Johann Hari

This week, a fretful, frightened conservative party is peering at its leader and looking beyond him for a successor. The choice they make will determine the future of our politics, and the world’s. Who will be bombed? Who will be saved? How rapidly will our climate unravel? These decisions are being made thousands of miles away from Britain’s faded sea-side side-shows, across an ocean, in New Hampshire, in Iowa, in Florida, and in California. It now looks likely the Republican Party will now choose a man even more extreme than Bush – and that he will be the next President of the United States.

Last week, a series of findings by the Democratic Party’s leading pollsters, Lake Research, were leaked. Until now, Democrats have assumed the flat-lining opinion polls for President Bush guaranteed a return to the White House. After all, CBS News recently found that with a 28 percent approval rating, Bush is now as popular in opinion polls as brussell sprouts, body hair on men, and reptiles. But the reality is “more sobering”, the leaked study warned. In crucial swing districts, Rudi Giuliani beats Hillary Clinton, who is cruising to the Democratic nomination, by a whopping ten points. Even if Barack Obama beats her, he still loses to Rudi at the general.

So who is the man most likely to be President? Giuliani was born to poor Italian-American immigrants in Brooklyn at the tail-end of the Second World War. His father, Harold, was an armed robber who had been banged up in Sing-Sing Prison, but he hid this from his son, raising him to have an intense, unquestioning loyalty to the police. This led Rudi to a career as a famously theatrical prosecutor, fond of arresting people in public and long press conferences boasting about his work. From there he ran for mayor of New York City – and the myths begin.

You know the script: Giuliani rescued New York City from its spiral into ungovernable criminality, and then became the hero of 9/11. He says he “saved New York” by introducing the famous policy of Zero Tolerance: crack down on any sign of social disorder, no matter how small, with the full force of the law. There’s only one problem. It’s not true.

The fall in crime Giuliani brags about began three years before he became mayor. On the watch of his black predecessor, David Dinkins, murder fell by 13.7 percent, and car theft by 23.8 percent. Giuliani inherited these trends. They had a complex range of causes, none of which were primarily his responsibility: the global economic boom, the fall in unemployment, the improvement in police computers.

Nor is zero tolerance the reason why the fall continued: criminal violence fell even more dramatically in cities that adopted smarter, ‘softer’ policies. For example, San Francisco chose to lavish cash not on chasing petty crime but on programmes to divert juvenile delinquents into job training, drug treatment and counselling. The result? Their crime rate fell by 33 percent, compared to 26 percent in NYC during the same period.

As for 9/11, nobody can doubt Giuliani’s personal courage as he stumbled through the dust and falling bodies. This is at the core of Giuliani’s Presidential bid: his fundraisers have been asking for donations of $9.11. But the reality is that, even as he was bravely donning a dust-mask, many people were dying because of obtuse and foolish decisions Giuliani had taken as mayor.

When the World Trade Centre was attacked by jiahdists in 1993, the fire service was horrified to discover that their radios didn’t work properly in the towers. They spent eight years warning about it – but Giuliani did nothing. As a result, the heroic firefighters in the Second Tower couldn’t be told that the building was about to collapse on them, and they died. Giuliani then lied about them to investigators, saying they refused to evacuate – when in fact, they didn’t hear the order. Don’t take my word for it. Ask the New York’s Uniformed Fire Officer’s Association, a conservative organisation who endorsed George Bush in 2004. They loathe Giuliani, and their spokesman explains bitterly: “He had eight years to solve that problem.”

It wasn’t his only call that ended hellishly that day. He chose to place the emergency “command bunker” for the City on the 23rd floor of the World Trade Centre, even though he knew it was the only place jihadis had ever tried to attack in America. The result was that the emergency services were barely able to co-ordinate as the dust filled Manhattan.

Yet on the basis of these myths, he may be on the brink of becoming President. On foreign policy, he says George Bush is “a great example” – except that he hasn’t been aggressive enough. Giuliani has pledged that, unlike the pansy Bush, he would bomb Iran imminently, offering last week “an absolute assurance” that “if they get to the point that they are going to become a nuclear power, we will prevent that or set them back five or 10 years. That is not said as a threat. That should be said as a promise.”

This is only the start. He has appointed as his senior foreign policy advisor Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of neoconservatism. When I interviewed Podhoretz last autumn, he declared that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” He added, “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better.” He describes critics of the war as “the domestic insurgency”, and says the fight against them is “no less bloody than the war being fought by our troops in the Middle East.”

Giuliani agrees. This summer, he blamed the media for the impression that Iraq is a disaster, and reasserted that Saddam “was a major pillar of support for Islamic terrorism”. Whatever you think US foreign policy should be, it cannot be achieved by these ideological hallucinations.

When Bush recently declared that the lesson from Vietnam is that the US should have stayed and killed more people, he was merely copying Giuliani. He bragged in a recent speech: “Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency.” This wasn’t quite his view at the time: he secured for himself no less than three exemptions from the draft.

America’s Mayor is also even more hardline than Bush when it comes to the Palestinians. He chides Bush’s purely rhetorical commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state, saying: “Too much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians… It is not in the interests of the US to assist in the creation of another state that will support terrorism.” He waves away the United Nations with the same haughty contempt, declaring that “the UN has been irrelevant to the resolution of every major dispute of the last 50 years,” and it should continue to be so. He shares Bush’s keep-on-burning approach to global warming.

Is there any way in which Giuliani is better than Bush? Well, he is not homophobic, supports civil partnerships and even moved in with a gay couple after he dumped his second wife live in the middle of a press conference. He is not against a woman’s right to have an abortion. And that’s it.

Yet it is in these personal, liberal views that a tiny glimmer of light can be glimpsed. If Giuliani becomes the Republican nominee, there is a significant chance that the evangelical wing of the party – obsessed with God, guns and gays – will break away and run a third party candidate against him. James Dobson, founder of the influential hard-right Focus on the Family, has already said he “cannot, and will not, vote for Rudi Giuliani in 2008. It is an irrevocable decision.” An evangelical third party could split the right-wing vote and let a Democrat through the middle – just as Ross Perot did in 1992 and 1996, and just as Ralph Nader let Bush through in 2000. Or perhaps – the best scenario of all – the American people will see through the Giuliani façade by then.

If President Giuliani becomes a reality, then yet another tragedy will have been born in the burning rubble of the World Trade Centre.

The evangelical third-party backlash against Giuliani is happening even sooner than I thought: check out my lovely friend Andrew Sullivan's post about it here.

What happens when a twenty-nine year old black Jewish girl from Camden Town, raised by a skint single mum, suddenly becomes a Member of Parliament? ‘House Music’ is the surreal, scintillating and – in the end – sad answer to this question.

The great political diarists of the past have written wry observations from the side of the Chamber, like Alan Clark or Chips Channon, or blunt accounts from the inside of government, like Tony Benn or Barbra Castle. Oona King offers something new: the political diary as chick lit confessional, taking you on a tour of the diarist’s ovaries, anxieties and marriage crises as she runs from one constituency surgery to another. Talk of Private Members’ Bills alternates with talk of her own unpaid phone bills; discussion of the IMF follows discussion of her IVF.

It all begins with a judder of optimism. During her first week, she walks into the empty chamber of the House of Commons in wonder. She explains: “Three male Tories walk in, such a bizarre species with their relentlessly upper-class accents and public-school striped ties. They eye me suspiciously. They’re in two minds about calling security. And then they catch sight of my Member’s pass. They look at me like I’ve gatecrashed their private member’s club.”

But she picks through the archaic absurdities of Westminster with a wry smile. In 1997, she notes: “One new MP was impressed to find that each MP’s coat hanger had a pink ribbon attached – presumably to highlight AIDS or breast cancer awareness – only to discover that these ribbons were for us to hang our swords on.” She finds some compensations. She fights for a Private Member’s Bill to help contract cleaners. She wades through the misery of her East End constituency, the poorest in Britain, where she finds people piled as many as twenty-to-a-flat, and finds she can help some of them. (Full disclosure: as a constituent, I met and became friendly with her at this time). She sets up an Anti-Genocide Select Committee, and becomes one of the few politicians to yell and shout about the horrific slaughter unfolding in Congo – the deadliest war since Hitler marched across Europe.

She begins to learn that for a politician, speaking plainly and honestly can mean career-death. One day, she is waiting in the queue at the supermarket, wearing a crop-top and a belly-button ring. A woman behind her recognises her, and asks if she is allowed to dress like that as an MP. “Oh, well I’m just going out dancing,” she explains. “Obviously when I go to the mosque tomorrow, and then for meetings in Whitehall, I dress differently.” Two days later, the deadline in a national newspaper reads: “MP Oona’s secret double life,” with details about how she “mocks” her Muslim constituents.

But it is King’s refusal to shut down her conscience that means she is frozen out by New Labour. She is called in by Alistair Campbell and ordered to write a piece attacking Ken Livingstone. When she refuses, he tells her with a smile that her career is over for five years – and it is. Although she supports much of the government programme, her cavils about how the war the war in Afghanistan was fought, detention without trial, and the abuse of asylum seekers mean she is seen as “unreliable.”

While all this unfolds, her marriage – to a tall, lean Italian hunk – begins to fall apart. She is forced to spend all her time at Westminster, trapped in “a posh boarding school with crap food”. She details how her marriage fissures and fails with a biting honesty, even detailing how her husband snaps at her one night: “You’re a politician. I don’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth.” They try to have a baby, only to deliver a “pregnancy sac”, “like an egg without a yoke”, she notes tearfully. She begins to wonder if she should resign.

And then comes the career-killer. King asks: “I went into parliament a human rights activist and trade unionist, and came out labelled a warmonger and murderer. Where did I go wrong?” She voted against bombing Iraq in 1998, but then she saw hundreds of Iraqis slump through her constituency surgeries as asylum seekers, and began to wonder: “Just because George Bush got away with murder, why should Saddam Hussein get away with genocide?” So she voted for the invasion – and signed her political death warrant.

Today, she says that if she had anticipated the “incompetence, corruption, ignorance and sheer stupidity” of George Bush’s occupation, “I would never have voted to invade Iraq.” But it was too late. George Galloway sharked into the constituency, declaring that King “wants to wage war on Muslims at home and abroad.” His campaign distributed pictures of her in a low-cut top to conservative Muslim areas, and Galloway announced on the radio that “Oona King is in the papers every day with stories of affairs.” On the street, people began to yell, “Go home, Jewish bitch.” Her seat – and an unborn baby – slipped away from her.

And yet King writes now, “My second biggest fear was of losing my seat at the general election. My biggest fear was of winning it.” Away from Westminster, she regains her life, her sanity and her marriage. She realises that the hours and lifestyle we demand from our politicians have a disastrous effect on the country itself. It means we are governed by freaks, who never see their families or friends.

If our political system cannot accommodate an Oona King – a plain-speaking young politician who ordinary people feel they can speak to – without sending her into a resignation-spiral of despair, then it is broken. The only comfort to be sucked from this story is that, at the end of it all, we got one of the most fresh and authentic political books in years.

You can buy 'House Music' here, and you can read my report on the Oona/Galloway battle in the East End here.

To find out details go to theBurma Solidarity Campaign. You can also donate money that will help smuggle information into Burma, aid the underground resistance, and help get terrified people out.

While the Labour conference leaves the seaside with a confident strut, an untold, unnoticed national scandal is picking off labour-with-a-small-l. Every year now, 77 or more people are killed on Britain’s construction sites – with a massive rise of 30 percent in the 2006 alone. It’s even worse in house-building: the number of people who had their heads or bodies crushed in that sector doubled last year. And it is all, alas, because of the policies of Labour.

For the past week, I have been wading through the grief these workplace disasters cause. Patrick O’Sullivan was a 54-year old brickie who played in a band at weekends. His son Patrick told me on Tuesday, “He was a lively guy, fit as a fiddle, always really active. He was more lively than a lot of guys in his 20s, and he was the sort of bloke who always kept people spirits up.” On the 15th January 2004, Pat went to work building the new Wembley Stadium. A crane that was supposed to be watched by two banksmen – but wasn’t – sent a vast wooden platform crashing down onto Pat. He bled to death before the air ambulance arrived. The inquest has not even begun yet. “The experience has crushed my family too,” John says, “just destroyed us.”

Kieron Deeney was a 25-year old Irish guy who worked with Pat. At his funeral, his girlfriend Jennifer whispered to him: “What would I do if it was you?” Last summer, it was. Kieron was fresh from getting married when he was sent to work on one of the glistening towers of Docklands. As part of his work, he had to walk along a piece of wood covering a liftshaft – but it was rotten. He fell 100 feet and died instantly. Jennfier says, “I lost my life too that day. I was just married, we were so happy. I lost everything.”

And it is not just construction workers who are dying in this surge in accidents. A year ago today, a 23 year old called Michael Alexa – who had just become a dad for the first time – was outside his mum’s house in Battersea changing a tyre on his car when there was a strange sound from the building site next to him. His mother Alexa heard it too, and, she tells me, “I immediately ran outside, like somebody was calling to me. I saw Michael trapped under a crane. There was nothing I could do… It has ruined my life. I have been given a life sentence. All his grandparents are alive, and he is gone.”

Why are these deaths happening more rapidly than before in Britain? There is one big reason: a campaign of lies, led by the right-wing press and big business, that has bullied the government into whittling down the Health and Safety Inspectorate to dangerously threadbare levels.

For over a decade now, the right has inventing stories that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is a gang of “clip-board wielding nannies”, imposing absurd rules like banning children from playing conkers. The BBC’s John Humphries has joined in this parade, attacking the “’Elf and Safety Nazis.” In reality, far from faffing about with conkers, the HSE is unable to investigate even instances where workers have their legs amputated following chronic negligence. A shortage of resources was the reason for not investigating a major injury – a lost leg, a smashed face, a paralysed father – in 188 cases in 2004/5, 255 cases in 2005/6, and 307 cases in 2006/7.

Yet the government bought into the lies, and saw the HSE as an easy service to swingeingly cut. The HSE has already lost 250 jobs, and they will have to cut a further 300 jobs by 2008. After her husband Kieran died, Jennifer decided to go and work for the HSE herself, to prevent more deaths like his. She was shocked to find “there just aren’t enough inspectors to do the jobs. There are huge abuses going on that they can’t look into. It’s not their fault, it’s the government’s.”

The plummeting number of HSE inspectors has led to a plummeting number of prosecutions for workplace negligence. In 1998, 42 percent of builder’s deaths ended in a conviction for the company. Today, it is just 11 percent. This means the risk of getting caught and punished has fallen for companies – so they are, entirely predictably, taking more risks. As Alan Ritchie, general secretary of construction worker’s trade union UCATT, explains: “It’s not rocket science to realise that if you implement a rigorous inspection and enforcement regime, sites will become safer. If you sit back and do nothing deaths will increase.”

Even when there is a conviction, the punishments are often an insult to the dead. Dozens of companies have been fined just £1000 for contributing to the death of one of their workers. Compare that to the fine this summer for British Airways of £121.5m for committing financial irregularities. Gordon Brown has been talking this week about the “signals” sent out by alcohol and cannabis laws. But what signal does this send - rip off rich people and we’ll fiscally horse-whip you, kill poor people and we’ll take your spare change?

There are other ways in which the laws protecting construction workers are bizarrely ineffective. Under the current government guidelines, the HSE has to give construction sites a long warning before they come to inspect. John O’Sullivan, remembering his father’s experience, says: “It means that the day before the inspectors come, the managers on a site go around sorting everything out, and the inspection is worthless. The food hygiene inspectors don’t ring up dodgy restaurants a week before they come so they’ve got a chance to scrub out their kitchens, do they?”

The Irish government has adopted the opposite approach to Labour’s – with striking results. They doubled the number of health and safety inspectors, and within a year the number of construction deaths literally fell by 50 percent. Scores of Pats and Kierons and Michaels have been saved.

Peter Hain, the new Work and Pensions Secretary, has convened a safety forum on this issue, and pledged to act. But will he introduce the only measure that will really make a difference: employ more Health and Safety Inspectors and give them the power to carry out unexpected on-the-spot checks? He will have to face down the shrieking of the fake populists on the right who claim to defend The Ordinary Bloke while they actually peddle the propaganda of their super-rich employers – something the government has lethally failed to do so far.

Kieron’s widow, Jennifer, knows what a cruel joke these HSE-bashing lies really are. She said to me as we parted: “If we had 70 doctors or 70 nurses dying in work every year, we’d do something about it. It would be a national scandal. But they seem to think these men don’t count because they work in construction. Well, they deserve to go to work and come home safe, like everyone else.”

POSTSCRIPT: You can support the campaign to have real health and safety protections by backing the Centre for Corporate Accountability here, or UCATT here..

You can e-mail comments ont his article for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk or you can e-mail them just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read my article about the dire protections for workers in British factories here, my article about the rebellion by Britain's army of underpaid cleaners here, my article about why I wish we really did have a 'compensation culture' here, and my piece about other ways in which the Labour government has failed to protect us from corporate abuses here.

This week, it is fifty years - and an eternity - since the publication of the Wolfenden Report, which began to rip up the laws that turned gay people into criminals. If you had whisked John Wolfenden and his committee by time machine into the Britain of 2007, they would have dismissed the country we live in as a utopian sci-fi fantasia. Openly gay people rising to top of every profession, including the government, army and police, a law banning discrimination against gay men and lesbians, gay people able to effectively get married - and even a Tory Party conference applauding equality for gay people? Nice dream, boys.

But we're there. A generation of gay people born today simply can't imagine the strange world my parents were born into, where gay men were jailed just for having sex. The gay rights movement has been a shimmering model of how a persecuted minority can peacefully appeal to the decency and humanity of the majority, and win.

Yet today, there is one corner of Britain where viciousness and violence against gay people are still endemic. It is a place where 41 percent of gay people are beaten up, and 17 percent receive death-threats. You have been there, and so have I. It's called school - and our playgrounds need a Wolfenden report of their own.

Jonathan Reynolds could have told you why. He was a 15 year-old boy from Bridgend, South Wales, who came out to some of his friends last year. He was bullied and harrassed and threatened as a "faggot" and a "poof" until he couldn't take it any more. So one day, after he sat a GCSE exam where he earned a starred A grade, he lay down on the train tracks near his home. He texted his sister Sam: "Tell everyone that this is for anybody who eva said anything bad about me, see I do have feelings too. Blame the people who were horrible and injust 2 me. This is because of them, I am human just like them. None of you blame yourself, mum, dad, Sam and the rest of the family. This is not because of you." Then a train sliced his body apart.

The bullying Jonathan endured is not unusual. It is the norm in Britain's schools. The word 'gay' is an all-purpose insult, the worst thing you can be called. Earlier this year, the gay equality organisation Stonewall published a detailed study of over 1000 gay pupils, carried out by the Schools Health Education Unit. It discovered that a majority of Britain's gay kids feel so unsafe that they skive off school to avoid abuse. Another three-year study found that more than half consider self-harm or suicide. I get e-mailed by a lot of distressed gay teenagers, and one intelligent, kind 15 year old girl recently wrote: "After it went round the school that I had told my mate I was gay, my locker was smashed up and a dead squirrel was put in it. In every corridor people just yelled at me I was a dyke and a rug-muncher, all that. When I went into my form room everyone got up and moved to the back, including my best friends. The teacher didn't do anything. I told [one of my teachers] and she said I shouldn't have told anyone. I should make it less obvious. They [other pupils] won't get changed [after PE] when I'm there." She used to love school. Now she feels "I can't stand to go in any more."

Homophobic abuse is often ignored by teachers - and sometimes even encouraged. I remember when I was at school a teacher called me "a poof" in front of a class and thought it was hilarious. Stonewall found that while 97 percent of pupils have been told racist bullying is wrong, only 23 percent of pupils today have ever been told by teachers that homophobic bullying is unacceptable. But there is good news in the study too: where there is a clear policy of punishing homophobia, it works. Those pupils in schools where action was taken were 60 percent less likely to be bullied and 70 percent more likely to feel safe. Teenagers might be insecure group-formers, desperate to punish difference, but there is no reason they should fixate on homosexuality as the marker of difference.

Homophobia is not inevitable among kids: they are simply picking up on a nervous ambiguity among teachers, who too often will not punish prejudice for fear of a backlash from bigoted parents. There have been excellent pilot schemes showing it doesn't have to be like this. George Green's School, near where I live in East London, has a tough anti-homophobia policy, in an area mostly populated by recent immigrants with uber-conservative views. Head-teacher Kenny Frederick has faced down homophobic parents and insisted on equality for all her students. If she can do it, any headteacher can.

So how do we ensure there are more schools like hers? The newly appointed Children's Minister, Kevin Brennan, is a decent person and says the right things. He recently told a gay equality conference: "Just as it took several years for racial equality laws to feed into real cultural change where racist language became unacceptable, we need to achieve the same with homophobic language."

But are the government's actions backing this up? In one significant way, they are making it worse. There is one type of school where homophobic bullying is most severe: faith schools. Pupils there are more than 10 percent more likely to be subject to anti-gay bullying, and 23 percent less likely to feel they can tell anyone about their sexuality. I was e-mailed by a 17-year old gay boy at a Muslim school last year who was told by one of his teachers in a lesson that "sodomites should be killed". In the Stonewall study, an 18-year old boy called Matthew said: "It's a Catholic school... and we are told 'gay people will go to hell because the Bible condemns it'... It's horrid, you just want to go and cry at come of the remarks made by the teachers." The government is currently embarked on an expansion of these schools. There is a danger that after abolishing Section 28 by the front door, the growth of faith schools unwittingly reintroduces it by the back door.

So a Wolfenden for the playgrounds would introduce a law, today, requiring all schools to have a tough anti-homophobia policy that can be monitored by Ofsted. If they refuse on the grounds of "religion", shut them down. The Littlejohnian right will howl about "political correctness", just as they howled at Wolfenden's report fifty years ago. Let them. We wouldn't tolerate a school that permits the persecution of black students; why aren't gay students accorded the same respect? How many kids like Jonathan Reynolds need to die texting "I am human" before we protect them?

To support the campaign against homophobia in schools, you can join or donate to Stonewall or Outrage!

I have written some related articles you might want to check out if this interests you: on gay pupils at boarding schools, why Damilola Taylor may have been a victim of homophobia, the epidemic of homelessness among gay teenagers, why I think the seperate gay school in New York for gay teenagers in not the solution to homophobic bullying, why it would help gay kids if some of our footballers came out, and - while we're at it - other reasons to oppose faith schools.

All feedback welcome to johann -at- johannhari.com

In the next month, a decision will land on Gordon Brown's desk that will tell us how seriously he takes the greatest crisis facing us all - the drastic destabilisation of our planet's climate. The harbingers are dark. He has already personally championed the growth of the greenhouse gas factory known as Heathrow airport, and appointed airline lobbyist Digby Jones to the government to champion its case. He has already encouraged more road-building, which every study shows will mean more car journeys and more emissions. But this decision - if he gives the nod - will definitively guarantee that Britain cannot meet its long-term targets to prevent global warming spiralling beyond the point of no return.

The energy company E.on have applied to build Britain's first new coal-powered fire station in thirty-three years. The decision is currently sitting with the local Tory-dominated council in Kent, but it will shortly be bumped up to the Department for Business and Regulatory Affairs in Whitehall. Like a piping hot piece of coal, it will be quickly handed on with a nervous wince to Number Ten Downing Street. Behind this application, here are at least three others in the pipeline, waiting and watching nervously to see what Brown decides.

Coal is the one of the dirtiest technologies known to man. If the E.on plan goes ahead, the emissions from this one plant alone will be greater than the 24 least-polluting countries combined. It produces 80 percent more climate-destabilising gases than natural gas, and 30 percent more than even burning up oil. So why its British come-back tour now? Our energy supplies are looking more precarious than ever, with chaos in the oil-rich Middle East, an ever-more-assertive Russia controlling the gas taps, and dwindling supplies in the North Sea. Any British government needs to put in place ways to keep the lights on - and there is Ol' King Cole, blowing black kisses and promising cheap and bountiful supplies.

The coal industry is busily trying to paint their lumps of coal green to make them more palatable to the public. They have created the concept of 'clean coal', and at first it sounds enticing. By using filters, coal companies can trap some of the worst waste products - like sulphur dioxide, which causes acid rain - before they leave the smokestalks, and then dump it in landfill or use it for other purposes. And as for the greenhouse gases? Using a process called carbon sequestration, they too can be captured from the atmopshere, pumped to the bottom of the oceans, and stored there forever.

If this could be made to work, it would be great - but the evidence suggests that it is a fairytale. Far from safely disposing of the toxins, the pilot project run by the US Department of the Environment in Indiana ended up pumping out cyanide and arsenic in the plant's wastewater at illegally dangerous levels. This was described as a "routine" occurrence in the government study.

The global warming effect behind 'clean coal', however, turns out to be even worse. Any carbon dioxide that was captured would have to be safely stored not just for decades, not just for centuries, but for millennia - with technology that hasn't be proven to work for even a few years yet. It was promised in the 1950s that nuclear waste would be stored away "forever", but today, barely a generation later, there have been numerous leaks and accidents. Once this 'stored' carbon dioxide leaks out, it will have the same effect on the environment as if it had just been released from a power plant - and the risk of a carbon dioxide leak is even greater than of nuclear material. CO2 is heavier than air, so it causes suffocation when it rises to the surface. In 1986, a volcanic crater beleched out a large amount of CO2 in Lake Nyos, West Africa. Some 1700 people choked to death. 'Clean' coal is still black at its heart.

For all these ineffective attempts to scrub coal clean, we will end up paying a fortune - stripping away coal's one advantage, its initial cheapness. The demonstration 'clean' coal power station built in Minnesota was supposed to cost $800m dollars. Today its price has risen to $2.155bn, and that doesn't even include the bill for the supposed carbon capture, transportation or storage. The Bush administration has thrown $1.8bn in subsidies at 'clean coal'. Of the thirteen projects authorised, 8 had severe delays or financial problems, 6 were behind schedule by 2-7 years, and two had gone bust and had to be ditched altogether. Even Bush's Department of the Environment - which has censored scientific reports on global warming - admits that geological sequestration "is not a reasonable option because the technology is not sufficiently mature to be implemented at production scale" and it won't be "technically practicable" for at least 15 years.

'Clean' coal is a huge medium-term investment that won't work - so why not go for a huge medium-term investment that will? Britain could lead the world in a new zero-carbon technology: tidal power. Britain has a long coastline, close to the strong currents of the Atlantic. We have the scientists and entrepreneurs itching to go. This summer, a brilliant Bristol-based company called Marine Current Turbines began constructing twin underwater turbines off the coast of Northern Ireland. It is the world's largest tidal power project, and a vivid demonstration that it can be done. It traps an incoming high tide, passes the water through turbines to generate electricity, and then lets it wash out to sea at low tide. Unlike other renewables, like wind power, it generates electricity 24/7. The Carbon Trust's 18-month scientific study discovered that tidal power could meet 20 percent of Britain's energy needs within a few decades, with no greenhouse gas emissions at all. It would be a model for the world - and put us in a far better position to coax and persuade others to cut their emissions.

But so far the government has allocated £50m to develop marine energy, spread out over seven years. In government spending terms, this is the equivalent of giving them a pack of crisps and a can of Cherry Coke. By contrast, the environmentally disastrous airline industry receives £10bn a year in de facto subsidies and tax breaks.

We should be having a sea-change to sea-power, the cleanest of all sources - but instead we may be about to sag back to the dirtiest. So far environmentalists have been disappointed with Brown. If he approves coal-powered stations, they will be disgusted. His only green promise so far is to build a few eco-towns. If makes the worst choice this month, they will look increasingly like a Potemkin village, designed to disguise the kerosene from a growing Heathrow and the black smudge of coal.

You can read some of my other articles about global warming here.

If you want to join the fight against global warming, you can join Greenpeace here or Friends of the Earth here or (my favourite) the Campaign Against Climate Change here.