Tottenham’s Bernie Grant Arts Centre to Welcome Ken Saro-Wiwa Memorial ‘Battle Bus’
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Jun 16, 2011
LAUNCH EVENT: Saturday 25 June, 12-2pm, Bernie Grant Arts Centre, Town Hall Approach Rd, London N15 4RX. MAP: View Larger Map A spectacular life-size steel bus, created as a memorial to Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, will be officially welcomed to its new home in Tottenham as part of Civic Day celebrations on Saturday 25 June....
Ogonis File Class Action Lawsuit in UK Over Shell Oil Spills
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Jun 15, 2011
The Ogoni community of Bodo has filed a class-action lawsuit at the High Court in London against oil giant Royal Dutch Shell. The case concerns damages caused by two major oil spills from Shell’s Trans-Niger pipeline in 2008-9, both the result of equipment failure. It took Shell several months before they finally clamped the pipeline....
Death knell or crying wolf?
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May 28, 2011
In April the Chancellor, George Osborne, launched his ‘Fair Fuel Stabiliser’. This linked the rate of tax paid by oil companies to global oil prices. When the price of oil was above $75 a barrel, the rate of tax on North Sea oil profits would rise, with the additional revenue used to lower the price...
The other offshore tax regime
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Apr 6, 2011
The lobby machine kicked into action following the announcement by George Osbourne of plans to raise £10 billion over the next 5 years from the oil industry. Ex-PLATFORMer Greg Muttitt, author of the forthcoming book Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq explains in this guest blog why the outraged claims of the oil...
BP violated human rights rules, says UK government
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Mar 9, 2011
Company failed to respond to alleged intimidation by Turkish security forces along its UK-backed Caspian oil pipeline Ruling places BP in breach of loan agreements, say campaigners A BP-led consortium is breaking international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies in its operations on the controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the UK Government ruled...
Oil, British foreign energy policy and Middle East repression
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Feb 24, 2011
British oil interests are tightly interlinked with our governments’ recent political and military support for Gaddafi’s regime. Libya’s oil reserves – the largest in Africa – long had Western companies drooling. Shell beat its competitors to the chase, signing a $1 billion gas contract in 2004 during Tony Blair’s first visit to Libya. After three...
Wikileaks cable shines light on ENI corruption in Uganda; Heritage offered to pay bribes in Congo
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Dec 15, 2010
• SECRET US CABLE SHINES LIGHT ON ENI CORRUPTION IN UGANDA • HERITAGE OFFERED TO PAY BRIBES IN CONGO ‘’If Tullow’s allegations are true – and we believe they are …” US Embassy, Kampala, 17 December 2009 A secret United States diplomatic cable (below and here) published by Wikileaks last week has exposed the real politics...
SHAKE! getting young people creative at The Stephen Lawrence Centre
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Aug 19, 2010
My name is Ed, and I teach about politics, religion and philosophy, and one of the other things I do is volunteer at PLATFORM. For most of the past few weeks I’ve been enjoying the privilege of summer holidays, but this week I’m participating in an experiment. It’s a course for young people called SHAKE!. Conceived by...
Upstream fossil fuel tax “politically feasible” in England
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Aug 3, 2010
A new report produced by conservative thinktank Policy Exchange – described as David Cameron’s “favourite”, promotesupstream carbon taxes as more effective than market-based cap & trade in reducing emissions. The report “Greener, Cheaper”, by Oxford based academic Dieter Helm, proposes an upstream fuel tax “levied on coal, gas and oil weighted according to their carbon content. Such a tax has...
Big Oil sponsorship map of London
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Jun 24, 2010
BP’s ‘absentee landlords’ under pressure to stop tar sands
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Apr 19, 2010
Yesterday, people from all over the country streamed into the Excel Conference Centre in the London Docklands to take part in the financial theatre that is the BP Annual General Meeting. One of the people who was protesting outside remarked that there was a “surprisingly low shareholder turnout of hedge fund managers in suits, and...
New PLATFORM report reveals RBS is UK bank most involved in financing loans to tar sands companies
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Feb 27, 2010
Tar sands extraction in Canada is devastating Indigenous communities, wildlife and vast areas of boreal forests, as well as being many times more carbon-intensive to produce than ‘conventional’ oil. “We are seeing a terrifyingly high rate of cancer in Fort Chipewyan where I live. We are convinced that these cancers are linked to the Tar...
