Young people harassed by Labour yobs!
26 Aug 2008
For the second year in a row child poverty has risen. Children in poverty increased by 100,000 in 2006-7 on top of the 200,000 rise in 2005-6 (before housing costs). And that was at the height of the economic boom ? the coming recession will make it worse still. Figures for child poverty after housing costs are even worse, with 3.9 million living in relative poverty instead of the target of less than 3.3 million (relative being 60% of average earnings). Thirty per cent of children ? yes, that?s nearly one in three – live in poverty in the UK (all statistics from government website) and the figure is rising despite New Labour?s tax and credit reforms. Labour?s promise in 1997 of halving child poverty may be missed by one million. But the government?s failings are even worse. Last month, the Children?s Commissioners for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland released a damning report to the United Nations that highlighted how legal and political attacks on young people?s rights and living conditions have intensified over the past few years. The report highlights a ?very punitive approach to misbehaviour? in the UK and that the UK has a low age of criminal responsibility (10 years compared with an EU average of 14), locking up many more children and young people than most European countries. In addition, the report exposes how severe child poverty makes the UK stand out from much of Europe, with bad health, poor education, substance abuse and teenage pregnancy. There is a clear racial dimension to child poverty. The commissioners? report condemns the treatment of young asylum seekers who are ?consistently treated differently? and experience ?serious breaches of their rights?, while a recent House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee report found that rates of poverty were twice as high among children in Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in the UK. Labour?s approach to youth since 1997 has been underpinned with Tory rhetoric such as ?tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime?, but in reality has focused on the former and not the latter. Antisocial Behaviour Orders (Asbos) have been used mainly on young people, criminalising youth for activities that under criminal law would not be offences. There?s no ?innocent until proven guilty? when it comes to Asbos: no trial, no jury, no case for the defence. But it?s a criminal offence to breach an Asbo ? with penalties including heavy fines, and even imprisonment. The latest Home Office statistics (from 2006) show that 61 per cent of all Asbos on young people were breached. As part of the same package of legislation, dispersal orders have allowed police to ban gatherings of young people in certain places, which threaten groups of more than three young people with criminalisation. Alarmingly, new technology has also started being used to target young people indiscriminately. The ?mosquito? device projects a loud high pitched noise that can only be heard by young people in order to disperse them from an area. Workers Power spoke to a young woman in Huddersfield who described its effect. ?There is one outside Kingsgate shopping centre which is on constantly. It doesn?t hurt but it?s distressing, it?s really unpleasant and just makes you want to run away.? In a further attack, the Labour government has cut funding for youth centres, with many having closed or been threatened with closure, and has built on many of the remaining inadequate urban green spaces in the UK. Schools have sold off playing fields to developers. The result has been that young people in Britain have far fewer places to meet and socialise ?important because young people often feel the need to escape the restrictive environment of home and family. With widespread poverty, victimisation by local government and the police, racism and a deteriorating standard of life, young people in Britain have never been more alienated from society. Despite the government?s age discrimination laws, the minimum wage for young workers is officially lower than for over 21s. Lower pay in most workplaces and rising costs of living are forcing those who would choose to leave home to stay in unhappy family situations. School life is becoming increasingly difficult for younger teenagers who have had to put up with a huge burden of homework and examinations. Little wonder then that the report by the Children?s Commissioners point to the fact that young people in Britain drink more alcohol and smoke more cannabis than in the rest of Europe. The report also shows that the mental health of children has deteriorated over the past 30 years, with one in 10 children between the ages of five and 16 suffering a clinically recognised mental disorder. Young people are easy scapegoats for the cowardly Labour government. Its attacks on wages, education, social and health care are causing many social problems, and are increasing levels of poverty and crime. The media whips up panic about ?chavs? and ?hoodies? – this is another example of how young people are victimised for social problems caused by poverty and alienation. But young people have shown that they can be the most energetic when it comes to fighting back. Young people led the way in organising demonstrations and walkouts against the Iraq war in 2003, and came to take a leading role in anti-capitalist struggles across Europe in early 2000-02. Today, young people have the potential to fight back against the poverty caused by the Labour Party today, and against racists like the BNP who are trying to take advantage of disillusionment to divide us against ourselves. The trade union movement should break its silence on the issue of young people, and condemn the Labour governments attacks on youth. They should rally the support of young people for workers? struggles against low pay, privatisation and cutbacks. They should launch a huge recruitment drive to organise young workers, fight for equalisation for the minimum wage and an end to low pay. Young people also need their own political voice: a revolutionary working class youth movement, run by young people, for young people, which can organise in the schools, colleges and workplaces to resist the government?s attacks on the youth and link resistance to the worldwide struggle against capitalism.

Thatcher’s shadow falls over Alex Salmond
26 Aug 2008
British politics have for the last thirty years been shaped by Margaret Thatcher, Thatcherism and the legacy of Thatcher?s period in office. All of the mainstream politicians who have followed her ? John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron at a UK level, and Alex Salmond and his Labour predecessors as First Minister in Scotland ? have been influenced by her, and their politics shaped, defined and framed by her and her achievements. This has been thrown into sharp focus by recent remarks – and the reaction to them – made by Alex Salmond in an interview for Total Politics with Iain Dale, who thought them so obvious as to be quite uncontroversial. The fact that the political world we live in has been created by Mrs. Thatcher is well made by Simon Jenkins in his persuasive thesis, ?Thatcher and Sons? where he examines the Thatcher legacy and its acceptance by Major, Blair and Brown. This entailed the reconfiguration of politics, the state and polity around a new credo of free market capitalism, deregulation, privatisation, celebration of the super-rich, alongside increased centralisation and an authoritarian, powerful central state. Blair and Brown both famously courted Margaret Thatcher once they arrived in office; both invited her to No 10 Downing Street, while at the same time overtly accepting, embracing and extending the nature of the Thatcher revolution. While they were doing this, large parts of Labour continued to see Thatcher as a hate figure and Thatcherism as something they totally detested. This produced a strange kind of almost Alice in Wonderland politics whereby Blair and Brown attempted to send out overt signals to former Tory voters that they understood their concerns, while continuing with her policies and operating within her legacy, and at the same time, offering the pretence that they disagreed with large parts of her legacy by creating a caricature of it: going about three million unemployment or the ?Black Wednesday? moment of Major?s government. At its core New Labour was, in the words of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, ?Thatcherism consolidated?. ?Bathgate No More, Linwood No More? and Thatcherism North of the Border The way Thatcherism has been perceived in Scotland has been even more pronounced on the surface, but even more complex and complicated underneath. The combination of Thatcher?s English persona and style, English nationalism and the fact that the Tories were increasingly a small, declining minority of votes, always meant that Thatcherism was never going to win the popularity stakes north of the border. Part of this was no doubt due to Mrs. Thatcher?s personality rubbing Scots up the wrong way, as much as her policies. The Thatcherite agenda produced north of the border economic and social dislocation with massive de-industrialisation, hardship and poverty, which were interpreted in Scotland increasingly in the 1980s as ?anti-Scottish? ? something that the North of England, Yorkshire and Wales shared in policy-wise, but could not experience through the same paradigm. The poll tax was important in precipitating this disparity as it was imposed on Scotland first: the country was singled out as a test case a year before the rest of the UK. There was a genuinely proconsular aspect to this, as one of the most Tory of policies was rolled out in the least Tory province, which precipitated anti-English sentiment. However, as with all things life was a little more complex that the ?Bathgate no more, Linwood no more? lament of The Proclaimers ? who compared Scotland?s experience of Thatcherism to the Highland Clearances. Scottish people enjoyed many of the benefits of Thatcherism ? buying their council houses and privatised shares, while higher public spending continued north of the border ? but they just didn?t vote Tory as a result of it. Instead, the majority of Scottish opinion, aided by the grotesque imposition of the poll tax, moved into a position of feeling both the ?victim? of and ?morally superior? to, the rest of the UK. Scottish politics for the eighteen years of Tory rule was characterised by opposition politicians ? Labour, Lib Dem, SNP ? trying to outdo each other in their opposition and rhetoric towards Thatcher. This was an era of symbols and shibboleths which defined the nation?s resistance to Thatcherism: Linwood, Invergordon, Ravenscraig and Rosyth. All but the last were closed under the Conservatives and each cause, campaign and crisis was meant to signify that the Union might be under threat. Two politicians who excelled in this climate were Gordon Brown and Alex Salmond. Understanding Thatcherism in the post-Thatcher Age The election of New Labour and acceptance and consolidation of much of the Thatcher legacy, led to Scottish politics moving on as well, but with the continuation of an even more complex Alice in Wonderland set of attitudes. With the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, both Scottish Labour and the SNP had to emphasise their ?Scottish? credentials and their difference. They did this by stressing that they were more left-wing and social democratic than parties south of the border, and continuing with the language of detestation towards Thatcher and Thatcherism. While they presented themselves in this way, both parties moved in the same direction as New Labour and came under the same influence: accepting the logic and values of the post-Thatcherite environment, while pretending otherwise. Thus, we come to the importance of Alex Salmond?s recent remarks on Margaret Thatcher. Salmond stated: The SNP has a strong, beating social conscience, which is very Scottish in itself. One of the reasons Scotland didn?t take to Lady Thatcher was because of that. It didn?t mind the economic side so much. But we didn?t like the social side at all. He then had to qualify his remarks almost immediately, taking the unprecedented (and slightly embarrassing) step as First Minister of Scotland of phoning in to BBC Radio Scotland?s Saturday ?Morning Extra? programme to state: I?m well on the record as never having approved of either Margaret Thatcher?s social or economic policies ? that?s clear if you look at the interview. He also commented that he would not be following Gordon Brown (and Tony Blair before him) of inviting Margaret Thatcher for tea. Subsequently Salmond said about his remarks: I was commenting on why Scots, in particular, were so deeply resentful of Thatcher and I think here her social message epitomised in the unfair poll tax and her comments of ?no such thing as society? cut against a very Scottish grain of social conscience. That doesn?t mean that the nation liked her economic policies, just that we liked her lack of concern for social consequences even less. Now it does not take a Kremlinologist to work out the difference between Salmond?s first and last statements. The quote that Scots ?didn?t mind the economic side so much? is a tacit acceptance and endorsement of Thatcherism?s economic agenda; in his follow up comments Salmond attempted to quote his ?economic and social side? remarks and deny that they were in any way support for Thatcherite economics. What was as revealing was the reaction to the remarks. The ?cybernat? community tried to defend Salmond saying this was not an endorsement of Thatcherite economics; that New Labour has more embraced it, and so on. Labour politicians attacked Salmond?s ?own goal? and ?praise of Thatcherism?. Most interesting of all was the comments from some of Salmond?s critics in the Nationalist community. Jim Fairlie, a senior figure in the party in the 1980s called the remarks ?a qualified acceptance of Mrs. Thatcher?s economic policies? and talked of Salmond?s ?drift to the right?. Jim Sillars, SNP victor of the 1988 Govan by-election commented: It is revisionist nonsense for Alex Salmond to suggest that our society only objected to her social policies, while we accepted her economic ones. What is going on here is that Salmond has violated the first cardinal rule of Scottish politics after Thatcher: that is namely to vilify, degrade and denounce Thatcher and Thatcherism with every word in your vocabulary, while being influenced, shaped and following in her footsteps. To be flattering, he made the ?political error? of being too relaxed and speaking with a degree of honesty. All of Scotland?s mainstream political parties have had their policies and philosophies altered by Thatcherism, while at the same time, they continue to articulate a social democratic centre-left politics which has been diluted and diminished by Thatcherism; you can even include the Scottish Tories in this equation as they have been consistently devoid of a right-wing agenda and gone with the grain of Scottish politics. When you combine this mix with the national question, Scottish centre-left politicians have to emphasise even more than south of the border, their distinctiveness and moral disgust at the world Mrs. Thatcher brought about. The ?Catch-All? Nature of the Scottish Nationalists Alex Salmond?s remarks and the controversy they have caused have to be seen in this context. He has inadvertently blown open the Alice in Wonderland mentality and Janus-like attitude which exists across the whole of the UK and the political spectrum about Thatcher and Thatcherism, which is just more acute and sensitive north of the border. The SNP like Labour north and south of the border are a broad coalition of social democratic sentiment which has acquiesced with Thatcherism and the neo-liberal project. It is not for nothing that the SNP, like Scottish Labour and New Labour, is ominously silent on the central issue of political economy. Salmond?s acceptance of the dominant economic order was evident in remarks in the same interview: I suppose I have tried to bring the SNP into the mainstream of Scotland. We have a very competitive economic agenda. Many business people have warmed towards the SNP. We need a competitive edge, a competitive advantage. That side of SNP politics ? get on with it, get things done, speed up decision making, reduce bureaucracy. These remarks reveal the ?catch-all? nature of the SNP?s political agenda, and the reality that for all its popularity, statecraft and progressive elements which have been on show since it came to office, social democracy and challenging the vested interests of the global order, are just as unsafe in the SNP?s hands as they are in Scottish Labour?s. The political project of the SNP is a ?Scotland plc? ? not that different from the kind of economy and society envisioned by Labour modernisers, only independent. That is one of the defining features of Scottish politics: the lack of a real, distinct set of political differences between Labour and the SNP beyond independence. And that leads us to the second cardinal rule of Scottish politics after Thatcher: because of that lack of substantive difference, Labour and SNP go at it upping the ante and vitriol between each other. The current Nationalist vision of the world is one where a ?national project? will see an independent Scotland and its government align with business and corporate interests to promote the nation and compete in the global economy. Jim Mather, Enterprise Minister, an ardent marketer, once commented: ?Any notion that an independent Scotland would be left-wing is delusional nonsense?; Mike Russell, Environment Minister, penned a book ?Grasping The Thistle? one year before becoming a minister, filled with the most fundamental free-market proposals. Alex Salmond, once a radical left-winger in the days when he was an economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland in the 1980s, has now undergone a full conversion to celebrating and advocating corporate interests. This can be seen in Salmond?s fully fledged support for Donald Trump?s luxury golf development in North East Scotland, or his consistent advocacy for the corporate interests of the Royal Bank of Scotland: the fifth largest banking group in the world. Sometimes it seems as if Salmond sees the interests of RBS and the Scottish economy as being one and the same; this is a bank which employs 8,500 people in Edinburgh. 1979 And All That: The Power of the BBC Consensus There is a larger set of questions for Scottish and UK politics posed by this episode. How long are politicians in Scotland and the UK going to continue being defined and shaped by Thatcher and Thatcherism? For how long are we going to continue to allow them to act in the two-faced, hypocritical, talking one way and acting another manner towards the Thatcher legacy? Alex Salmond inadvertently has hit a raw nerve with his recent comments. He has shown the lack of straightforwardness and honesty that lies within the SNP acceptance and continuation of Thatcherism, that is much like Labour?s. By doing so has exposed the narrowness of the SNP?s rationale as a party to the ?left? of Scottish Labour. 1979 was a long, long, long time: over a generation ago. Yet, its myths, folklores, triumphs and limitations still shape our politics, our political debate and political horizons and imaginations. The current political, economic and social impasse has a direct linkage and causal relationship to the events and forces which emerged in 1979 and this cannot go on forever. However, no political settlement just collapses because of the weight of its own internal contradictions, but requires a counter-movement and set of stories. It took over thirty years before the previous watershed – 1945 – was challenged and overthrown. But that was part of an international, neo-liberal mobilisation for a new global arrangements. Despite the limitations of Thatcherism and flaws in the neo-liberal worldview, of which the ?credit crunch? is the latest example, we don?t yet have any countervailing economic and social strategy. Instead, we still live in the world created by Thatcherism: the world of the BBC consensus: Blair, Brown and Cameron (with Alex Salmond providing a supporting role). It is aptly titled for it is comprehensively signed up to by the influential and powerful in the UK whether they are in politics, the corporate world or the media. The bandwidth of what is politically possible and imaginable is defined by these elites, and what passes for their commentary unquestioningly supports the present political, economic and social order. We should be grateful to Alex Salmond for being relatively honest about this and scornful of the hypocrisy of those in the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats who want to deny their subordination to the Thatcherite hegemony. It is up to progressives and democrats of every and no party to challenge this state of affairs. We have to push and pull, dream and work, to devise new counter-movements and widen our political horizons and imaginations from their current straightjacket.

Going Overboard
25 Aug 2008
AS ROSSPORT ACTIVISTS TAKE ON SHELL IN IRELAND The protests against Shell?s Corrib gas project in Rossport, Ireland, saw waves of direct action this week. More work has started on the pipeline with a special pipe-laying ship arriving last weekend with just two weeks to do its job. But it?s yet to start – so if protesters can stop or delay it over the next week, the project will be set back a long way and cause massive problems for Shell. Protesters are asking people to come and help them resist at this crucial time… DANGEROUS WATERS Yesterday (21st) at 10am, fifteen Shell to Sea activists entered the water at Glengad Beach as dinghies, surfers and swimmers surrounded the machine and stopped work. Three Gardai in a boat began arrests and taking the boats an hour later. With no regard for health or safety, they wrestled with protesters in the water. On at least one occasion they worked together with the Shell security team who grabbed a protester and held him until the Gardai got there. Then three protesters moved onto a rock in the sea near the dredging operation. At around 11.40am the dredging machine started picking up large amounts of debris from the sea bed and dumping it within inches of the protesters ? as the Gardai stood and watched – before then arresting all three. Mary Jones, who witnessed events said, ?It was so dangerous. The huge dredging machine continued working right over those lads? heads and then the Gardai half drowned them. It?s amazing no one was killed. It?s a crime that the Gardai can work for Shell like that.? SOLIDARITY CAMP BACK ON With the gas refinery half built, Shell are now starting work on the accompanying pipeline. In late July, the company set up a compound on Glengad beach (former site of Rossport Solidarity Camp) to begin preparatory pipeline work. A causeway was constructed and over half a mile of 10 foot high steel fencing was used to cordon off a large part of the beach. Many local people resisted Shell?s occupation of Glengad and destruction of the pristine Broadhaven Bay (a Special Area of Conservation). They were met by a joint team of 40 Gardai and 70 Shell specialist security – 13 were arrested and one hospitalized for several weeks after being injured in Garda custody. This week, in anticipation of the arrival of the world?s largest pipe laying ship, the Solitaire, a week of action was called. Booked up solidly for the next two years, it is believed to have just two weeks before going off to the next job. Marine & Public Information Notices had announced the Solitaire would arrive in Broadhaven Bay last weekend, but at present it is still docked over 5 hours away in Donegal Bay. Last Saturday, a team of kayakers – some fresh from the Camp For Climate Action?s Rebel Regatta – began the week of action by reclaiming Glengad beach. To a crowd of cheering onlookers they entered the compound via the water, hanging a banner inside. On Monday, Rospport Solidarity Camp was reborn and a large marquee and tents were set up in Glengad, just 100 metres from the compound. In a display of things to come, as soon as the marquee was up, Shell?s compound was invaded. On Tuesday, when the Solitaire still hadn?t arrived in the bay, three kayakers went over to Donegal to meet her there. They paddled 1200 metres out to sea to deliver a letter to the Captain of the ship asking him to reconsider the ships involvement and informing him that if he continued he would meet strong resistance in the waters of Rossport. NOXIOUS GAS The story behind this latest stage in the Corrib project is filled with the usual dose of political corruption and intimidation tactics. When Shell first moved into Glengad it appeared that planning consent for the work had not been granted. Later, Minister for Energy Eamon Ryan stated that the authorisation had been given, but the government had made an ?oversight? in failing to publicise them. Oversights such as this are a defining feature of the project and exactly what the Green Party minister was so critical of in opposition before he got into office. This key section of the onshore pipeline at Glengad was granted permission outside of the usual planning process. Eamon Ryan used the Gas Act to exempt this 200 metres of the onshore pipeline from the planning process, which is arguably the most dangerous part of the whole project. Subject to the pipeline?s highest pressures (potentially up to 345 bar, the highest pipeline pressure in a residential area anywhere in the world), it runs from the landfall at Glengad under Dooncarton mountain. Dooncarton mountain is notorious for landslides and the original landfall permission was awarded in 2002 before the devastating 2003 landslide that saw 200,000 M3 of debris washed off Dooncarton, destroying houses, bridges and roads. Despite the obvious dangers, no review has taken place since. Aside from this, no planning permission exists for the onshore pipeline. The proposed route runs 9km through protected blanket bog habitats, a Special Areas of Conservation, Specially Protected Area (protected habitats under the EU habitats directive), common and farmland. However, activity at Glengad and the arrival of the Solitaire demonstrates that Shell are certain that permission is already in the bag. Perhaps this is because they know the government will be using the Strategic Infrastructure Act to get round any troubling resistance. The act allows chosen planning consents to bypass the local democratic process and be forced through from above. It was surely not just co-incidence that this handy piece of legislation was first proposed by Bertie Ahern after a meeting with Shell where the company expressed concerns at the Irish planning process! Since Shell occupied Glengad beach, their small army of security have been an ominous presence in the area. The unidentified security (often wearing balaclavas), use video cameras and binoculars to monitor anyone on, or near, the public beach, including children. The company hired by Shell is headed by a former member of the elite Irish Rangers Unit and while the company claim that current members of the defense force are not part of the operation, it is known that other former military personal have been hired. Meanwhile, Shell has used its usual tactics of divide and rule and bribery to silence resistance from local fishers to the project, overcoming what the company views as one of the final hurdles preventing the Solitaire beginning work in the bay. The local fishers universally expressed concerns over the location of the discharge pipe and its outfall diffuser (certain to pollute both Broadhaven Bay and inshore waters), and disruption to their work during the laying of the pipeline. However, last week, after long negotiations, a significant number of fishers have agreed to keep quiet in return for compensation. On the other hand some remain resolute in their opposition. Fisherman Pat O’Donnell stated that he would continue fishing in the path of the Solitaire. He added that even if a court order was granted, if the state wanted to stop them they would ?have to send [him] and the other fishermen to gaol.? Rossport Solidarity Camp is a hive of activity this week, with new recruits and random boats and water equipment arriving all the time? Actions against the Solitiare will continue for the next few weeks. Sail and rail tickets from anywhere in the UK to the area cost just 35. Pack yer arm-bands and join the fun. For background see SchNEWS 611, 603, 595 Check out www.corribsos.com for the latest news and videos.

The Contradiction of Choice from the Government
25 Aug 2008
Buzzwords abound in the rhetoric of politicians and never more so than when the talk is of public sector reform. Of the current phrases spewing forth ?choice? and ?empowerment? are two of the favourites but whose choice and whose empowerment? And while MP?s try to frame these words as synonyms of ?public benefit?, is choice always a good thing? Health and education are the main areas where politicians see choice as the best way of improving services. Choosing where and what treatment to have and which school to send your children to are policies which both the Labour and Conservative parties are pursuing. This year?s Darzi review made patients? rights the focus of change, proposing that patients? views on the quality of care should have an impact on future funding, with bonuses for those GPs and hospitals providing the best services. Furthermore, the results of patient satisfaction should be published creating a form of NHS league table allowing patients to choose at which GP or hospital they wish to receive their treatment. Parents are continually told that by being able to choose which school to send their children to they are getting a better deal from state education. Government ministers eulogise choice as the best way to match a child?s educational needs to the school that is best placed to cater for them. Choice as prescribed by this government, however, leads to centralisation, destruction of communities, privatisation and the marginalisation of the poorest from the process. Their legacy of choice will be less choice. Polyclinics are a perfect example of this. Patients are told that these super-surgeries will lead to more choice but one key choice will be removed: the choice to go to your community hospital or GP. Elderly patients, who frequently need to seek medical advice, will see their relationships with their doctor destroyed and will be forced to travel impractical distances. NHS league tables, while appearing to increase patient choice, are in reality just another way of imposing more targets. Moreover, if patients do utilize them to make decisions about which hospital to go to they will find that choice is removed. A hospital which scores poorly in the table will receive less funding, therefore their results will get worse and fewer patients will choose them. As this spiral continues services will have to be closed down as they will no longer be efficient and then you no longer have a choice. Choices can also be confusing, stressful and in the end you can always make the wrong one. When it comes to medicine my knowledge is possibly not as comprehensive as that of a qualified and experienced practitioner. I would, therefore, rather know that all hospitals and surgeries are clean and friendly and then allow my GP to refer me to the nearest one where I could receive the required treatment. The government’s promise to give every parent a choice of secondary school for their child was proved a myth again this year with figures showing the number of pupils getting their first choice of school has dropped. As parents understandably clamour to get their children in to schools high up the league tables the idea of going to your local school is becoming a nostalgic notion, with over half of children not going to their nearest school. Commuting to school is detrimental to community development and the environment. Worse still any benefits of the current policy are going to the wealthiest. A report by Bristol University found that disadvantaged families miss out in the current system and even in the same postcodes poorer families end up at the lower-performing schools. Expanding the better performing schools may not be possible as ?giving popular schools the freedom to expand does not mean they will do so. To the extent that a school’s position in the league tables depends on the attainment of its intake, schools may be unwilling to increase and potentially to dilute the quality of their student body,? said Professor Burgess. Whilst ?good? schools cream off the best pupils the rest are left with lower league table results and less people ?choosing? to go there. Some of the best teachers may leave and in worse case scenarios the school maybe closed. As with hospitals the choice is then removed. Furthermore, expanding the best schools and shrinking or closing the rest as suggested will result in huge institutions where education suffers. American researchers are leading the way in analysing the impacts of school size. Craig Howley, of Ohio University, and Robert Bickel, of Marshall University, looked at whether smaller schools could reduce the negative effects of poverty on student achievement. They found that the correlation between poverty and low achievement was ten times stronger in larger schools than in smaller ones. ?Everyone knows that there is a strong association between social class and achievement and that this association works very much to the disadvantage of economically disadvantaged students,? Bickel told Education World. ?The California research, however, had the virtue of demonstrating that this disadvantage was exaggerated as school size increased.? One in seven pupils in England are now in a secondary school with over 1,500 students and the number of pupils in schools of over 2,000 has doubled since 1997. Promoting choice is driving these figures ever higher. If you thought a change of government would bring about a change of direction then, like in most areas, the differences between Labour and the Conservatives are negligible. In a letter this week to local residents, Philip Dunne, Conservative MP for South Shropshire wrote: ?We believe that the best way to enhance the power of patients is through choice. We will allow patients to choose, in consultation with their GP, where they get their secondary care. And we will ensure that money follows the patient so that hospitals and clinics and other care providers are paid according to the results they deliver for that patient.? Once again, it seems, Labour equals Conservative and the public is left without an alternative. When ministers speak of choice what they really mean is installing the practice of privatised competition in the public sector. Not even the most ardent free-market Tory would openly pursue a fully privatised health or education service; it would be electoral suicide. All politicians know this so instead they are doing it under the radar masked by the promise of choice. Genuine, useful choice and universal empowerment are great things which should be strived for but do not confuse them with current government policy. Next time you get excited by the prospect of politicians offering you a choice think again as it?s not always a good thing.

NATO Briefing
25 Aug 2008
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded in 1949, as a defensive organisation, in the early years of the Cold War. Its initial members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. The Warsaw Pact was founded in response, by the then Soviet Union and its allies, in 1955. In the 1950s, Greece, Turkey and West Germany joined, followed by Spain in 1982. At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, but NATO was not. With the disappearance of one superpower, the other did not just fade away and allow a harmonious world to emerge ? as we were promised at the time. The US moved to fill the positions vacated by its previous rival. Nowhere is that more clearly demonstrated than with the expansion of NATO. As the countries of eastern Europe embraced free market economics and multiparty democracy, the US moved rapidly to integrate them into the US sphere of influence via NATO. This was an effective strategy ? remember the ?new Europe? issue at the time of the war on Iraq ? with Poland vigorously backing the US, against the ?old Europe? of Germany and France. The first steps towards full-membership were taken via the Partnerships for Peace programme from 1994. In March 1999, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were all admitted to full membership. Ten days later they found themselves at war with their neighbour Yugoslavia, as part of NATO?s illegal bombing campaign. But the change at that time was not limited to NATO expansion. At NATO?s fiftieth anniversary conference in Washington in April 1999, a new ?Strategic Concept?, was adopted. This moved beyond NATO?s previous defensive role to include ?out of area? ? in other words offensive ? operations. The geographical area for action was now defined as the entire Eurasian landmass. In March 2004, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania were admitted to NATO ? not only former Warsaw Pact members, but also former Soviet republics. This has contributed to international tension as Russia sees itself being surrounded by US and NATO bases, including in the Balkans, the Middle East and central Asia. Over the last few years, the US drive for global domination has become increasingly active in military terms. NATO has become a vehicle for this process, in particular with the war on Afghanistan. This has been a NATO-led war since 2003, when NATO assumed control of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), established in 2002. By May 2008, there were around 47,000 troops from 40 countries in Afghanistan under the auspices of ISAF, with NATO members providing the core of the force. Recently, the US has turned its sights on the strategic area of the Black Sea and south-western Asia. This region is very significant in terms of energy production and transportation. The US backed the change of government in Georgia in 2003, which has led to an increasing pro-western orientation. In 2005, Georgia joined NATO?s Partnership for Peace scheme, and Georgia signed an agreement supporting and aiding transit of NATO forces and NATO personnel. At the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, Albania and Croatia were invited to join. President Bush called for Georgia to be allowed to join the membership Action Plan, which is the next stage towards full membership. This was rejected due to opposition from several countries, led by Germany and France. But Georgia was assured in a special communique that it would eventually join NATO and a review of the deision has been pledged for December 2008. NATO is also a nuclear-armed alliance, and US nuclear weapons are stationed in five countries across Europe. There is strong campaigning opposition to the nuclear weapons in those countries. NATO also has a nuclear ?first use? policy. This is exceptionally dangerous, particularly at a time of global instability where we are entering a new Cold War. Further expansion of NATO, to include former Soviet republics like Georgia and the Ukraine, must not take place. Such a step, taken together with the development of the US Missile Defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, would be highly provocative and destabilsing. We do not want a new world order based on NATO aggression, pursuing the US military agenda.

Security services colluded in unlawful detention
25 Aug 2008
In a key intervention in the 42 days debate last month, the former head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller stated: “arguments can be made to justify any time of detention, just as in other countries, although mercifully not here, they can be made to justify any method of interrogation.” That remark elided key questions about how far the security services are complicit in interrogation practices overseas, questions which were raised anew in a High Court judgement on Thursday. Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones ruled that British security services colluded in the unlawful detention and interrogation of Binyam Mohamed, a UK resident detained in Pakistan six years ago. The judges stated: By seeking to interview BM in the circumstances described and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship between the United Kingdom government and the United States authorities was far beyond that of bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing. The details of Mohamed’s treatment, as reported to the security services in 2002, are set out in a separate closed judgement. The court ruled that the Foreign Secretary has a duty to provide information that could support Mohamed’s case that he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco before being sent to Guantanamo Bay. The court stopped short of ordering the Foreign Secretary to hand over the information to Mohamed’s lawyers, in order to allow time for the national security implications of the ruling to be considered. A decision on this point is due at another hearing next week. Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, who has represented Mohamed since 2005, said of the ruling: This is a momentous decision. The Bush Administration committed crimes against Binyam Mohamed. The British government may have been Bush?s poodle, but the British courts remain bulldogs when it comes to human rights. Compelling the British government to release information that can prove Mr. Mohamed?s innocence is one obvious step towards making up for the years of torture that he has suffered. The next step is for the British government to demand an end to the charade against him in Guantnamo Bay, and return him home to Britain.

SATs fiasco- Labour?s failure
25 Aug 2008
On August 15, the British Labour government?s regulatory body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), terminated the contract of the company responsible for marking Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) school test papers (which are mandatory for all school children in England aged 11 and 14 years.) The QCA had only signed the 156 million, five-year contract with ETS Europe (a branch of the US-based Educational Testing Service Global BV) in February 2007. However, a series of major problems with the administration and marking of the tests this year caused almost a month?s delay in publishing the majority of results for key stage two (11-year-olds) and three (14-year-olds). Key stage three results were not released until August 12, although some were still incomplete. Not only was the deadline missed, but the accuracy of marking was severely compromised, with many schools reporting that inexplicable results in some cases suggested that the markers either did not understand the questions themselves or that there was not adequate time to check. When ETS was awarded the contract to administer the SATs, it had boasted of a new method to ensure marking accuracy. Markers would have to sit online tests every time they had assessed 80 exam papers, supposedly to ensure they were marking to the given criteria. In practice, however, the markers were given no feedback other than a pass or fail and could not adjust their marking accordingly. Not only was the marker training inferior to previous years, but markers did not receive papers in sufficient time, as they were sent from schools to a central depot and then on. This meant the papers had to be marked under tremendous pressure during school term time, further undermining accuracy. Papers/scripts that were near the borderline of grades were not double-checked, as was the case in previous years. On top of this, some markers received no papers at all, while others received papers for the wrong subject. Unlike in previous years, pupil registers had to be checked online and marks for every single question submitted online?an extremely time-consuming if not futile exercise, exacerbated by crashed websites and helplines that went unanswered. Following the virtual collapse of the test paper marking system, the QCA and ETS Europe agreed to dissolve the contract with immediate effect. Under the agreement, ETS Europe is expected to pay back 24.1 million of the nearly 40 million it received to run this year?s testing process and is to be stripped of the five-year deal. Government agencies will now oversee the delivery of the last 30,000 results and the appeal process. ETS has been banned from contacting schools directly. ETS Europe had hoped to prove itself in the English school system so as to expand elsewhere in Europe. It won the SATs contract despite a catalogue of past failures to deliver on its commitments. In 2002, software errors by ETS led to serious failures, including giving the wrong marks, in the graduate management admission test (GMAT) in the US. According to the New York Times, in 2004, mismanagement by ETS led to more than 40,000 teachers taking a flawed exam and ETS paying out millions of dollars in compensation. From the very start of its contract in England, there had been problems with the delivery and collection of test papers from schools, the electronic registration and moderating system crashed, and markers and schools could not log on. The helpline was constantly engaged. Thousands of teachers dropped out of the marking scheme, and many other markers resigned. A backlog grew, forcing ETS to set up 24-hour emergency marking centres. According to the Guardian newspaper, at one point, the National Assessment Agency went in and found 10,000 unopened emails from increasingly desperate schools. Now, the exams regulator, Ofqual, has asked Lord Sutherland to head an inquiry into the delays. Ofqual head Kathleen Tattersall said that if there is a significant rise in schools appealing over results, then all 1 million SATs results should be annulled. The general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Mick Brookes, said that such appeals ?are set to rocket.? He has urged the schools inspection body Ofsted to disregard SATs results when making a judgement on a school. Results that Ofsted deems poor could contribute to a school being placed in the failing category of ?special measures,? in some cases resulting in heads and teachers losing their jobs. State education given over to the market While no parent, teacher or child in England will shed a tear on the departure of such a clearly incompetent company from schools across the country, the more fundamental issue exposed by this latest crisis is not the marking but the actual tests themselves. But rather than replace the testing system, as most teachers, educationalists and parents have been arguing?well before the latest marking fiasco?the government intends to replace one company with another in order to continue with the whole flawed testing enterprise. Teacher unions have already cast doubt on whether a new contract could be awarded in time to deliver next year?s SATs and called on ministers to overhaul the system. Schools secretary Ed Balls said he was ?open to reform long-term.? He floated ?lower-intensity? testing but flatly ruled out suspending SATs for 2009. The government has hinted that the data-handling firm Capita may be contracted to run next year?s SATs. Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, said it would launch an urgent tendering process and that he expected organisations that previously expressed an interest to bid again. ETS was one of five companies short-listed two years ago. According to the Guardian, two of the three other major exam boards have already ruled themselves out of the contract, on the basis that they did not believe there was a strong enough educational rationale for the SATs tests. Greg Watson, head of the OCR exam board, said it did not bid because the tests were used to measure schools against one another, rather than qualifying a child at a certain level and diagnosing skills. A second exam board, AQA, also said it had not bid because of concerns about the purpose of the tests. One unnamed senior examiner said that the process was so educationally ?vacuous? that it would actually be more suited to a company such as Capita, which is used to dealing with large-scale public sector data projects rather than educational examinations. So indefensible have the SATs now become that a former aide of Tony Blair admitted recently that they risked turning schools into ?drab, joyless assessment factories? where preparation for tests crowds out real learning. The disparity between the overblown election promises the Labour government made on education policy and the subsequent mess that it has made in the school system has been widely acknowledged. But the government and the media are seeking to conceal how and why this has happened. The cash-starved and moribund education system that emerged after 18 years of Conservative-rule was the one of the most glaring examples of the socially regressive policies of the Thatcher and Major administrations. In the absence of a mass socialist alternative to address this, the right-wing ?new? Labour Party under Blair successfully capitalised on popular support for a radical break with the pro-market policies of the past and for a reduction in the levels of social inequality that rocketed following the speculative boom of the 1980s. On taking office in 1997, Blair and then-chancellor Gordon Brown kept rigorously to Tory spending limits while introducing cosmetic changes in education?such as more classroom assistants and the introduction of learning mentors. Most significantly, however, the Labour government sought to introduce the most pro-business agenda in education for a generation. Virtually every area of education was opened up to corporate profit making; from the building of school infrastructure, the development of business-friendly ?specialist schools,? the increase of ?faith schools? and to the setting up of private ?academies.? State schools have become testing grounds for ever-more uninspired ways to narrow the already prescriptive national curriculum and force children through a selective testing system. The effects of teaching to the tests?as in the present SATs?on especially young children is to squeeze out the joy of learning that should be inherent in an imaginative, widely scoped, generously resourced syllabus. This contributes significantly to the growing levels of disaffection amongst pupils that has been confirmed by international reports on the levels of unhappiness amongst children in the UK. Furthermore, teachers have been demoralised as they are turned into part-time administrators of prescribed curriculum, while being scapegoated and even publicly hounded by the government for its own policy failures. Many well-meaning teachers have found themselves grubbing for each test paper point instead of being free to open young minds to the exploration and discovery of the world around them. Crowning it all, each school faces the constant threat of government inspection whereby they are monitored, praised or punished on the basis of fulfilling increasingly arbitrary targets. Schools are encouraged to compete against one another?via league tables?in a desperate bid for decreasing resources. At the end of this process, parents are thrown into a scramble to get a place at the ?best? school for their children. The end result of the corporate-inspired curriculum and the assessment system?the implementation of which has been the mainstay of the Labour government?s education policy since taking office in 1997?is the straitjacketing of the intellectual and imaginative capacities of children in order to provide for the demands of big-business and industry. The government?s education policies have long since alienated millions of parents, but such is the damage it has caused, the very corporate interests that it sought to serve have signalled their dismay at the results of the school system. After complaining about the low literacy and numeracy levels of school levers, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) announced recently that it was withdrawing its support for the government?s new diplomas, which were intended to replace the current A-Levels (taken at 18 years of age). Whatever new schemes Labour devises in response to such criticisms, its continued drive to redistribute wealth away from working people to big business and the super-rich, further fuelling social inequality, means it is incapable of arriving at a ?better,? or more just education policy.

Romany roads
24 Aug 2008
Discriminatory policies against Italy’s Romany Gypsy population, including the fingerprinting of children, are said to have their origins in the fascist policies of Mussolini. Many were shocked by the apathy shown when two Gypsy girls drowned on a beach near Naples, as people carried on enjoying their day out only yards away, regardless of the small bodies laid out on the sand. But how different is Britain when it comes to prejudice against its own travelling people? According to a report last year from the Children’s Society, almost nine out of every 10 children and young people with a Gypsy background have been the victim of racial abuse. The report also stated that nearly two-thirds have been bullied or physically attacked. Few campsites are provided for British Gypsies, and draconian powers allow local authorities to crack down on new encampments. Shelter Scotland points out that if you are a Gypsy and you own your own land, you can still be evicted by your local council. Ernie Rutherford, Romany Gypsy and professional boxing trainer, told me: There ain’t no life on the road no more. You’ll end up living in a house ? that’s just the way it is. That’s how they’re killing it out. They take away our lifestyle and make us fit in with everybody else’s ? In the end there won’t be no Gypsies ? that’s the way it’s going. We can’t even buy some land and put nothing on it, because they’ll bulldoze it down. At the end of the day they don’t want to give us nowhere to live, they don’t want us to drive about on the road, they don’t really want to give us houses. When I ask him whether he thinks Gypsies are discriminated against, he says, “Yeah, you’re not wrong. We’re the only people now that you can call pikey and things like that on the telly and get away with it. Catherine Tate takes the piss out of us every week mate.” This makes me glad that Tate didn’t win the British Comedy award. Rutherford grew up in St Mary Cray, in south-east London, which is the largest settled community of Romany Gypsies, or Travellers, in the UK. Like many Gypsies, the Rutherfords lived in pre-fabricated asbestos housing until the site was eventually closed down and they were moved into houses. “Them houses were the worst houses in the area ? they were dangerous,” he recalls. Not Kushti Atchin Tan, or a good stopping place, in the Roma language. Ernie tells me how some of his family have had bricks thrown through the windows of their caravans when they’ve been on the road. “Some people don’t like you in their area, they don’t want you there. They look on us as we’re the worst kind of people in this country,” he says. He just wants to be treated with respect. The government does not provide sites for the Travellers, but he would love to buy a plot of land and put a mobile home on it. He accepts that at the moment this is an almost impossible dream. “If the government can’t control ya, then they don’t want ya,” he believes. “They talk about China and all these places, they’re just as bad. They ain’t no different, they just do it craftily.” He complains that there are no schools for Traveller people. “They’re killing our culture that’s what they’re doing. They’re doing it slowly, but they’re doing a good job of it.”

Televised lobby briefings
23 Aug 2008
In evidence to a House of Lords? inquiry into the government?s spin machine, Nicholas Jones says televised lobby briefings would introduce a new sense of discipline and accountability. If Downing Street had a publicly-identified spokesperson who appeared on camera, it would set a new standard for attribution within the rest of the government. The House of Lords Communications Committee is conducting an inquiry into whether the government communications system is ?open, impartial, efficient and relevant to the public?. In written evidence to the committee Jones said: There could hardly be a more opportune moment to consider an overhaul of the government communications system and to chart a new sense of direction for civil servants working in the information service. The forthcoming general election and the installation of a new administration will provide an ideal opportunity for a fresh start. What is needed is a change of culture and a new presumption that the flow of information from the state to the media should be de-politicised and that all news providers outlets should have equal access. The practice of trailing government announcements in advance — almost invariably on an off-the-record basis — has now become institutionalised within Whitehall departments. To all intents and purposes it has become the state-sanctioned leaking of official information and it is the widespread distribution of confidential data on an un-attributable basis which has done so much to weaken the neutrality of civil service information officers and undermine the credibility of what is being said by the government of the day. As a first step Downing Street lobby briefings should be given in public by an upfront spokesperson and the proceedings should be available for live broadcast on television, radio and via the internet. A lead has to be given from the top: if daily briefings on behalf of the Prime Minister were given on the record, by a publicly-identified spokesperson, it would set a new standard for attribution for the rest of the government. The Phillis review recommended that lobby briefings should be ?on the record, live on television and radio and with full transcripts available promptly on line.? (Phillis Review 2004). Despite its acceptance of the Phillis recommendations, the government made only a half-hearted attempt to persuade lobby correspondents to accept on-camera briefings and it was no surprise that the lobby voted to maintain the status quo, anxious to defend at all cost the un-attributable and anonymous briefings which have become the lifeblood of modern political journalism. Nonetheless if the leading Downing Street spokesperson had the necessary confidence and authority to speak publicly, that individual would inevitably be accountable for what was being said on behalf of the government and if there was a greater degree of accountability it would help curb the uncontrolled activities of the much-enlarged cadre of special advisers. It is these political aides who are responsible for many of the anonymous briefings which in recent years have caused so much mischief for ministers and civil servants and undermined the credibility of official information. On-camera briefings would introduce a sense of discipline and reinforce the repeated recommendations by the Civil Service Commissioners that special advisers should be required to speak on the record. Greater certainty about the government line would also assist departments and agencies. Senior civil servants in the UK, like their counterparts in the USA, would then come to realise that if needs be, the practice of speaking on the record does have many advantages. Political correspondents prefer to be briefed un-attributably because it gives them a greater degree of journalistic licence. They maintain that being able to get information from politicians and officials on an off-the-record basis results in more exposure and serves the public interest. But the growth in the number of anonymous sources in Whitehall and Westminster — and the freedom this has given journalists to embellish and even fabricate stories — has become a cancer, eating away at the authority of the government of the day and eroding trust in the political system. The rapid expansion in online journalism and the growing impact of alternative news providers has opened up an opportunity for the Whitehall machine to re-think its strategy. Significant political stories are now being researched and delivered by journalists outside the Westminster lobby system. Websites, bloggers and reporters using the Freedom of Information Act are increasingly challenging — and beating — the established political correspondents and the government of should encourage this trend, not least because of the greater openness of on-line journalism. The aim of the state should be to be even handed in the supply of information and in view of the immediacy and commendable transparency of most on-line journalism, there is nothing to be gained by perpetuating the divisive practice of continuing to give exclusive access and information to favoured political journalists. Trading exclusive stories with selected national newspapers, television and radio programmes is seen by the administration as the only way to influence the news agenda and gain favourable publicity. But this practice has always been divisive and the House of Lords Communications Committee could give a lead by reviewing the evidence since the Phillis Review and by recognising that a new approach is needed. Perhaps the clearest exposition of the mentality which persists across Whitehall was given by Tony Blair?s former director of communications, Alastair Campbell. In his diaries, The Blair Years(2007), Campbell said that his policy when it came to the news media was to ?divide and rule?. (see page January 31, 200, page 441). Campbell?s first act on becoming Blair?s Downing Street press secretary was to rewrite the rule book for government press officers to ensure that the Whitehall publicity machine raised ?its game?. (See report of Mountfield working group, November 1997). Press Office Best Practice was revised and civil servants were instructed to ?grab the agenda? by promoting government announcements by means of a selective ?ring round? of newsrooms in order to start ?trailing the announcement during the previous weekend?. Campbell?s edict of ?divide and rule? became the norm and is deeply ingrained in civil service psyche as illustrated by the text of confidential government media plans. (See Trading Information: Leaks, Lies and Tip-Offs by Nicholas Jones, Politico?s 2006) For example, the lead up to the announcement that the government had purchased the London Heart Hospital for 27.5 million in 2001 was a textbook example from the pages of Press Office Best Practice. A leaked copy of the Department of Health?s media plan indicated the importance of advance, off-the-record briefings when implementing a media policy of ?divide and rule?: ?We are trailing the story with David Charter at The Times. In addition we will brief the Today programme?Once the story breaks in The Times this evening, the duty press officer will ring round all broadcasters and picture desks to let them know of the morning photo call?A press notice will be issued at 9.30 a.m. (Department of Health media plan, 8 August, 2001) The unedifying spectacle of the state competing in the media market place — rather than serving the public interest by supplying all media outlets with information at the same time — reached its nadir in April 2007 when two members of a Royal Navy crew captured by the Iranians were allowed (encouraged?) to sell their stories exclusively to the national press (Faye Turney was paid 100,000 by the Sun and Arthur Batchelor received 20,000 from the Daily Mirror). There was a public outcry over what happened and considerable criticism of the failure of the Ministry of Defence to deal fairly with the news media as a whole by failing to present the released crew members at a press conference open to all news outlets. Tony Hall, who conducted an inquiry for the government, found there had been a ?collective failure of judgement? over the affair and officials within the department ?simply didn?t understand how it had been allowed to happen?. Perhaps Hall should have done more to acquaint himself with media practice within Whitehall and he would have understood that the strategy of supplying exclusives to two of the biggest-selling popular newspapers — Sun and Daily Mirror — is precisely the kind of strategy which has become the norm within the civil service. Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, was so appalled by what had happened that he made sure that all media outlets were dealt with even handedly when Prince Harry served in Afghanistan. A news black was arranged with the Society of Editors and equal access for newspapers, television and radio was assured when the story finally broke in February 2008. Another illustration of what can be achieved is the success of the Crown Prosecution Service in providing a legal spokesperson to give on camera reaction at the end of controversial court cases. Sir Ken MacDonald, the DPP, deserves credit for this initiative. At the conclusion of trials which have a significant public interest, the Crown Prosecution Service provides a spokesperson outside the court. Here we have a demonstration of the openness which can be achieved. I have long argued that journalists are unlikely to put their own house in order and it is the state which should make the first move. I do hope Lord Fowler, chairman of the Lords Communication Committee, will look at the transcripts of the Westminster Media Forum which he chaired earlier this summer (1.7.2008). One of the contributors to the discussion was David Hill, who succeeded Alastair Campbell as Blair?s director of communications. Hill told the forum he believed the twice-daily Downing Street briefings should be televised. This would open up the lobby system to wider scrutiny and force political correspondents to ask their questions in public. Hill believed the lobby briefings as presently constituted were counter productive and if they were on camera he hoped that whenever possible a senior minister would attend to answer questions. In conclusion I would argue televised briefings would not be a mere cosmetic but could become an important constitutional safeguard. American news services keep their recordings of White House briefings and if a story suddenly changes, or there are suggestions subsequently of a cover-up, radio and television stations can replay the original answers and draw attention to any alterations or discrepancies in the official guidance. Televised extracts from White House briefings during the lengthy proceedings involving President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky became part of the montage of material which was shown as pressure mounted for impeachment. Mike McCurry, Clinton?s press secretary, resigned in October 1998 in protest at the way he felt he had been used unfairly to perpetuate a deception about Clinton?s sexual relations. My point is that televised briefings would not only help the government of the day by allowing ministers to get off the back foot and explain their policies but would also herald a new era in openness which might help restore trust in the process of government and also make life harder for the journalists who make it up. There are far fewer hiding places for on-line journalists. They can get challenged within an instant and do have to adjust and correct their reports. Not only might there be more transparency in government, but also a greater level of attribution by reporters and less reliance on the use of anonymous sources. Nicholas Jones, political journalist and author, is a council member of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. Contributor to www.spinwatch.org.uk Archive of articles and speeches: www.nicholasjones.org.uk (In 2003 Jones gave evidence to the Phillis Review team and participated in its seminars)

Miliband in Georgia – playing a dangerous game
23 Aug 2008
British politicians love playing Winston Churchill. Tory leader David Cameron was at it last week when he flew to Georgia. According to the Guardian, Georgia?s president Mikheil Saakashvili invited him after he compared the situation there to ?the appeasement of Hitler?. But in fact the famous conflict between Churchill and his great rival and predecessor Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s was over whom to appease. Britain was confronted by two rising imperialist powers, Germany and the US. Since it couldn?t take both of them on, the British ruling class had to choose which one to appease and which, if necessary, to fight. Distrusting the US, Chamberlain chose to appease Hitler ? thus earning the scorn of posterity. But in order to defeat Germany, Churchill had to throw himself at the mercy of the US. His grovelling towards the US president Franklin Roosevelt has been repeated by every subsequent British prime minister. True to form, foreign secretary David Miliband appeared on the Today programme on Wednesday of last week to denounce Russia?s ?blatant aggression? against Georgia. ?The sight of Russian tanks rolling into parts of a sovereign country on its neighbouring borders will have brought a chill down the spine of many people,? he declared. Actually the sight of US and British tanks rolling into Iraq in March 2003 sent a chill down the spines of hundreds, if not thousands of millions of people. Listening to Miliband, I wondered whether he was being consciously hypocritical in ignoring such an obvious comparison. My guess is that he probably wasn?t. The leaders of the Western powers genuinely believe they are the ?international community? and are entitled to make up the rules as they go along. Consistency is for other weaker states that must obey their commands. George Bush displayed the same attitude when he said last Saturday that the Russian-controlled enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia were ?part of Georgia? and that they ?lie within [Georgia?s] internationally recognised borders?. He added, ?Georgia?s borders should command the same respect as every other nation?s.? Breakaway But why aren?t Serbia?s borders entitled to ?the same respect?? The US and the main European powers have supported the breakaway of Kosovo from Serbia, even though this hasn?t been sanctioned by the United Nations security council. Nevertheless in the present crisis, the European Union (EU) as a whole has been far less bullish in backing the US against Russia. At the Nato summit in Bucharest last April, France and Germany vetoed Bush?s demand that Ukraine and Georgia be admitted to the alliance. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, brokered last week?s truce between Russia and Georgia. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, flew to meet Dimitri Medvedev, the Russian president. Germany has been relatively muted in its criticisms of Russia and has stated its opposition to US talk of expelling Russia from the G8. Of course, this attitude is connected with German and French awareness that the EU depends on natural gas imported through Russia. While it is cynical, the stance of France and Germany is at least rational. By contrast, the debate here in Britain is dominated by a race to see who can be toughest on Russia. Gordon Brown has ordered Miliband off to Georgia in Cameron?s wake. Meanwhile the Tory leader demands that ?Russia must pay a price? and that Nato offers Georgia ?a clear pathway to membership?. Miliband, Cameron and company should answer a simple question. Would they be willing to go to war with Russia to defend Georgia?s ?internationally recognised borders?? If Georgia was a Nato member it would be entitled to expect this. Bush has shown that even he isn?t prepared to go this far. As the Washington Post bluntly put it, the US ?has neither the wherewithal nor the willingness to enter into a military conflict with Russia on its territorial border?. But the support Saakashvili has been getting may encourage him into more adventures. Georgia?s Western backers are playing a dangerous game.

DFID and Sierra Leone
23 Aug 2008
In 2004, at the cost of 7.5 million to the British tax payer, DFID launched ENCISS ? ?Enhancing the Interaction and Interface between Civil Society and the State to Improve Poor People?s Lives?. ENCISS is essentially a PR strategy to support the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) ? a bundle of corporate-friendly initiatives dreamt up by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to the ENCISS Project Memorandum, obtained by Corporate Watch under the Freedom of Information Act, the main objective of the programme is the ?successful delivery of the PRS? by ?aiming to strategically engage with civil society in contributing to an enabling environment for social and economic development.? This is being achieved in a number of ways. ENCISS is a very high profile campaign, and its designers quickly realised that its success would depend upon appearing politically neutral. Of course, as a creation of DFID, a UK government department, it is not. The strategy report warns that ?ENCISS?s non-partisan relationship with key stakeholders involved in the decentralisation and PRSP communication and information dissemination process is crucial to achieving its purpose.? Those involved have worked hard to ensure that ENCISS comes across as impartial ? easy to do when you?re controlling the main communications process: ?ENCISS is perceived as a non-partisan, non-political actor, an honest broker and has over its first year or so of operation built an image of credibility and integrity?, (DFID Memorandum). In essence, the success of the programme is dependent on the public believing a lie. Democracy Promotion At heart, ENCISS is an exercise in democracy promotion, ?an innovative approach to transformative change within and between civil society and the state,? according to its strategy report. But it isnot unopposed. Some civil society organisations ?have undertaken an unconstructive and confrontational state vis-a-vis the government of Sierra Leone? (DFID). ENCISS is seeking to reverse that trend by creating a ?partnership? between civil society groups and the government, ?ensuring that civil society capacity is not built in isolation of the State?. Notwithstanding the fact that this seeks to silence or moderate voices critical of the government, ENCISS also overlooks how a functioning democracy requires a civil society isolated enough from the government to be able to hold it to account. A large part of ENCISS involves selecting groups ?whose interests and work aligns with ENCISS?s overall goal? of pushing IMF restructuring, and supporting them. Its designers openly acknowledge that this will mean giving a stronger voice to groups that suit DFID?s needs and isolating others. A quick look at the type of organisation whose ?interests and work? aligns with ENCISS demonstrates the type of civil society DFID is seeking to promote: Search for the Common Ground (SFCG) SFCG is a US-based conflict resolution organisation. It receives funding from the Nataional Endowment for Democracy (NED), the United States Institute for Peace and a range of foreign ministries including the UK and US, as well as multinational corporations including Nestle, ExxonMobil and Chevron. It has powerful political connections ? its board vice chairman, George Moose, was US Assistant Under-Secretary for State under Clinton and a SFCG senior advisor; Nancy Bearg was National Security Advisor to Reagan and Director of Policy Analysis at the US Department of Defense. According to SFCG?s programme overview for Sierra Leone, ?SFCG aims to build the legitimacy of government – including local – in the hearts and minds of the people, generating trust and confidence in the institutions.? ENCISS works through SFCG?s Talking Drum Studios, which, among other activities, writes and produces shows championing the PRSP. Talking Drum dominates the airwaves in Sierra Leone, producing radio programmes for 18 local and international radio stations across Sierra Leone. ?A recent listener survey indicates that 89% of people listen regularly? (TDS website). Through ENCISS it also provides numerous community radio stations with equipment and training. SFCG is also chair for National Elections Watch (NEW), a coalition of civil society groups and non-governmental organizations which monitored the last local council elections. Campaign for Good Governance (CGG) The CGG is a local NGO with strong ties to the international ?democracy promoting? community. It was set up by three influential members of Sierra Leone?s ruling class, with funds from the International Crisis Group and Transparency International, two key democracy promotion organisations. Since then it has received over $180,000 from NED, as well as money from DFID, USAID, and World Vision and CIVICUS, two other democracy promotion organisations. CGG provide journalism training, produce weekly television and radio shows, conduct educational campaigns which include writing ?human rights handbooks for high schools?. CARE International DFID has hired CARE International (UK) to implement ENCISS. Of the 12 members of CARE International UK?s Board of Trustees, nine have held senior positions in major multinational corporations, and the remaining three have all worked for the British government, including a former private secretary to Margaret Thatcher. Although officially non-governmental, CARE UK receives a huge proportion of funding from government sources ? DFID is their largest funder. CARE International UK?s corporate partners include Starbucks, Unilver, United Business Media, BP, Morgan Brookes, Ernst and Young, Deloitte & Touche, Conoco Phillips, Johnson and Johnson, KPMG, Marks and Spencer, Npower, Royal Bank of Scotland, Petro-Canada and PWC. Media Assistance ENCISS is essentially a public relations, ?communication and information dissemination?, campaign around the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. As well as dominating the airwaves through Talking Drum Studios, ENCISS has also set up resource centres ? the only ones available ? to manage ?community expectations and perceptions?. ENCISS also supports the Independent Media Commission, a government body that can issue or revoke media licences. The commission, originally set up by DFID, also receives funding from Celtel – a telecommunications multinational that provides a huge chunk of the mainstream media?s advertising – and the Panos Institute, which itself is substantially funded by DFID, as well as having received recent grants from the Open Society Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation. according to the strategy report, Other ENCISS activities, include: ? interactive radio discussions in local languages; ? learning and dialogue road-shows; ? identifying and nurturing ?champions?; ? documenting and publishing success stories and case studies; ? using community meetings as a platform for information dissemination and to assess perceptions and concerns ? council meetings, farmers days, youth career days, etc.; ? use of mobile vans with speakers during market days and other community gatherings; ? developing a clear strategy to work with selected editors and/or journalists in the mainstream media; ? making use of local council notice boards and other notice boards at local level; ? developing a quarterly newsletter; ? repackaging PRSP goals and achievements in attractive formats: video, brochures, posters etc. to suit specific audiences; ? designing event promotional items: t-shirts, caps, pens, calendars etc.; ? and – my personal favourite – developing dialogue and music cassettes for taxis to provoke discussion, under the slogan ?Taxi Talk?, ?Taxi Tunes?; This list is not exhaustive. Nor does it include the ?discussions? with targeted community leaders ? youth leaders, mothers, chiefs or religious leaders

Identity Politics in Climate Change Hell
23 Aug 2008
If you want a glimpse of how the movement against climate change could crumble faster than a summer snowflake, read Ewa Jasiewicz?s article, published yesterday on the Guardian?s Comment is Free site(1). It is a fine example of the identity politics that plagued direct action movements during the 1990s, and from which the new generation of activists has so far been mercifully free. Ewa rightly celebrates the leaderless, autonomous model of organising that has made this movement so effective. The two climate camps I have attended ? this year and last ? were among the most inspiring events I?ve ever witnessed. I am awed by the people who organised them, who managed to create, under extraordinary pressure, safe, functioning, delightful spaces in which we could debate the issues and plan the actions which thrust Heathrow and Kingsnorth into the public eye. Climate camp is a tribute to the anarchist politics that Jasiewicz supports. But in seeking to extrapolate from this experience to a wider social plan, she makes two grave errors. The first is to confuse ends and means. She claims to want to stop global warming, but she makes that task 100 times harder by rejecting all state and corporate solutions. It seems to me that what she really wants to do is to create an anarchist utopia, and use climate change as an excuse to engineer it. Stopping runaway climate change must take precedence over every other aim. Everyone in this movement knows that there is very little time: the window of opportunity in which we can prevent two degrees of warming is closing fast. We have to use all the resources we can lay hands on, and these must include both governments and corporations. Or perhaps she intends to build the installations required to turn the energy economy around – wind farms, wave machines, solar thermal plants in the Sahara, new grid connections and public transport systems – herself? Her article is a terryifying example of the ability some people have to put politics first and facts second when confronting the greatest challenge humanity now faces. The facts are as follows. Runaway climate change is bearing down on us fast. We require a massive political and economic response to prevent it. Governments and corporations, whether we like it or not, currently control both money and power. Unless we manage to mobilise them, we stand a snowball?s chance in climate hell of stopping the collapse of the biosphere. Jasiewicz would ignore all these inconvenient truths because they conflict with her politics. ?Changing our sources of energy without changing our sources of economic and political power?, she asserts, ?will not make a difference. Neither coal nor nuclear are the ?solution?, we need a revolution.? So before we are allowed to begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions, we must first overthrow all political structures and replace them with autonomous communities of happy campers. All this must take place within a couple of months, as there is so little time in which we could prevent two degrees of warming. This is magical thinking of the most desperate kind. If I were an executive of E.On or Exxon, I would be delighted by this political posturing, as it provides a marvellous distraction from our real aims. To support her argument, Jasiewicz misrepresents what I said at climate camp. She claims that I ?confessed not knowing where to turn next to solve the issues of how to generate the changes necessary to shift our sources of energy, production and consumption?. I confessed nothing of the kind. In my book Heat I spell out what is required to bring about a 90% cut in emissions by 2030. Instead I confessed that I don?t know how to solve the problem of capitalism without resorting to totalitarianism. The issue is that capitalism involves lending money at interest. If you lend at 5%, then one of two things must happen. Either the money supply must increase by 5% or the velocity of circulation must increase by 5%. In either case, if this growth is not met by a concomitant increase in the supply of goods and services, it becomes inflationary and the system collapses. But a perpetual increase in the supply of goods and services will eventually destroy the biosphere. So how do we stall this process? Even when usurers were put to death and condemned to perpetual damnation, the practice couldn?t be stamped out. Only the communist states managed it, through the extreme use of the state control Ewa professes to hate. I don?t yet have an answer to this conundrum. Does she? Yes, let us fight both corporate power and the undemocratic tendencies of the state. Yes, let us try to crack the problem of capitalism and then fight for a different system. But let us not confuse this task with the immediate need to stop two degrees of warming, or allow it to interfere with the carbon cuts that have to begin now. Ewa?s second grave error is to imagine that society could be turned into a giant climate camp. Anarchism is a great means of organising a self-elected community of like-minded people. It is a disastrous means of organising a planet. Most anarchists envisage their system as the means by which the oppressed can free themselves from persecution. But if everyone is to be free from the coercive power of the state, this must apply to the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The richest and most powerful communities on earth – be they geographical communities or communities of interest – will be as unrestrained by external forces as the poorest and weakest. As a friend of mine put it, ?when the anarchist utopia arrives, the first thing that will happen is that every Daily Mail reader in the country will pick up a gun and go and kill the nearest hippy.? This is why, though both sides furiously deny it, the outcome of both market fundamentalism and anarchism, if applied universally, is identical. The anarchists associate with the oppressed, the market fundamentalists with the oppressors. But by eliminating the state, both remove such restraints as prevent the strong from crushing the weak. Ours is not a choice between government and no government. It is a choice between government and the mafia. Over the past year I have been working with groups of climate protesters who have changed my view of what could be achieved. Most of them are under 30, and they bring to this issue a clear-headedness and pragmatism that I have never encountered in direct action movements before. They are prepared to take extraordinary risks to try to defend the biosphere from the corporations, governments and social trends which threaten to make it uninhabitable. They do so for one reason only: that they love the world and fear for its future. It would be a tragedy if, through the efforts of people like Ewa, they were to be diverted from this urgent task into the identity politics that have wrecked so many movements. www.monbiot.com References: 1. Ewa Jasiewicz, 21st August 2008. Time for a revolution. Comment is Free. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/21/climatechange.kingsn…

Threat of Recession
23 Aug 2008
There has been a host of statistics in the last few weeks that testify to the increasingly serious impact the financial crisis is having on the British economy and the living conditions of working people. The rise in the cost of living has outstripped pay increases for the first time since the 1990s?meaning that the average person is now officially worse off. According to the Office for National Statistics, the annual inflation rate has doubled in the last six months, reaching 4.4 percent in July, the largest rise since this index, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), began in 1997. It was much larger than expected and more than double the Treasury?s target rate of inflation, raising fears that the Bank of England will raise interest rates. The more broadly based Retail Price Index (RPI) went up by 5 percent in the 12 months to July. As well as a 26 percent rise in petrol and oil, there has been a 13.7 percent rise in food costs, particularly meat, bread, cereals and vegetables, and a 16 percent rise in utility bills. The rise in the CPI will in turn trigger a 6 percent increase in rail fares next January. The prices that manufacturers pay for their materials and fuel have risen by a colossal 30.1 percent in the last year. They have posted price increases on their domestic sales of 10.2 percent, the highest since 1982. Yet the Bank of England had predicted last year that the CPI would reach 2 percent. It has been forced to revise its estimates, and expects inflation to reach 5 percent or more, later this year. Just last May, it had predicted a 3.7 percent inflation rate for the year. Now it recognises that even the 5 percent figure may be optimistic, as the risks are high, particularly if inflation leads to higher wages. But even more importantly, the Bank has revised its forecast for the economy downwards. It expects zero growth in the economy for the next year, despite a boost from exports as consumer spending and investment tumble. Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, told a press conference, ?There is no point pretending that what is happening is not happening in the world economy?that this unique combination of higher food and energy prices on the one hand and a sharp dislocation in the financial sector on the other?is going to do anything other than make the next year a painful adjustment for the UK economy.? King added that the country faced a period of stagflation. ?The next year will be a difficult one, with inflation high and output broadly flat,? he said. He noted that since employment prospects were not good, ?labour market flexibilities? might offset inflationary pressures. But he could not avoid pointing out that there was a risk that the economy would spiral downwards into a deep recession. King said that there were ?bound? to be one or two quarters of falling output as a result of the credit crunch and rising commodity prices. Furthermore, house prices had further to fall due to the banking sector?s inability to raise money in the capital markets and the consequent mortgage drought. He made it absolutely clear that the Bank would ?remain cautious??code for refusing to lower interest rates to stimulate investment and the economy?despite the fact that wage growth was lower than inflation. ?Wages do not make inflation,? he said. ?It depends upon what happens in firms.? In other words, if companies believed that they could pass on their own cost increases onto their customers, second order inflation would appear. The governor insisted however that ?We will come through it; inflation will come down.? When asked why he was so confident, King replied, ?We will take the action necessary to see that it does.? What this means is that the Bank will raise interest rates to whatever levels are necessary and force the working class to bear the cost of adjustment. Already unemployment has started to rise. The number of people claiming unemployment benefit rose for the sixth month in succession, increasing to 864,700. Last month saw the number of new claimants rise at the fastest rate for 16 years. The unemployment rate now stands at 5.4 percent. Total unemployment, including those jobless for more than six months and thus not eligible for unemployment benefit, rose to 1.67 million. Redundancies rose by 13 percent between April and June. This is likely to rise further with more than 10,000 layoffs announced in the building and financial sectors since the end of June. A number of high profile city centre developments around the country have come to an abrupt halt, while British Land has held off signing construction contracts for the prestige 47-story development for the City of London known as the Cheesegrater. John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said that the rise in unemployment was ?gaining worrying momentum.? Total employment would have fallen had it not been for the increasing number of pensioners taking jobs. Pensioners have been hit by the failure of the state pension to cover even the most basic needs, leaving ever more of those above retirement age in poverty and forcing them to stay in or return to work. The number of pensioners in work has risen by more than two-thirds since 1997 to 1.33 million, meaning that the employment rate for pensioners increased from 7.9 percent to 11.7 percent. There has been a 47,400 fall in the number of job vacancies to 634,900. The trends illustrate how the credit squeeze and inflation are affecting employment. Particularly hard hit have been vacancies in shops, restaurants and hotels, which fell by 18 percent in the second quarter of the year as consumers have reined in their spending. Vacancies in the construction sector fell by 12.6 percent and in the financial sector by 9.9 percent. Last week, a report from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) found that the fall in the housing market was affecting the demand for household goods and furnishings on the high street. Annual like-for-like sales were down in July for the fourth time in five months. The BRC said that shoppers were reluctant to spend on non-necessities, and they now included clothes in the non-necessity category. The supermarkets were the only high street traders to report significant growth on July 2007. With fuel and food prices rocketing, more and more people are falling behind with their mortgage payments and face losing their homes. According to Ministry of Justice figures released a week ago, the number of court orders for mortgage repossessions rose to 28,568 in the second quarter of 2008, a 24 percent rise on the same period last year and the highest since the second quarter of 1992, when 30,587 court orders for repossession were made. Adam Sampson, the chief executive of Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, accused mortgage lenders of ?still using repossession as the first, rather than the last resort, despite being urged not to.? The Ministry of Justice also reported that the number of people facing bankruptcy rose from 17,847 percent in the first quarter of the year to 19,158 in the second quarter, an increase of 5 percent on a year ago. The number of creditor petitions?served by people who are owed money?jumped by 17 percent in the second quarter to 5,625. The number of debtor petitions?personal bankruptcies?climbed nearly 4 percent to 13,533. According to Standard and Poor?s, the credit rating agency, UK credit card companies are seeing an increasing number of people walking away from the credit card debt. Companies have increased their charge-offs?defined as repayments of principal and interest which they no longer expect to receive?by an average of 6.9 percent in June, up from 6.62 percent in March. The Bank of England?s warning of a recession sent sterling tumbling against the dollar and the euro. On Friday, the pound fell against the dollar for the eleventh day in succession to $1.85, down 6.5 percent since July. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who used to boast as Chancellor of the Exchequer that he had abolished the cycle of boom and bust, has made it clear that public sector workers will see their pay rise by no more than 2 percent even as prices rise, and has encouraged private employers to similarly limit their pay increases. While the Labour government has bailed out banks and mortgage lenders on the point of collapse due to their own semi-criminal and reckless policies, it has done and will do nothing to assist the millions of working people struggling with mortgages, rising bills and debt.

Anarchy, State, Utopia, and Climate Change
22 Aug 2008
Ewa Jasiewicz: Time for a revolution There can be no state solutions to climate change, argues Ewa Jasiewicz: governments won’t give up the powers that lead to environmental ruin. There was a joke going round the

Political epitaph
22 Aug 2008
Which genius dreamed up the idea of sending Gordon Brown off to Afghanistan to meet puppet president Hamid Karzai and to mimic Tony Blair’s previous media stunt of posing in brilliant white shirt surrounded by British soldiers? President Karzai could only have been the answer to the question of what international leader’s grip on his job is more tenuous than our Prime Minister’s. Commentators used to joke that his writ only ran as far as the outskirts of Kabul. This overstates his real influence. The Afghan president continues to be guarded by US contractors because he distrusts his own armed forces and he is utterly dependent on NATO military power, which remains incapable of suppressing resistance to the occupation of Afghanistan. Mr Brown’s lavish praise of British troops, likening them to Olympic heroes on a daily rather than a four-yearly basis, is unlikely to have endeared him to them, knowing, as they do, that he is responsible for placing them in the dangerous and unwinnable situation that faces them. British troops were originally dispatched to Afghanistan in what was said to be a cross between a peacekeeping and a nation-rebuilding mission. It has turned out to be an all-out war, especially since they were redeployed, at Pentagon insistence, to Helmand province, where resistance is fierce and where casualty levels have inexorably risen. Despite this reality, the Prime Minister claims that “substantial progress” is being made against the Taliban and the proof for this is that the Afghan resistance is having to adopt tactics “more of a guerilla nature than head-on confrontation with our forces.” How very unsporting. Wouldn’t it be so much better if the Afghans formed up into massed ranks to charge tanks and heavy machineguns or to present a clear target to the occupiers’ aerial power rather than using roadside bombs and suicide attacks. The government’s advisers should have known that such guerilla tactics would be favoured in a long-lasting war of attrition, but new Labour put subservience to the White House before any concern for British troops, to say nothing of the Afghan civilian population, who are the real sufferers in this US imperial aggression. Still, it’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good and the arms traffickers of BAE Systems aren’t doing too badly at all, thank you very much. Our government’s slavish determination to support every Made in Washington war has meant a bonanza for the company’s private shareholders, with the latest contract to supply ammunition to our armed forces over the next 15 years weighing in at 3 billion. That should guarantee plenty of bonuses and dividends for senior civil servants and new Labour ministers who jump on board after being deservedly turfed out at the next general election. Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth is delighted that this programme will ensure “a modernised, sustainable munitions industry which will support British jobs.” What a pity that such concern for industry and jobs has never extended to the rest of Britain’s manufacturing sector, which new Labour has allowed to disintegrate without lifting a finger. And it is this obsession with war and private profits that will be new Labour’s political epitaph.

Israel shuts down BBC in Hebron
22 Aug 2008
The IDF shut down BBC radio transmitters in Hebron on Wednesday, acting on orders of the Communications Ministry and citing interference with communications at Ben-Gurion International Airport. The IDF Spokesman said the transmitters were illegal, adding that the Communications Ministry had found them to be jeopardizing contact between Ben-Gurion’s control tower and passenger aircraft. BBC employees had raised the issue during a press conference held by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Wednesday. A government official said in response that in addition to the BBC’s transmitters, a number of additional transmitters had been shut down, including some inside Israel, as they were “endangering civilian aviation, a problem we have been suffering from for a long time.” The official added that the BBC was broadcasting on a wavelength allocated to it by the Palestinian Authority without prior coordination with the Communications Ministry. “We are now trying to solve the problem,” the official said. In a statement, the BBC confirmed that its “FM broadcasts in the city of Hebron ceased late yesterday morning. The BBC understands that the Israeli Ministry of Communication instructed contractors, accompanied by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), to visit the transmission site and confiscate a transmitter and other equipment. We understand there were similar visits to two other private stations in the vicinity.” The BBC added that it had had “no contact from the Israeli authorities relating to aircraft interference resulting from our FM broadcasts since broadcasts started in Hebron in March this year. The BBC has implemented technical protocols to prevent interference from its broadcasts, however there are any number of factors that could produce interference. “We have requested that our equipment be returned immediately. We are now in discussion with the Israeli authorities and are aiming to resolve this matter as soon as possible.”

Economy hit by inflation and threat of recession
22 Aug 2008
There has been a host of statistics in the last few weeks that testify to the increasingly serious impact the financial crisis is having on the British economy and the living conditions of working people. The rise in the cost of living has outstripped pay increases for the first time since the 1990s?meaning that the average person is now officially worse off. According to the Office for National Statistics, the annual inflation rate has doubled in the last six months, reaching 4.4 percent in July, the largest rise since this index, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), began in 1997. It was much larger than expected and more than double the Treasury?s target rate of inflation, raising fears that the Bank of England will raise interest rates. The more broadly based Retail Price Index (RPI) went up by 5 percent in the 12 months to July. As well as a 26 percent rise in petrol and oil, there has been a 13.7 percent rise in food costs, particularly meat, bread, cereals and vegetables, and a 16 percent rise in utility bills. The rise in the CPI will in turn trigger a 6 percent increase in rail fares next January. The prices that manufacturers pay for their materials and fuel have risen by a colossal 30.1 percent in the last year. They have posted price increases on their domestic sales of 10.2 percent, the highest since 1982. Yet the Bank of England had predicted last year that the CPI would reach 2 percent. It has been forced to revise its estimates, and expects inflation to reach 5 percent or more, later this year. Just last May, it had predicted a 3.7 percent inflation rate for the year. Now it recognises that even the 5 percent figure may be optimistic, as the risks are high, particularly if inflation leads to higher wages. But even more importantly, the Bank has revised its forecast for the economy downwards. It expects zero growth in the economy for the next year, despite a boost from exports as consumer spending and investment tumble. Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, told a press conference, ?There is no point pretending that what is happening is not happening in the world economy?that this unique combination of higher food and energy prices on the one hand and a sharp dislocation in the financial sector on the other?is going to do anything other than make the next year a painful adjustment for the UK economy.? King added that the country faced a period of stagflation. ?The next year will be a difficult one, with inflation high and output broadly flat,? he said. He noted that since employment prospects were not good, ?labour market flexibilities? might offset inflationary pressures. But he could not avoid pointing out that there was a risk that the economy would spiral downwards into a deep recession. King said that there were ?bound? to be one or two quarters of falling output as a result of the credit crunch and rising commodity prices. Furthermore, house prices had further to fall due to the banking sector?s inability to raise money in the capital markets and the consequent mortgage drought. He made it absolutely clear that the Bank would ?remain cautious??code for refusing to lower interest rates to stimulate investment and the economy?despite the fact that wage growth was lower than inflation. ?Wages do not make inflation,? he said. ?It depends upon what happens in firms.? In other words, if companies believed that they could pass on their own cost increases onto their customers, second order inflation would appear. The governor insisted however that ?We will come through it; inflation will come down.? When asked why he was so confident, King replied, ?We will take the action necessary to see that it does.? What this means is that the Bank will raise interest rates to whatever levels are necessary and force the working class to bear the cost of adjustment. Already unemployment has started to rise. The number of people claiming unemployment benefit rose for the sixth month in succession, increasing to 864,700. Last month saw the number of new claimants rise at the fastest rate for 16 years. The unemployment rate now stands at 5.4 percent. Total unemployment, including those jobless for more than six months and thus not eligible for unemployment benefit, rose to 1.67 million. Redundancies rose by 13 percent between April and June. This is likely to rise further with more than 10,000 layoffs announced in the building and financial sectors since the end of June. A number of high profile city centre developments around the country have come to an abrupt halt, while British Land has held off signing construction contracts for the prestige 47-story development for the City of London known as the Cheesegrater. John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said that the rise in unemployment was ?gaining worrying momentum.? Total employment would have fallen had it not been for the increasing number of pensioners taking jobs. Pensioners have been hit by the failure of the state pension to cover even the most basic needs, leaving ever more of those above retirement age in poverty and forcing them to stay in or return to work. The number of pensioners in work has risen by more than two-thirds since 1997 to 1.33 million, meaning that the employment rate for pensioners increased from 7.9 percent to 11.7 percent. There has been a 47,400 fall in the number of job vacancies to 634,900. The trends illustrate how the credit squeeze and inflation are affecting employment. Particularly hard hit have been vacancies in shops, restaurants and hotels, which fell by 18 percent in the second quarter of the year as consumers have reined in their spending. Vacancies in the construction sector fell by 12.6 percent and in the financial sector by 9.9 percent. Last week, a report from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) found that the fall in the housing market was affecting the demand for household goods and furnishings on the high street. Annual like-for-like sales were down in July for the fourth time in five months. The BRC said that shoppers were reluctant to spend on non-necessities, and they now included clothes in the non-necessity category. The supermarkets were the only high street traders to report significant growth on July 2007. With fuel and food prices rocketing, more and more people are falling behind with their mortgage payments and face losing their homes. According to Ministry of Justice figures released a week ago, the number of court orders for mortgage repossessions rose to 28,568 in the second quarter of 2008, a 24 percent rise on the same period last year and the highest since the second quarter of 1992, when 30,587 court orders for repossession were made. Adam Sampson, the chief executive of Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, accused mortgage lenders of ?still using repossession as the first, rather than the last resort, despite being urged not to.? The Ministry of Justice also reported that the number of people facing bankruptcy rose from 17,847 percent in the first quarter of the year to 19,158 in the second quarter, an increase of 5 percent on a year ago. The number of creditor petitions?served by people who are owed money?jumped by 17 percent in the second quarter to 5,625. The number of debtor petitions?personal bankruptcies?climbed nearly 4 percent to 13,533. According to Standard and Poor?s, the credit rating agency, UK credit card companies are seeing an increasing number of people walking away from the credit card debt. Companies have increased their charge-offs?defined as repayments of principal and interest which they no longer expect to receive?by an average of 6.9 percent in June, up from 6.62 percent in March. The Bank of England?s warning of a recession sent sterling tumbling against the dollar and the euro. On Friday, the pound fell against the dollar for the eleventh day in succession to $1.85, down 6.5 percent since July. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who used to boast as Chancellor of the Exchequer that he had abolished the cycle of boom and bust, has made it clear that public sector workers will see their pay rise by no more than 2 percent even as prices rise, and has encouraged private employers to similarly limit their pay increases. While the Labour government has bailed out banks and mortgage lenders on the point of collapse due to their own semi-criminal and reckless policies, it has done and will do nothing to assist the millions of working people struggling with mortgages, rising bills and debt.

The shame of British complicity
22 Aug 2008
The judgment given by the high court yesterday in the case of Binyam Mohamed opens up the real prospect that the international law and rule of law transgressions of the “war on terror” will unravel in British courts. Never before has so much been disclosed of the real extent of the British government’s complicity even though much of the hearing was in closed sessions using special advocates and the only judgment we have access to is the “open” one. Binyam Mohamed is the only British resident left in Guantánamo Bay. Although all the other residents have been returned the US has refused to bring him back to the UK on the grounds that he is to be put on trial before a military commission which could impose the death penalty. Clive Stafford Smith, Binyam’s lawyer asked the UK government to disclose information in its possession which could help prove that he had been the subject of extraordinary rendition to Pakistan and then Morocco and had been tortured at the behest of the US on the basis that this might then persuade the US convening authority in charge of the military commissions to withdraw the charges against him. The court found that such information should be disclosed but has given the foreign secretary, David Milliband, further time to consider the security implications. The information in British possession came about because of the involvement of the British security services in Binyam’s murky story. They were involved in the questioning of Binyam in Pakistan when he was detained unlawfully incommunicado and without access to a lawyer from May to September 2002. Witness B from the security services who gave evidence in secret at the hearing and at one point refused to answer questions because of possible self-incrimination of war crimes not only worked with the US on the questioning but told Binyam that he would not help him unless he cooperated fully with the US. In the event the help he promised did not materialise and after September 2002, when Binyam reports being rendered to Morocco, the British security services continued to “facilitate interviews by the United States authorities … when also they knew BM was still incommunicado and when they must also have appreciated that he was not in a United States facility and that the facility in which he was being detained and questioned was that of a foreign government.” Binyam alleges that his torture in Morocco included his penis being cut with a scalpel. Although the judgment makes no finding on this it contains pointed observations about the failure of the US to respond to the torture allegations calling its position “untenable” The judgment makes a clear finding of complicity: By seeking to interview BM in the circumstances described and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship of the United Kingdom Government to the United States authorities in relation to BM was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing. It is this which now really puts the cat among the pigeons. During the war on terror both MI5 and MI6 have flown around the world giving assistance to the US by providing information and conducting interviews with detainees known to them. They are known to have questioned people detained by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay and are believed to have assisted in renditions such as that of Jamil el Banna and Bisher Al-Rawi from the Gambia to Afghanistan and then Guantánamo. The full extent of British “facilitation” has not yet come out but this action could be the tip of an iceberg. Did the British allow Diego Garcia to be used as a secret prison? Does our government or security services know of other secret prisons or arrangements with foreign governments? My firm is among others in bringing claims for damages and crucially a demand for a public inquiry by ex-Guantánamo detainees against the British government and security services for British collusion in the human rights abuses they suffered. But really we should not now have to wait for the courts to pronounce on these matters. The last time we heard the words “ethical foreign policy” was years ago in the time of the late Robin Cook but they could have reappeared in the recent article by David Miliband. Instead of waiting for more shaming disclosures of the same kind as in this judgment the government could make a real break with the moral equivalence of the Blair government by setting up a public inquiry and devising a new code for the security services to ensure they never “facilitate” torture and abuse again. If they do not do so it is increasingly clear that the UK courts will stand up to the executive on such fundamental government wrongdoing. Louise Christian of Christian Khan solicitors acted for some of the detainees released from Guantánamo Bay

UK backs US stance on Russia
21 Aug 2008
In an article in the Times on the day that NATO foreign ministers met in an emergency meeting to discuss their response to the crisis surrounding South Ossetia, Miliband demanded that international monitors be sent to Georgia to oversee the ceasefire and to defend ?Georgian sovereignty.? ?The invasion of Georgia was entirely unjustified,? Miliband wrote, ?and we will strengthen support for its wish to join Nato.? ?You don?t need to be a student of the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 to find the sight of Russian tanks rolling into a neighbouring country chilling,? Miliband continued, deliberately evoking the language of the Cold War. ?The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others.? Miliband complained of ?overwhelming Russian aggression.? Russia, he said, had ?provided no evidence of war crimes? and had ?violated successive UN Security Council resolutions which they themselves agreed.? Russia, Miliband went on, had ?blatantly violated the sovereignty of a neighbouring (and democratic) country.? ?The British position,? Miliband declared, ?is that aggression cannot and will not redraw the map of Russia?s former ?near abroad? (or anywhere else).? NATO foreign ministers must reassert their commitment to Georgia?s territorial integrity, Miliband insisted, and ?confirm the commitment made at the Nato summit in April to membership for Ukraine and Georgia and to follow it up with serious co-operation?militarily and politically?as part of a structured route map to eventual membership.? Miliband struck a high moral tone. But the British government is in no position to criticise others for ?overwhelming aggression? and violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states. The Labour government supported the US-led invasion of Iraq without any UN mandate under the false pretext that Saddam Hussein had ?weapons of mass destruction? and assisted in enforcing ?regime change? in that country through military aggression. Only 17 months earlier, it had participated in the invasion of Afghanistan on the spurious grounds that the country was responsible for the 9/11 terror attack. Although the assault on Afghanistan had the backing of other NATO countries, it was no more legitimate for that. NATO forces have repeatedly targeted civilians. The government of Hamid Karzai is a Western puppet regime with little local support even in the capital. On the same day that Miliband?s article appeared in the Times, it was announced that British Special Forces would take part in a ?decapitation? strategy in Afghanistan. Its aim will be to assassinate leading opponents of the Western-backed regime who are thought to be in the tribal territories of Pakistan. The Independent quoted what they called ?senior defence sources? who said that their intelligence pointed to an ?implosion of security? in Pakistan, following the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf. It cannot be doubted that the plan is to extend the NATO campaign into Pakistan. A history of aggression and provocation In 1999, British forces participated in the bombing of Serbia, which targeted civilians and neutral embassies. Earlier this year, Britain recognised the unilateral breakaway of Kosovo from Serbia. The UK government had no concern then for the territorial integrity of Serbia. Rather, its support for Kosovo?s independence was justified on exactly the same grounds as those now being claimed by anti-Georgian separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. That step must in itself have contributed to the Russian decision to act as it did in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Britain, in alliance with the US, has adopted an increasingly aggressive attitude in regions that border on Russia and were part of the former USSR. In April, Britain backed the US call for Georgia to become a NATO member. France and Germany were reluctant to initiate the process that would lead to membership, recognising that the move could only antagonise Moscow. Britain has also backed the US plan to base a ground-based missile interceptor system in Poland and an x-band radar site in the Czech Republic. Miliband, who is to visit Georgia on Wednesday, called for both economic and political support for Georgia and Ukraine. He said that Britain would play its full part in sending observers to monitor the ceasefire. He rejected the idea of expelling Russia from the G8, floated in Washington. But he insisted that the other powers must be able to act as the G7 whenever they wished. While the practical implications of being excluded from the G8 may be small, it is a significant diplomatic gesture. Other European powers have urged a more cautious approach. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walther Steinmeier warned against a ?knee-jerk reaction? to the Georgia crisis. He called for the lines of communication to be kept open between the West and Russia. A reckless bellicosity The decision to send Miliband to Georgia followed criticism in the British press that the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown had not responded to the Georgian conflict adequately. A front-page headline in the Sun demanded, ?Where?s Gord?? It was followed days later by an article written by the Sun?s political editor Trevor Kavanagh headlined ?Hello? Gordon? We still can?t hear you.? This response indicates a deep dissatisfaction with Brown?s performance in the key sections of the international financial elite for whom Murdoch?s media empire speaks. Kavanagh pointed to the Russian warning that Poland?s decision to host the US missile defence system made it a military target. ?This escalation in tension only makes the question more urgent,? Kavanagh wrote: ?Where on earth are Gordon Brown and his Foreign Secretary David Miliband?? Other international leaders were taking a prominent role, but Brown had let Conservative opposition leader David Cameron make the running on Georgia, Kavanagh said. Brown had only issued statements after Cameron appeared on the media. Tony Blair, Kavanagh pointed out, would not have behaved in this way. Kavanagh?s article appeared on the day that Cameron flew to Tbilisi to meet with President Saakashvili. He had been invited to the capital after he compared the response of the West to the Georgian crisis with the appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1939. Cameron called for visa restrictions on Russians, ?Russian armies can?t march into other countries while Russian shoppers carry on marching into Selfridges.? The Foreign and Commonwealth Office pointed out that there are already visa restrictions on Russians. But the damage inflicted on the Labour government was real. Cameron?s intervention followed the outbreak of what was described in the media as warfare in the Labour Party as Miliband challenged Brown?s leadership. Miliband criticised the performance of the government in a Guardian article at the end of July. Labour could still win the next election, Miliband insisted, even following two by-election defeats. But he did not mention Brown?s name, which was taken as a sign that he was putting himself forward as a potential leader. Guardian columnists Polly Toynbee and Jackie Ashley were quick to offer their support to Miliband. Toynbee was once a firm supporter of Brown in his contest with Blair. But she could barely contain her enthusiasm. ?Suddenly everything changed,? she wrote following Miliband?s article. ?The burst of optimism was so startling it dazzled those too long trapped deep in a dungeon. In that one moment it was all over for the old leader who had plunged them into these depths. Suddenly here was the chance of escape everyone was waiting for.? Ashley was positively adulatory. ?A man who has often seemed too fastidious for frontline politics,? Ashley wrote of Miliband, ?suddenly looks like a killer.? Brown?s difficulties did not go unnoticed in Washington. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Kyle Wingfield, editorial writer for the paper?s European edition. ?When Gordon Brown returns home from his summer vacation,? it began, ?he may find that the locks at 10 Downing Street have been changed.? This internecine conflict left the Brown government slow to respond to the Georgian crisis. Cameron was able to seize a certain advantage. He is presenting himself as the best candidate to continue the close alliance in foreign policy between London and Washington. Brown has played his part in creating the circumstances that created the international crisis over Georgia. As chancellor of exchequer, he provided the finances that made it possible for Britain to fight a war on two fronts and act as Washington?s closest ally. But now with the economy on the brink of recession and international tensions sharpening, the question of whether Brown is capable of continuing in a leading role inevitably emerges. Cameron has raised one of the touchstone issues of British politics. His reference to appeasement was to the policies of the Chamberlain administration at the beginning of the Second World War. He made these remarks in a situation that has been recognised as bearing dangerous similarities to the international crises that preceded previous world wars. Implicitly, Cameron is presenting himself as the better potential war leader. Brown is not about to concede the point. His response has been to despatch his foreign secretary to the flashpoint. Eager to show his mettle, Miliband took a belligerent line at the NATO summit. The contest among British politicians to demonstrate that none of them are Chamberlains may itself become a factor in escalating international tensions as they compete in bellicosity ever more recklessly.

Snooping silo to cost millions
21 Aug 2008
The government is pressing ahead with plans to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a massive central silo for all UK communications data, The Register has learned. Home Office civil servants are working on plans for the database under the banner of the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP). The team has recently been expanded and a director-level official appointed to run the project, which is not yet official policy in public. Sources said secret briefings revealed the cost of the database would run to nine figures and has already been factored into government spending plans. The IMP budget was part of the intelligence agencies’ undisclosed funding bid to the Comprehensive Spending Review last year. In an answer to a parliamentary question on 8 July, the Home Office refused to provide any budgetary details, citing national security concerns. The sum will dwarf the 19m we recently reported the government has given telecoms companies to service authorities’ data requirements since 2004. The berdatabase will render existing arrangements for sharing communications data with government agencies obsolete. The project has been pushed hard at Whitehall by the intelligence agencies MI6 and GCHQ. One ISP source described their demands as “science fiction”. It’s envisaged that the one-stop-shop database will retain details of all calls, texts, emails, instant messenger conversations and websites accessed in the UK for up to two years. Communications providers fear a technical nightmare if they are forced to implement common data formatting rules. GCHQ declined to comment. A pilot scheme will see probes inserted in networks owned by one mobile, one internet and one landline operator, sources said. It’s thought the database could be administered by an expanded National Technical Assistance Centre, a Home Office agency. The probes will not record content of communications, which is seen as intrinsically less useful for intelligence data mining efforts. A Communications Data Bill mandating the database was expected to be proposed before the summer parliamentary recess, but did not appear. It had been planned that the database would be bundled with the EU Data Retention Directive (EUDRD), which must be enshrined in UK law by March 2009. However, last week the government released a consultation paper on transposing the Directive as a standalone statutory instrument. Laws made by statutory instrument do not require a vote in Parliament. Amid widespread headlines decrying the long-published EUDRD as another “snoopers’ charter”, insiders wondered what had happened to the Communications Data Bill and its central database. A Home Office spokeswoman said the bill will be published at some time this year. She told The Register that plans had changed “to make the best use of parliamentary time”. When the Bill was announced by Gordon Brown in May, apart from transposition of the EUDRD, its aim was cryptically described as to “modify the procedures for acquiring communications data and allow this data to be retained”. At Whitehall, sources said advocates of the berdatabase have sucessfully lobbied that a central repository is required to “maintain capability” to monitor communications. In his 8 July parliamentary answer, Home Office minister Lord West indicated that view has become policy when he wrote: The objective of the interception modernisation programme is to maintain the UK’s lawful intercept and communications data capabilities in the changing communications environment. It is a cross-government programme, led by the Home Office, to ensure that our capability to lawfully intercept and exploit data when fighting crime and terrorism is not lost. The “maintain capability” lobby argued that when everyone communicated using BT landlines, government intelligence gatherers could simply contact the operator to get call records. Now we all use myriad devices and services, the only feasible solution is to pool the data centrally, they contend. Others have countered in Communications Data Bill discussions that a central, searchable database will not “maintain capability”, but grant investigators unprecedented power to cross-reference data sources (including location data from mobile phone triangulation), go on “fishing trips”, and infringe privacy. The Information Commissioner’s Office voiced such opposition when early details of the IMP were reported in May. But according to our sources, public resistance to the berdatabase has so far had no significant impact on policy. The massive investment promises a bonanza for IT contractors. Answering a parliamentary question about the project’s feasibility, Lord West said: “The private sector is likely to play a major role in this work and the programme will be conducting a competitive tender and entering commercial negotiations to commission its services.”

Coal’s Comeback
21 Aug 2008
The coal industry of last century is the prime reason Merthyr Tydfil has the worst health in the UK. Now, with more coal and cash to carve from one of Europe?s largest opencast mines, developers and the local authority are back to finish the job. Wind turbines could have been standing here, turning in the strong winds streaming over the hills. But on the grounds of being noisy and unsightly, Merthyr Tydfil council overturned a planning application for a wind farm on the site of what is to be one of the largest opencast coalmines in Europe. Explosives blasting twice a day, massive machinery will then dig and scrape out an estimated 150 million tonnes of rock to reach the 10.8 million tonnes of coal buried here. With the nearest homes a mere 36m away and four schools within 600m, Merthyr?s residents must wonder how their council defines ?noisy? and ?unsightly?. The 1 per tonne of coal (10.8 million in total) the council will earn in royalties makes it quite clear where its motivation lies. The site of the coal mine stretches over 1,000 acres, with the hole eventually reaching 200m down. But according to the council and Miller Argent, the consortium behind this great hole in the ground, it isn?t actually an opencast coalmine ? it is the ?Ffos-y- Fran Land Reclamation Scheme?, which will ?restore 367 ha of derelict land? and ?go a long way towards creating a better and safer environment for the local community?. While some of the land was derelict, with spoil heaps and disused mineshafts being used as waste dumps, most was rough pasture and moorland, an open common where people walked and animals grazed and a much-needed habitat for lapwings, curlews and the protected great crested newt. The derelict land could have been cleaned up within three years and paid for by European Objective One funding. Calling this a land reclamation scheme overturns any rules stipulated by the MTAN ? Minerals Technical Advice Note for Coal. An opencast coalmine anywhere else in the UK needs a minimum buffer zone of 500m between it and the nearest home. Had this rule been enforced, this mine would not have gone ahead. Merthyr Tydfil has the poorest health in the UK, with nearly half the population suffering from a chronic disease. Residents collected 10,000 signatures opposing the mine and mounted a legal challenge that won a short-lived victory in the High Court. Pensioner Elizabeth Condron, who was eligible for legal aid, led the challenge. Since then she has endured anonymous death threats, bottles smashed against her home and the shooting of her beloved dog, and has now installed CCTV to protect herself. ?People in this town say I am either very brave or very stupid,? she says. ?I pretend I am brave.? The council, while allowing Miller Argent to recoup its legal costs from royalties due to the council, has since applied to have Elizabeth?s legal aid stopped. While local and national government loudly proclaim a commitment to reducing emissions, they aid and abet corporations in the short-sighted pursuit of profit. It?s a profit paid for by the health and quality of life of the local community, the destruction of the surrounding environment and by wider society due to the climate-changing impact of an estimated 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. And to think, this could have been a wind farm.

Say no to biofuels
20 Aug 2008
Beware simplistic solutions to complex problems. Humanity is in a fix: for over a century our advanced industrial civilisation has been almost entirely fuelled by fossil hydrocarbons ? oil, coal and gas ? extracted from geological reserves under the Earth?s surface. We have known for years that the combustion of these fuels releases carbon dioxide, enhancing the planet?s natural greenhouse effect and condemning us all to a fiery future unless we leave the majority of remaining reserves under the ground. What to do? Biofuels are an obvious solution: replace ?mineral? petrol and diesel from fossil reserves with biological fuels extracted from plants and the result will be no net addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. This is because the carbon released in combustion was originally sucked out of the air when the plants grew using energy from the sun. So once enough cars run on biodiesel or ethanol, humanity will effectively have switched to a solar energy economy and the problem will be solved. Or will it? Perhaps the strongest argument against biofuels is that they simply replace one ecological problem with another. Humanity is already exerting tremendous pressure on the planet, largely because of agriculture. The UN?s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a landmark report authored by thousands of experts, found that over the last 50 years humanity has changed the planet?s ecosystems ?more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history?. This has already led to a major loss of biodiversity, and at least 60% of the Earth?s ?ecosystem services? (things like freshwater, air purification, fisheries and so on) are being degraded or used unsustainably. In other words, humanity is already living far beyond its means ? we are hitting the ecological buffers in many other areas apart from just global warming. A large-scale shift towards biofuels ? extracting fuel from the biosphere rather than underground ? can only worsen the human agricultural pressure on ecosystems, as we shift from producing not just food but also fuel from increasingly scarce cultivable land. Some of the worst examples of biofuels causing the destruction of valuable ecosystems ? such as the conversion of Indonesian tropical forests to palm oil plantations ? are already well-known, thanks to vociferous campaigns by groups like Friends of the Earth and Biofuelwatch. Using palm oil for biodiesel production is little short of madness, even from a strictly climate change perspective ? far more carbon is released when the forests are cleared (particularly when the peat underlying them is drained and burned) than will ever be clawed back through the replacement of fossil fuels. A similar equation applies on Amazonia, where the expansion of soya production (soya is another biodiesel feedstock) is also driving deforestation. Indonesia and Brazil are amongst the top ten carbon emitters in the world due to the degradation and destruction of their forests, thanks increasingly to biofuels. But there are other less visible problems too. Most farmers apply nitrogen-based fertilisers to their crops to stimulate production. Most of this nitrogen isn?t captured by the plants, but runs off into rivers and lakes, causing algal blooms which kill fish and deplete oxygen levels. Whole areas of the ocean are now classified as ?dead zones?, because of this agricultural runoff. Indeed, the planet?s natural nitrogen cycle has been even more dramatically altered by humans than the carbon cycle, although this is gets much less attention than the issue of climate change. But the two issues are interlinked: fertilisers also degrade on land to produce nitrous oxide, a very powerful greenhouse gas. A recent scientific analysis by a team led by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen found that biofuels can ?contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O [nitrous oxide] emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings?. These two issues ? nitrous oxide and emissions from land-use change ? should by themselves be enough to rule out a large-scale shift to biofuels. But the ecological concerns raised by biofuels run even deeper than this. With more than six billion people on the planet, humanity has already run short of agricultural land for food production, and the conversion of virgin forests and grasslands into farmland monoculture can only worsen the current extinction crisis. Some charismatic species like the orang-utan in Borneo and Sumatra are directly threatened by biofuels production, but there are countless other less visible victims of agricultural expansion: in total, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, a third of all amphibians and 70% of plants are currently threatened by human activity, according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN), whose director Julia Marton-Lefevre now talks of a ?global extinction crisis?. These species are important not just for economic or aesthetic reasons, but because the whole earth system ? air, oceans and climate ? depends vitally on living organisms: biology is as much a part of our Earth as chemistry and physics. If we wipe out biodiversity, we risk triggering escalating impacts which will eventually rebound on human societies too. Biofuels are currently only a small part of this equation, but any increase in agricultural production can only intensify the extinction crisis. Some of this comes about through a displacement effect: even if biofuel feedstocks, whether corn, sugar cane, soya or palm oil, come from supposedly ?sustainable? sources, the gap in food supplies caused by their use will necessarily drive further deforestation and agricultural expansion in other areas. But some of the damage is much more direct. For example, 20,000 acres of Kenya?s Tana River wetlands ? home to 350 species of birds, as well as hippos, elephants, rare sharks, reptiles and primates ? are currently slated by the country?s government for destruction to produce sugarcane for ethanol, to be exported to the west for use in cars. In Cote d?Ivoire another wetland, the Tanoe Swamps Forest ? a last refuge for three highly endangered primates ? is due to be converted into palm oil, again for biofuels production. Biofuels supporters frequently advocate the use of plants like the oilseed-producing drought-tolerant shrub jatropha, which they argue can be grown in ?marginal? areas in poorer countries without reducing food production. However, these ?marginal? areas are often precisely the places where a semblance of biodiversity still clings on. In addition, if crops like jatropha become successful, they will doubtless be expanded into food-producing areas and forests alike: unless strict laws are in place, economic incentives will always trump humanitarian or ecological concerns. Similarly, so-called ?second-generation? biofuels are also touted as a radical improvement on current fuel production from food crops. By brewing ethanol from crop waste or wood, the argument goes, biofuels production can be ramped up without driving up food prices and starving the poor. But if this ?cellulosic ethanol? were ever to take off in a big way, it might present an even greater threat than today?s generation of biofuels. Entire forests would likely be liquified in order to produce petrol and diesel for motorists ? not just in rich countries, but increasingly in rapidly-industrialising nations like India and China. If world oil prices continue to rise, pressure to find substitutes like biofuels can only escalate. That is not to say that all biofuels are bad. Burning old chip fat in car engines is beneficial, but only on a tiny scale and because it uses waste oil. Biogas produced from human sewage could be used to replace natural gas from underground. And biomass ? from coppice woodland, for example ? can be a good way to produce heat and power, but again only on a limited scale. So with biofuels largely out of the equation, how should we tackle global warming? The best way to reduce emissions from vehicles is not to find new sources of liquid fuels, but to shift rapidly to the production of electric cars and trucks, which can plug into the grid to recharge. This electricity in turn must come from wholly renewable sources, which means wind, solar and wave or tidal power. A 100% renewable economy may sound like a pipe-dream, but it is technologically entirely feasible, and economically represents an enormous opportunity for growth in jobs and manufacturing, as Germany has already begun to discover. Over the century ahead humanity has to learn how to supply its energy needs in ways which do not destroy the capacity of the planet to support life. Neither biofuels nor fossil fuels meet this test ? but luckily there are plenty of energy sources that do.

Targeting temporary workers
20 Aug 2008
The recent gains of employment rights for temporary workers, such as the enforcement of equal pay and sick leave, have been a great step forward for a much under-represented section of the working class. We should be in no doubt, however, that the motivation for this compromise. Gordon Brown and his big business pals intend to strengthen their hand in continuing their opposition to the proposed European Union (EU) Agency Workers Directive, which proposes far more progress. Temporary workers remain largely unorganised and unions remain weak on the issue. Employers can offer lower pay and conditions to these workers as well as using them as a leverage point to drive down permanent workers’ pay and conditions and to undermine militancy. As big businesses have recognised temporary workers as targets for exploitation, the number of agencies appearing on high streets has increased massively over the last few years. Britain has over 1.4 million temporary or agency workers from both the public and private sectors. Agency workers are often some of the most vulnerable and young people. The government, after negotiating and manoeuvring with the unions and the bosses’ CBI, have announced that agency workers – following a 12-week “qualifying period” – will be entitled to employment rights such as sick leave, paid holidays, and equal pay with the lowest scale permanent employees. This is great news for these much beleaguered workers. However, this agreement has been long in the making, with all but three EU members taking this on years ago. The EU looks set to further extend employment rights for temporary workers – but Britain looks set to oppose this as well. This continued opposition goes against the Warwick agreement of July 2004. In exchange for continued union support, Tony Blair agreed to reforms of labour legislation including a commitment to support the new EU agency workers directive. The main problem with the new bill is the 12-week qualifying period. Temporary workers’ assignments are short, and many are unlikely to reach this. Temporary workers need to be unionised. Unions find it difficult to engage with militant agency workers, being usually ill adjusted to working with this sector. The casualisation of workers does create difficulties here, so it is essential to begin to build networks. Greater progress must come from grassroots self-organisation. Unions without this support and drive may only be able to secure superficial changes. Tom Ramplin is an agency worker and activist

Middle East media bias?
20 Aug 2008
The long-established Middle East conflict polarises opinion. It is difficult to have a dispassionate viewpoint. Most people would like to see a reduction in tension leading to a peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. However, depending on their experiences individuals understand, and therefore prefer, one version of events which they believe to be more truthful and accurate. Journalists are not free from these forms of influence, and unsurprisingly, this polarisation is often reflected in the British media’s coverage of Israel and its relationship with the Palestinians. The Israeli Ambassador, Ron Prosor, pointed out that Israeli affairs are more widely covered than most other countries with a similar population. There are complex reasons why this is so. Firstly, my PhD research indicated that the British media often reflects the interests of the US; in this context, Israel could be viewed as more newsworthy than countries that do not enjoy such a close relationship with America. Secondly, the media cannot be divorced from its commercial interests – it operates in a competitive space, and media outlets publish what sells newspapers and broadcast items that attract audiences. This conflict is one such story. Another issue is location; the Middle East has more than its fair share of drama. Most news organisations have a considerable number of journalists posted to the region at any time, making it easier to follow interesting stories arising there. Associated with this is Israel’s success in attracting media organisations to base their Middle East operations in Jerusalem. This was explained by a BBC executive, who stated: “Israel is an easy place to work in journalistic terms; it is accessible.” He compared this with the complex bureaucracy found in some Arab countries. Interestingly, Israel’s pole position is being challenged by Dubai, which has recently put a great deal of effort into creating an attractive working environment for the international media as part of its own commercial development. My own opinion is that since developing its media hub, Dubai gets far wider coverage in the British media than neighbouring Emirates such as Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, and indeed, often more than other Arab states. If this trend continues, international coverage of Israeli matters could decline, but this may not suit Palestinian or Israeli interests. The Israeli ambassador cited a recent study claiming that more newspaper commentaries give a negative view of Israel than a positive one. These statistics are only relevant if compared to other national and international coverage showing that Israel is the only country depicted in this manner, but that is unlikely. Bad news often takes precedence as it is seen as more interesting. Recent topics such as corruption scandals and the siege of Gaza have been widely and sometimes negatively reported in the Israeli media; it is not surprising to find these high-profile stories in Britain. News stories may be negative or reflect different versions of ‘truth,’ but that does not in itself imply inaccuracy, nor breach of the Editors’ Code or Ofcom regulations. Many Israeli supporters claim that the British media ignores ‘terror’ attacks on Israel citizens. All military attacks cause ‘terror’ amongst local populations, but with no international definition of this word, it is meaningless terminology. From an alternative perspective, organisations that reflect Arab opinion believe there is more media emphasis on rocket attacks on Israel than on Israeli attacks on Palestinians. This has some credibility. For example, I read in the Israeli press that last year there were 92 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces, but no Israeli child was killed by Palestinians during the same period. These tragic statistics were ignored by the British media. Downplaying Palestinian deaths is not a new trend. Research in 2006 found that more words were used to describe the kidnapping of one Israeli soldier than were used when reporting 20+ Palestinians killed by Israel, most of them civilians. For example, the Daily Mail devoted 661 words for the kidnapping, and 167 to the deaths, and the Guardian used 826 for the kidnapping, and 393 for the deaths. My own research shows that when 15 Palestinian children were killed by Israelis during one month in 2002, 107 words were printed per child death. During this same period, seven Israeli children were killed by Palestinians, with an average of 1,070 words each. Israelis were described as innocent victims of hatred, whereas Palestinian children were frequently made to appear culpable for their own deaths; for example, a reporter might associate a death with stone-throwing. Reports often cited Israeli views of events but ignored Palestinian versions. Palestinian children were rarely named or personalised, whereas Israeli children often were. Similar findings were made in an extensive study of ITV and BBC output by Glasgow University. As many people use TV as their main source of news, the study demonstrated that the lack of context, the style of language and the spokespersons used often confused audiences rather than informing them. Respondents in their audience studies did not understand fundamental issues such as refugees, military occupation and settlement building, but instead saw the conflict as a tit-for-tat border dispute. The BBC is particularly vulnerable to lobbying, as the public views it as more reliable than commercial broadcasters; the corporation claims “accurate, robust and impartial journalism.” The BBC commissioned an independent report from Loughborough University in 2005 to evaluate its coverage of the conflict; the findings correlated with the Glasgow study, describing coverage as incomplete and misleading. An important finding was that BBC reports did not show that one side is in control whilst the other side lives under occupation. They also described a disparity in favour of Israel that existed in talk time and media appearances. This was also confirmed by an extensive Arab Media Watch study of BBC news output, which showed similar disparities in terminology, talk time, historical context, and the tendency to play down Palestinian suffering. For example, after Israeli attacks resulting in many civilian deaths, there was one Palestinian attack on Jewish settlers and one suicide attack, but the BBC repeatedly described these as “ending a period of relative calm.” The terminology and context issues particularly concern refugee issues. The Glasgow study found that only 8% of people knew that Palestinian refugees were displaced from their homes when Israel was formed. The media had an opportunity to debate this after the 2007 Arab Summit. Their peace initiative was re-launched, promising Israel full peace in return for withdrawing from occupied lands and finding a just settlement for refugees. This was not mentioned in tabloid newspapers, and although a dozen broadsheet editorials at the time referred to the Arab offer, none focused on the refugee issue. The British broadcasting media are required to provide balanced coverage, but the press has no such restrictions and can provide a partisan view, hence there are likely to be articles that reflect opposing versions of ‘truth.’ However, newspapers still have a duty to provide accurate information, but that does not stop them from omitting items that do not suit their editorial line. It is notable that there has been little comment on the siege of Gaza, which conforms to the legal definition of collective punishment of 1.5 million civilians. When the siege intensified at the beginning of February 2008, the only commentary in the Times was entitled “A barrage against Israel,” and the siege was blamed on the Palestinians. It went on; ”?the frenzied, rhetorical onslaught of the Jewish state is at best intellectually lazy?” However, there was little sign of this onslaught; out of 10 daily newspapers, only the Telegraph, Independent, Financial Times and Guardian each published one leader, and in addition there were only nine commentaries, five of them in the Independent. Only the Independent reacted directly to Israel’s intensification of the siege, whilst the others reacted to the breach in the Gaza-Egypt border. An AMW terminology study in March 2008 compared the newsprint coverage of 120 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, and eight Israelis killed by a Palestinian in Jerusalem days later, noting the selection of words used to describe the incidents. Five journalists balanced their choice of descriptive words in each tragedy, whereas nine others used terms such as “massacre”, “bloodbath” and “slaughter” when describing the Palestinian attack, but used sanitised terms such as “offensive”, “incursion” and “strikes” to describe the Israeli attacks. When asked to explain his use of terminology, one journalist stated that he avoided the use of inflammatory words, but his copy had been changed by his editorial team without his knowledge or permission. The British media has a responsibility in its reporting of the conflict, as inciting hatred of either Israelis or Palestinians, or hiding the historical obstacles that need to be understood and overcome, can only prolong suffering. In order to guide the media, there should be more empirical research that covers issues such as historical context, story selection, terminology, types of discourses followed, spokespersons used, accessibility and prominence. Independent academic studies so far have shown that the British media tends to follow discourses that do not create understanding of the Palestinian case. There are many complex reasons why this occurs, but in itself this can foster anti-Israeli sentiment, as a largely one-sided perspective can mislead some audiences into thinking that Israel controls everything, and hence creates an environment in which radicalism can grow. That worries many people – including most Palestinians.

All the Kingsnorth’s Men
20 Aug 2008
Reports coming in from the Camp for Climate Action (see SchNEWS 641) Day of Mass Action on Saturday 9th August suggest that the day was more successful than many mainstream media sources made out. Despite coverage claiming E.ON continued their coal-chugging business as usual, arrestee charge sheets tell a different story. One of four people arrested inside Kingsnorth reveals they shut down the plant’s cooling system and disrupted the running of the station. Activists set about besieging the coal-powered giant by land, sea and air. Four contingents were deployed. The Blue Group was the highly organised Great Rebel Raft Regatta (GRRR), which set out to sail the high seas (well, the river Medway) and sneak into the power station via the jetty that carries coal to the plant. Members of ?Operation Ikea? set sail on rafts made from pallets and oil drums; ?Operation Treasure Island? on inflatable dinghies previously stashed away in the woods and located using elaborately hand-drawn treasure maps. All treasure came with its own paddles, inflating pump and small bottle of rum. Several affinity groups were seen rummaging around in the woods, some having spent the night avoiding the helicopter that circled overhead searching for pirates. A total of 29 vessels made it onto the water, including 8 kayaks and a currach (made in the woods overnight). Despite police interceptions (termed ?rescues? in the press), at least one vessel made it all the way and the crew dropped a banner reading ?COAL: Starter Gun For Climate Chaos? – before collapsing from sheer exhaustion having paddled hard for an hour. The other pirates succeeded in tying up plenty of police vessels with cheeky water-bound cat and mouse antics. The Jolly Roger was later seen flying from a police boat and an officer wearing a pirate hat ? a convert perhaps? The green group made their way over land to the coal-powered colossus. They used the outer Harris fence – a temporary extra security measure – as a ladder to scale the tall spiky middle fence, before the cunning use of a warning sign thrown at the final electric fence established that it was in fact turned off. A small number of triumphant activists made it into the plant to be immediately jumped on by riot cops just as the first raft appeared on the horizon. The silver group aimed to storm Kingsnorth by air using fighter jets, I mean, erm, balloons and kites. At least one parachute was seized by police while making its way onto site ? pushing the definition on seizing offensive weapons just a bit!. Unfortunately weather conditions were not quite right and Betsy the helium balloon pig never made her giant leap to the skies. Keep a look out above Kingsnorth for future piggy action. The orange pod was the fluffy contingent, made up of kids, locals and non-arrestables – and seems to have suffered the largest number of arrests. Having been told by loudspeaker from a police helicopter that if they did not disperse immediately at the agreed finish time then police dogs, horses and long batons would be deployed, a mere 19 protesters decided to stand their ground in defence of the right to protest. All were promptly arrested. The camp might be over, but the campaign against Kingsnorth and other polluters continues, with other actions taking place including: ** Protesters scaled an electricity pylon and unfurled a ?Shut Down Kingsnorth? banner. ** Campers occupied the roof of Smithfield Meat Market and dropped a ?Stop Climate Change: Go Vegan? banner. ** 15 campers descended on Mildenhall US Air Based in Suffolk, some dressed as planes to highlight military co2 emissions. ** 9 campers invaded offices of coal-mining giant BHP Billiton, some gluing themselves to the doors, others scattering coal in the lobby and educating staff. ** SEPT 26-28th: The first Post-Climate Camp National Gathering, to be held in Manchester. Crash Space available. More details to be released soon. Visit www.climatecamp.org.uk