by the self interests of corporate capitalism.
How on earth could the principle of the polluter pays be over-ridden by protective legislation for corporations. ?
I would like to think civil society drives change; but generally that reliance is insecure. The greatest driver of transformative change in society is neither civil society nor politics; but technological innovation, especially digital innovation – by a long, long way. Politics always proves resistant to change, and only very rarely (1945 for example – it took two world wars) anything much at all. Politics is a better wrecking ball than creative force, in British experience, save exploiting people; which governments do with greater ease than helping them.
I can live in hope John
I think some technological changes have been immensely ‘disruptive’ – so, antibiotics, the chain saw, hydraulic ram and other developments have had massive impacts, but these predate the digital era.
However, I don’t think progress from the i-phone 4 to i-phone 8 was at all disruptive, nor have many ‘new’ pharmacological developments been more than incremental change, (as Mazzucato discusses).
In ‘The Great Transformation’ Polanyi noted the huge technological changes that prefaced or accompanied the Industrial Revolution had to be complemented by a recasting of social and economic relationships to embed them in industrial society, and that transactionalism was the main vehicle.
At that level there had to be a partnership between the agents of socio-economic change and the tech innovators.
I think this pretty much confirms the influence that technology has.
Luckily, civil society can still provide some pretty crucial improvements.
I think the civil rights movement is one such in the States, and here in the UK the advancement of both women’s rights and gay and racial rights have not been tech dependent.
Yet it is true that these have been somewhat ‘insecure’ as suggested, given over 50 yrs later women still don’t get equal pay.
As far as tackling the climate crisis, we do need urgent system change, not tinkering, and I see embedded neoliberalism as the foundation for current total inertia and failure to act timeously.
Like Richard, for our grand kids sake, we do have to live in hope.
AI? Maybe. But I am not convincved as yet….
Coal was problematic; the misery of the colliers was never quite redeemed; and the misery caused by pollution scarred multiple generations. Asbestos illustrates the downside of technical innovation. The problem is we live in a culture of celebration of innovation, and never look back at the cost it wreaks. Too many Historians do an ineffective job. They are insufficiently interdisciplinary in their methods (the silos of academia). On Big Tech the problem has been described by Zuboff on the substance of real innovation – surveillance capitalism. Read her book. As usual both politics and the law lag far behind, until the public’s carcase has been picked clean by the vultures. Then they stumble in, too late to make any difference. The next rip-off is already being innovated.
Technology transformation is value free – it can be beneficial. the washing machine, or catastrophic, fossil fuels. And on the catastrophic side those promoting the change often know beforehand that the change is going to be problematic. Otto English in Fake Heroes recounts the story of leaded petrol. Early in the history of the IC Engine “knocking” was a problem so scientists set to work and the problem was solved. Now, everybody knew lead was toxic, the Romans knew but like the motor lobby they found it was very useful so they continued to use it.
Then the lobbyists get to work, and the captured scientists and the additive is declared safe, a bit like Rwanda. This scenario is repeated time and time again. A toxic, hazardous substance is just too useful and too profitable, (freon was another example created by the same man apparently) and so we are all poisoned but at least some get rich on others misery. Until eventually, the evidence is so overwhelming, that something has to be done, but only slowly.
Maybe when the ocean conveyor belt suddenly shuts down politicians will wake up. Now that would be transformational.
Credit to Good Law Project for applying their shoulders to this wheel. While I don’t support the way we have become ever more litigious I can see a wave of group actions stemming from this precedent. Businesses all around the shores of Windermere whose revenues have been impacted by the stink, watersports and hospitality all around the coast and along the rivers. Freshwater and onshore fisheries. I wonder if it will also apply to agricultural run-off. Or will an incoming Labour government legislate to restore legal protection to the polluters?
I too have supported the GLP for some time. The trouble is it takes so long to get a result and it’s almost prohibitively expensive without donations, crowdfunding etc. That’s 8 years to get a result that government could have achieved “at a stroke” if it had been so minded.
Civil society needs to find a way creating a democracy nearer to the meaning of the word where citizens have an important say in governance rather than the party apparatchiks who are slaves to political dogma and seem interested only in power rather than what they can do with that power to make a fairer more caring society.
A climate graph like Barrow in Alaska certainly would be transformational.