John Harris provides, as usual, an excellent piece on what is wrong with British politics (Politics can’t heal until politicians stand clear of the revolving door, 3 September). However, former politicians and functionaries moving to lucrative jobs in the private sector and people from the private sector moving to less lucrative but influential positions in government is neither new nor a particularly British or European malady. What is missing from Harris and sadly from the Guardian in general is the recognition that this is how capitalism works at home, and is a key feature of how capitalism works globally.
How often do we hear the plea from politicians, functionaries, and corporate executives exposed for questionable practices that they were “doing nothing wrong”. In the strictly legal sense this is often correct, but it only highlights how capitalism and the state work hand in hand. Corporate sponsorship of the Paris climate change meetings is only the most important of recent manifestations of this phenomenon, in this case not only helping to explain why people around the world appear to be losing faith in conventional politics, but also why so little is done to get to the roots of why fossil-fuelled capitalist globalisation has been allowed to put the very existence of the planet at serious risk.
Leslie Sklair
London
• You argue (Editorial, 2 September) that Greens should concentrate on “their” issues (climate change, for example) and leave stuff like the economy, inequality, human rights etc to the mainstream parties. It’s true of course that “an environmental conscience is not the exclusive property of the left”. But this is not the point. Most Greens have realised that their position is unavoidably on the left not because of any tactical calculations, but because ecological justice on the one hand and social and economic justice on the other are inextricably linked.
Climate change is not just about the environment, but affects everything: industrial strategy, agriculture, global as well as domestic inequality, refugee flows, defence and security, health policy. There’s no chance that free-market capitalism will address this satisfactorily because its timescales are too short and its interests too socially narrow; perpetually continuing accumulation for the wealthy, at any cost, cannot solve the problem.
The pope gets it: in a previous leader (1 September), you quote him as saying: “Human beings are deeply connected with all of creation. When we mistreat nature we also mistreat human beings.”
Richard Middleton
Castle Douglas, Dumfries and Galloway
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