The two current big environmental disasters say it all.   BP has contaminated huge stretches of the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana, and now its shares have lost a third of their value (a fall of $40bn), the company is subject to an ‘aggressive’ criminal investigation led by the US Government, and there is serious talk that BP (the third largest corporation in the US) could be broken by this environmental catastrophe.

Trafigura, a UK oil trader, it is now revealed, tried to get rid of hundreds of tonnes of oil wastes in the Netherlands by concealing how dangerous these wastes were, failed, had to pump it all back on board its tanker, and then ‘dumped it over the fence’ in the outshirts of Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire – only now to face criminal charges in Amsterdam because it misled the authorities by claiming the toxic wastes were routine ‘slops’  from tank cleaning.

The scandal of both these incidents is that if they had occurred anywhere else except in the US of EU, the oil companies would have got away with it.    BP’s and Shell’s ravages in Africa particularly, but also in the Middle East and Asia, are regularly done with impunity while Trafigura’s poisoning of thousands of Africans goes unpunished (apart from very modest compensation) even today.   So what should be done?

It isn’t enough to rely on popular outrage or the vicissitudes of legal compensation cases in Western countries.   In a globalised economy it’s too easy for unscrupulous Big Business to circumvent the rules.   The Trafigura case is an icon of corporate capitalism – keeping the profits and dumping the costs on someone else.   Health and safety risks are dumped on sub-contractors, social and economic risks are dumped on the State, toxic waste is dumped on the poor, and greenhouse gases are dumped on taxpayers.

The International Criminal Court has made it much more difficult for war criminals to evade justice and provides a significant deterrent to war crimes being committed in the first place.   We need an International Environmental Court run on similar principles.  Large-scale wanton pollution or destruction of the environment would be subject to criminal prosecution wherever it occurred, on principles set down by international treaty and with penalties agreed and enforced by all signatory countries.   Business without regulation is little more than organised crime.   If Labour is now about renewing itself, this should be one early priority – and it would resonate as combining both economic and environmental justice against coeporate predators who have got away with it for far too long.

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