Flame, shame and symbols7 Apr 2008It couldn?t have been more symbolic. We all strained to see the Olympic flame, barely visible, ringed by a double band of Chinese security guards and British police as it approached Downing Street. ?Just look at them!? said a frail and elderly Londoner, balancing precariously on the wall next to me. ?We?ve become a police state!? she added as officers fell upon individual demonstrators who got over the barricades. Inside No 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was welcoming the Olympic torch ? and prudently avoiding all physical contact with it. You?d have thought it was ? well, not a torch but a bloodied torture baton. But, hang on! The Olympic Games are non-political ? as leading politicians keep telling us. Then why are they talking about it so much? And why did they jump on that absurd torch relay PR bandwagon? Perhaps they know that it?s just not true. For the host country the Games are almost inevitably political. In China?s case this is especially so, as its leaders milk the opportunity for recognition of national clout ? economic, political, military. Ask the people living in occupied Tibet what that clout feels like. Ask those in the Darfur region of Sudan or those in Burma what it feels like to live under an oppressive state backed by China. Ask human rights activists, environmentalists and exploited workers within China itself, about the consequences of lack of political freedom. As the torch proceeds around the world, the symbolism will become even more poignant. It?s due to cross the Himalayas ? a route taken by thousands of Tibetans each year as they flee their country to take refuge in Nepal. As a final slap in the face, in June the torch is due to be taken into Tibet itself. What is currently happening in the Tibetan region is, unfortunately, more than symbolism. The repression has increased since the March protests which exiled groups say resulted in 140 deaths. The Free Tibet Campaign reports that last week police in Sichuan province fired on hundreds of Buddhist monks and residents, resulting in eight deaths. Meanwhile the Chinese authorities have launched a programme to ?re-educate? Tibetans. The international focus on China?s role in Tibet is greater than ever, creating a sense of possibility. ?In Tibet too,? one exile told me at the London demo, ?our youth are chanting ?Free Tibet? although it is very dangerous for them. If they get caught they are arrested and tortured.? But asked to comment another Tibetan exile said: ?I?m sorry. I can?t speak. I can?t talk to you about this. We have lost so much? That?s what cultural genocide is about: the systematic destruction of everything that matters to a people. And for Tibetans it?s been going on for almost six decades now.
The Iraqi whirlwind6 Apr 2008A persistent drumbeat of optimism about the progress of the war in Iraq has been audible among some United States commentators in the last months of 2007 and the early months of 2008. The reduction in American military and Iraqi civilian casualties during much of this period has helped fuel this mood, and the notable decrease in US media interest in Iraq – partly owing to the blanket coverage of both an effervescent presidential-election campaign and a severe economic downturn – has further encouraged the subliminal sense of a gradual improvement. Now, the extensive fighting between Iraqi government forces and the Shi’a militias of Muqtada al-Sadr1 in and around the southern Iraqi city of Basra – and an ensuing upsurge of violence in Baghdad itself – have forced less comfortable Iraqi realities back into the political and media consciousness. The impact of these events in Iraq, and on the contest for the US presidency, may be to replace the roseate view that had begun to prevail with a more realistic assessment. After the surge The United States military “surge” did have a substantial effect in 2007, and the increase in security in parts of Iraq that it delivered meant that thousands of civilian deaths and injuries that might otherwise have occurred were avoided – a very welcome outcome in an otherwise bleak situation. The indications from the January-March 2008 period suggest, however, that this improvement is not being maintained. The clearest evidence is the increasing casualty rate among both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. At the end of March, three Iraqi government ministries – health, interior and defence – published figures showing that 1,082 Iraqis had been killed that month; this total was significantly higher than the February toll of 721, and almost double the January number of 540 (see BBC News, “Iraqi death toll climbs sharply2“, 1 April 2008). American military losses have also shown a marked if uneven rise in the first three months of the year, reflecting too more frequent insurgent attacks. The number of troops killed grew from twenty-three in December 2007 to forty in January 2008; there was then a decline to twenty-nine in February and a rise again to thirty-eight in March (see the Iraq Coalition Casualties3 website). The sharp increase in attacks on US and Iraqi forces and civilians in Baghdad4 in late March – at the same time as the violence in Basra peaked – is especially notable. The mortar and rocket-propelled grenade attacks on the “green zone” in Baghdad have been widely reported, but these are just one part of a much bigger picture (see Dieter Bednarz, “Baghdad’s Green Zone Under Attack5“, SpiegelOnline, 31 March 2008). In the week from 24 March, for example, there were 728 attacks across Iraq, 430 of these in Baghdad (which had been the main focus of the US surge); this compares with an average of 326 attacks a week in Baghdad in June 2007, the fifth month of the surge (see Sudarsan Raghavan, “Attacks on U.S. Forces Soared at End of March6“, Washington Post, 2 April 2008). In a fix What is the explanation for this trend of events? It is becoming clear that much of the decrease in violence towards the end of 2007 was due to the decision by the Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to order his Jaish al-Mahdi (Mahdi army) to observe a six-month ceasefire. Indeed, this was at least as significant as the other developments championed by proponents of the “optimistic” narrative – the US surge itself and the associated US arming of Sunni militias against al-Qaida elements in central Iraq. Moreover, the Sunni insurgents who remain in combat mode have demonstrated a resilience and capacity for innovation that have taken US forces by surprise. A prime example of this is their use of a new generation of sophisticated and deadly roadside bombs, termed “explosively-formed projectiles” (EFPs) or “shaped charges”. These devices7 produce slugs of molten metal projected at extremely high velocities which are capable of penetrating most standard light armour. They have been in use in Iraq, and inflicted many casualties, in the past two years; but in the first three months of 2008 more powerful versions, often employing multiple charges, have begun to appear. This development has provoked the US army into a demand8 for fresh supplies of the new and heavily armoured “mine-resistant, ambush-protected” (MRAP) vehicles. A reliable military journal reports that: “Yet more weapons are being used in each attack. Typically insurgents take multiple EFPs, position them in foam to look like the surrounding terrain and angle them to do most damage to a vehicle” (see Kris Osborn, “Powerful IEDs Renew U.S. Interest in MRAPs”, Defense News9, 31 March 2008). The multiple-charge capacity means that insurgents are now able to prepare devices where a single explosive charge will deliver up to seven armour-piercing projectiles. Many US soldiers have lost limbs to EFP devices; as one American sergeant is quoted as saying, “It’s just molten copper ripping through these Humvees. It goes in one side and out the other and takes everything in between with it” (see Darrin Mortenson, “Troops’ Recurring Nightmare in Iraq10“, Time, 15 October 2007). This is part of a pattern that has emerged throughout the five-year war: of the United States responding to insurgent attacks by reconfiguring its equipment and tactics – including a much greater reliance on heavily-armoured personnel carriers – while the insurgents learn to upgrade their own operations at least as quickly. These latest developments suggest that the insurgent forces are a long way from being curtailed; indeed they appear capable of considerable innovation at precisely the time when neo-conservatives (and others) in Washington have been speaking of likely victory in Iraq. The southern front The United States role in Iraq, target of a continuing challenge from militants in the Sunni areas, is also central to the upsurge in fighting around Basra in late March 2008. The immediate cause of this was the Iraqi government’s decision to mount an offensive on 25 March 2008 against the Jaish al-Mahdi militias in the key oil-industry centre of Basra, which could not have been undertaken without the knowledge and support11 of the US military (even if the White House was quick to distance itself from the operation). The result of the intense, week-long combat has been inconclusive12, but it – and the multiple attacks on the green zone in response to the Basra campaign – are potent reminders of the Mahdi army’s capabilities, as of the complex power-struggles in the Iraqi south (see Reidar Visser, “Basra’s second battle decoded12“, 31 March 2008). When Muqtada al-Sadr announced his militia’s ceasefire at the end of August 2007, there was a presumption that his position had been weakened by the decay of some of its elements into what amounted to local warlordism. An extension13 of the ceasefire after the first six months was seen as a further sign of weakness. This, it seems, encouraged the Nouri al-Maliki government to use the opportunity to launch an assault on the militia’s activities in Basra (see Gareth Porter, “Muqtada’s fight puts US to flight14“, Asia Times, 1 April 2008). The fact that US approval was needed for the government to go ahead means that US military planners are likely to have shared the Iraqi government’s assessment. At the very least, there was an active assumption that the Iraqi army units were capable15 of wresting some degree of control of Basra from several of the militias that had established control there, principally if not exclusively the Sadrists. The failure to do so, compounded by reports of elements in the Basra police force switching sides to support the militias, is a major setback. It has already resulted in the British government’s announcement that it intends to maintain16 force levels near the city; and it will probably make US troop withdrawals that bring the total deployment to below the pre-surge levels of January 2007 even less likely than they already were (see Steven Lee Myers & Thom Shanker, “Bush Given Iraq War Plan With A Steady Troop Level17“, New York Times, 25 March 2008). The war at home What does all this mean for the United States presidential campaign? A curious aspect of the broadcast media presentation of the recent fighting in Basra and Baghdad in the US is the strong impression that what was happening was both distant and largely disconnected from the country’s own involvement in Iraq. Apart from a concern with the capital’s green zone (especially when three Americans were wounded18 there), the portrait suggested that this was all a local, Basra-centred and essentially internal Iraqi affair. True, broadsheets such as the Washington Post and the New York Times offered a wider view, but the network TV channels that are the public’s main source of news were remarkably consistent in reflecting this attitude. The source of this approach may, again, be partly a by-product of the all-consuming coverage of the domestic election campaign and the economic crisis; though there may also be an element of reluctance to confront the realities of a dismal and inescapable conflict. The result is a mix of neglect and one-sidedness that is very different from the neocon picture of a winnable war, even if it offers no real insight into what is actually occurring in Iraq (see the illuminating interview with Iraq-based journalist Patrick Cockburn, “Who is Iraq’s ?firebrand cleric’?[19]”, Mother Jones, 31 March 2008). The institutional and even psychological barriers to consistent American attention on Iraq may be very great in this sixth year of the war. But the overall security situation in Iraq is so uncertain and fragile that this studious ignoring of the war is unlikely to last. There are in addition urgent calls20 for Nato reinforcements in Afghanistan at a time when attacks on Nato21 supply-lines have escalated and thousands of Taliban militia are moving from Pakistan into Afghanistan. It is therefore probable that some combination of Iraqi and Afghanistan crises will become inescapable even for those who thought the countries could be safely forgotten until after the election. The “long war” is not going to go away. Links:
1. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/who-is-muqtada-alsad…
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7324106.stm
3. http://icasualties.org/oif/
4. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080330/wl_afp/iraqunrestbaghdadcurfew_0803…
5. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,544373,00.html
6. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/01/AR200804…
7. http://www.defense-update.com/newscast/0207/news/010207_efp.htm
8. http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3438257
9. http://www.defensenews.com/
10. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1671444,00.html
11. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/931okg…
12. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/02/AR200804…
13. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/22/iraq.main/index.html
14. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD02Ak02.html
15. http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/04/01/africa/ME-GEN-Iraq-Basra-Opera…
16. http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed040108b.cfm
17. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/washington/25policy.html?partner=rssny…
18. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,543708,00.html
19. http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2008/03/who-is-iraqs-firebrand-cler…
20. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7327944.stm
21. http://www.nato.int/issues/afghanistan/index.html
Climate Change and the Public Sphere6 Apr 2008It might seem a long way from public toilets to the politics of climate change, but there’s an important relationship between what is happening to such public spaces and what is happening to the climate. As so often, it is one of the “rich” countries where the notion of the public realm has been most corroded by individualist, marketised ideology – Britain – that provides a vivid illustration of a more general international trend. In March 2008, the secretary of state for communities and local government noticed that as Britain’s urban areas were hosting ever-busier crowds of daytime shoppers and nighttime revellers, the number of “public conveniences” available to meet their needs was insufficient. Something had to be done. The solution Hazel Blears proposed is instructive. Pubs, cafs, restaurants and shops are to be paid by local councils to allow the public in to use their toilets (or what other parts of the English-speaking world knows as “rest rooms”). This is a kind of private-finance initiative (PFI) in reverse: one in which public money is diverted to private enterprises so that they can provide what is indisputably a public service. The alternative seems obvious: to spend the money on refurbishing and maintaining public toilets, without the private go-between. Why isn’t it the first option of a minister whose remit covers the health of “communities”? Because it is – according to a crude cost calculation – less expensive to pay the private sector than invest in the public sector. The problem here – and the insight it can generate – is that the notion of “cost” and “expense” being employed is an impoverished one that fails to recognise the value of the public sphere itself. The wrong path The environment is a classic example of a “common-pool resource”: no one can be effectively excluded from using it, but it is finite and diminishing. Common-pool resources are subject to the “free-rider problem”: namely, that people can’t be excluded from benefiting from the resource, and therefore have no self-interested reason for keeping it well-maintained. In fact their self-interest lies in relying on other people to maintain it, while they spend their time doing other things. The popular English phrase that captures this phenomenon is “having your cake and eating it”. There are a number of possible solutions to the free-rider problem. Many focus on those who do free-ride, but it is less common – and may be more interesting – to attend more to those who don’t. Why would anyone work to maintain a public resource from which they could benefit equally well without doing so? The answer lies in the commitment of those people to the idea of the public realm where the common-pool resource is located. This suggests a different type of solution to problems like climate change. The most familiar such solutions tend to be written in the language of commerce and contract, according to which self-interested people will only act for the common good when it’s in their interest to do so. So tradable permits combined with a cap on emissions, for example, are proposed as a way to guarantee lower overall emissions. But from the point of view of the free-rider problem, tradable permits are part of the problem rather than part of the solution – because they reinforce the frame of mind that leads to the problem in the first place. It will always be in the free-rider interests of carbon-traders to set the cap too high and the price of carbon too low – which is exactly what happens all the time. An alternative frame of mind is needed – one which seeks to maintain the integrity of the common-pool resource because of its public benefit, not because of some private, excludable benefit that might accrue to the individual. This is an explicitly non-contractual approach to collective social action, and one which runs counter to the popular and apparently unassailable “I will if you will” campaign for pro-environmental action. When this formula is examined more closely, two flaws emerge. The first is that it assumes that the free-rider problem has been overcome – but it hasn’t, since it can’t ever really be known whether other people are fulfilling their side of the bargain. So the contract contains the permanent possibility of its own demise through internal corrosion. The second problem with the formula is its logical corollary: “I won’t if you won’t”. This is obviously a recipe for inaction, yet in the free-rider world it is the most likely outcome of the contractual approach. Moreover, it becomes even more damaging where the relationship between the individual and government is concerned, since in conditions of widespread low levels of trust in government even in many democratic states, citizens often won’t fulfil their part of the contract because they don’t believe government will fulfil its. So what is required is a different social logic: “I will even if you won’t”. This seems utterly illogical from the point of view of commerce and contract; but it is entirely rational when it comes to building the kind of social movement that climate-change mitigation requires. The right shift This is exactly where the idea of the public realm plays such an important role. The public sphere is where members of a society learn what a common-pool resource is and how to look after it. It is where people develop non-contractual habits, and learn how to cope with free-riders without falling into the trap of believing that the only solution is privatised “incentivisation” – which just makes the problem worse. Taxes, fines, exemptions, rewards and permits all point away from the public towards the private, which is precisely the wrong direction. To solve the problem of climate change, a broader and wider frame of reference than seems currently on offer is essential. Technological solutions alone are not enough – but nor are political solutions, so long as they run along the same lines that caused the problem in the first place. This is why Hazel Blears’s favouring of the privatised solution to the problem of public conveniences is bad news not just for late-night revellers but for the fight against climate change. It reinforces the brutal assault on the idea of the public realm which has been such a marked feature of life in Britain over the last thirty years. Yet without this idea, and a commitment to its protection and what it represents, a society’s ability to address key environmental challenges such as climate change is severely damaged. The fight against climate change is at once technological, political, economic and cultural – and the biggest cultural change the government could effect would be to expand and defend the public sphere. In too many places, however, governments seem to be pushing their citizens in the opposite direction: private-finance initiatives, individual learning contracts, council-house sales, declining library budgets, and – yes – the demise of the public convenience. All these are potent indicators of the corrosion of the public realm and public interest. The biggest casualty of the rush to privatisation, enclosure and the withering of the public sphere may well be the climate itself. It’s time for a change of outlook – one which will make so many other things, hitherto unimagined, suddenly possible.
Opposing an Era of Permanent War6 Apr 2008Five years ago on 18 March, the British parliament had its first historic opportunity to vote on whether to go to war or not. They fluffed it, and only 139 Labour MPs opposed Blair together with a handful of Tories, Lib Dems and Nationalists, and our former Prime Minister got his way, plunging us into war. That seminal vote in the face of a national demonstration of well over one million people, which represented more than 10 per cent of all Labour voters at the previous general election, demonstrated the hubris and arrogance of Blair. By using spurious calls for loyalty and arm twisting threats against individual MPs we were involved in a war. The participation in Bush?s invasion of Iraq put us in the same camp as the US in mounting an illegal invasion, defying the United Nations, and separating us from most other major powers who all saw the dangers and folly of this war. A couple of months later, George Bush, standing on an aircraft carrier, proclaimed victory in Iraq. He assumed that it would only be a matter of time before Blair and Bush would be riding in open top cars, amid cheering crowds in Baghdad. Historically, the calmest time in Iraq was the few weeks after the invasion, but gradually the attacks on the coalition forces intensified, and car bombings, assassinations increased, as did the violence of the occupying forces, particularly in the Battle of Fallujah. The insurgents, unknown before the war, became a feature of the battles in Iraq, as politically the whole thing spiralled out of control. All wars have winners and losers. The losers are the three quarters of a million dead in Iraq, the two million trying to survive in shantytowns within Iraq but away from their own homes, and another two million who are trying to survive in Jordan and Syria. The Iraqi death toll is horrific as is the loss of life amongst coalition soldiers from the United States and Britain in particular. If there are winners in wars, then the biggest prize must go to the United States? burgeoning defence industry, which has seen the most massive increase in federal spending on arms since 2001, and they continue to receive ever bigger orders from the Pentagon. They are followed by the security and infrastructure companies, who have been handed lucrative contracts to undertake work for the military in Iraq. The attempted passage of the oil bill through the Iraqi parliament shows the real intentions in relation to the exploitation of the natural resources of Iraq in the long term, even though after five years oil production levels are still way below the levels achieved during the Baathist regime. This month also marked the 20th anniversary of the chemical attacks on Halabja, when thousands of civilians died as the Iraqi forces dropped gas bombs on an undefended small town. There were protests around the world but the governments of the West ignored them, as did the neo-cons, who 15 years later took us into war. Indeed, less than a year after Halabja, the Baghdad Arms Fair went ahead as normal, selling weapons to the regime. There have been other losers in this conflict and they are civil liberties in the UK and other western countries, as anti terror legislation gives great power to the evidence of security services being admissible in court, and detention without trial is planned for 42 days for those whom the police suspect of involvement in terrorist activities in any form. The first casualty of war is truth, as we saw with the Weapons of Mass Destruction argument used by Blair. The second is the loss of thousands of lives in a needless and hopeless war and third, the civil liberties of people in far away countries who are involved in the war. Tony Blair was eventually forced out of office because of Iraq. Gordon Brown suggested last year he would reduce troop numbers with a view to an eventual withdrawal from Iraq. The troop numbers did come down and are now largely confined to their own barracks in Basra where they are routinely shelled by local insurgent forces. Gordon Brown initially resisted calls for an inquiry, then suggested there would be one but only ?when the time was right?. He used the ensuing media discussion of this possibility to effectively bury an MoD statement that troop numbers would remain the same or rise again, as instability becomes even worse in Iraq. The legacy of Iraq is that war has become more likely in other countries. Indeed, the Afghan war which is almost two years older than the Iraq war, is now predicted to last up to 30 years. We are moving into an era of apparently permanent war, in a world crying out for action to protect people from the effects of climate change, poverty, and health inequalities. Blair lost office because of Iraq but appears to be unrepentant. Gordon Brown seems incapable of even symbolically breaking with Blair?s neo-con foreign policies, and is thus alienating millions of voters, who are looking for something very different. Ironically, in the US where initially the anti-war movement was smaller than its European counterparts, both houses of Congress have voted twice for the withdrawal of troops who only remain there through the Presidential veto, and whilst Clinton and Obama both have limited foreign policy objectives, at every debate, they vie with each other for being the most anti Iraq war. We have now been through nearly seven years of tragedy since 9/11. The legacy of Bush and Blair for the rest of this century will be one of war, waste and destruction because they were not prepared to look in the direction of dealing with injustice and imbalance of power as a response to 9/11.
Blair’s Moral Inferiority6 Apr 2008For once Tony Blair told the truth. With a “wall of sound” from hundreds of anti-war protestors in the background, he told the Westminster Cathedral audience at his lecture on Faith and Globalisation on 3 April, “I make no claims for moral superiority. Quite the reverse.” Blair’s boundless hypocrisy and gall was much to the fore in the rest of his speech, in which he called for “people of faith” like himself — for whom “belief is quintessentially about truth” — to become “the conscience of the world”. No mention of course of the serial lying he told to take Britain into an immoral and illegal war. No mention indeed of Iraq at all, which the United Nations calls the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world today. Blair claimed his faith guided him “to do good, to think and act beyond the limitations of selfish human desires”. Clearly his faith went into hiding over the last few months when he pocketed a five million pound advance for his memoirs, took a part-time advisory role with bankers JP Morgan, said to be worth up to 2.5m a year, and another advisory role with Swiss insurers Zurich worth half a million a year, added to which the 230,000 he got for one speech in China was just small change. (See http://tinyurl.com/2cbhnm) The Westminster Cathedral lecture was preceded outside by a silent vigil by Catholic anti-war group Pax Christi, members of which then joined Stop the War’s noisy protest timed to start as Blair began speaking. For once, an anti-war protest got some media coverage, the Daily Mail report being one of the better examples: http://tinyurl.com/yoctq3 However, the BBC’s Today programmed managed to have a long feature on Blair’s speech without mentioning the protests outside. Musician and record producer Brian Eno, who participated in the anti-war “wall of “sound”, sent this response to the BBC: “Your ‘Today’ report about Blair’s speech failed to mention the source of the noise in the background: many hundreds of people protesting outside against the absurdity of the man who has presided over Britain’s biggest foreign policy disaster since the Crimean War being asked to talk about globalisation. The real democrats were outside last night. Funny you missed them.” Many thanks to Brian and everyone else who made the “wall of sound” protest so memorable. Blair apologised to his audience that we there. “Sorry about the people who follow me around,” he said. We intend to keep doing so until he is held to account for his part in war crimes that have destroyed Iraq, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians and turned four million people — one in seven of the population — into refugees.
Petraeus testimony may signal Iran attack6 Apr 2008On April 5, the London Telegraph reported that “British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the U.S.-backed Baghdad government. A strong statement from Gen. David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a U.S. attack on Iranian military facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment.” The neocon lackey Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney, and Petraeus together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the U.S. governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that “the U.S. must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq.” Don’t expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. On April 3, the International Herald Tribune reported that senators and representatives have made millions of dollars from their investments in defense companies totaling $196 million. Rep. Ike Skelton, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is already on board with the attack on Iran. The Telegraph quotes Skelton: “Iran is the bull in the china shop. In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi’ite groups, whether they be political or military.” All Skelton knows is what the war criminal Bush regime tells him. If Iran really does have all these connections, then it behooves Washington to cease threatening Iran and to make nice with Iran in order to stabilize Iraq and extract the U.S. from the nightmare. Reporting from Tehran on April 4, Reuters quotes Mohsen Hakim, whose father, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, an ally of the Maliki U.S. puppet government in Iraq: “Tehran, by using its positive influence on the Iraqi nation, paved the way for the return of peace to Iraq and the new situation is the result of Iran’s efforts.” Instead of thanking Iran and working with Iran diplomatically to restore stability to Iraq, the Bush regime intends to expand the nightmare with a military attack on Iran. Crocker was quick to dispute Hakim’s report that Iran had used its influence to end the fighting in Basra. Crocker alleged that Iran had started the fighting. The absurdity of Crocker’s claim is obvious, as even the neocon U.S. media reported that the fighting in Basra was started by the U.S. and Maliki in an effort to clear out the Shi’ite Sadr militias. Most experts saw the attack on Sadr for what it was: an effort to remove a potential threat to the U.S. supply line from Kuwait in the event of a U.S. attack on Iran. Crocker alleges that the rockets dropping on the Green Zone during the Basra fighting were made in 2007 in Iran. As should be obvious even to disengaged Americans, if Iran were to arm the Iraqi insurgency, the insurgents would have modern weapons to counter U.S. helicopter gunships and heavy tanks. The insurgents have no such weapons. The neocon lie that Iran is the cause of the Iraqi insurgency is just another Bush regime lie like the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaeda and the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan attacked the U.S. The Bush regime will tell any lie and orchestrate any event in order to “finish the job” in the Middle East. “Finishing the job” means to destroy the ability of Iraq, Iran, and Syria to provide support for the Palestinians and for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Syria might simply give up and become another American client state. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Israel can steal the rest of the West Bank along with the water resources in southern Lebanon. That is what “the war on terror” is really about. The entire world knows this. Consequently, the U.S. and Israel are essentially isolated. The U.S. can only count on the support that it can bribe and pay for. At the NATO-Russian summit in Bucharest, Romania, on April 4, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, “No one can seriously think that Iran would dare attack the U.S. Instead of pushing Iran into a corner, it would be far more sensible to think together how to help Iran become more predictable and transparent.” Of course it would, but that is not what the warmonger Bush wants. Perhaps the British government has derailed the plot to attack Iran by leaking in advance to the Telegraph the disinformation Cheney has prepared for Petraeus and Crocker to deliver to the complicit U.S. Congress Tuesday and Wednesday. On the other hand, the U.S. media is likely to bury the real story and trumpet Petraeus’ claims that Iran has, in effect, already declared war on the U.S. by sending weapons to kill U.S. troops in Iraq. By next Thursday we will know from how the Petraeus-Crocker dog and pony show plays in the U.S. Congress and media whether the Bush regime will commit yet another war crime by attacking Iran.
Darling ducked the difficult decisions6 Apr 2008Like the Lord Almighty, the Chancellor giveth, and the Chancellor taketh away. On the one hand a 10 per cent increase in plane duty will force aviation to pay more of its environmental costs and help reduce emissions. On the other, Alistair Darling?s explicit support for the expansion of both Heathrow and Stansted airports will force emissions ever upwards. A higher rate of first-year tax on polluting 44s will reduce emissions. But postponing the increase in fuel duty will increase them. If his Budget speech to the Commons is to be believed, Darling has made up his mind: climate change is the greatest challenge facing us all, and ?there will be catastrophic economic and social consequences if we fail to act?. In response to this, with great determination and steely efficiency, the Chancellor . . . fails to act. There was no more money for the cash-strapped low carbon buildings programme, so the UK domestic renewables sector will continue to decline. Aviation can expand virtually unchecked. By caving in to the roads lobby and postponing the increase in fuel duty, he is making fossil fuel slightly cheaper in real terms, helping to increase consumption. Darling also wants to ?encourage sustainable biofuels?, apparently not realising that in today?s world the phrase is an oxymoron. He is happy to jump on the Daily Mail?s plastic bags bandwagon ? a campaign of marginal importance environmentally ? but unwilling to do anything to encourage manufacturers to produce goods more sustainably. And so it goes on. Big decisions have been postponed. Instead of agreeing that the UK?s reductions targets should be bumped up to 80 per cent by 2050, in line with the latest science, this decision has been handed to the Committee on Climate Change and put off until December. There were no headline announcements on road pricing; it will be subject to further study. There was no announcement on feed-in tariffs to support micro-renewables, despite this being heavily trailed. New houses will be zero-carbon from 2016, and commercial properties zero-carbon from 2019. But there is nothing substantial to reduce pollution from the existing housing stock, which at 27 per cent of UK emissions is one of our big gest sources of CO2. The government will give 26m to something called the Green Homes Service, but that has yet to be launched ? and 26m really isn?t very much money. At this rate of progress, our existing homes will be carbon-neutral by about the year 5000, when most of Britain will be under water. The inescapable conclusion is that if the government does pass the Climate Change Bill as intended and set itself legally binding cuts in carbon, it will be hard-pressed to achieve them ? particularly if the 2050 target is indeed raised to 80 per cent, as the green coalition group Stop Climate Chaos and many others are demanding. A little-noticed win for the climate-change movement was achieved recently when the government agreed to annual indicators of progress on carbon cuts, rather than just the five-yearly budgets. But this will make it even more difficult for ministers to duck difficult decisions, as Darling is doing by pledging commitment to acting on global warming while doing nothing substantial to reduce emissions. The beauty of the Climate Change Bill approach is that it will forcibly iron out these inconsistencies in government policy. Future chancellors will not be able to stand up before the country and simply pledge action; they will be judged by what happens with carbon emissions from year to year. If a future Alistair Darling wants to make petrol cheaper for motorists, thereby increasing emissions, he must force even deeper cuts in another sector of the economy to make up for it. There is no middle way. But the bill still has a rather large hole in it ? one large enough to fly a jet or sail a tanker through. International aviation and shipping are still excluded from our domestic targets, on the grounds that this aspect of our carbon footprint is shared with other countries. Ministers pretend that the issue is terribly complicated, but it really isn?t. We could simply count all the emissions from each departing plane or ship, but ignore those that arrive. It?s all the same to the planet.
Fending off the English6 Apr 2008Here we go again. Every few weeks, Gordon Brown’s crusade to re-establish “Britishness” rears its tired head. A fortnight ago we were treated to Lord Goldsmith’s proposals for schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the Queen, and a new Britain Day to help “create a greater sense of shared belonging”. This week, justice minister Michael Wills was wheeled out to fire the latest salvo with a speech on “the politics of national identity”. Britishness, says Wills, in a precise echo of Brown, is the glue that binds us together. English or Scottish, Jewish or Muslim, black or white, bourgeois or proletarian – everyone loves being British. Which is why the government is going to draw up a “British statement of values”. It doesn’t know what these values are yet, but when it’s worked them out (with a little help from all of us), it’s sure that we’ll be keen to celebrate them – perhaps on Britain Day. Clumsy but dogged – rather like the prime minister himself – Brown’s ongoing campaign for “Britishness” is an exercise in top-down futility. The reality is that Britain is dying, and the government knows it. An institution which was clumsily welded together from four distinct nations in order to service a global empire has today, that empire gone, lost its point and purpose. Westminster politicians of all stripes regularly talk in hushed tones about “the breakup of the union” as if it were the worst thing in the world. Yet the breakup of the union is probably inevitable – and if the government doesn’t like it, it only has itself to blame. Britain is under assault from many quarters – but the biggest threat, perhaps counter-intuitively, comes from the English. When Labour created a Scottish parliament, and assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland, it claimed they would strengthen, not weaken, the British state. But the devolution process was incomplete because the largest British nation – England – was not included. Today’s constitutional settlement brings almost daily reminders of why this is an injustice – and the English are waking up to it. As they do, they threaten not only the future of the union but the future of Gordon Brown, Michael Wills and the government of which they are a part. The Scottish today have a powerful and effective parliament; the Welsh have a less powerful but still impressive devolved assembly, as does Northern Ireland. All of these nations also have representatives in the British parliament at Westminster. The English, meanwhile, have the worst of both worlds. Instead of our own elected parliament or assembly, we have unaccountable “regional assemblies” – eight of them, which make major decisions on housing, spatial planning and transport, among other things, with no recourse to the people they claim to represent. Meanwhile, at Westminster, Scottish and Welsh MPs can make decisions about the future of England for which they will never have to answer to their constituents. This – the thorny old West Lothian question – is the timebomb ticking quietly under Brown’s “Britishness” agenda, and it is what will eventually doom it. Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs sitting at Westminster can vote, and have done, to impose policies on the English which their constituents at home will not have to suffer, and for which they will not be answerable at the ballot box. Most notoriously, this has happened in two of New Labour’s most controversial policy areas. In 2003, government proposals to create Foundation Hospitals were rejected by the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly. Only England remained, and Labour MPs were split. A parliamentary amendment removing Foundation Hospitals for England from the proposed Health and Social Care Bill was supported by most English MPs – but Welsh and Scottish MPs, drilled into the lobbies by the government, defeated them. The next year the same thing happened when university “top-up fees” were rejected in Scotland and Wales but imposed on the English by just five votes – the votes of Scottish MPs. England today is the only British nation without any form of democratic devolution. It is the only nation in Europe without its own parliament or government. It has fewer MPs per head of population than the other British nations, and receives considerably less money per head from the treasury. Opinion polls show that the English are increasingly aware of this injustice – and increasingly unhappy (Alex Salmond enjoys reminding the English of the unfairness of the situation, for obvious reasons). This unhappiness, which is coalescing into resentment and anger, threatens not only the union, but the government’s power base. New Labour is a Scottish creation, and any devolution to England could destroy not only the (Scottish) prime minister but the legitimacy of his government – a government which, if you removed its Scottish and Welsh MPs from the equation, would be a minority administration in England. In this context, it becomes clear why the government is so keen on “Britishness”: it is trying to hold the English at bay; trying to avoid having to finish the devolution project by ensuring that England, too, controls its own affairs. As a result, we are seeing a mirror-image of the UK’s pre-1997 constitutional injustices. Back then, the Scottish were resentful at being ruled from Westminster by a political party – the Tories – which did not represent their interests and which used their country as a testing ground for unpopular policies, most notoriously the poll tax. The Tories responded either by ignoring them and hoping they would go away or by issuing hysterical warnings about the breakup of the union. Sounds familiar? Today England has the illegitimate government, and the English are the guinea pigs for its unpopular ideas. It responds by simply denying the legitimacy of their claims (“separatist nationalism must be taken on”, squeaks Michael Wills) or by feebly grasping at a fading British mythology. Some Scottish or Welsh nationalists may be enjoying the schadenfreude of seeing the English get a taste of their own medicine – but they shouldn’t. This is not about setting the English up against the Scots or the Welsh. It is, at root, about democracy and about justice. It is about all of us – Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and English – getting Britain off our backs.
Loyalty to Corporation, Services to Customers6 Apr 2008HEFCE wants from staff loyalty. From an article by John Gill in THES, 30 Nov 2007: A report from the Leadership, Governance and Management Strategic Committee of the Higher Education Funding Council for England says that the sector is “on the cusp of substantial and complex change” and calls for staff to adopt new attitudes. It says: “Staff will need to be more aware of and aligned to the strategic needs of the higher education institution. “Academics’ goals are often related to their discipline rather than their institution, and they will need to develop institutional loyalties in addition to discipline loyalties.” It also warns universities not to be “afraid” of the language and culture of business, and says that managerial leadership is not valued or rewarded highly enough. So, the new corporate mentality of universities make them love loyalty and demand loyalty from their staff. But it is widely accepted that a person’s answers to the question “What you do not like?” provide more insights into his/her personality than answers to a positively charged question “What do you like?” Let us apply the same approach to universities and see what they do not like. A case study is provided by the Leeds Metropolitan University’s programme document “Leeds Met ACTS: Attitude, Character & Talents” for its new staff performance development system, see Leeds Met ACTs Source Booklet. Staff attitudes are divided in two groups: More Effective Behaviours and Less Effective Behaviours. It is the Less Effective Behaviours list that is interesting. A few gems: Does not accept the concept of “customer” or “service user” Does not demonstrate respect for rules, regulations and procedures Does not prepare written or verbal communication effectively for meetings and other interactions Does not engage with the Vision & Character of Leeds Met Does not volunteer new ideas/suggestions for improvement Sceptical about change – lets negative reaction to change affect morale of self and others Fails to explain the need/reasons for change
Talks negatively about others and the university Uses learning and development opportunities purely for own self development or recognition We see the prominent role of the concept of “customer” or “service user”. It is another key buzzword; I feel that it is directly linked to the loyalty issue. Indeed, Lewis Elton‘s brief letter to THES (“Client not customer”, 25 November 2005) contains a remarkably precise formulation: Students are neither customers (“persons who buy”), nor consumers (“persons who purchase goods or services”) – they are clients (“persons who seek the advice of a professional man or woman”). [...] (All quotes are from the Collins English Dictionary.) If we accept that students are clients who seek the advice of a professional man or woman, we instantly recognise that the relations between a client and a professional are regulated by professional codices controlled by a wider professional community. You cannot just come to a solicitor, hand her money and dictate what she has to do for you — a solicitor’s primary responsibility is compliance with the law and extensive professional regulations. Similarly, you cannot come to GP and demand a prescription — it is a doctor’s duty to decide what is best for you on the basis of his experience and, again, norms of his profession. In my humble opinion, only loyalty to their disciplines and their communities makes academics what they are. In the present disputes about the future of academia, we have to insist that we are professionals, that only the peer review and peer control of professional communities ensures both rigour of research and high standards of education — and, of course, we have to insist that students are our clients. Moreover, it is crucial for survival of universities that some of our students become our disciples and absorb the ethics norms of our communities. HEFCE wants to de-professionalise university staff by cutting their connections to professional communities and professional networks. It could be part of a wider picture: anecdotal evidence suggests an increasingly hostile stance of the Government towards learned societies. But this is a serious issue which has to be properly discussed on its own. Disclaimer. Should I remind you that my views are mine alone and not those of my employer, or of any professional organisation, or anyone else, for that matter?
The Watchdog that did not Bark5 Apr 2008?No party financial records were shredded. They are held in electronic format, and cannot be shredded,? proclaimed the British National Party after Jon Cruddas MP exposed the party?s dodgy financial dealings in the House of Commons on 18 December. By 13 February, following the broadcast of the BBC?s File on 4 investigation into the BNP?s finances, the BNP had changed its tune. Said John Walker, the BNP treasurer: ?The bag of shredded items produced in the studio to me which the listeners were expected to believe the BBC?s claims, appeared to be in the main, working copies of the print outs of the book keeping software and draft accounts. To suggest I shredded cheques and invoices is ridiculous, why would I destroy invoices, as I would not have paperwork to cover the expenditure as required by the auditor.? The BNP works on the principle that if one lie is exposed, try another, and hope no one notices the contradiction. Apart from the fact that Walker now admits that the BNP does have non-electronic records, Searchlight?s perusal of the shreds has revealed numerous pieces of original receipts and cheques, clearly identifiable by their various colours, typestyles and handwritten details. They include numerous references to various family members of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, which may bolster the allegations from across the political spectrum that Griffin treats the party as his ?cash cow?. Another name that appears on several of the bits of paper is Vanguard Promotions. This is the private printing business in Leeds owned by Mark Collett, the party?s unpopular and incompetent graphic designer and star of the Channel 4 television documentary Young, Nazi and Proud. His imprint appears on many BNP leaflets and many people have questioned the relationship. Walker was also rather coy about the BNP?s failure to include a donation of 5,315 from Steve Johnson on its return to the Electoral Commission for July to September 2007. ?Only one donation for the 3rd quarter of 2007 ? was missed,? glossing over the fact that this was 50% of the total number of donations. ?It was not reported to my regional treasurer at the time,? he continued, protecting another seriously incompetent BNP officer David Hannam, ?and as soon as the Electoral Commission brought this matter to my attention it was duly reported to the satisfaction of the commission?. Walker does not explain how the Electoral Commission knew about the donation to bring it to his attention before he reported it. Perhaps he does not want to admit that he found out about the omission from Searchlight?s Stop the BNP website. Reporting a donation late is not the unique preserve of the BNP. The Electoral Commission publishes a list of donations reported in the fourth quarter of 2007 that should have been reported previously. Donations to all three main parties and others are on it, but not Johnson?s, which has simply been added to the BNP?s quarterly list as if it had been reported on time. It is unclear why the BNP receives such apparently preferential treatment from the Electoral Commission. The BNP reported three donations received in the final three months of 2007, from Sheila Butler, Charles Wentworth and Adam Champneys. Each gave precisely 5,000. Champneys, who has made large donations to the party before, appeared on the BNP?s list of candidates for the South East in the 2004 European election. Butler is new to the donors? list. It is not known whether she is the same Sheila Butler who made donations to the UK Independence Party in the South West in 2003 and 2004. The shredded financial records had originated from John Brayshaw, Walker?s predecessor as BNP treasurer. Before resigning he refused to sign off the party accounts because he had not been given access to all the records he wanted to see. He told the Electoral Commission that he had resigned as BNP treasurer ?as a number of irregularities had come to light?. Explaining that he had seen Walker and Hannam shredding the documents and been told to burn them, he declared: ?I have not seen what the party sent to the commission but do not believe it is a full and accurate set of accounts for the BNP?. But the Electoral Commission was unconcerned. It took just two weeks to dismiss the matter, without even asking to see his evidence. Its response to him was blunt: ?with regard to a breach of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, we currently have no reason to believe that such a breach has taken place?. Jon Cruddas MP was similarly unable to persuade the Electoral Commission to take complaints against the BNP seriously. In a letter dated 28 January 2008 the Commission pointed out that the BNP had paid the ?appropriate fine of 1,000? for the late submission of its 2006 accounts, in other words end of story. As for the BNP?s attempt to solicit donations from overseas via its front group Civil Liberty, the Commission dismissed the concerns stating that there was not ?sufficient evidence to establish that ?Civil Liberty? was an organisation of any significant scale, that it raised any substantial funds from any source, or that it passed funds to the British National Party?. Civil Liberty is not a limited company and has no obligation to make its accounts public. How exactly did the Electoral Commission investigate what funds it had raised? Did the Commission do any more than ask the BNP and/or the BNP officers who ran Civil Liberty, Kenny Smith and Kevin Scott? On this the letter is silent. ?The Commission does however monitor the activities of political parties and associationed [sic] organisations and individuals, and keeps matters under review,? the letter concludes. We are not reassured.
Under the Knife5 Apr 2008Tom Nairn recently described parliament as ?a dry-rot infested ruin where one shame succeeds another?. Decay appears to be spreading rapidly. The speed with which former health secretary Patricia Hewitt, and the former health minister Lord Warner, have transferred their services to private healthcare companies appears less and less shocking. It?s not simply the snouts-at-the-trough aspect that is of concern. What their actions show is that the advance of private healthcare at the expense of formerly public provision is sufficiently entrenched to make them confident of a lucrative future. It should make what is happening clearer to the public too. Since 2000, the year of the NHS Plan, a central feature of government policy for the NHS has been the concealment of its real trajectory. At the acute healthcare conferences organised annually by private healthcare analysts Laing and Buisson, for example, ministers and top civil servants have for several years given detailed policy briefings to companies on new private sector healthcare opportunities, while Hewitt was constantly assuring journalists that NHS privatisation was ?out of the question?. Creeping privatisation Nowhere has concealment of the government?s real aims been more rigorously applied than in the independent sector treatment centre (ISTC) programme. Ostensibly designed primarily to harness additional capacity from the private sector to reduce waiting times for elective (non-emergency) operations such as knee replacements and cataract removals, privately owned ISTCs ? 23 of them, spread across England, plus one in Scotland ? have in reality served as a bridgehead for market penetration of the NHS, the first time that NHS surgical care has been systematically handed over to for-profit providers. So far this has meant ensuring adequate and financially risk-free levels of clinical activity, encouraging companies to set up in business to compete with NHS hospitals and treatment centres. It also involves significant and ongoing transfers of NHS staff. But because the NHS remains one of the most popular institutions in the country, replacing public with private services involves enormous political risk. How many MPs ? including Conservatives, at least in marginal seats ? would be prepared to declare that NHS treatment should increasingly be handed over to private companies, like the railways? Managing and mitigating that risk involves a wide array of mechanisms. A key example is an exercise in spin called ?integration?. In reality the only way the private ISTCs can carry out the number of elective procedures they have contracted to provide is to have NHS staff transferred to them. Originally, because they were supposed to bring in ?additional capacity?, they were not allowed to employ anyone who had worked for the NHS in the previous six months. This rule was repeatedly diluted, either through secondment of NHS staff, or by applying it to an ever-shrinking number of specialties. By September 2007 ISTCs could use NHS consultants for almost all surgical procedures. A key method in enabling this change has been calls by various bodies, notably the BMA consultant committee leadership, and the Healthcare Commission, to integrate ISTC facilities with those of NHS hospitals in the interests of patients. While the overall threat of NHS privatisation is denounced, measures to ensure that NHS staff are transferred to the new private employers are supported. For example, the BMA?s Dr Paul Miller told a 2005 BMA conference that ?as things stand, I would not accept an MRI scan or elective surgery from these ISTCs? ? yet the leadership firmly resisted a motion opposing the centres, arguing that ISTCs could bring about ?a sustainable expansion of capacity? and that NHS consultants should be allowed to work in them. A year later, commenting on the health committee?s report, Miller stated: ?For the last three years, the BMA has been shouting from the rooftops about its concerns regarding ISTCs. I am particularly pleased to see the committee agrees that the Department of Health needs to go further in enabling NHS doctors to work and train in ISTCs, as I believe this will benefit standards and integration of patient care.? Revolving doors Political risk has also been managed through the development of a ?policy community? of insiders committed to marketisation. The rapid interchange of personnel between government and the private sector ? policy makers, management consultants, and healthcare company executives ? has been particularly glaring in health policy circles. The example of Tony Blair?s senior health policy adviser, Simon Stevens, who left to become president for Europe of the giant US company UnitedHealth, is well known. Another example is the former special adviser to both the prime minister and the health secretary, Darren Murphy, who became director of corporate lobbyists APCO UK. APCO?s clients rapidly came to include all the companies involved in the ISTC programme. By February 2006 these companies had formed an ?NHS Partners Network?, under the aegis of APCO, and had a meeting with Tony Blair where they were warmly welcomed into ?the NHS family?. Tom Mann, formerly head of the Department of Health?s ?national implementation team? which imposed the first ISTC contracts on sometimes highly reluctant primary care trusts, subsequently became chief executive of Capio, which won a large number of these contracts. Patricia Hewitt?s defection to the healthcare venture capital group Cinven, which now owns Bupa?s former hospitals, and Lord Warner?s to the health insurer AXA PPP, are only the latest in a long line. And within the NHS itself a new ?national leadership network? has been formed, consisting of some 150 ?clinicians and managers from partner organisations? (i.e. including the private sector) to provide ?collective leadership for the next phase of transformation, advise ministers on developing policies ? and promote shared values and behaviours?. What these values and behaviours are is kept secret. Access to the network?s webpage is restricted to its members, and publications, resources and contacts are all password-protected. Concealing data These restrictions are a good example of another key means of limiting political risk ? information control. Such control was particularly sensitive in relation to the quality of operations done in the private centres. The first official quality assessment of ISTCs, carried out in October 2005 by the National Centre for Health Outcome Development (NCHOD), found that poor data returns rendered ?any attempts at commenting on trends and comparison between schemes and with any external benchmark futile?. The one direct indicator of clinical outcomes at ISTCs had been completely ignored. This did not stop Lord Warner declaring that the NCHOD?s report provided ?heartening? evidence of a ?robust and comprehensive quality assurance and reporting system?. A further study was undertaken by the Healthcare Commission, but in July 2007 it had to report that the necessary information was still lacking. Yet the data concerns NHS patients, whose health and lives are at risk. Concealment would appear to have been essential, as many first-hand reports by NHS specialists on clinical quality in ISTCs have been highly critical. For example, the professor of orthopaedic surgery at Nottingham University, Angus Wallace, told the Guardian in March 2006 that: ?We expect failure rates of hip replacements at approximately 1 per cent a year. But we have got some of the ISTCs that are looking at 20 per cent failure rates.? A study by Dr Gordon Bannister, a leading orthopaedic surgeon in Avon, found that 9 per cent of hip and knee replacements carried out at a nearby ISTC had to be reoperated on, compared with 0.6 per cent in the local NHS hospital ? in spite of ISTCs being able to select simpler cases. Notably the surgical repair work fell on the local NHS hospitals. Such results are hardly surprising. Most of the surgeons originally involved in the first wave of ISTCs were brought in from overseas. They were often unfamiliar with NHS surgical techniques, sometimes had language problems, and were under pressure to achieve high levels of productivity. Release of information about their results therefore had to be kept to a minimum. Once sufficient numbers of NHS consultants have transferred to ISTCs the availability of outcome data will no doubt improve. All these measures to limit political risk show that ministers and their advisers are acutely aware that the risk is real. The counterpart of this is that if the public clearly understood what is being planned, there is an excellent chance that this path to privatisation would have to be abandoned. Stewart Player?s and Colin Leys? new book, Confuse and Conceal: the NHS and Independent Sector Treatment Centres, is published by Merlin Press at 10.99
Pledges that Melt Away5 Apr 2008IT is to be hoped that Labour MP Greg Pope is kicking himself today for believing the assurances made to him by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and various senior ministers that they would review the impact of the abolition of the 10p basic income tax rate and its effect on the poor. The gullible Mr Pope withdrew his motion opposing the abolition, which had been signed by over 40 MPs, in the light of those assurances. But no sooner had Mr Pope withdrawn the motion than reactionary Business Secretary John Hutton leaped onto the airwaves to rule out any rethink of the government’s decision, claiming that it was not possible to go back on the change that was announced by Mr Brown last year in his final Budget as Chancellor. So much for promises from new Labour ministers. Clearly they are not worth the paper they weren’t written on. But what adds insult to injury is the vacuous nonsense that Mr Hutton spouted to justify his government’s inflexibility. Claiming that the tax change had been part of a “balanced package” which cut the main rate of income tax by 2p to 20p, and which left families with children “significantly better off,” he continued by saying that, for those who did lose out, the scale of the losses was relatively small. “We are talking in the worst case scenario about half a per cent of net income being the scale of the maximum loss that someone might have,” he said. It takes little imagination to trash such a blatantly untrue statement. Mr Pope pointed out that people with low incomes between 5,000 and 15,000 a year will pay up to 152 more tax and pensioners particularly could be hard hit. Well, if 152 is half of 1 per cent, then the old or low paid would appear to be trousering around 30,000 a year, if Mr Hutton’s statement had any truth in it. So Mr Hutton is, quite simply, a liar. And his political master Mr Brown is revealed as a manipulative deceiver who will promise anything to quell dissent in Labour’s ranks, with his cronies not even waiting a week before they shamelessly renege on his pledges of a review. The new tax rates took effect on Sunday and the biggest beneficiaries will be people earning 35,000 a year, who will be 377 a year better off, those on 30,000, who will see a 292 increase in their take-home pay, and people earning more than 45,000, who will also be paying 292 less tax a year. But, down at the bottom of the heap, people earning between 5,931 and 15,075 will be up to 152.40 a year worse off. However, we can console ourselves that those poor devils of struggling higher-rate taxpayers with short-term investments will see the rate at which they pay tax on those investments fall from 40 per cent to 18 per cent. Quite possibly the only truth ever uttered by the new Labour clique was when they proclaimed themselves as the natural party of business. For the rest of us, its a question of devil take the hindmost and, for new Labour, hindmost clearly means poorest. Those 43 MPs whose signatures appeared on Mr Pope’s motion will have their work cut out to fight for the reinstatement of the 10p rate. But fight they must if the gap between rich and poor is not to be widened yet again by this monstrously ineffective Labour government.
Corporate Power and the SNP Government5 Apr 2008The SNP government has played a bit of a blinder in its first ten months, consistently wrong footing Labour and the rest of the unionist opposition. It is still too early to come to a definitive judgement on the SNP record in relation to business, although some early lines of development are pretty clear. These can be divided into two main areas. First is the area of economic policy and the general orientation towards business interests. For the most part this is business as usual, little different from the policies pursued by the neo-liberal labour/Lib Dem administration. Second is the area of social policy where the SNP has almost appeared to be a social democratic government. Among the announcements was Nicola Sturgeon?s commitment that ?We reject the very idea that markets in health care are the route to improvement?.1 Other statements include ?positive commitments? as the STUC?s Grahame Smith put it, on prescription charges, prison estate, more free school meals and nursery places.2 Democrats will applaud the sentiments and make sure they examine the details. The other area to watch is the much vaunted bonfire of the quangos. There seems to be very little action here yet. This is not one of those dull media feeding frenzies on broken manifesto commitments but a serious question about re-democratising the public sector. Yes, this means resisting contracting out, shared services and all the other means for the corporations to get their hands on free money and attack terms and conditions. But the other pressing issue is the fact that legions of political appointees gum up the possibility of serious opening up and accountability. Many of these people would need to be removed in a bonfire of the quango-crats. Two examples will suffice. Sir Ken Collins at SEPA is a former Labour MEP. To be fair his long experience as chair of the Environmental committee at the European Parliament was a significant qualification for the job. But SEPA has not been able to play the role of a proper watchdog on environmental issues because it has been too close to the Executive and too willing to be influenced by big business. Collins himself is still politically active. As well as being a public servant he acts as an advisor to the European Public Affairs Consultants Association ? the EU lobbyists lobby group ? which is determined to resist openness and transparency. This is the kind of conflict of interest of which any public servant should beware since advocating for corporate interests by definition undermines the public interest. Such conflicts pale, however, beside the extraordinary fact of the appointment of Sir Ian Byatt and a whole crew of neo-liberal ideologues to run the Water Industry Commission for Scotland. Their ostensible role is to make sure that the Scottish Water is run efficiently within the public sector. But from the beginning they have been more interested in pushing it towards privatisation. This suits their friends and allies in the think tanks and private water companies well. In fact it suits pro market consultancies such as Frontier Economics, too. Frontier is retained as a consultant to the Byatt led WICS and – would you believe it? ? Frontier in turn employs Byatt as a ?senior associate?. The continuation of such appointments is an affront to the most basic principles of public life. After gutting the quangos of pro market place people, the SNP might then be tempted to fill the resulting places with its own stooges. This would be an historical mistake as it would lead inexorably to the reinstatement of the institutionally corrupt layer currently in post when the government changes. For Scotland to function at anything approaching a democratic polity changing the people needs to be accompanied by changing the structures. The quango-cracy is in it self anti democratic and more or less insulated from popular pressures. So, fundamental reform and direct democratic input is required. This might mean the wholesale abolition of many of these organisations. In fact though the whole machinery of government needs overhauled. The senior management at the old Scottish Executive ceased some time ago to be the impartial civil service of old. They have made clear statements on their own behalf indicating they are almost to a person signed up to the neo-liberal reform agenda. All the rhetoric about bringing business ideas and expertise to the public sector is itself a betrayal of their responsibility as public servants. No sign so far of any movement here. At a more visible level the direct role of business in government seems not to have abated. Scottish Financial Enterprise (a business lobby group, despite the name suggesting it is part of the public sector) is still able to shape policy on financial services by having 7 out of 12 seats on the Financial Service Strategy Group and ten of seventeen on the Financial Services Advisory Board, both of which combine to run Scottish government policy on financial services. This composition and the fact of one union rep on both organisations is the same as under Labour. The Scottish Executive Management Group has been renamed the Scottish Government Strategy Board and has lost one of its ?non-executive directors?, the corporate lobbyist and networker Shonaig Macpherson. The other two (Bill Bound formerly of PricewaterhouseCoopers and David Fisher of HBoS) remain. No changes there. Meanwhile in the Parliament the one area where Scotland could said to be ahead of Westminster was on openness and transparency particularly in relation to lobbying, where the Standards Committee declared for regulation of lobbyists in 2003. Since then the European commission has launched the European Transparency Initiative and even the Westminster parliament is holding an inquiry on lobbying. At the Scottish Parliament the issue appears dead. The amazing antics of the Scottish Parliament Business Exchange show how much contempt the Parliamentary bosses have for democracy and transparency. The exchange is alleged to be an educational venture to teach MSPs about business and vice versa. It claims to have ‘no connection with lobbying in any form’ and at ‘all times operates in an open and transparent manner’. Neither of these statements appears to be true. The interim director until January 2008 was Devin Scobie, himself a lobbyist who ran Caledonia Consulting, a own lobbying consultancy while at the SPBE. There is no public information about whether any of his clients are also SPBE members. However, we do know that former Pfizer lobbyist and head of the SPBE on the business side, Lynda Gauld, also works at Caledonia. As if that is not enough, other connections between the two organisations include the former member of the SPBE and former MSP, David Davidson, who now also works at Caledonia. The new ?Chief Executive? of the SPBE from January 2008 is Arthur McIvor. McIvor is a former marketing man from Royal Mail who recently set up his own consultancy – Art McIvor Consultants – which seems to offer high end lobbying and hospitality services. The SPBE is in other words a virtual gateway for lobbyists into the Scottish Parliament. No sign so far that this will change under the SNP or that the issue of lobbying regulation will come back on the agenda, despite the recent launch of the civil society coalition the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency.3 On economic policy the SNP are, as used to be said by the Labour Party, the Tartan Tories. Used to be said, before, that is, the former people?s party emulated the neo-liberal, pro-privatisation policies of the Thatcher government. The deeper cut in business rates made to bring the Tories on board for the budget is a key indication. But there are some areas where SNP policy departs from manifesto commitments or their own social democratic rhetoric. In much the same way that the phrase ?military precision? is now widely understood as referring to mass civilian casualties, the phrase ?Private Sector efficiency? is now widely recognised as meaning inefficient, more expensive and unjust. Two key areas to watch where there may be some potential for democratic outcomes are the Scottish Futures Trust and the mooted mutualisation of Scottish Water. The Futures Trust is heralded as an alternative to the widely loathed extortion that is PFI/PPP. Although the detail on this is yet to be worked out it is already clear that the Futures Trust would transfer public assets out of the public sector and insulate them from public accountability, much as has happened with the transfer of museums and leisure facilities from Glasgow City Council to ?Culture and Sport Glasgow? The issue of mutualisation of water was kicked into the long grass before the last election with Labour, the SNP and the Greens declaring their opposition to mutualisation ? a back door means to bring in the banks and effectively privatise Scottish Water. But in February amidst a morning fanfare the issue of mutualisation was back on the agenda as the SNP announced a review of the water industry. Briefings from the First Minister spin doctors suggested a policy change.4 Yet by the afternoon it was clear that the relevant minister and the rest of the party were not signed up for this and the matter was downplayed. Not a lot of sign for social-democratic optimism there as the vultures which have been circling the Scottish water industry for some years, circle closer. These are both fudges which will allow the private sector in by the back door. They are not ?public sector? solutions and will end up defrauding the public and putting public services beyond direct accountability. All in all then, there are some signs of social democratic reform, but for the most part it is business as usual with a few frills attached. 1. BBC Online Plans to end private cash for NHS Last Updated: Thursday, 21 June 2007, 15:21 GMT 16:21 UK
2. STUC Response to Scottish Government Budget 14th November 2007 http://www.stuc.org.uk/press-releases/441/stuc-response-to-scottish-gove…
3. http://www.lobbyingtransparency.org . Spinwatch.org is a founding member.
4. Steven Vass ‘Ofwat backs cross-border competition ‘, Sunday Herald, 1 March 2008
False Propheteering4 Apr 2008?And thus I clothe my naked villany,
With odd old ends stol’n forth of holy writ
And seem saint, when most I play the devil.?
Richard 111, William Shakespeare. There were two of those ?this cannot be real? moments, during March. One was that a man who enjoined a ?crusade?, has barely had a passing acquaintanceship with the truth in years, has joint responsibility for over a million Iraqi deaths in five years and those of an average of six thousand Iraqi children a month from his tenure beginning 1997 through March 2003, is to teach subjects including ?Faith? at Yale University. (The aforementioned deaths added to the silent slaughter of a nation, starting in August 1990.) The second surreality is that he is to address the congregation on ?Faith? from the pulpit at London’s (Roman Catholic) Westminster Cathedral, on the 3rd of April, at the invitation of no less than a Cardinal: Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor.
For those who have been vacationing on another planet for approaching eighteen years, meet Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, QC., who embraced Catholicism in time for Christmas, was welcomed in to the arms of the Church by the Pope himself and the Cardinal. ?If he wants a public platform, it should be from the Dock at the War Crimes Tribunal at the International Criminal Court at The Hague?, remarked a friend, pithily. At least the Catholic church cannot be accused of being elitist, embracing a man accused of involvement in an illegal war, responsible for carnage equal to many of history’s most shameful bloodbaths and facilitator-in-charge of the lies which have led to the destruction of the cradle where his ?faith? was nurtured. Can the Cardinal be unaware that his speaker shares responsibility for the damage – thought irreparable – to Ur, where Abraham, Father, for believers, of his religion and of Islam and Judaism was born? Has the destruction of Qurna, thought to be site of the Garden of Eden, also passed him by? Perhaps Blair might reflect publicly from the pulpit on the enormity of his wickedness and read from Revelations: ?Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city?? and since it was all about oil, reflect from the same Book: ?Behold, I come as a thief? and also on: ?Those men who have not the seal of God on their foreheads?. Catholics are big on confessions and they are not needed more than by the man who helped destroy the region of wonders, where his ?faith? was born and beliefs flourished. Gut wrenching ironies in evil do not come greater This man who has, arguably, ?not the seal ?? could perhaps explain his statement of March 16th 2003, four days before the illegal invasion of Iraq, where he said from the Azores – having met with his (?we pray together?) partner in crime George W. Bush and Spain’s then Prime Minister Aznar: ?... Saddam (remains) armed with weapons of mass destruction … disarmament never happens.? Two days later, he lied to the House of Commons saying that the Iraqi regime’s behaviour had resulted in the departure of the weapons inspectors. The weapons inspectors of course fled before the (illegal) four day bombing of Christmas 1998, warned by their then Head, Australia’s Richard Butler, another man who, it was subsequently established, sometimes found truth a confusing concept. That Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, Blair assured Parliament, was ?palpably absurd?. Catholic sources stated that Mr Blair would have had to attend confession in the days leading up to his reception in to the Church, in order to seek pardon for his sins. They must have been long days, with quite a list. Surprising he had time for anything else. The Book of Proverbs is fairly explicit about the most deadly of sins, all of which, an impartial observer would surely perceive, Britain’s former barrister Prime Minister to have broken on a massive scale: A proud look A lying tongue Hands that shed innocent blood A heart that deviseth wicked imaginations Feet that be swift in running to make mischief A false witness that speaketh lies He that soweth discord Blair has, arguably, hit the sinners’ jackpot. The ?mother of all sinners?, some might conclude. Whereas Collins describes faith as: ?A specific system of religious beliefs?, ?faithless? seems more apt in the case of this former figurehead of the ?Mother of Parliaments?: ?Treacherous or disloyal? (Collins) certainly describes the ignominy to which he has reduced and to where he led Britain, in the eyes of much of the world, during his tenure as Prime Minister. Ironically, his conversion took place within forty eight hours of the ninth anniversary of another illegal assault on Mesopotamia, the four day (illegal) Christmas blitz of 1998, ?Operation Desert Fox?, which also coincided with the great Islamic and Jewish festivals. A few mea culpas for that would not go amiss. Blair’s beliefs even fly in the face of one of Catholicism’s sanctities, the right to life of the unborn child. He voted for abortion and as John Smeaton, National Director of the Society for the Unborn Child commented: ?During his premiership Tony Blair became one of the world’s most significant architects of the culture of death, promoting abortion, experimentation on unborn embryos, including cloned embryos, and euthanasia by neglect.? He will also be speaking exactly two weeks after the body of the Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, was found in a shallow grave, possibly murdered, as so many of the real believers of Blair’s new faith, since the invasion, whose kind lived and worshipped in the region for nearly two thousand years. Will he reflect on his responsibility in the deaths of so many and the flight of an estimated half of Iraq’s Christians? Will he reflect that his enjoined ?crusade? indeed mirrors the slaughter, flight and terror of those against whom Salahadin’s forces fought against those earlier, never to be forgotten, marauding, invading blood lettings? Will he reflect on another Christian, Tareq Aziz, Iraq’s former – or for many, still – Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, held with other Ministers and legal representatives of the Republic of Iraq, illegally and without charge? As this man of a ?faith?, so flimsy that he has said he could not talk about it during his premiership in case he was regarded as ?a nutter?, speaks from the pulpit, will he reflect on those of real belief, who stayed in Iraq through unimaginable hardships and ongoing bombings for which he bears much responsibility, the priests, the Bishops and Cardinal Emmanuel Delli, who, with their Muslim and other Faith counterparts, stayed throughout, to help and comfort? The Church, however, is not all as welcoming to potential war criminals as Cardinal O’Connor. The Catholic organisation Pax Christi is holding a silent vigil for Blair’s arrival and a protest to drown him out, with musical instruments of every kind, drums, cymbals, sirens, whistles, horns, rattles, cowbells, drummers, percussionists and students from the Royal Academy of Music, have vowed to make Blair’s pulpit debut unforgettable. Brian Eno, musician and Producer of U2, Coldplay, David Bowie and other internationally renowned performers, will be there; diversity includes a Catholic nun with a burglar alarm. (See: http://www.stopwar.org.uk ) The burglar alarm may have resonance for some who have read the United States ?Camp Victory? website recently. Under ?Freedom Facts? is:
?The (US Army) Gulf Region Division has met its oil projects goals by increasing crude oil infrastructure capacity to 3 million barrels per day; increasing the natural gas infrastructure capacity to 800 million standard cubic feet per day….... The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers budget invested $1.7 billion in Iraq?s oil infrastructure.? Blair is to link his address on ?Faith? with ?globalisation?. Stop the War’s Media Officer, David Wilson comments: ?or ?Why I think it’s good to invade other people’s countries??. The former Prime Minister’s alleged adherence to Mammon before God is a separate article. Another anomaly which deserves a place here, however, is the Messianic certainty of the ?rightness? of the decisions he has shared with George W. Bush. Both, it would appear, seem to believe to have been directly guided by God. The address at Westminster Cathedral as the fifth anniversary of their ?crusade? is commemorated, is a week (depending on where you are on the planet) of the bringing down of the statue of Saddam Hussein on 9th April 2003. The beliefs of fundamentalists in some ?Judeo-Christian? traditions is that this is the date of Christ?s rising from the dead. The date of Easter changes from year to year, so that it coincides with the astronomical setting at the time of Christ’s resurrection. April 9th, 30 A.D. has been shown to be the day the resurrection occurred, they believe. Further: ?... the Bible gives a very specific date and hour for the birth of the Church. Though the Bible does not speak to us in terms of the Roman calendar date for the birth of the Church, yet very obviously it speaks in the language of the Hebrew liturgical calendar as given by Moses. The birth of the Church took place about ?the third hour of the day?, on the ?Day of Pentecost?, as recorded in Acts 2. This was ?50 days? after the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection of Christ was on the ?day after? the Jewish ?Sabbath? that occurred during ?the Feast of Unleavened Bread?. Now all that is very specific language. Translated into Roman calendar dates, Christ was resurrected from the dead on Sunday morning of April 9th, 30 A.D. Exactly 50 days later the Church was born on Sunday morning, about 9:00 A.M., May 28th, 30 A.D., the day of Pentecost.(http://www.2think.org ) This has been described as ‘the time of rapture of the Prophets’.* This all gives rise to serious questions as to whether there really are those in high places prepared to not alone ram raid for oil, but who believe in fundamentalist dominance from: ?The Nile to the Euphrates?. Back to Mammon. Catholicism’s new son commands huge sums for his spoken offerings. This publication has failed to confirm whether his Cathedral address is free. London’s Evening Standard newspaper ?believed? this was the case. Oh yes – and Westminster Cathedral was built on the site of a jail. Some may feel the irony of Blair’s choice for the place of his newest self reinvention. See also: London Review of Books, 20th March 2008 : Frank Kermode: ‘Did it Happen on 9th April?’ Review of ?The Resurrection?, by Geza Vermez., http://www.lrb.co.uk Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist and activist who has visited the Arab and Muslim world on numerous occasions. She has written and broadcast on Iraq, her coverage of which was nominated for several awards. She was also senior researcher for John Pilger’s award-winning documentary,
“Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq”. http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partID=4
and author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of ?Baghdad? in the ?Great Cities? series, for World Almanac Books (2006.)
http://www.amazon.com/Baghdad-Great-Cities-World-Nikki/dp/0836850491/sr=... Please also see: It Goes Back to 1990: Activist’s Memoir of the Iraq War, By Felicity Arbuthnot Terrified, humiliated ? and innocent: the evidence against 42-day detention Understanding Evangelical s Prophesy of War and the End Times: finding Hope in the Era of the Neo-Crusades
CND says No New Nukes4 Apr 2008Just one year since the huge backbench rebellion on Trident replacement, we have seen the largest protest at Aldermaston for two decades. Five thousand protesters converged on the Atomic Weapons Establishment, marking the 50th anniversary of the first Aldermaston march in 1958. But more importantly, we were protesting about what is taking place there now. The government is currently pursuing massive redevelopment of Britain?s nuclear bomb factory. The scale of building works, investment and recruitment taking place make it inconceivable that these are just routine improvements to facilitate ongoing work. It is clear that this work ? which includes supercomputer and laser facilities which can simulate nuclear weapons testing ? is for the development and manufacture of a new nuclear warhead. But Parliament has not yet made a decision to endorse such a development. In March 2007, Parliament agreed to proceed with the ?concept phase? of a Trident submarine replacement ? no more than that. In the 2006 White Paper on the nuclear weapons system, it was made clear that a decision on a future warhead would be taken in the next Parliament. We have not yet reached that point, and no decision has yet been taken. It would seem that the government has made a pre-emptive decision with its 5 billion spending on Aldermaston, and the work going on there, on the scale of Heathrow Terminal Five. This continuing development is just one side of the contradictory approach which the government has pursued over nuclear weapons during the past year. Some of what has happened has been positive. There has been an interesting shift by the government on multilateral initiatives for nuclear disarmament. On several occasions, there have been high level statements indicating that steps need to be taken. And crucially, the government has now recognised that there is a link between the failure of the nuclear weapons states to meet their disarmament obligations, under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and an increased likelihood of nuclear proliferation. In other words, disarmament and non-proliferation must go hand in hand. This was something that Blair refused to admit, somehow trying to argue that we are entitled to have nuclear weapons. Recently, Defence Secretary Des Browne has announced that Britain intends to host a summit for nuclear weapons states, to discuss decommissioning nuclear weapons. This is a welcome initiative. But if Britain is serious about contributing to global nuclear disarmament, it cannot say one thing and do another. A halt must be called to the Trident developments ? both submarines and warheads. That will be a real indication of good faith to the international community, and will help support any initiatives towards multilateral negotiations.
Paisley?s Resignation and Adams?s Regret4 Apr 2008Ian Paisley?s decision to resign in May this year from his office as First Minister of Northern Ireland has been greeted with great regret by those he has spent his entire political career denouncing. Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, described Paisley as a ?fascinating, gracious man.? Paisley, according to Adams, was motivated by ?genuine endeavour to make things better for the people who live here.? Adams was looking forward to getting to know Paisley better when he retires to the back benches. Sinn Fein?s Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister, was just as effusive: ?I think that [Paisley] will be fondly remembered by the people of Ireland?north and south?for the very courageous leadership that he showed.? In contrast, when Paisley steps down next month, his own party, whose leadership he is resigning, will be glad to see the back of him. He will likely be replaced by his longstanding deputy and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) hard man, Peter Robinson. Paisley has been steadily undermined since he took over the First Minister position. He has faced increasing criticism from Unionists within and outside the DUP, which he founded, for his amiable working relations with McGuinness. A property scandal involving his son, Ian Paisley junior, who himself resigned as a junior minister, removed his last prop of support within the DUP. Yet, Paisley has never renounced or expressed the slightest regret for his decades spent in anti-Catholic and anti-Republican incitement. More so perhaps than any other one individual, he is associated with the sectarian hatred and killing in Northern Ireland that characterised much of the ?Troubles.? For almost a half century, he functioned as the loudest ideologue and agitator. Many of those recruited into loyalist terror gangs cited Paisley?s incendiary demagogy as central to their political development. In 1986, at the head of a loyalist demonstration, he famously insisted that Ulster would ?never, never, never? surrender. The kind words from Adams and McGuinness express the degree to which Sinn Fein has been integrated into the apparatus of British rule in Northern Ireland, over which Ulster Unionists have less influence than hitherto. This, in turn, can only be understood as the product of the impact of globalised capitalist production on all political and social relations and which gave rise to the ?peace process,? the Good Friday Agreement, the 2006 St. Andrews Agreement between Adams and Paisley, and the revival of the Stormont Assembly with Sinn Fein in power alongside the DUP. When Northern Ireland was partitioned off from the rest of Ireland in 1921 following the Anglo-Irish war, the six-county state dominated by the rich and powerful Protestant bourgeoisie was an important and highly integrated part of British imperialism?s industrial and political power. Belfast was a major industrial location, with the vast majority of its considerable production exported to Britain and its imperial holdings. The continual threat from a powerful working class was countered by state-organised religious sectarianism, Orange mobs, and systematic anti-Catholic discrimination and hysteria. By the 1960s, however, the industrial importance of the north was in rapid decline. The military spending of World War II had propped up the economy, but this came to a sudden end. Considerable industry remained, but this was no longer cutting edge. Northern Ireland was increasingly dependent on Britain. At the same time, the Catholic minority population?s determined demands for civil rights were gaining a hearing amongst Protestant workers. The response from the Unionist bourgeoisie was brutal repression, enflamed by Paisley?s incessant religious ranting. British troops were sent in large numbers in 1969 to stabilise a political situation, which the British government saw as a threat not only to Protestant Ulster but to the stability of capitalist rule across Ireland and in Britain itself. Over the course of the decades of ?the Troubles? and the dirty war against the IRA, British imperialism expanded a vast amount of effort in maintaining its rule over Northern Ireland, which became one of the most militarised areas on the planet. For the Unionist bourgeoisie, the large military and related high levels of social spending, maintained for decades, became a new source of wealth and privilege, while the large military apparatus provided work for significant numbers of Protestants. This regime of perpetual crisis obscured the underlying loss of competitiveness and increasingly isolation and backwardness of Northern Ireland industry. At the same time, the Irish republic, long an economic backwater, emerged rather suddenly through low tax policies and European funding as one of the most favourable investment locations in the world. American companies poured in, finding cheap labour and access to European markets. By the 1990s, the ?Celtic Tiger? economy was among the fastest expanding in the world, while Ireland had one of highest per capita standards of living, and was eyed enviously from across the border. Northern Ireland, by contrast, was still in a war that, by their own admission, neither side could win. Civil conflict, politically and economically, was increasingly an obstacle to economic development. Who would invest in divided Belfast, trapped behind a militarised border, when Dublin was a safer, more fashionable and lower tax option?one, moreover, with better transport links to the UK and Europe? In the end, British imperialism concluded that the high levels of military and social spending in Northern Ireland could not be sustained and an agreement had to be reached with Sinn Fein and the IRA. As for Sinn Fein, with its traditional American links, the investment wave drew it closer to the orbit of US imperialism from whence most of the investment originated. These circumstances formed the underpinning of the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Sinn Fein, in return for accepting British rule, was allowed into a power-sharing arrangement with the Unionists. Sectarian division would remain an essential instrument of rule because every level of government, including ministerial positions, would be allocated based on a ?community? designation. The Irish republic also agreed to remove any constitutional claim on the North. In return for the removal of the IRA, the British military effort would be drastically scaled down, releasing forces for more pressing foreign wars. Sinn Fein would cease its paramilitary policing of nationalist areas and support, oversee, and encourage Catholics to join a reformed Royal Ulster Constabulary?the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). Cross-border links and institutions would be developed specifically to allow greater collaboration at all levels of government. In this way, Sinn Fein, and the aspiring layer of increasingly wealthy Catholics for whom it speaks, would become integrated into, and responsible for, capitalist rule in the North. Its members would take up comfortable positions in the state apparatus and develop their own business interests alongside their Unionist counterparts. For the Unionists, the terms meant that Ulster would indefinitely remain part of the UK, while the IRA would be neutralised. Without the war, the investment and tourism opportunities available to the Celtic Tiger would be available to the North. One ?strand? of the Good Friday Agreement offered a British-Irish council to deepen Unionist ties to the rest of Britain. This is to a large extent what has happened, with the initial establishment of the Assembly, with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) led by David Trimble as the major party and Sinn Fein playing second republican fiddle to the then larger Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP). Prime Minister Tony Blair?s former chief-of-staff Jonathan Powell?s recently published book on the background to the Agreement, Great Hatred Little Room, makes clear how important it was for Sinn Fein that any deal was presented in terms that would appear to be a move towards a united Ireland. Adams was desperate to avoid a split within the republican movement, such as gave rise to the Provisional IRA when it split from the Official IRA. However, in 2003, Adams announced that ?The IRA is never going to disband in response to ultimatums from the British government or David Trimble [then leader of the UUP]. But I do believe the logic of the peace process puts us in a different place. So if you ask me do I envisage a future without an IRA? The answer is obvious. The answer is yes.? These words were in fact penned by Powell himself in his role as adviser and Northern Ireland fixer for the Blair government between 1998 and 2007. [1] For the more hard-line Unionists, however, it was politically necessary to appear to have conceded nothing at all. Historically, privileges offered exclusively to Protestants generated mass support for Unionism amongst Protestants, and were justified in the rantings of a succession of religious demagogues, epitomised by Paisley himself. Concessions to Dublin, dilution of Protestant hegemony, or undermining its security apparatus were all presented as an attack on the rights and heritage of the ?Protestant people.? At every point over the extended decay of Northern Ireland?s economic influence, hard-line Unionism attempted to mobilise on the streets and politically to block any and all threats to rule from Britain. This accounts for the continual tensions within Ulster Unionism, caught between those attempting to open the way for the expansion of corporate profit in Northern Ireland, and those whose interests lie in maintaining the traditional apparatus and British subsidies. Trimble, the former deputy-leader of the far-right Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party whose loyalist strike brought down a previous power-sharing agreement in 1973, was elected as leader of the UUP in 1995. He came to public prominence in Portadown during a succession of loyalist protests outside Drumcree Church, when he did a jig in front of TV cameras with Paisley. But it was under Trimble that the UUP was finally cajoled into the Good Friday Agreement by the British and US governments. Paisley?s DUP and some hardliners within the UUP opposed signing the agreement and furiously denounced the disbandment of the Protestant-dominated Ulster Defence Regiment, and the reform of the RUC. After 1998, the DUP denounced every move towards implementing the Agreement as a concession to terrorism and insisted that IRA disarmament and weapons decommissioning was speeded up and independently confirmed. The Northern Ireland assembly was repeatedly suspended to prevent First Minister Trimble from losing support to the DUP. Nevertheless, the polarisation of political opinion was expressed by Sinn Fein becoming the largest Republican Party and the DUP finally replacing the UUP in 2005 as the largest Unionist party. Once he came to office, however, ?Dr. No? also ended up agreeing to power sharing with Sinn Fein. He was assisted in this by the effective disbandment of the IRA. US support for the IRA all but dissipated since the September 11, 2001, attack on the Twin Towers. Under intense pressure from Washington and London, and after a complicated process of arms destruction, monitoring and international verification, the IRA agreed to end its military campaign and Sinn Fein have joined the PSNI policing boards and accepted MI5 being in charge of national security. Underpinning the final agreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP, and the revival of Stormont in 2007, was also a growing unease that the protracted delays in reviving the Assembly were impacting on economic prospects. In the end, the DUP and Paisley were presented with a ?Plan B,? under which more influence over affairs in the North would be transferred to Dublin with the weakened Unionists further excluded. Faced with this, and a healthy short-term subsidy from Britain, the DUP signed up to power sharing. Sharing office with the arch-Unionist villain Paisley was in many ways a political coup for Sinn Fein. His acquiescence was proof that the fruits of office were now secure. However, while the DUP leadership around Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds are every bit as concerned as Sinn Fein to draw in new investment and prepare the way for privatisations, the longstanding conflicts remain and have increasingly focused on the 81-year-old Paisley. Paisley and McGuinness became known disparagingly in hard-line Unionist circles as the ?Chuckle brothers.? Shortly after taking office in 2007, Paisley was removed from his position at the head of the Free Presbyterian Church he formed in 1951 for consorting with the ?monstrous and ungodly? Sinn Fein. Free Presbyterians took out adverts protesting ?power-sharing with murderers.? The DUP has also seen a string of resignations. In March 2007, Jim Allister, who replaced Paisley as the DUP?s member of the European Parliament (MEP), resigned. Allister, a former lawyer, established a new group, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), which opposes the Good Friday and St. Andrew?s Agreements, calls for direct rule in a simple majority Assembly, which would be controlled by Unionists, and describes Sinn Fein as ?unrepentant terrorists.? TUV equates Paisley with Trimble and describes his attitude to the IRA as ?hopelessly nave.? A TUV candidate in a recent council by-election at Dromore, a commuter village near Belfast, polled 739 first preference votes, against 1069 for the DUP and 912 for the UUP. The Protestant-dominated seat was finally won by the UUP through second preference allocations. Paisley?s fate was sealed following the revelation that Ian Paisley junior had utilised the St. Andrew?s negotiations, at which he served as the closest adviser to his father, to extract concessions for a tourist project at the Giant?s Causeway, in which a DUP supporter and personal ally of Paisley junior had interests. Deprived of his closest ally, Paisley quietly retired. This leaves the Sinn Fein leadership facing an increasingly fractious and disunited DUP, prompting Adams to state, ?My only concern…is that those within the DUP who are against power-sharing, and there are some, would use any instability in the leadership or any question around the leadership to set back the progress we have made thus far.? Notes: 1. Jonathan Powell. Great Hatred Little Room, Making Peace in Northern Ireland. Bodley Head, 2008 (p. 213).
Was it Like This for the Irish?2 Apr 2008The history of thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, as it is being written today, might give the impression of a steady progression towards an inevitable and just conclusion. The new suspect community in this country, Muslims, want to know whether their experience today can be compared with that of the Irish in the last third of the 20th century. It is dangerously misleading to assert that it was the conflict in Northern Ireland which produced the many terrible wrongs in the country?s recent history: it was injustice that created and fuelled the conflict. Before Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators who were marching to demand not a united Ireland but equal rights in employment, education and housing (as well as an end to internment), the IRA was a diminished organisation, unable to recruit. After Bloody Sunday volunteers from every part of Ireland and every background came forward. Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ?shoot to kill?, the use of torture (hooding, extreme stress positions, mock executions), brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant: that the state was seen to be combating terrorism sufficed. Central to the anger and despair that fuelled the conflict was the realisation that the British courts offered neither protection nor justice. The Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday, which was carried out by the lord chief justice, absolved the British army and backed its false account of 13 murders, ensuring that Irish nationalists would see the legal system as being aligned against them. We should keep all this in mind as we look at the experiences of our new suspect community. Just as Irish men and women, wherever they lived, knew every detail of each injustice as if it had been done to them, long before British men and women were even aware that entire Irish families had been wrongly imprisoned in their country for decades, so Muslim men and women here and across the world are registering the ill-treatment of their community here, and recognising, too, the analogies with the experiences of the Irish. As good a place to start as any is 19 December 2001. On this date a dozen men, all foreign nationals, were interned in this country. Recognising the connotations of the term ?internment?, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland, the government insisted this was not equivalent to arbitrary detention without trial, a practice forbidden by the European Convention on Human Rights except in extreme emergencies, because each man was free to leave. The premise on which they were detained was that the United Kingdom could not in fact send them back to their countries of origin, since it was accepted that they would be at the very least a target for torture, if they were not killed on arrival. December 2001 did not in fact mark the beginning of Britain?s official interest in men described as ?Islamists?, since some from Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria who were in this country as refugees had long been the subjects of complaints to the UK by the regimes they had fled. After 9/11, however, Tony Blair professed a desire to stand ?shoulder to shoulder? with President Bush. It would have been difficult to match Bush?s executive onslaught on constitutional rights in the US, by means of the Patriot Act; the designation of ?enemy combatants? and their detention by presidential order; the abolition of habeas corpus; the subjection of detainees to torture in Afghanistan and Guantnamo or their unofficial outsourcing via rendition flights to countries specialising in even more grotesque interrogative practices, many of them those same regimes which had pressured the UK to take action against their own dissidents. Claiming that a parallel emergency faced Britain, Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ?evidence? to be heard in secret with the detainee?s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security. Each of the dozen men snatched from his home on 17 December 2001, and delivered to HMP Belmarsh, expressed astonishment: first at finding himself the object of the much trumpeted legislation and, second, at discovering who his fellow detainees were. Each asked why, if he was suspected of activity linked to terrorism, he had never been questioned by police or the Security Services before it was decided that he was a ?risk to national security?. The sole activity which some speculated might be the reason for their detention was their attempt to support Chechens when in 1999 their country was the subject of a second brutal invasion by Russia. But thousands of others had acted similarly, and such support was not unlawful. Each man was told that, for a reason that could not be disclosed, he was in some unspecified way thought to be linked to unspecified persons or organisations, in turn linked to al-Qaida, which was then depicted by now discredited ?al-Qaida experts? as taking the form of the hierarchical pyramid of classic Western military systems. At the base of the pyramid were those who had been interned, almost all of whom said that they had never heard of al-Qaida before 11 September 2001. All of this echoed other wrongful detentions, like that of John Walker in 1974, when the West Midlands police coerced an innocent Irishman into confessing that he was an IRA ?brigadier?, ignorant of the fact that such a title existed only in the British army. This confession was nevertheless swallowed whole. Walker was one of the Birmingham Six, all of whom spent 16 years in jail before the assertions of their prosecutors were finally discredited. There should have been no need for the Muslim community to anticipate a similar wait, since just before Christmas 2005, three and a half years after internment had been rushed through Parliament, the House of Lords gave its judgment on that legislation in what should have stood as the most important legacy of British law in recent history. The law lords swept aside what had been said by the attorney general to constitute a just system necessary for national security. Focusing on the government?s disproportionate response to a claimed emergency, and its indefinite detention only of foreign nationals, the language of the law lords was heroic in its strength. There was a sense that the ruling?s importance went far beyond its importance to the 12 detainees, eight of whom had now been driven into mental illness, four of those into florid psychosis, and had been transferred by the home secretary from Belmarsh to Broadmoor. Since the judgment, however, signalling as it did that the government had impermissibly crossed the legal barriers guaranteed by domestic and international treaties, it has become clear that the government intends to ignore the spirit if not the letter of the decision. It has also become clear that the government had, and continues to have, a wider strategy of which internment legislation was only one part. Little by little, ripples of information have found their way to the surface, sometimes confirmed by the government, sometimes denied. While the world knows and can assess for itself what chains of reaction were created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by the enormity of injustice suffered by the Palestinians, the cumulative effect of many other policies deserves analysis. It emerged for instance that in late 2001 the UK had begun to tip off other governments, for the ultimate benefit of the US, of the whereabouts of British nationals and British residents. Moazzem Begg, who was living with his wife and children in Pakistan, was kidnapped in January 2002; within hours he was in the hands of Americans (with a British Intelligence agent to hand), and transported without any semblance of legality to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, by this time an interrogation camp where torture was practised. After a year during which he witnessed the murders of two fellow detainees, he was moved to Guantnamo Bay. Until he finally returned to this country in 2005, nothing was known of the presence at his abduction of a British agent. Instead, for the whole of that year in Bagram, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office repeatedly told his father that they had no information about Begg and that the Americans would tell them nothing. Seemingly unrelated areas of injustice, we now learn, have all along been connected. Two British residents, acknowledged to have been seized in 2002 in the Gambia and subjected to rendition by the US as a direct result of information provided by British Intelligence, were for the next five years subjected to interrogation (including torture) primarily to obtain information about a man interned in this country. One of those interned in December 2001, a Palestinian, trying to guess the reason for his detention the next year, told his lawyers that he had raised money for many years to build wells and schools and to provide food in Afghanistan. One of those wells, he said, bore the name of the son of its donor, Moazzem Begg. The Palestinian?s lawyers, knowing by now that Begg was in Guantnamo, started to think the unthinkable. During hearings at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, at which these cases are heard, there is a brief opportunity for the detainee?s lawyer to question an anonymous Security Service witness concealed behind a curtain, before the lawyer is asked to leave the court so it can continue its consideration of secret evidence. The witness was asked: ?Would you use evidence that was obtained by torture?? The unhesitating answer was: ?Yes.? The only issue that might arise, the agent added, would be the weight such evidence should be given. Three years after this, in December 2005, the House of Lords affirmed the principle that no English court can ever admit evidence derived from torture, no matter how strong the claimed justification or emergency. The message for the government was again unequivocal: the principles of legal obligation must be adhered to in all circumstances. Despite the strength and intended permanence of these two rulings by the House of Lords, however, many Muslims have come to see any protection from the courts as constituting only a temporary impediment before the government starts to implement a new method of avoidance. After three months of prevarication, the internees were released on bail under stringent conditions, but the Home Office was simultaneously pushing yet more emergency legislation through Parliament, this time to introduce Control Orders which placed a substantial number of restrictions on the now released detainees. Any breach would constitute a criminal offence carrying a penalty of up to five years? imprisonment. Three of the detainees, including the Palestinian, were pitch-forked out of Broadmoor during the night and driven by police to empty flats. One of them, a man without arms, was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact anyone without committing a criminal offence, subject to a curfew and allowed no visitors unless approved in advance by the Home Office. Two of these three detainees were immediately readmitted to psychiatric hospitals; neither of them had been hospitalised before being interned. These men had already been found to have patterns of psychological damage explicable only as a result of their indefinite detention. Other former detainees, particularly those with wives and children, soon began to recognise the disturbing effects of the Control Orders. The electronic tag they had to wear, which registered every entry and exit from the house, was only one element of a family?s altered existence; a voice recognition system was supposed to confirm the detainee?s presence at home during curfew, but the machines, of US manufacture, often failed to recognise the accents of Arabic speakers, with the result that uniformed police officers would enter the house in significant numbers at all times of the day and night. No visitor would come near their homes because to enter required first to be vetted by the Home Office. Children could do no schoolwork that involved the internet, the use of which was forbidden. Families had endlessly to involve lawyers in the most trivial matters: to obtain permission to go into the garden; to attend a parent-teacher meeting; to arrange for a plumber to enter the house. What happened to these men? Are they still, three years later, trying to live normal lives despite the restrictions? The answer came only five months after their release. On 7 July 2005 bombs exploded in London. Within days it was known that the bombings had been carried out by young men born and bred in Yorkshire. On 5 August Blair announced that ?the rules of the game have changed? and that diplomatic agreements were being made to deport the same small group of detainees to their countries of origin, although the government knew that the use of torture was still routine in these countries. It was said that an assurance would be obtained that the men themselves would not be tortured after they were returned, and that an independent monitoring organisation in each country would guarantee that this was being adhered to. Despite such assurances, these deportations flew in the face of two important legal commitments to which this country is obliged to adhere: one, to send no person to a country where there is a risk to him of torture, the central premise of the Refugee Convention, and, two, to achieve the eradication of torture (and not by negotiating a single exception, while offering no protest to a regime?s use of torture on others). On 11 August the Algerian and Jordanian former internees were again arrested. There were soon more arrests, this time of two Algerians who had been acquitted unanimously in a trial at the Old Bailey in April 2005 of involvement in a conspiracy to use ricin, an allegation that had been seized on at the time of their original arrest by Colin Powell in his attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq to the UN. (One juror described how for him a moment of truth came early in the trial, when a witness from Porton Down nervously drank three containers of water while in the witness box seeking to explain why an early lab report said to have been conveyed to the police and confirming that there was no trace of ricin, had, curiously, never reached the Cabinet Office.) Those detainees who remain in the United Kingdom are still in prison or under extreme bail restrictions. One has been returned twice to Broadmoor from prison before being bailed to a psychiatric hospital. There are now two more Jordanian detainees and several Algerians, while Libya rapidly became the third state to promise safe re-entry to its dissident citizens. As for the promised monitoring organisations, one was purpose-built in Jordan in 2005, a husband and wife team bankrolled by the UK, which by the summer of 2007 (when two thousand inmates in one Jordanian prison were beaten the day after the first ever visit of an NGO, Human Rights Watch, to whose representa
UKWatch.net