Let’s keep this short.

• If Adani builds its proposed coalmine in Queensland, and exports thermal coal to India, well, ‘it’s game over man’, for the species.
• Siemens seemsperfectly happy to facilitate this kind of ecocide,  while also spouting gleaming technomastubatory smart city guff. The CEO has ’empathy’ with the environment movement. So that’s alright then.
• Activists (mostly XR) in Manchester turned up at Siemens HQ in Manchester to protest the Adani thing a while back.

Meanwhile, Manchester City Council and University of Manchester have an ongoing relationship with Siemens under the MSG programme (1).

But the City Council volunteered the info  that “There is no contractual relationship between Manchester City Council and Siemens as part of the Triangulum project”.

And a Freedom of Information Act can reveal (drumroll please)

a) Manchester City Council has spent almost half a million ($460k) over the last three years for some CCTV with automatic number plate recognition (2)

TC730 Demountable CCTV with ANPR Capability.  £460,345.00 for 3 years.

For all the talk of social value and ethical procurement in the Council, in response to the question –

Has Manchester City Council held any internal discussions about

a) its ongoing relationship with Siemens (if it has one) in light of Siemens’ decision about Adani – if so, please provide minutes/copies of correspondence

b) creating and maintaining a list of companies with which it will not do business on the grounds of those companies environmental record. (If such a list/policy already exists, please supply, but I think it does not).

we are told

Capital Programmes don’t have a relationship with Siemens and would not hold a list of companies we won’t do business with.

Procurement have not been involved in any discussion regarding item (a) or (b).

Oddly, there seems to be some info we’re not being given-

Reports and minutes of a meeting, and those reports and minutes will be exempt from FOIA disclosure under Section 21 of the Act.

Now, this is interesting.  Because it means that there is, somewhere, a publicly accessible, set of minutes. and report. Weaponising  section 21 of the FOIA, the Council doesn’t even have to give us a clue as to where that might be.

It is therefore reasonable for a public authority to inform the applicant that it holds the information in order to give them the opportunity to access it by another route.

In plain English, they rather than just saying “yeah, go and look at Resources and Governance Scrutiny Committee meeting for April 31 2018, you’ll find what you need,” instead they are in effect saying “good luck looking for that particular needle in our Giant Haystacks, sucker.”

I love the smell of democracy in the morning.

Meanwhile, the planet burns.  And Climate Emergency Manchester has a petition.  And they know how ridiculous that seems, but, what are you gonna do?

Footnotes

(1) Mutually Supportive Greenwash. If the corporates can have their TLAs (3), so can the great unwashed.

(2) The panspectral state is not gonna go full Orwell on its own, ya know.

(3) TLA- Three Letter Acronym