Toxic Chemicals Poisoning Brits While MP's Reap Profits

Number 80

In this issue:

1. Chemicals, cancer and corruption: a special report

i. Poisoned for profit

Thousands of adults and children could be suffering from cancers and other serious illnesses because of the UK’s collusion with the powerful chemicals industry, a whistleblower has told The Acorn.

“It is something the government had the means to put right more than eight years ago. But weak-willed and corrupt civil servants caved into industry pressure and are delaying vital safety changes”, says Terry Edge.

“I’ve tried to back out of this issue, but I won’t give up while the entire population is being poisoned for profit”.

The scandal involves the use of toxic flame retardants in home furnishing, which are used to meet legislation imposed in Britain and Ireland but not in Europe and the USA.

As well as poisoning people in their homes on a daily basis, with children particularly vulnerable, they also worsen the overall effects of fires.

Not only do they in fact do little to slow down the spread of a blaze, but they also create highly toxic smoke.

As a result, UK firefighters have been suffering from cancers and other serious conditions while fire victims, such as those in London’s 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster, (see item below) have also obviously been badly affected.

Terry, who runs a website dedicated to this issue, is a retired civil servant who worked on the British government’s review of furniture and furnishings regulations (FFRs).

He explains that from early 2013 to August 2014, as the dedicated expert, he led on the development of a new “match test” for the FFRs.

“This new test would have made our furniture fire-safe (our research proved that the current test is not safe), greener and cheaper. But the chemical industry would have lost millions. The test remains blocked”.

And he warns that the “hugely powerful” chemical industry is manipulating UK law so that their products continue to be put into sofas and mattresses in huge amounts – around 30-50 kgs per household, not counting those in carpets, curtains and electrical goods.

He points out that he and his colleagues proved there was a problem with the regulations as long ago as 2014, but “business and senior civil servants blocked the changes that would have put them right”.

In 2019 a government select committee – the Environmental Audit Committee – actually backed up his arguments.

Its report stated: “Some of the most commonly used flame retardants in consumer products, such as deca-BDE, have been classed as persistent organic pollutants and substances of very high concern.

“Some have been banned and regrettable substitutions have occurred. Internationally, restrictions are increasingly being placed on their use in furniture, mattresses, children’s products and electronics.

“In addition, evidence has emerged that flame-retardant chemicals increase the toxicity of smoke in domestic fires, which calls into question their overall benefit.

“Inaction has allowed unnecessary and potentially toxic chemicals to continue to enter homes for over a decade. Chemicals which, while purporting to protect the public from fire, cause more toxic smoke and increases the production of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide”.

The committtee called for immediate action on such substances being put in children’s products – its members, says Terry, had been horrified to find that children’s mattresses contain chemicals that were banned from sheep dip because they are so toxic.

Its report concluded: “We agree with evidence provided by Terry Edge that inaction and obstruction within BEIS [Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy] has contributed to the delay in reforming the Regulations.

“It is clear that opposition from some in the furniture and flame-retardant industries, and protection of their market share, also contributed to the delay and the inability to achieve a consensus for reform… We take Terry Edge’s allegations against individuals within BEIS and the industry very seriously”.

However, four years later nothing has been done, laments Terry: “Indeed, I found out this week that it looks as if it will be around another 10 years before there might be any changes at all. Of course in the meantime firefighters will continue to suffer unnecessary cancers and the rest of us will continue to be poisoned in our own homes; oh, and home fires will continue to be incredibly toxic”.

ii. The Grenfell cough

The effect of flame retardant chemicals on London firefighters involved in the 2017 Grenfell Tower tragedy, which killed 72 residents, is now coming to light.

A report in The Mirror on January 12, 2023, revealed that up to a dozen of the firefighters have been diagnosed with cancers, the majority of which are understood to be digestive cancers and leukaemia, for which there is no cure.

It adds: “But it is feared this could be the tip of the iceberg, with some cancers taking up to 25 years to appear”.

A fire service source told the newspaper: “We are expecting some really depressing data to be revealed soon. It’s shocking.”

One firefighter said “I’ve heard loads of guys and girls have been sick with the ‘Grenfell cough’”.

He revealed that he has failed several medicals since the blaze because of his lung function and now needs inhalers.

“Before Grenfell my health was great. I passed all the medicals and had no problems at all”.

The Mirror refers only to “contaminants” in its report and does not spell out exactly where these came from.

But Terry has dedicated a special page on his site to the Grenfell disaster and insists: “The hundreds of sofas and mattresses in the Tower would have released hydrogen cyanide in large amounts upon ignition, as a result of the flame retardant chemicals used to meet the requirements of the FFRs”.

iii. Fear and fakery

Lies have always played a central role in the insidious operations of the business mafia, with a favourite ruse being to hide profiteering and ill-doing behind a virtue-signalling facade.

The fire retardant regulations scam is no exception, as was clearly set out in an important piece of investigative journalism in the USA’s Chicago Tribune back in 2012.

In a hard-hitting series of articles, Patricia Callahan and Sam Roe exposed “a decades-long campaign of deception that has loaded the furniture and electronics in American homes with pounds of toxic chemicals linked to cancer, neurological deficits, developmental problems and impaired fertility”.

They wrote: “The tactics started with Big Tobacco, which wanted to shift focus away from cigarettes as the cause of fire deaths, and continued as chemical companies worked to preserve a lucrative market for their products, according to a Tribune review of thousands of government, scientific and internal industry documents.

“These powerful industries distorted science in ways that overstated the benefits of the chemicals, created a phony consumer watchdog group that stoked the public’s fear of fire and helped organize and steer an association of top fire officials that spent more than a decade campaigning for their cause”.

The Tribune investigation showed that “Citizens for Fire Safety” was not the broad coalition it claimed to be, but a trade association with only three members which just happened to be the big three flame retardant businesses, Albemarle, Chemtura (now Lanxess) and ICL.

Another body, the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, based in Brussels, was made to sound like a neutral scientific body, but was founded and funded by chemical manufacturers, including Albemarle, to influence the debate about flame retardants made with bromine.

Videos based on the investigation (see here and here) describe how the industry faked evidence that flame retardants work and deliberately frightened the public into thinking their houses would burn down and their children perish in their flames if they voted against the presence of the chemicals in their homes.

The cynical use of children’s scripted pleas to “keep us safe” in order to advance a corporate agenda is strangely reminiscent of the Covid fear propaganda… or perhaps not so strangely, as we will see later.

While the battle was won in the USA a decade ago, Britain and Ireland are still stuck with the chemical-imposing regulations, despite occasional reporting of the issue such as this 2017 BBC Newsnight report and the associated in-depth written article.

A look, for instance, at the “technical partners” of the so-called European Fire Safety Alliance reveals that they include Lanxess, ICL and other chemicals businesses.

Its “fire safety specialist” René Hagan even had the cheek to use the Grenfell Tower tragedy as a pretext to promote more flame retardant materials!

Then there is the Modern Building Alliance, which claims that “an essential pillar of our cause is the ambition for greater fire safety across the construction industry” and whose members include chemical businesses like BASF, Dow and Covestro.

A key role is also played by the massive PR firm, Burson Cohn & Wolfe (formerly Burson-Marsteller), mentioned by the BBC journalists and which, explains Terry on his site, “represents the three big flame retardant producers and spends a fortune on promoting their products as wonderful life-savers in times of fire, while covering up any evidence that in fact they are incredibly toxic”.

iv. Who’s behind this?

Asking who is behind any big business may seem redundant today, when it appears that virtually everything, everywhere, is owned by an interlocking knot of funds and holding companies centred around BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard.

But let’s take a look anyway.

The big three flame retardant producers are Lanxess (formerly Chemtura), Albemarle and ICL.

Lanxess is a German-based business with around 60 production sites worldwide, which has been linked to the appearance of high levels of cancer-causing chemicals in aquifers and accused of using up badly-needed water supplies for its processes.

Its institutional shareholders include Paradigm Asset Management, New Perspective Fund, New World Fund and two different parts of Vanguard.

Albemarle Corporation is an American chemicals company which, as of 2020, was the largest provider of lithium for electric vehicle batteries.

It has been accused of working through industry associations such as the Methyl Bromide Working Group and the Methyl Bromide Global Coalition “in an attempt to roll back national and international regulations such as the Clean Air Act and the Montreal Protocol” and in 2022 it was sued by the Chilean goverment over environmental damage.

Its top three institutional shareholders are State Street, BlackRock and, in leading position, Vanguard.

ICL Group Ltd (formerly Israel Chemicals Ltd) produces approximately a third of the world’s bromine.

In 2019 it was on the receiving end of the biggest environmental class action suit in Israeli history, accused of polluting groundwater and a popular spring and stream at a nature reserve.

Its top institutional shareholders include JP Morgan Chase & Company, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock and, of course, Vanguard.

ICL is in fact part of a bigger Israeli entity, Israel Corporation, the country’s largest holding company which was founded in 1968 by the Israeli state and whose core holdings are fertilizers, chemicals, energy, shipping and transportation.

Israel Corporation’s list of top institutional shareholders includes Goldman Sachs and no fewer than three manifestations of Vanguard.

Burson Cohn & Wolfe, the PR firm which works for all three of these Big Chem entities, is part of WPP plc, a London-based multinational communications, advertising, public relations, technology, and commerce holding company, which until recently was acclaimed as the world’s largest advertising firm.

WPP’s main institutional shareholders include two sections of Vanguard.

And what about the beginnings of the flame retardant scam, as exposed by the Chicago
Tribune report?

What exactly is the “Big Tobacco” entity that wanted to distract attention from the obvious fire risk posed by its products?

According to the World Medical Journal, the five largest tobacco companies are: Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, Japan Tobacco International, and China National Tobacco Company, so let’s have a brief look at some of their top institutional shareholders as well…

Philip Morris International: JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, State Street, BlackRock and (in top position) Vanguard.

British American Tobacco: Goldman Sachs, Europacific Growth Fund and (twice) Vanguard.

Imperial Brands: Paradigm Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, Capital World Growth & Income and Vanguard.

Japan Tobacco International: New World Fund, Strategic Asset Management and (twice) Vanguard.

China Tobacco is owned by the Chinese state, operated by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, enjoys a virtual monopoly in China, which accounts for roughly 40% of the world’s total consumption of cigarettes, and is the world’s largest manufacturer of tobacco products measured by revenues.

But top institutional shareholders in its Hong Kong entity, China Tobacco International (HK) Company Limited, include no fewer than three manifestations of Vanguard!

So we can see that Big Tobacco is essentially the same entity as Big Chem (and indeed Big Pharma). With this in mind, it seems less of a coincidence that its manoeuvre of switching attention to the “need” for flame retardants came at the same time as lead was being banned from petrol.

Israel produces a lot of bromine, which used to be sold in huge amounts to go into petrol, balancing the effects of lead.

When lead was banned, the industry was left with a lot of excess bromine and the flame retardant boom was the perfect new market.

Two wings of the Great Racket therefore conspired together to ensure their own profitability at the expense of the health of countless innocent people.

There are two main ways in which the Vanguardian global empire corruptly imposes its callous and greedy will on the rest of us.

The first is by ensuring that all positions of power are held by individuals subservient to its interests, for some reason or another (as explored here).

Once they are in place, these puppets can be relied on to steer official policy in the direction desired by the criminal conspiracy in any given realm.

In this respect it is interesting to note that one of the British politicians named by Terry as being involved in blocking reforms of the flame retardant regulations is none other than Matt Hancock, Health Secretary from 2018 to 2021 and ardent enthusiast for lockdowns, social distancing and jabs.

Indeed, in 2023 he is still cheerleading for the Big Pharma wing of the Great Racket and loudly denouncing “disgusting, anti-Semitic, anti-vax conspiracy theories”.

The other, related but more long-term, manner in which the global criminals control goverment policy is by ensuring that their desired outcomes are hardwired into the legislative infrastructure.

In the case of the flame retardant scandal, this means protecting their tobacco industry and increasing their chemicals profits by the means of regulations purporting to advance “fire safety”.

In a similar way, the proposed WHO pandemic treaty sets out to override any remaining vestiges of democray by making its directives legally binding on states that sign up to it.

Its claimed aim is to “build resilience to pandemics” but the WHO rather gives the game away with its talk of the need for “sustained and sufficient political and financial investment”, in other words yet more billions of public money shovelled into the conspirators’ coffers.

And, as explained here, the global infrastructure around “development” and “economic growth” has long been drawn up to serve the very same interests, to legally ensure that their profiteering can never be slowed down, let alone halted.

What this all amounts to is a privatisation of power, a seizure of the public realm by financial interests on an almost unimagineable scale, the negation of anything resembling democracy, a vast and despicable crime carried out against us all by a gang of ruthless psychopaths.

If we don’t bring an end to this full-spectrum criminal domination they will end up poisoning us, our children and our world to death.

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2. Rising up for our land

Thousands of people turned out in south-west England on January 21, 2023, in reaction to the move by a wealthy hedge fund manager to limit public enjoyment of Dartmoor. This summary of reports comes from our friends at Grassroots Alternatives.

Recently we put up this post about a protest on Dartmoor in defence of the right to roam: Raise Old Crockern to Defend Dartmoor! 15.1.23. Those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis will be aware that the issue of land is very close to our hearts as we made clear in this post: Why the question of land is crucial to the future we want… 21.1.23.

The right to roam protest went ahead on Saturday 21^st January and even those who called it were probably surprised at a turnout of over 3,000. Bear in mind that the protest location was on the fringes of Dartmoor, not easy to reach by public transport and it took place on a cold winter day. Taking those factors into consideration, that’s an impressive turnout.

It has been described by seasoned campaigners as one of the largest land rights protests in recent history. You’d have to go back to the 1980s and 1990s to find similar rural based protests about land rights. In what is a weird and increasingly dystopian political climate with an activist scene that’s pretty fragmented, the turnout on Dartmoor on Saturday 21^st January was heartening.

Is this the start of something ‘interesting’? We’d like to think so. What’s interesting is the way the protest has made a direct challenge to the question of who owns the land, how did they acquire it and what has to be done to bring that land back into the commons so we all benefit from it. We and many others will be watching developments with interest.

Dartmoor protests: inside the battle over the right to roam – Siân Bradley | Huck | 26.1.23

The crowd cheered as the creature came over the hill. It was the Old Crockern, a mythical monster of folklore. The story goes that once, a rich man came down from the city to fence off farmland on the Moors. The locals were furious. It’s said that the ancient Pagan god appeared with a threat: “If he scratches my back, I’ll tear out his pocket.” The landowner didn’t listen, and the curse came to fruition. He spent all his money failing to farm the land, later retreating home completely bankrupt.

Dartmoor protest reawakens right to roam movement – Nina Pullman | Wicked Leeks | 24.1.23

Campaigners are building on a historic turnout against a ruling that would ban wild camping on Dartmoor by asking MPs to dramatically expand public access to green space across the UK.

People are being urged to sign and forward letters to their local MPs calling for them to support a new Right to Roam act to guarantee the right to wild camp and extend access.

Only eight per cent of the UK is currently accessible to the public under the Countryside & Rights of Way (CRoW) Act of 2000, something campaign group Right to Roam was set up to address.

The Dartmoor ruling is the wake-up call we all needed – Eliza Egret | The Canary | 23.1.23

More than 3,000 people marched on Dartmoor on Saturday 21 January in a show of defiance against a high court ruling which ended the right to wild camp on the moor. People travelled from all over the country to join one of the largest land rights protests in recent history.

Dartmoor had been the only location where wild camping was still legal in England. A case brought by hedge fund manager Alexander Darwall, who owns land on Dartmoor, overturned this right. Darwall deployed private security guards to surround the entrances of his home as protesters marched past. The crowd continued up onto Stall Moor, an area of Dartmoor owned by Darwall himself.

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3. Edward Carpenter: an organic radical inspiration

The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.

Edward_Carpenter2

“If each man remained in organic adhesion to the general body of his fellows no serious dis-harmony could occur”

Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was a philosopher, writer and poet who fought for organic libertarian socialism and against industrial capitalism.

He is further remembered as one of the early English campaigners for gay rights.

Carpenter was influenced by John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau. He belonged to Henry Salt’s Humanitarian League and to the Social Democratic Federation alongside William Morris.

He also worked with Peter Kropotkin and helped the Walsall anarchists, who were set up for prosecution on bomb-making charges in 1892 by a Special Branch agent provocateur.

victorian industry Carpenter was a forthright critic of modern industrial civilization and condemned “the artificial life, of houses and cities” (1) in which people were cut off from nature and from each other.

He wrote in ‘England’s Ideal’, first published in 1884: “The moment one comes to look into the heart of modern society one perceives how essentially unclean it is – how, after all, the pervading aim and effort of personal life, either consciously or unconsciously entertained, is to maintain ourselves at the cost of others – to live at the expense of other folk’s labor, without giving an equivalent of our own labor in return – and if this is not dishonesty I don’t know what is!” (2)

In his 1921 book Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, Carpenter declared that modern civilisation was “a kind of disease”. (3)

He identified the increase of money and private property as having destroyed the health of the “old community of life and enjoyment” (4) – the natural organic society that Ferdinand Tönnies termed Gemeinschaft.

victorian police Carpenter wrote: “The growth of wealth, it is shown, and with it the conception of private property, brought on certain very definite new forms of social life; it destroyed the ancient system of society based upon the gens, that is, a society of equals founded upon blood-relationship, and introduced a society of classes founded upon differences of material possession; it destroyed the ancient system of mother-right and inheritance through the female line, and turned the woman into the property of the man; it brought with it private ownership of land, and so created a class of landless aliens, and a whole system of rent, mortgage, interest, etc; it introduced slavery, serfdom and wage-labor, which are only various forms of the dominance of one class over another; and to rivet these authorities it created the State and the policeman”. (5)

Under capitalist society, everyone tried to grab as much as they could for themselves. Private accumulations arose and artificial barriers of law had to be constructed in order to preserve the unequal levels of wealth. Force had to be used by the possessors in order to maintain the law-barriers against the non-possessors “and finally the formal Government arises, mainly as the expression of such force”. (6)

He added: “This is no true Democracy. Here in this ‘each for himself’ is no rule of the Demos in every man, nor anything resembling it. Here is no solidarity such as existed in the ancient tribes and primaeval society, but only disintegration and a dust-heap”. (7)

Carpenter saw a healthy society as one which was whole, pointing out that the two adjectives shared the same roots and fundamentally described the same idea.

He wrote: “The idea seems to be a positive one – a condition of the body in which it is an entirety, a unity – a central force maintaining that condition; and disease being the break-up – or break-down – of that entirety into multiplicity”. (8)

victorian gentry The disease inflicted on the social organism by industrial society therefore represented “the break-up of its unity, its entirety, into multiplicity” (9) and the “consumption of the organism by masses of social parasites”. (10)

Carpenter added: “It is clear enough that if our social life were really vivid and healthy, such parasitic products as the idle shareholder and the aforementioned policeman would simply be impossible.

“The material on which they prey would not exist, and they would either perish or be transmuted into useful forms. It seems obvious in fact that life in any organism can only be maintained by some such processes as these – by which parasitic or infesting organisms are either thrown off or absorbed into subjection. (11)

“Accordingly we find that it has been the work of Civilisation – founded as we have seen on Property – in every way to disintegrate and corrupt man – literally to corrupt – to break up the unity of his nature”. (12)

In response to all this, Carpenter suggested that the modern person had to rediscover themself as “the free child of Nature” (13) which they had been meant to be.

nature preraphaelites To be true to this inner nature, a man had to cherish “his organic relation with the whole body of his fellows” (14) because it was this which held an anarchic natural society together.

When that organic order-from-below was gone, the door was opened to the alleged need for a state to come in and impose order-from-above.

Carpenter wrote: “If each man remained in organic adhesion to the general body of his fellows no serious dis-harmony could occur; but it is when this vital unity of the body politic becomes weak that it has to be preserved by artificial means, and thus it is that with the decay of the primitive and instinctive social life there springs up a form of government which is no longer the democratic expression of the life of the whole people; but a kind of outside authority and compulsion thrust upon them by a ruling class or caste”. (15)

Video link: TV report 1980s (9 mins)

edward carpenter art

1. Edward Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, and other essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 28.
2. Edward Carpenter, England’s Ideal and other papers on social subjects (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1919), pp. 3-4.
3. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 1.
4. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 30.
5. Carpenter, Civilisation, pp. 4-5.
6. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 30.
7. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 33.
8. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 12.
9. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 16.
10. Carpenter, Civilisation, pp. 2-3.
11. Carpenter, Civilisation, pp. 16-17.
12. Carpenter, Civilisation, pp. 25-26.
13. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 26.
14. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 28.
15. Carpenter, Civilisation, p. 31.

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4. Acorninfo

“Why is The Guardian useless?” asks a highly pertinent piece from Iain Davis. “The Guardian insinuates that the people it labels as ‘conspiracy theorists’ are also ‘far right’ extremists who believe ‘nonsense’. These dangerous radicals include ‘vaccine conspirators’ and ‘climate conspirators’. The people the Guardian brands as ‘far-right’ can be identified, it claims, because they ‘believe in the idea of a “great reset” plot led by multinational organisations’. Perhaps the Guardian is right? What evidence does the Guardian offer to substantiate its opinion? None! Absolutely none at all”.

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Rebel artist Ken Avidor has now pulled together all the episoides of his entertaining fictional animation Unjabbbed: The Movie, which can be seen here.

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A beautiful and immensely moving ten-minute video of the January 2023 vaccine-injured protest in London has been produced by Alice the Journalist. The expressions on the faces of passers-by suddenly realising what is happening provide a note of hope despite all the despair.

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US journalist Helen of desTroy has weighed in with some articulacy on the same censorship issues we recently addressed in “Ramping up the global inquisition“. She warns: “The idea is to graduate a generation for whom privacy is alien, dissent is criminal, obedience is a competitive sport, and turning in your parents for wrongthink is second-nature, all justified by the vague nonspecific crisis that has been looming in the background since they were born. The censorship of New Dawn, the university witch-hunts against Dr. Coles and both Millers, the absurd white supremacy conspiracy bill, are all symptoms of the same totalitarian virus gradually sucking the will to resist out of humanity”.

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Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) is taking the UK government to court to challenge its ongoing licensing of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, in a High Court hearing due to end on February 2, 2023. It is arguing that UK arms sales are unlawful because of evidence that suggests UK arms have contributed to numerous breaches of International Humanitarian Law in Yemen. See the CAAT website for updates.

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Police officers making fools of themselves has always been a cause for public mirth, probably even before the days when the Keystone Cops featured on the silver screen. Somehow when they’re dressed in riot gear it’s even funnier, as these stuck-in-the-mud German cops at a recent environmental protest demonstrate.

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“Sometimes it feels like I have always been living in something half way between a theme park and a concentration camp”. The World Is Ours is a new mildly-experimental short prose-poem from Paul Cudenec calling on people everywhere to grab back their lives from the global slave-masters. You can listen to it here, if you don’t mind the DIY sound quality.

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“Worrying developments” that are “eroding the resilience and stability of the global system” are highlighted in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023. Among the threats to the system and its “economic productivity” the WEF lists “mounting citizen frustration” which it warns could lead to “secession and anarchism”. Fingers crossed!

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Acorn quote:

“The anti-development struggle aims to break this vicious cycle, which is why it is based on the negation of both work and consumption” – Miguel Amorós.