What’s the matter with Sunderland?
23 Sep 2008
Ingratitude, if Madeleine Bunting’s apologia for New Labour is any guide, is what is the matter with Sunderland. The city has been ploughed with an avalanche of development cash. A school is to be rebuilt every year for the next fourteen years. Health centres, children’s centres, business parks, new development zones with the marina, fancy apartments and coffee shops… And the locals react by sputtering “you’ve done nothing for me”, slagging off immigrants and voting Tory. There is some weird “disconnect” between Labour’s actually loveable behaviour toward one of its most loyal constituencies and its dismal status in the popular perception. Working class Toryism, in the form of support for a set of sentiments including ‘individual self-reliance’ and ‘community’ and ‘family values’, is on the rise once more, a la 1979. The obvious conclusion is that the left must rally behind the government. Some version of this is likely to be the overall diagnosis of the soft left as Labour loses its so-called heartlands: regardless of all the disappointments and betrayals, despite the warmongering, privatization, pandering to employers and union-bashing, the real problem is the basic inability of the working class to recognise its true allies. The root problem is its affectless indifference and disloyalty, its susceptibility to racism and nationalism, and its gullibility as regards Tory propaganda. So, what is the truth of the matter? What is the matter with Sunderland? What might Madeleine Bunting have found out had she not been relying upon the word of Chris Mullins MP? One of the most pressing issues facing working class areas in this country, without question, is housing. In Sunderland, as elsewhere, the government has been pressing for the complete privatization of housing stock. Sedgefield Borough Council, for example, having lost a vote in favour of transfer in 2005, has been trying to persuade residents yet again to go with privatization. What is causing the residents to doubt the word of council chiefs is that the company that would take over the houses – Gentoo, formerly the Sunderland Housing Group (eulogised here) – has a track record of failure. The company was awarded an 80m contract in 2002 to regenerate a poor estate called Doxford Park, some six years ago, and it has only recently begun work. Similarly, when thousands of council houses were transferred to the group in 2001, Gentoo/SHG invested millions in new private homes, and neglected to build the rented accomodation it was obliged to build. 6,200 council houses were demolished, sold off or left empty, but the company only built 111 new houses over the next four years. The number of people seeking a home rose from approximately 5,000 to over 19,000. Meanwhile, it did successfully build the private developments, including maritime housing and the Athanaeum – the sort of investment and development that Bunting lauds, albeit with a grudging admission that “critics say” it may not seem of much use to single mothers and those on incapacity benefit. Bear in mind that Gentoo/SHG is a Registered Social Landlord (RSL), exactly the kind of landlord that the government says we have least to fear from. An RSL is answerable to the Housing Corporation, and supposedly behaves better than other private landlords. If the Housing Corporation doesn’t hold them accountable, then those co-responsible for sealing the deal should. In fact, the behaviour of Gentoo/SHG had been noted before by local Labour councillors Mike Tansey and Brynley Sidaway, and they did try to alert residents and fellow councillors to the problem. Both Sidaway and Tansey rejected stock transfer because the result, where the government had been able to impose its scheme, was a rise in rents and an increase in homelessness. However, by 2006, they had been driven out of the Labour Party for their pains. They became independents, and on the back of a successful campaign against stock transfer a lively local Respect group was built. What they had to say was important, and their actions benefited the people they represented. By contrast, Labour policy at both a local and national level pitted it against its traditional working class supporters. There is a clue right there: those elected Labour Party members who try to represent their constituents effectively have been punished and expelled. It is important to understand the rationale behind the government’s transfer policy. It wants to fund housing, but it is committed to a taxation structure that cannot raise the necessary funds without hitting the poor harder. So, either local authorities would have to borrow, thus breaking the government’s fiscal rules, or they would have to neglect housing, thus destroying the working class voting base. By transferring homes to private housing groups like Gentoo/SHG, they can allow huge amounts of money to be borrowed for investment, because the costs will be formally borne by the social landlord. If the government were not so committed to a neoliberal policy mix, it could raise taxation on upper income brackets and on corporations, to fund such investment. The ugly side of this neoliberalism is a tendency to blame the poor for their plight. One of the government’s recent proposals, dreamed up by Housing Minister Caroline Flint, was to compel unemployed recipients of council housing to sign degrading “commitment contracts” which compelled them to agree to actively seek work if they wanted to be allowed a council house – thus blaming the unemployed for their situation and forcing them to humiliate themselves in a lifeless labour market at pain of losing their home. Local Labour Party loyalists felt compelled to distance themselves from Flint’s ideas. There is another clue: the government has been complacent about its core working class vote, assuming that they had nowhere else to go, and therefore has scapegoated working class people for its failures. Another of the government’s prominent policy agendas, so dear to its heart that it made this a central plank in the 2001 election despite over 80% public disapporval, is the private finance initiative. I have written enough about its obscene wastefulness here before. Once again, the rationale behind the policy is that it appears to provide something for nothing: money for investment without incurring debts or driving up taxes in the short-run. But the net result is almost invariably a poorer quality of service and a higher cost. For example, in Coventry, two hospitals were replaced by one hospital, with fewer beds and staff overall, and a final cost of 900m, 30 times higher than it would have been to simply renovate the two existing hospitals and keep the beds and staff. In Northumberland, four fire stations were closed and replaced with two under a 10m PFI scheme. One could go on at some length. In Sunderland, as elsewhere, local government functions including in health, education, road-building, street-lighting and waste management have all been outsourced to private companies under expensive PFI and PPP schemes. Perhaps the most controversial application of the PFI model is in the national health service. Patricia Hewitt announced in 2006 that there would be big cutbacks in public spending on the NHS. She said that the reason was that generous government investment had not been spent on reforms but on salaries for greedy public servants. In fact, as Allyson Pollock pointed out, the government’s market-driven reforms had created the crisis. The costs of this marketisation consumed between 6% and 14% of the NHS national budget, on a conservative estimate. As a result, thousands of NHS staff were shed in hospitals up and down the country. The impact has, predictably, been to alienate Labour’s usual supporters. One of the main campaigners against the government’s NHS cuts in Sunderland has been a well-known local nurse named Kathy Haq, who had been lauded in 1999 for embarking on an unpaid, voluntary mission to improve healthcare in Bangladesh and who had run a support network for victims of a doctor who had raped patients. Haq might have been exactly the sort of person whom New Labour would wish to win over: a devoted public servant and campaigner, who had worked for the NHS for forty years. But she joined Respect when it was launched in the area in 2006, and became the branch secretary. One reason is that City Hospitals Sunderland Foundation Trust ran up debts of over 5m and therefore made plans to shed 10% of its staff, particularly in the Sunderland Royal Hospital. Patients were also angered when local hospitals started to charge for parking, following the lead set by PFI hospitals across the country. Problems within the NHS have been a prominent theme in the local press. In fact, although Bunting refers to the Tory capture for the Ryhope constituency in a bye-election with a low turnout, she does not notice that a surprisingly large component of Labour’s vote, perhaps more than a third, appears to have been redistributed over some years to an independent local campaigner and former journalist known as Patrick Lavelle, who made his name by campaigning on the NHS. Another clue, then: investment isn’t the same thing as provision, and one cannot disaggregate the money supplied from the way it is spent and the policies underpinning it. If working class voters experience a decline in service, the fact that a large amount of money has been spent on producing the decline makes it even worse. The PFI was originally a Tory policy, but by adopting it, the government has handed the Tories one of their main propaganda planks: higher spending equals more bureaucracy and less efficiency. Sunderland is one of the poorest places in England. Mainly as a result of the destruction of its extraction and manufacturing industries, it has suffered a declining population, particularly among working age males, and this trend is projected to continue at least until 2023. That means a smaller tax base for the city, especially as those who remain are likely to be those with the least resources. More than fifty percent of its children live in low income families, according to the Child Poverty Action Group, which is well above the national average. Even official unemployment is almost double the national average [.pdf] according to the Office for National Statistics, while a total of 31% of the working age population is estimated to be out of work. Large numbers of people are kept on long term incapacity benefit to conceal the real rate of unemployment, albeit incapacity among older males in former mining areas is in fact quite widespread. The government has a number of solutions for the industrial hinterlands, but among them is not a revival of the manufacturing base or of the unions that can maintain decent incomes. One of the few big manufacturers in Sunderland is the Nissan car plant, which was built in 1986. The plant is symbolic of a supposedly ‘new’ high-tech economy vaunted by neoliberals of all stripes. But Nissan has repeatedly threatened to close the plant or slash thousands of jobs, and has repeatedly been bailed out with millions in government grants. And while it does employ thousands of local people, who are unionised, it is hardly a substitute for the massive industries of the past. The government is committed to a City-based growth policy with a strong pound, and as a consequence has seen well over a million manufacturing jobs lost on its watch. As has been widely noticed by now, this is one reason why the UK economy is particularly exposed to the chaos in the financial markets, and why it stands least prepared to withstand a crash. Under New Labour, the remaining mining pits in Sunderland were allowed to disappear, with nothing to replace them. Today, the biggest employer in Sunderland is the government, while the services industry is the biggest sector of employment in the city. The council has sought to rejuvenate the economy by gentrifying it, making it into a more tourist-friendly zone, and building up a financial services industry, which is today almost as big as the manufacturing sector. All of these factors make Sunderland particularly susceptible to the toxic situation that we now face: public sector pay cuts, cuts in spending, a crisis in the financial sector, and higher food and energy prices. In addition, while Bunting mentions a disproportionately high rate of single motherhood and incapacity in Sunderland, she does not mention the government’s policies of rolling back single mother benefits and incapacity benefits. These, in addition to a vindictive plan to force the long-term unemployed to do ‘community service’ as if they were criminals, are poison for a local Labour Party seeking to gather votes. Further, in a city with life expectancy well below the national average, the government’s plans to raise the retirement age and privatise the pension system – while demanding that people save money they don’t have to invest in a pension scheme that floats on the oh-so-reliable stock market – is asking for trouble. To that should be added a recent rise in pensioner poverty, when a fifth of pensioners already lived on less than 5,000 a year. Sunderland is supposedly an example of where the government has genuinely tried to help the poor, yet is losing support from voters who fail to recognise New Labour’s loyalty to them, while imprudently flirting with the Tories. In truth, while New Labour has delivered some very mild reforms, there could hardly be a more dramatic example of its policies failing the working class on the one hand, and punishing them on the other. The story of Sunderland is typical in this respect. There remains one question: will Sunderland go Tory, and if so, will it be for the reasons Bunting suggests? Sunderland still has a majority Labour council, and will probably return a Labour MP even on a relatively low turnout. The worst wipeouts for the government will be in the south-east, while the polls show the Tories making least headway in core Labour areas. Further, there is nothing to support the claim that once heartland Labour constituencies are won over to right-wing sentiments, and Bunting offers no evidence for this assertion. There is certainly nothing comparable to 1979, when Thatcher won on a platform of aggressively right-wing and anti-union policies. David Cameron is successfully appropriating the centrist language and sentiments of New Labour, even positioning themselves to the ‘left’ of the government on some questions. In Wales and Scotland, where there are centre-left and sometimes radical left alternatives, the Tories are not reviving at anywhere near the rate that they have been in England. And while the Tories are likely to be the beneficiaries of government unpopularity in England, the process of party identity breaking down is advancing rapidly for both Labour and Conservative parties. What is the matter with Sunderland is what is the matter with the UK as a whole. The system is failing, the neoliberal solution doesn’t work, parliament is increasingly impervious to our needs, and we’re facing a crisis in which we find elected officials happy to pour money into the City, but extremely reluctant at best to do anything which alters the fundamentally unfair distribution of wealth and power in the society.

Victory in Iraq? Not so much
23 Sep 2008
?They create a desolation and call it ?peace?? – Tacitus US Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin last week accused Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama of failing to recognise the “coming victory in Iraq“. What’s the nature of this “victory” that Palin’s talking about? Has the US finally won the Iraq War? Not so much. For the last few months its been taken as read by many in the political mainstream that the “surge” of extra US troops into Iraq “worked” in quelling the violence that had been reaching cataclysmic levels by late 2006. In fact, this is a vast over-simplification, if not a self-serving lie put about by the war’s supporters. A number of other factors have contributed to bringing down the levels of daily killings (which still remain extraordinarily high). The ?surge? is merely one of these, at best is possibly the least of them, and at worst has in some respects been a countervailing force. The principal factors behind the decline in violence are: the unilateral ceasefire of Moqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation Shia militia; the decision made by nationalist Sunni insurgents, before the ?surge? was conceived of, to concentrate their fire on the extremist “al-Qaeda” elements amongst them that had been responsible for the major attacks on Shia civilians; and the fact that the civil war in Baghdad has essentially played itself out, with Sunnis and Shia respectively expelled from mixed communities, the two groups divided, and no more ‘sectarian cleansing’ to be done (the outcome being a net win for the Shia forces). Let’s look at each of these in turn. The Mahdi Army ceasefire may have been called with one eye on the coming influx of US troops, but it was still a unilateral decision. The fact is that Moqtada al Sadr continues to defy the US, five years after the occupiers set out to “kill or capture” him; as we saw in March when attempts to go after his Mahdi Army met with humiliating defeat. The US always wanted al-Sadr out of the way. By now, he’s more powerful than ever. No US “victory” here. Then there’s the decision of Sunni nationalist insurgents to turn on al Qaeda, i.e. the foreign religious extremists who had come to Iraq to wage jihad both on the US and the Shia population. This has been hugely significant, and one cannot discount the effect of the US decision to stop fighting these nationalists guerrillas (who were always the bulk of the insurgency) and to pay them to concentrate on fighting and killing off al Qaeda. But the Sunni backlash against the religious extremists was not a US invention. It began as far back as 2005, and US backing for the movement was as much a pragmatic recognition that (a) it could not defeat the nationalist insurgency and (b) only those nationalists could defeat al Qaeda. Paying people to stop shooting at you and to instead fight some other people that you can’t beat either is not in anyone’s definition of “victory” as far as I’m aware. And as for the third and possibly most important factor – the final Shia victory in the sectarian “Battle of Baghdad” which saw mixed neighbourhoods purged and thousands driven out of their homes – this is not merely a question of the US not being able to take credit for the relative peace that came after the civil war burnt itself out. No small amount of blame attaches to the US military itself for these gruesome events. As Michael Schwartz has argued in this indispensible analysis of the “surge” in Baghdad, US tactics may actually have facilitated the sectarian cleansing and effective Shia takeover. Either way, violence appears to have petered out in large part because one group of armed thugs achieved victory over the other, at massive cost to the civilian population, and not because the US stepped in as peacekeeper to enforce an early end to the fighting. So the US mostly isn’t fighting the Shia nationalists anymore because the Shia nationalists stood down of their own accord. It mostly isn’t fighting the Sunni nationalists any more because (a) its paying them to fight Al Qaeda instead (which they were already doing) and (b) it couldn’t beat them anyway, so its had to learn to live with them. It isn’t fighting Al Qaeda anymore because its paying the Sunni nationalists to do that for it, since it couldn’t beat Al Qaeda itself. And the Sunni and Shia aren’t fighting each other anymore (or are doing so a lot less) because that battle’s (mostly) over (at least in Baghdad) and the Shia won. The case for saying that US “surge” has “worked” and that Washington can soon declare “victory” is, therefore, a little on the thin side. What’s also misguided is the related insinuation that Iraq has become in some way peaceful. Iraq is still one of the most violent places in the world, with levels of daily killing equivalent to those of the Lebanese civil war. Last month at least 360 civilians were killed and more than 470 wounded in violence. Adjust that for the size of the total population and you?re talking about the equivalent of 800 plus British deaths and over a thousand injuries in political/military violence over 31 days. Imagine that occurring in a Soviet-occupied United Kingdom, while Kremlin leaders prattle on about “victory” and ?success?. And remember that these are just the deaths that journalists and officials know about and are able to verify. Yes, things aren’t as bad in Iraq as they were in 2006. But the fact that the blood now washes up to your waist, as opposed to your neck, doesn’t make Iraq something other than a bloodbath. Demanding that people accept some of the worst levels of violence on earth as some sort of good news story displays a pretty low regard for human life on Palin’s part. The people best placed to judge the success of US military strategy are those who have to live with it on a daily basis: the Iraqi public. They don’t get interviewed at length by the major news networks, or write op-eds for the Washington Post, but their opinions are relevant nonetheless. By March 2008, when this [.pdf] poll was taken, it was already close to being conventional wisdom in the West that the “surge had worked”. Clearly a lot of Iraqis hadn’t received the memo. The poll asks whether the ?surge? has helped in the five areas where beneficial effects were promised: security where troop levels have increased, security in other areas, conditions for political dialogue, the ability of the Iraqi government to operate, and the pace of economic development. On each of those areas, the proportion of Iraqis saying the ?surge? had been beneficial ranged between 21 and 36 per cent. Between 42 and 53 per cent said it has made things worse. The balance was made up by those saying it had made no difference. So in each area, between 63 and 79 per cent of Iraqis say the ?surge? had made things worse or made no difference. That’s between 63 and 70 per cent in the case of security and 79 per cent in the case of political reconciliation (the latter of which we’re given to understand was the overall purpose of the ?surge?). Of course, the real aim of the ?surge? was for the US to get Iraq properly under its control, not to perform an act of altruism or humanitarian relief work from which it has nothing to gain for itself, though that is exactly how the ?surge? has been described, practically without exception, in our media and amongst our politicians. The question of whether it is for one country to forcibly place another country under its control, for its own purposes and against the wishes of majority of people in the latter country, is hardly one that should be ignored – though it has been. In any event, the ?surge? appears to have failed in this respect. With the Iraqi government apparently now moving to reject the US demand for a permanent military presence and privileged access to oil reserves, the real reason for the 2003 invasion. What was supposed to be an US-client government in Baghdad now thumbs its nose at Washington and sidles up to, of all people, the Iranians. Do Palin and McCain really call that success, even on their own warped terms? Apparently dishonesty and greed now battle it out with rank stupidity for control of the United States government. The 2003 invasion of Iraq devastated the country, driving well over 4 million Iraqis out of their homes (or around one in every six of the population) and killing perhaps a million (or around one in every twenty-nine of the population) according to the best estimates available. The refugees included many of Iraq’s former professional classes, driven into poverty and marginalisation in neighbouring countries, their children into malnutrition, their daughters into prostitution. Those left behind fare little better, be they the maimed, the bereaved, the unemployed, the impoverished, the imprisoned or the tortured. Nothing can erase the suffering that has taken place over the last five years, or return the hundreds of thousands of dead to their loved ones. This tsunami of grief was delivered to Iraq by an aggressive war of choice, instigated under a cloak of propaganda and straightforward lying, that was aimed at no more lofty a goal than the acquisition of greater wealth and power. To talk of “victory” in Iraq is obscene, as indeed is any reaction from anyone in Britain and America other than outright cringing shame. Yet not only is it a commonly accepted truth, here and in the US, that the “surge has worked”, but early backers of the ?surge? are now lauded as wise sages of military and foreign policy. A little over a year ago John McCain’s bid for the White House was seen as little more than the quixotic last gasp of a failed militarist, his approval rating for the Republican candidate languishing in the single digits. McCain’s subsequent political resurrection rested almost entirely on the notion that “the surge worked”, as he had doggedly insisted it would, and it is in many ways to this misapprehension that we can attribute the now present danger of a McCain-Palin Presidency from January 2009, with all the chilling prospects that raises for the United States and the world.

London Protesters Demand an End to US Coups
23 Sep 2008
Scores of solidarity campaigners picketed the US embassy in London on Wednesday night before a huge rally at the National Union of Journalists head office to demand an end to US interference in Latin America. Responding to ongoing coup attempts in Bolivia and Venezuela, NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said that it was ironic that he was protesting outside the US embassy when its government had nationalised more of its economy in the last few days than Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had in the last decade. “The US is standing up for privilege, for the interest of the few against the interest of the many and will go to any length to achieve it,” he stormed. “It will go to the lengths that it did in Chile and will drown the revolution in blood if it gets the opportunity,” referring to the CIA-orchestrated coup against Salvadore Allende 35 years ago. “But there is one big difference – we are prepared, we have learned the lessons and we are already organised.” The 100-strong crowd chanted “No More Coups” and waved colourful solidarity banners as embassy workers left for the day. Dozens of people made speeches in English and Spanish, with some making the point that, in the dying days of US President Bush’s regime, many people thought that he would attack Iran – yet it was clear that Latin America was the real target. Loud cheers went up whenever speakers brought up the expulsion the US ambassador in Bolivia because of his links to coup-plotters and Venezuela doing the same in solidarity, with cries of “Yankee go home” filling Grosvenor Square. At the NUJ headquarters, Bolivian ambassador Maria Beatriz Souviron explained how the traditional political system in Bolivia had been swept away with the election of Evo Morales. “He has given people hope for the first time. There has not just been a change in who controls the state, but also a change in culture in a country that has been racist for so long.” Bolivia Solidarity Campaign organiser Amancay Colque, who helped organise the actions with Hands Off Venezuela, brought harrowing news from the northern state of Pando, where the far-right governor threatened to split from Bolivia and had paid mercenaries to machine-gun rural workers loyal to Morales. She explained how the elite was fuelling racism to try to divide Bolivians and that, in the right’s eastern stronghold of Santa Cruz, it was now impossible for an Aymara or Quechua indigenous Bolivian to walk down the street without being attacked. John McDonnell MP pointed out that “what is happening is not a personal attack on Morales or Chavez but an attack on the seeds of socialism that they are spreading. “What the US is terrified of is the prospect that socialism will catch light all across the Americas, so of course it has to go on the attack. But it is exactly for this moment that solidarity campaigns exist.” Venezuelan charge d’affaires Felix Plasencia said that he was “honoured to stand with Bolivia as all Latin America struggles for dignity, sovereignty and independence. We have finally thrown off the US Monroe Doctrine that treated us as their ?backyard’ for 200 years. “The aim now is to extend this people’s power throughout Latin America and the solidarity shown to Bolivia as it fights back against counter-revolutionaries is a significant step in uniting our countries,” he added to great applause.

The Patron Saint of Charlatans
23 Sep 2008
Does Moore’s law now apply to human civilisation? In 1965 Gordon Moore observed that the density of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every two years or so, and predicted this would continue. Similar laws now seem to apply to every aspect of computing. And, perhaps, to the rest of the world. The information available, the scale of human interactions, the detail involved in financial deals and trading relationships and political decisions appear to be growing exponentially. We are drowning in complexity. To be good citizens we must understand what is done in our name. But how? We lean ever more heavily on experts. But who can we now trust? Corporate PR has become so sophisticated that it’s almost impossible for most people to tell the difference between genuine science and greenwash, or real grassroots campaigns and the astroturf lobbies concocted by consultants.1 PR companies set up institutes with impressive names which publish what purport to be scientific papers, sometimes in the font and format of genuine journals.2 They accuse real scientists of every charge that could be levelled at themselves: junk science, hidden funding, undisclosed interests and inflated credentials. If journalists have any remaining function, it is to help people navigate this world: to try to understand the crushingly dull documents that most people don’t have time for, to smoke out the fakes and show how to recognise the genuine article. But we mess up too. The most we can promise is to try not to make the same mistake twice. So what can you say about a man who makes the same mistake 38 times? Who, when confronted by a mountain of evidence demonstrating that his informant is a charlatan convicted under the Trade Descriptions Act, continues to repeat his claims? Who elevates the untested claims of bloggers above peer-reviewed papers? Who sticks to his path through a blizzard of facts? What should we deduce about the Sunday Telegraph‘s columnist Christopher Booker? This week Richard Wilson’s book Don’t Get Fooled Again is published.3 It contains a fascinating chapter on Booker’s claims about white asbestos. Since 2002, he has published 38 articles on this topic, and every one of them is wrong. He champions the work of John Bridle, who has described himself as “the world’s foremost authority on asbestos science”.4 Bridle has claimed to possess an honorary professorship from the Russian Academy of Sciences, to be a consultant to an institute at the University of Glamorgan, the chief asbestos consultant for an asbestos centre in Lisbon, and a consultant to Vale of Glamorgan trading standards department.5 None of these claims is true. Neither the institute at the University of Glamorgan nor the centre in Lisbon have ever existed.6 His only relationship with the Glamorgan trading standards department is to have been successfully prosecuted by it for claiming a qualification he does not possess.78 None of this deters Mr Booker. Armed with Bridle’s claims, for the past six years he has waged a campaign against asbestos science. White asbestos cement, he maintains “poses no measurable risk to health”.9 He contends that “not a single case” of mesothelioma – the cancer caused by exposure to asbestos – “has ever been scientifically linked with asbestos cement”.10 A paper commissioned by the UK’s Health and Safety Executive, he says, “concluded that the risk from white asbestos is ‘virtually zero’”.11 Booker tells me he has read this paper. Oh yes? The term he quotes – “virtually zero” – does not appear in it.12 It does show that white asbestos (chrysotile) is less dangerous than brown or blue asbestos. But, while there is uncertainty about the numbers, it still presents a risk of mesothelioma, which depends on the level of exposure. People exposed to a high dose (between 10 and 100 fibres per millilitre per year (f/ml.yr)) have a risk (around two deaths per 100,000 for each f/ml.yr) of contracting this cancer. Only when the dose falls to less than 0.1 f/ml.yr does it become “probably insignficant”.13 But Booker’s columns contain no such caveat. He creates the impression that white asbestos is safe at all doses. The paper he misquotes also cites five scientific studies of exposure to asbestos cement, which record “high levels of mesothelioma mortality”.1415161718 Two years ago, John Bridle’s misleading CV and dodgy record were exposed by the BBC’s You and Yours programme.19 So the BBC immediately became part of the conspiracy: in Booker’s words “a concerted move by the powerful ‘anti-asbestos lobby’ to silence Bridle”.20 He suggested that the broadcasting regulator Ofcom would clear Bridle’s name.21 In June this year it threw out Bridle’s complaint and published evidence even more damning than that contained in the programme.22 So has Booker changed the way he sees “Britain’s leading practical asbestos expert”? Far from it. He tells me that “my view of Ofcom has plummeted”23: it too has joined the conspiracy. We are not talking about trivia here. This is a matter of life and death. How many people might have been exposed to dangerous levels of asbestos dust as a result of reading and believing Booker’s columns? For several years he has been waging a similar war against “warmist alarmists”, by which he means climate scientists. Nine days ago, for instance, he attacked Michael Mann for publishing a paper that shows (alongside scores of other studies) that global temperatures do indeed follow the famous hockey-stick pattern: a moderate long-term cooling trend terminating in a sudden upward bend. Mann, Booker told his readers, had been “selective … in his new data, excluding anything which confirmed the Medieval Warming”.24 But Mann’s paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses every uncluttered high-resolution proxy temperature record in the public domain.25 How did Booker trip up so badly? By using the claims of unqualified bloggers to refute peer-reviewed studies. Under their guidance he routinely mistakes weather for climate and makes claims about the temperature record that bear no relation to the studies he cites. My favourite Booker column is the piece he wrote in February, titled “So it appears that Arctic ice isn’t vanishing after all”. In September 2007, he reported, “sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration … Its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km”.26 To reinforce this point, he helpfully republished the graph, showing that the ice had indeed expanded between September and January. The Sunday Telegraph continues to employ a man who cannot tell the difference between summer and winter. But for the Wikipedia Professor of Gibberish, this patron saint of charlatans, even the seasons are negotiable. Booker remains right, whatever the evidence says. It is hard to think of any journalist – Melanie Phillips included – who has spread more misinformation. The world becomes even harder to navigate. You cannot trust the people who tell you whom to trust. 1. See Chapter 2 (The Denial Industry) of my book Heat: how to stop the planet burning. 2007. Penguin, London. 2. See for example Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Willie Soon, And Zachary W. Robinson, 1998. Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C. Marshall Institute. http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm. This paper was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 3. Richard Wilson, 2008. Don?t Get Fooled Again: a sceptic?s guide to life. Icon Books, Cambridge. 4. Ofcom, June 2008. Broadcast Bulletin No. 111. Complaint by Professor John Bridle brought on his behalf by Fisher Scoggins LLP. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/prog_cb/obb111/issue111.pdf 5. You and Yours, BBC Radio 4, 18th October 2006. 6. ibid. 7. ibid. 8. I wrote to John Bridle twice seeking to put questions to him, but though – according to Christopher Booker – he is aware of my emails, he has not replied. 9. Christopher Booker, 25th May 2008. Farmers face 6bn bill for asbestos clean-up. Sunday Telegraph. 10. Christopher Booker, 31st January 2004. The BBC helps to sex up the asbestos threat. Sunday Telegraph. 11. Christopher Booker, 12th January 2002. Billions to be spent on nonexistent risk. Sunday Telegraph. 12. John T. Hodgson And Andrew Darnton, 2000. The Quantitative Risks of Mesothelioma and Lung Cancer in Relation to Asbestos Exposure. Annals of Occupational Hygiene, Vol. 44, No. 8, pp. 565?601. 13. ibid, Table 11. 14. M. Albin, Jacobson, K., Attawell, R., Johannson, L. and Wellinder, H., 1990. Mortality and cancer morbidity in cohorts of asbestos cement workers and referents. British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Vol. 47, 602?610. 15. M. Albin, Johansson, L., Pooley, F. D., Jakobsson, K., Attawell, R. and Mitha, R., 1990. Mineral fibres, fibrosis and asbestos products in the lungs from deceased asbestos cement workers. British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Vol. 47, 747?774. 16. M.M.Finkelstein, 1984. Mortality among employees of an Ontario asbestos-cement factory. American Review of Respiratory Disease. Vol. 129, 750?761. 17. M.M.Finkelstein and Vingilis, J. J., 1984. Radiographic abnormalities among asbestos cement workers: and exposure response study. American Review of Respiratory Disease. Vol. 129, 17?22. 18. M.M.Finkelstein, 1989. Mortality among employees of an Ontario factory manufacturing insulation materials from amosite asbestos. American Journal of Industrial Medicine. Vol. 15, 477?481. 19. You and Yours, ibid. 20. Christopher Booker, 14th October 2006. The BBC falls for the asbestos scam. Sunday Telegraph. 21. Christopher Booker and Richard North, 2007. Scared to Death. From BSE to global warming: why scares are costing us the earth. P319. Continuum, London. 22. Ofcom, ibid. 23. Christopher Booker, 22nd September 2008. By telephone. 24. Christopher Booker, 14th September 2008. Climate change chicanery. Sunday Telegraph. 25. Michael E. Mann et al, 9th September 2008. Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. PNAS. Vol. 105, No. 36, pp13252?13257. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805721105. 26. Christopher Booker, 4th February 2008. So it appears that Arctic ice isn?t vanishing after all. Sunday Telegraph.

The week that changed everything
22 Sep 2008
The last week has changed everything. A series of extraordinary events in the United States – from the collapse of Lehman Brothers to the forced sale of Merrill Lynch, from the state takeover of insurance giant AIG to the Federal Reserve’s emergency bailout plan – has transformed the crisis in the financial markets into an argument about the very foundations of the model of economic governance that rules the world. For three decades the ship of global finance has been steered by the economics of globalisation – the flawed neo-liberal economics of the Chicago school. Their navigational charts for deregulation and liberalisation have led the global economy into a financial hurricane of unprecedented intensity. This crisis will prove immensely destructive – of the value of assets like property, of jobs, of pensions and investments, and of the hard-earned achievements of companies small and large, everywhere. Above all, the crisis will damage the lives and the futures of millions of blameless citizens, most of them poor. Orthodox economists did not see the crisis coming, even as the financial hurricane hit land on what I have called “debtonation day”, 9 August 2007. They still do not understand it. They failed to warn their paymasters or the captains, crew and passengers of the finance-sector’s ships. Even now, their intellectual and policy maps offer no way forward. This is because orthodox, neo-liberal economic theory pays little regard to the role of finance in the economy. Systemic insolvency is not permitted in the assumed world of orthodox economics. Very few members of the Chicago school have read Irving Fisher’s Booms and Depressions (1932); and if they have read John Maynard Keynes on the theory of money and interest, it was only to malign or marginalise his rationale for the regulation of finance. Instead, they lionised free-marketeer Milton Friedman, trenchant enemy of “big government”. But in the single week of 14-20 September 2008, the public and even much of the media began to register the scale of the finance sector’s and governments’ intellectual and policy failure. No one – it seems – is fooled anymore. Free-marketers now embrace big government with a fervour that embarrasses socialists. Even more conservative voices in the establishment media have begun to challenge the flawed economics that they have for so long championed. The world may be moving on its axis, but the change has not yet gone nearly far enough: for neo-liberal economists remain at the helm of the global economy, and continue to disseminate potent mis-diagnoses of what is happening. These economists include the world’s major central bankers and finance ministers. It is vital that their economics and their three principal delusions are challenged if the global economy is to be steered safely out of this all-consuming storm. Three delusions The first and most important of these delusions is the belief that banks and financial institutions are illiquid, when in fact they are insolvent. Systematic insolvency is, again, categorically excluded from world of orthodox economics. It was the failure of central-bank governors and finance ministers like Alistair Darling and Hank Paulson to acknowledge insolvency in the summer and autumn of 2007 that has prolonged and deepened the crisis. It is the failure to recognise insolvency now that lies behind the apparently endless, and ineffective flow of taxpayer-backed liquidity from central banks. Second, central bankers are – thanks to their reverence for orthodox economic theory – allowing illusory inflationary pressures to justify keeping interest-rates high, and refusing to relax monetary policy. Despite a spike in oil and food prices, inflation is now falling. The deleveraging of asset prices (think of the fall in property prices) will force down a whole range of prices and if not checked, could lead to deflation. Deflation will be far more devastating to the population as a whole than mild inflation. The 1930s and Japan since 1990 are sobering precedents here. Central bankers must escape from the gridlock of orthodox economic theory and act now to check the downward, debt-deleveraging, deflationary spiral. Third and most urgently, central bankers and finance ministers have to escape the constraints of orthodoxy – and think system-wide fixes not quick fixes. To ban a few short-selling speculators is but tinkering with a system that needs comprehensive overhaul. Four solutions What then should be done? Here are four steps. First, a good place to start would be where Franklin D Roosevelt did in 1933 – by declaring a week-long bank holiday. The Federal Reserve, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the Bank of England could then take time and check the books of banks for well-hidden “toxic waste” – their massive undeclared liabilities, including more than $60 trillion of so-called “credit default swaps” (CDS). Only when regulators have a proper sense of the scale of the mess, can they take decisive and appropriate action. Right now they are sloshing buckets of our money about, unsure as to the whereabouts of the financial “weapons of mass destruction” that banks have concealed. Second, there must be an end to “inflation targeting” – which is just a cover for keeping interest-rates high. High interest-rates are great for lenders/creditors, but a killer for debtors, and there are far more debtors in the economy than savers. If this financial crisis – and the planetary threat of climate change – are to be faced, there is a need for cheap (but not easy) money to help finance investment in energy security (for more on this theme, see the report I co-authored, A Green New Deal [new economics foundation, 2008]). Third the Bank of England and the Fed should regain control over interest- rates – all rates. The interbank lending rate (the so-called Libor rate) should no longer be set by a closed committee of private bankers meeting daily at the British Bankers’ Association. Rates must be set by a committee accountable to society; and, when setting rates, it must consider the interests of all who make the economy work – labour and industry as well as finance. Fourth, in order to again exercise control over all rates, the Bank of England will have to reintroduce capital controls. That might require a new international agreement, along the lines agreed at Bretton Woods in 1947. All of this is doable as well as necessary. These are the initial system-wide fixes needed to deal with systemic threats; the public have every right to expect the guardians of the nation’s finances to implement them promptly. If they are to do so, these guardians will need a new moral compass, new navigators and new helmsmen and women. But one thing that is not needed is a new navigation chart. That was provided by John Maynard Keynes in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). Its ideas will today do just as well to restore the world to a period of stability as after the great depression of the 1930s. This was a period that Barry Eichengreen and Peter H Lindert (in The International Debt Crisis in Historical Perspective, MIT Press, 1991) described as “a golden era of tranquillity in international capital markets”. To return to such a golden era, the money-lenders, speculators, and orthodox economists responsible for the gross failures exposed by the week that changed everything must stand aside – so that everything indeed can change, and for the better.

Spinning the banking collapse
22 Sep 2008
We are told that the economic crisis is a global problem, nothing to do with the UK ? it simply blew in unexpectedly from the US. Nonsense. The subprime housing market crisis certainly blew up first in the US, but all the makings of the crisis were already deeply embedded in UK and European financial markets and would have blown up here without any promptings from the US. The de-regulatory, free-wheeling market agenda was already as strongly installed in the City of London as in the US; securitisation was as rampant in the City as on Wall Street, and UK mortgages were increasingly being marketed in the UK on a 6:1, even 10:1, debt to income ratio. The US has nothing to teach the City about subprime or about arcane derivatives. Second, the left cannot contain itself with glee over Hank Paulson’s “nationalisation” of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, AIG, and the state-run Resolution Trust Corporation, designed to sweep up the crippled Wall Street failures under the protective wing of the state. Private market Armageddon, and state control triumphant. It is nothing of the kind. Actually it reveals the reverse. Once the finance catastrophe is past (which may take a year or two) and all the colossal banking losses have been safely socialised with the taxpayer, the private market will re-present itself ? slightly reconfigured no doubt by some minimalist re-regulation ? as the natural delivery mechanism for the next splurge of global capitalist growth. Whatever limitations have been placed by Gordon Brown’s “cleaning up the City”, the race will then be on to find a way round them and to renew the culture of mega-bonuses for the few at the expense of the many. After 1929 and the second world war, it happened in the 1950-60s until it was stopped by the oil shocks of 1971-3, then it happened again in the 1980s until the US savings and loans associations crumbled between 1989-95, and then it took off again with the securitisation scam until the Northern Rock collapse on August 9 2007. It will start yet again within the next five years because the culture has not changed one jot and the driving force remains maximum enrichment by the largest amalgamations of capital (increasingly in the hands of secretive private equity and hedge funds uninhibited by even the limited transparency of public companies), shielded by their close harmony with political leaders. All the US nationalised companies with be returned to the private sector as quickly as feasible, as will Northern Rock. Public ownership is seen as a despised necessity, an unfortunate interregnum in the endless drive for private profit, and a temporary refuge to be milked for all it is worth for as little time as it is required. Hardly a triumph for those who believe in it. Instead of the left preening itself that this capitalist debacle leaves events falling into its lap, it needs to realise that there is still a mountain to climb before the culture is transformed. The intellectual conspirators of St Pelerin in Geneva in 1947 took over 30 years to get their neoliberal philosophy to take root. The left today have hardly started. The need for a profound, wide-ranging, persisting, in-depth intellectual and political debate on the realities of an alternative world economic order has never been great

Alex Salmond and Thatcherism
22 Sep 2008
Sir Angus Grossart is to head the Scottish Futures Trust (SFT), which will be responsible for attracting private capital bids for public infrastructure projects. His appointment reveals a great deal about the social and political character of the Scottish National Party (SNP) administration in Edinburgh. Grossart is the founder, chairman and majority shareholder of investment bank Noble Grossart, the former vice chair of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the director of numerous companies in the UK, US and Canada. Described by the Times as the ?doyen of Edinburgh?s financial community,? he is an owner of a sixteenth century castle and holds a place on the Sunday Times rich list. His nephew, Hamish, is the deputy chair of Scottish-based oil and gas exploration group Cairn Energy. While in opposition, the SNP under Alex Salmond made great play of being opposed to the Public Private Partnerships/Public Finance Initiatives (PPP/PFI)?a means of backdoor privatisation used by successive Conservative and Labour governments to transform social and infrastructure spending into lucrative and long-term revenue streams for private capital. However, the Scottish Futures Trust is simply a repackaging of PPP/PFI in line with the needs of the financial sector in Scotland. The Scottish government is unable to issue its own bonds, the SNP?s preference, but the SFT will seek to create consortia of local authorities, private operators and the SFT to sell bonds for specific projects along with other means of finance. An example of the sort of return being generated by PFIs can be seen in the scheme to rebuild Hairmyres Hospital, near Glasgow. For an outlay of 8.4 million, building company Kier and PPP investment specialist Innisfree expect a return of 145.2 million over 30 years. Innisfree has 715 million worth of investments in more than 8 billion worth of PFI deals in 18 hospitals, 17 education projects, and 5 prison and court projects in the UK. By contrast, the local health authority, NHS Lanarkshire, made a loss of 15.6 million last year, and was forced to sell 20 million of land to clear its debts. Grossart?s appointment, hailed in the media as a ?coup,? represents a seal of approval from the Scottish financial elite for both the SFT and the SNP administration. Numerous finance houses and banks are headquartered in Edinburgh. Grossart?s job will be to fix deals with the big operators such as RBS, one of the world?s largest banks. RBS has its own PPP arm, Royal Bank Project Investments Ltd. Douglas Fraser, political editor of the Glasgow Herald, noted approvingly that ?the challenge is now for Sir Angus to make the anti-profiteering rhetoric into an attractive package for profit-seeking financiers.? The SNP?s subservience to the financial establishment is not exactly new. Salmond was an oil economist at RBS for years before becoming SNP leader. The SFT deal comes only a few months after the SNP government attempted to push through a 1 billion golf resort for magnate Donald Trump in defiance of local planning laws and public opposition. The SNP?s central demand is that an independent Scotland should be able to emulate Ireland as a low-tax investment platform. Yet for many years, the SNP has sought to dress this pro-business agenda up in social democratic garb?a presentation that was only possible due to the right-wing lurch of Labour and the services rendered to the nationalists by the middle class radical groups such as the Scottish Socialist Party, Tommy Sheridan?s Solidarity Movement and the Scottish Greens. All these groups have claimed that an independent Scotland is the means through which socialism can be realised long-term and that an independent capitalist Scotland under the SNP is a first step in that direction that must be supported without precondition. With the Labour government imploding, Salmond believes that the SNP will be the main beneficiary in Scotland. Consequently, he has become more open in speaking about the real aims of the Scottish administration. In a recent interview with the Total Politics magazine, Iain Dale asked Salmond, ?Ten years ago, the Conservatives were seen as a terrible enemy by the SNP, and they saw you as very left-wing. It seems to me that you have tried to change that and create a very big tent for the SNP.? Salmond replied, ?I suppose I have tried to bring the SNP into the mainstream of Scotland. We have a very competitive economic agenda. Many business people have warmed towards the SNP. We need a competitive edge, a competitive advantage?get on with it, get things done, speed up decision making, reduce bureaucracy. The SNP has a strong social conscience, which is very Scottish in itself. One of the reasons Scotland didn?t take to Lady Thatcher was because of that. We didn?t mind the economic side so much. But we didn?t like the social side at all.? The SNP?along with much of the political establishment in Scotland?has always sought to distance itself from Thatcherism and its perspective of unbridled free market capitalism and assaults on workers? social gains. ?Thatcherism? has been portrayed as a peculiarly ?English? affair, at odds with what is routinely portrayed as the more just, socially aware ?Scottish? national consensus. Salmond?s incautious admission that he ?didn?t mind the economic side? of Thatcherism ?so much? blew the gaffe on such claims. Notwithstanding his absurd attempt to separate Tory economic policy from its social consequences, his statement exposed the degree to which the fundamentals of Thatcherism?the gutting of social provision for the personal enrichment of a fabulously wealthy elite?has been embraced across the entire official political spectrum. That is why the next morning, Salmond took the unprecedented step for a First Minister of phoning a radio talk show to claim that he had been misinterpreted. Salmond has attempted to recover political ground by unveiling the SNP?s proposals for a local income tax to replace the current council tax. Levied by local authorities, the council tax is based on property values. The housing price bubble over the last years?coupled with cuts on social spending?has meant that this tax falls disproportionately harshest on working people. The SNP has said it intends to abolish the council tax entirely and replace it with an income tax levied at three pence in the pound. It argues that this will save the average family between 350 and 535 a year and has challenged the other parties to veto the measure. The proposal has to be seen in the context of the growing moves in all the major parties and the business establishment towards some form of greater financial independence for Scotland, so-called fiscal autonomy. The intended income tax is not a local tax as such. It is a tax set centrally in Edinburgh, which is then parcelled out locally, reducing local authorities to mere conduits for state funding. More fundamentally, the SNP has made clear that the purpose of the new tax is to further ratchet up tensions between Edinburgh and London, in order to serve its strategic goal of independence. Some 2.5 billion is currently raised under the present council tax, but the SNP?s proposal will bring in just 1.6 billion?a 900 million shortfall. Almost half of this is to be recouped through unspecified savings. But the SNP is also demanding that Scotland continue to receive some 400 million from UK central government that is currently paid in benefits to those too poor to finance the council tax in full?even though the tax will be abolished. In other words, the SNP?s ?redistributive? tax is dependent to a great extent on the UK government and taxes raised on working people in England and Wales. Salmond calculates that this is a win-win situation for his administration. If London agrees, the SNP will reap the benefits in terms of strengthening its popularity. And should London refuse, the SNP believes it will lend credibility to its demands for complete independence in Scotland and even help stoke up anti-Scottish sentiment south of the border. In the same Total Politics interview, Salmond made clear his preference for a bonfire of national vanities. Asked if he agreed that there ?is a resurgence of an acceptable form of English nationalism,? he replied, ?I have huge sympathy with the political argument. As you know, by choice, SNP MPs have abstained from every vote on English legislation that does not have an immediate Scottish consequence. If you?re asking me should people in England be able to run their own health service or education system, my answer is yes. They should be able to do it without the bossy interference of Scots Labour MPs…. Because I believe in independence for Scotland, I also believe in independence for England.? Over the recent period, the Conservative Party?still concentrated predominantly in southern England?has begun to flirt with English nationalism. Sure enough, the right-wing press in England made hay with allegations that with the income tax reform, Scotland was again being subsidised by English taxpayers. In response, Prime Minister Gordon Brown signalled that the Labour government is prepared to concede greater fiscal autonomy to Scotland. In a speech to Scottish business leaders earlier this month, he said there was a ?problem? with the fact that the Scottish parliament was not more accountable for its spending.

Burying the hatchet
21 Sep 2008
If you decided to draw a family tree of the British left, you?d have a bit of a job on your hands. There have been so many splits and splinters that we?ve all ended up as ideological half-sisters or second cousins, surrounded by immediate family who warn us off having anything to do with our scatterbrained relatives. You could see the Convention of the Left, then, as a sort of family get-together ? one thrown by a well-meaning aunt to encourage us all to ?get along better?. It has the potential to be the most important event for socialists for many years, which is why I?m going to be blogging from it for Red Pepper over the next five days. But can it really work? Its organisers have certainly picked a good time and place. Setting it up as a counter-conference to the Labour Party?s debate-free rally is a great way to pull in some of ?Old Labour?, and having the opening session right after Saturday?s Stop the War protest will draw in some activists who might not otherwise have made the journey. And the convention is not a rushed response to the wipeout the left faced in the May elections, or even to the escalating economic crisis. It was announced more than six months ago: before London elected a Thatcherite buffoon for mayor and a full-fledged fascist to its assembly, and the rest of the country appeared to take a shine to David Cameron; before the consternation about whether British politics was ?moving to the right?; and before certain over-eager lefties started declaring that the collapse of a few banks means ?the end of capitalism? (again). The immediate issue it plans to tackle is not the rise of the right or the twilight days of that system we all love to hate ? it is the collapse of the left, in the broadest sense. Labour?s support is a fraction of what it was even in Blair?s day, with the ?core? voters and the diehard members finally pushed over the edge by Brown?s head-in-the-sand tricks, and yet the left-of-Labour parties have somehow spectacularly failed to grow. Without going into the controversial details (we all know them anyway), it seems clear at least that we never managed to harness the energy of the anti-war protests five years ago into anything long-term. Today, the left has another chance. It is only the Westminster system that makes it look as if the public somehow desire woolly centrism tied to fetishes for privatisation and war ? in poll after poll, voters support the parties on the basis of ?lesser of two (or three) evils? politics while roundly rejecting their actual policies. The economic crisis has exposed the absurdity of having three neoliberal parties and no alternative: no-one can seriously maintain that the City is an ?engine of growth? when people are losing their homes because some speculators decided they?d make good casino chips in their game of roulette. You don?t have to think very hard about bankers getting multi-million pound rewards for failure while food prices and energy bills go through the roof to come to some notion of nationalisation or ?production for need? (even if you don?t necessarily call it that). In an age when an economic crisis can get halfway around the world before the central bankers have even got their boots on, anyone can see that the problem is the system ? the economic Wizards of Oz have suddenly found their curtains drawn back, exposed as the selfish frauds they always have been. The free market has stopped being simply unpleasant and started actually not working on its own terms. New Labour, the New Tories and the Cameron-lite New Lib Dems have no answer to that. I?m not saying that ?the revolution is upon us, comrade?, but it certainly seems that people are casting around for an alternative. The point of the convention is to organise a forum where we can see what unites us and how we can make tentative steps towards unity that will really work ? the broad support the convention already has is an encouraging sign. I just hope the left will use its convention as a chance to bury the hatchet, not as a venue for that most destructive of socialist sports: sectarian point-scoring.

Why greens must learn to love nuclear power
21 Sep 2008
?If nuclear power is the answer, it must have been a pretty stupid question,? went an oft-cited slogan of the 1970s environmental movement. But the question was not stupid, and it is even less so today when the challenge is even blunter: how are we going to provide for our energy needs in a way that does not destroy, via global warming, the capacity of our planet to support life? The hard truth is that if nuclear power is not at least part of the answer, then answering that challenge is going to be very difficult indeed. Unfortunately, just by writing the sentence above, I will already have prompted many readers to switch off. Being anti-nuclear is an article of faith (and I use that word intentionally) for many people in today?s environmental movement and beyond, just as it was during the 1970s. That the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have held the same position on the subject for 30 years could show admirable consistency ? but it could also be evidence of dogmatic closed-mindedness. When I first broached the issue in these pages three years ago, the reaction was extraordinary. A close acquaintance sent me a tearful email saying that I had ?destroyed? her motivation for environmental campaigning. Other friends here in Oxford accused me ? jokingly, of course ? of having formed a romantic liaison with BNFL?s spokeswoman. Just last week, after tackling the subject once again, I received a one-line email from a well-known environmentalist accusing me of having ?done a considerable disservice to the cause of combating climate change?. So why does the nuclear issue evoke such strong reactions? For answers, I think we need to look to nuclear?s past, when today?s entrenched positions were first formed. Civil nuclear power began life as a heavily state-subsidised industry largely designed to produce plutonium for bombs. Civil nuclear power was part of the military-industrial complex and shrouded in secrecy. An association with the mushroom cloud has tainted the nuclear industry ever since ? and clearly continues to be an issue in countries such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. Then there is radiation. Most people are terrified of radiation precisely because it is invisible, making it all the more threatening, and because of its potential to cause cancer and genetic deformities. (Many other cancer-causing agents such as food or smoke seem innocuous by comparison.) Nuclear accidents and near-meltdowns ? such as Three Mile Island in 1979 ? provoke scary headlines throughout the media, as did popular treatments such as the film The China Syndrome (released, by an extraordinary stroke of luck for the film-makers, just 12 days before Three Mile Island), in which a sinister nuclear cabal covers up evidence of an accident. It is undeniable that nuclear fission generates radioactive by-products, some of which will inevitably enter the environment. It is also undeniable that exposure to radiation increases the risk of cancer (though radiation can also be employed to treat cancers). But it is the level of risk that counts, and here the story is less fearsome than many would have us believe. Take Three Mile Island, which exposed local populations to one millirem of radiation on average(1). This equates to roughly what we all receive from natural sources (cosmic rays and naturally occurring radioactive elements in the ground) every four days(2). The number of deaths from Three Mile Island ? the worst civil nuclear accident ever in a western country, and one that ended the US nuclear programme (not a single reactor has been built since) ? is therefore officially estimated to be zero(3). Even Chernobyl, surely the worst-imaginable case for a nuclear disaster, was far less deadly than most people think. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, 28 people died due to acute radiation sickness(4) ? all firemen and power plant workers, some of whom had been exposed to radiation doses as high as one million millirems(5). By comparison, 167 men were killed during the Piper Alpha disaster on a North Sea oil rig in 1988. But it is the long-term effects from Chernobyl that tend to scare people most. In a 2006 report, Greenpeace claimed that ?60,000 people have additionally died in Russia because of the Chernobyl accident, and estimates of the total death toll for the Ukraine and Belarus could reach another 140,000?(6). These figures, if correct, would make Chernobyl one of the worst single man-made disasters of the last century. But are they correct? The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation reports 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and young people in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but very few deaths (thyroid cancer is mostly treatable). Indeed, it concludes, ?There is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident?, and no evidence of any increase in cancer or leukaemia among exposed populations(7). The World Health Organisation concludes that while a few thousand deaths may be caused over the next 70 years by Chernobyl?s radioactive release, this number ?will be indiscernible from the background of overall deaths in the large population group?(8). Without wishing to downplay the tragedy for the victims ? especially the 300,000 people who were evacuated permanently ? the explosion has even been good for wildlife, which has thrived in the 30km exclusion zone(9). A plentiful supply of free fuel One way of statistically assessing the safety of nuclear power versus other technologies is to use the measure of deaths per gigawatt-year. This technique is cited by Cambridge University?s Professor David MacKay in his book Sustainable Energy ? Without the Hot Air (available free on the web), and shows that in Europe, nuclear and wind power are the safest technologies (about 0.1 death per GWy), while oil, coal and biomass the most dangerous (above 1 per GWy)(10). A focus on statistics is also useful when assessing the financial costs of nuclear power. The high price for nuclear waste disposal and decommissioning ? with a hefty chunk always payable from public funds ? is surely one of the environmental lobby?s strongest arguments, particularly if any subsidy from taxpayers means taking money away from investment in renewables. Helen Caldicott?s book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer discusses the finances of nuclear under a chapter subheaded ?Socialised Electricity?, quoting figures for nuclear?s subsidy in the US over recent decades of $70bn. To make a direct cost comparison, the International Energy Agency in a 2005 study looked at life-cycle costs for all power sources ? including construction costs, operations, fuel and decommissioning ? and concluded that nuclear was the cheapest option, followed by coal, wind and gas(11). But how about nuclear power?s potential contribution to mitigating global warming? One persistent myth is that once construction and uranium mining are taken into account, nuclear is no better than fossil fuels. However, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), total life-cycle greenhouse-gas emission per unit of electricity is about 40g CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour, ?similar to those for renewable energy sources?(12). But why not ditch nuclear and focus only on renewables, as the greens suggest? MacKay calculates that even if we covered the windiest 10 per cent of the UK with wind turbines, put solar panels on all south-facing roofs, implemented strong energy efficiency measures across the economy, built offshore wind turbines across an area of sea two-thirds the size of Wales, and fully exploited every other conceivable source of renewables (including wave and tidal power), energy production would still not match current consumption(13). This is rather different to Britain being the ?Saudi Arabia of wind power? as many in the environmental movement are fond of asserting. Indeed, MacKay concludes that we will need to import renewable electricity from other countries ? primarily from solar farms in the North African desert ? or choose nuclear, or both. Indeed, it is vital to stress the neither I nor MacKay nor any credible expert suggests a choice between renewables and nuclear: the sensible conclusion is that we need both, soon, and on a large scale if we are to phase out coal and other fossil fuels as rapidly as the climate needs. As MacKay told me: ?We need to get building.? The UK?s Sustainable Development Commission, in its 2006 report on nuclear power, argued that new plants should be ruled out until the existing waste problem could be solved(14). But what if a new generation of nuclear plants could be designed that, instead of producing more waste to leave as a toxic legacy for our grandchildren, actually generated energy by burning up existing waste stockpiles? This is the solution proposed by Tom Blees, a US-based writer, in his upcoming book Prescription for the Planet(15). Blees focuses particularly on so-called fourth-generation nuclear technology ? better known as fast-breeder reactors. While conventional thermal reactors use less than 1 per cent of the potential energy in their uranium fuel, fast-breeders are 60 times more efficient, and can burn virtually all of the energy available in the uranium ore. This gives these fourth-generation reactors a big advantage. As Blees puts it: ?Thus we have a prodigious supply of free fuel that is actually even better than free, for it is material that we are quite desperate to get rid of.? Moreover, fast-breeder reactors can also run on the ?depleted? uranium left behind by conventional reactors, and help reduce the proliferation threat by burning up plutonium stockpiles left over from decommissioned nuclear weapons. Blees estimates that supplies of nuclear waste and depleted uranium are sufficient to ?provide all the power needs of the entire planet for hundreds of years before we need to mine any more uranium?. Although these reactors produce plutonium ? which might be used for nuclear weapons, and could therefore pose a proliferation threat ? weapons-grade material is never isolated in the fuel-cycle process, making fast-breeders less dangerous to international stability than conventional reactors, and relatively simple to inspect. But what about the waste these reactors themselves produce? Since the by-products of fast-breeder reactors are highly radioactive, they have much shorter half-lives ? rendering them inert in a couple of centuries, instead of the longer time over which conventional nuclear waste remains dangerous. (Once again there is a powerful myth here ? that high-level waste from reactors remains dangerous for enormous lengths of time. Greenpeace states that ?waste will remain dangerous for up to a million years?(16). In fact, almost all waste will have decayed back to a level of radio activity less than the original uranium ore in less than a thousand years.)(17) Fourth-generation nu clear technology is also inherently safer than earlier designs. The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), discussed at length by Blees, operates at atmospheric pressure, reducing the possibility of leaks and loss-of-coolant accidents. It is also designed to be ?walk-away safe?, meaning that if all operators stood up and left, the reactor would shut itself down automatically rather than overheat and suffer a meltdown. So why, given the purported advantages in safety and fuel use, have fast-breeders not been developed commercially? The US Integral Fast Reactor programme was shut down in 1994, possibly ? Blees suggests ? because of political pressure levied on the Clinton administration by anti-nuclear campaigners. (Even so, fourth-generation nuclear power plants are being built in India, Russia, Japan and China.) Ironically, the Clinton administration may have inadvertently killed off one of the most promising solutions to global warming in an attempt to please environmentalists. Even if the decision were to be reversed immediately, 20 years has been lost. It is worth remembering the contribution that nuclear power has already made to offsetting global warming: the world?s 442 operating nuclear reactors, which produce 16 per cent of global electricity, save 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year compared to coal, according to the IPCC. Blees agrees that ?the most pressing issue is to shut down all coal-fired power plants? and urges a ?Manhattan Project-like? effort to convert the world?s non-renewable power to IFRs by the thousand. This sounds daunting but it is not unprecedented: France converted its power supply to 80 per cent nuclear in the space of just 25 years by building about six reactors a year. An anti-nuclear report published by the Oxford Research Group in 2007 concluded that an additional 2,500 reactors would need to be built by 2075 to significantly mitigate global warming(19). The report?s authors suggested that this was a ?pipe-dream?. But it sounds eminently achievable to me, given that it is only a five-times increase from today. The question is this: are those who care about global warming prepared to reconsider their opposition to nuclear power in this new era? We are no longer living in the 1970s. Today, the world is more threatened even than it was during the Cold War. Only this time nuclear power ? instead of being part of the problem ? can be part of the solution. References: (1) United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Fact Sheet on the Three Mile Island Accident, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.htm… (2) Chapter 5 in ?The Nuclear Energy Option? by Bernard Cohen, 1990. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/blc/book/chapter5.html (3) United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Fact Sheet on the Three Mile Island Accident, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.htm… (4) World Health Organisation, ?Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes?, 2006. http://www.who.int/entity/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/WHO%20Report%20on… (5) Chapter 7 in ?The Nuclear Energy Option? by Bernard Cohen, 1990. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/blc/book/chapter7.html (6) Greenpeace, ?Chernobyl death toll grossly underestimated?, 18 April 2006. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/chernobyl-deaths-180406 (7) UNSCEAR, ?The Chernobyl Accident: UNSCEAR?s assessments of the radiation effects?, http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html#Health (8) World Health Organisation, ?Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes?, 2006. (9) National Geographic News, April 26, 2006: ?Despite mutations, Chernobyl wildlife is thriving?. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0426_060426_chernobyl.ht… (10) David McKay, ?Sustainable Energy ? without the hot air?, Part 2, ?Making a difference?, p174. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf (11) IEA, ?Projected costs of generating electricity ? 2005 update?. (12) IPCC, 2007: ?Mitigation?. p. 269. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter4.pdf (13) David McKay, ?Sustainable Energy ? without the hot air?, Part 1, ?Numbers, not adjectives?. (14) SDC, ?Is nuclear the answer??, http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/060306.html (15)Tom Blees, 2008: ?Prescription for the Planet ? The painless remedy for our energy and environmental crises?. http://www.prescriptionfortheplanet.com (16) Greenpeace, ?Nuclear power ? the problems?. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/nuclear/problems (17) World Nuclear Association, ?Radioactive Wastes?, see figure ?Decay in radioactivity of high-level waste?. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf60.html (18) IPCC, 2007: ?Mitigation?. p. 269. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter4.pdf (19) Oxford Research Group, 2007: ?Too Hot to Handle: The future of civil nuclear power?, p.7 http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/pdf/t…

Deep sense of fairness?
21 Sep 2008
With the Labour Party conference and the Convention of the Left running concurrently, Manchester is going to be a city of contrasts for the next week. And it started even before either conference had got fully under way, with the colourful and vociferous peace march on Saturday and the Unite rally on Sunday providing an inside and outside contrast which may well, in its own way, provide the pattern for the week. While new Labour loyalists in the conference were desperately mounting a rearguard action to save the Prime Minister – and new Labour’s – bacon, and Mr Brown himself was doing a mea culpa on TV, admitting that mistakes have been made and pledging, like a naughty schoolboy, to do better next time, thousands of peace activists were on the streets outside the conference campaigning against new Labour’s biggest mistake, the Iraq war. And as Unite the union joint general secretary Tony Woodley called on marchers to remember the “many thousands of innocent victims of the lunatics that have taken us to war,” one of the chief lunatics was being praised by Cabinet Office Minister Ed Miliband for his “deep sense of fairness.” On Sunday, this deep sense of fairness was put centre-stage again, with furious public-sector workers demonstrating outside the conference against the below-inflation pay deals that are being thrust on them as a result of government policy, while that same deeply fair government is doing absolutely nothing to curb the swingeing power company price rises that are producing a profits bonanza for the privatised utilities. Deep fairness again prompted Mr Brown to observe that the City’s bonus culture encouraged “excessive” risk-taking, but that it was difficult to regulate as bonuses were part of a global system. It’s a bit difficult to work out what the difference is between speculators working for foreign-owned banks and factory workers employed by foreign-owned manufacturers or NHS privateers, but we are sure that deep fairness means there is a reason why one set should have their wages pegged and others not. But we probably shouldn’t get carried away with blaming it all on poor Mr Brown. After all, he is only doing what he is told by his masters in the banks, who have made it very clear that, if their mistakes are not covered by taxpayers’ money, then the entire global financial system will collapse. Does the blame, then, lie with the global capitalists who are holding a financial gun to the otherwise good-hearted Prime Minister’s head? Or is it that, lacking the courage to face them down, this country’s government is doing its best to preserve and underwrite the system that has brought the world’s most developed countries to the brink of ruin? Perhaps there is a lesson here for the trade union movement on the exercise of industrial muscle. But the movement cannot exercise the power that it has without the full-hearted support of the people of those countries who, at the moment, have swallowed the biggest lie in history, that there is no alternative to capitalism, warts and all. Therein lies the lesson for the Convention of the Left. Unite and refute the big lie that is capitalism. Or stay divided and stay powerless. The trade union movement needs the left and the left needs the trade unions. And everybody needs a movement united under the banner of defeating the money-men who have made the City their own and who easily control Labour governments that are utterly divorced from their working class.

Revival of the numb
21 Sep 2008
From the press reports greeting the launch in September 2008 of Balanced Migration: a new approach to controlling immigration, it sounded as though this was an official or at least authoritative report by a cross-party group of MPs, perhaps under the House of Commons imprimatur like the reports of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights. That the report is in fact written by the well-known anti-immigration group Migrationwatch hardly received a mention. This ambivalence as to whether and to what extent the report is ‘official’, or sanctioned by government or any part of it, carries through to the preface, written by two MPs – Frank Field (Labour) and Nicholas Soames (Conservative) – who say that ‘we’ have asked Migrationwatch to ‘prepare some constructive proposals that we can put forward for a sensible debate’, without ever explaining who the ‘we’ are and who they claim to represent. However, the fact that these MPs chose Migrationwatch for their ‘constructive proposals’ suggests that the report they got was the one they wanted. For, true to the raison d’être of Migrationwatch, the theme is that there is too much immigration and it must be curtailed. The report trots us at a fair old pace through a history of mass migration (seeing off in a sentence the argument that increased immigration has anything to do with globalisation), ‘public concern’ (a self-explanatory section in which modesty prevents the organisation from claiming its rightful role in the production of the concern it reports), to the impact of modern immigration on ‘public services and community cohesion’. A section on the economy is a précis of the House of Lords Select Committee’s April 2008 report, The Economic Impact of Immigration. We then peer into the future, scan government policies and finally come to the solution, the ‘Balanced Migration’ of the title – essentially a quota system ‘balancing’ numbers granted settlement with those emigrating. Dubious statistics Things aren’t quite as straightforward as that, however. What appears as a thoroughly researched, quasi-academic and objective piece of work, meticulously footnoted and sourced, frequently dissolves into contentious and unfounded assertions, or dubious statistics. For example, we are told that ’70 per cent of all marriages with a foreign spouse have some element of coercion or force’. The source for this is a report from the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, which (if one bothers to look at its report) obtained its figures from ‘experience of their communities, and of friends and family’. We learn that ’40-60 per cent of immigrants from the Indian sub-continent enter arranged marriages with a spouse from their country of origin’. The source for this is a guesstimate based on ‘numbers of marriageable age’ entering the UK from the Indian sub-continent, contained in an earlier Migrationwatch briefing paper1. Then there are wholly unsourced assertions, particularly in the section headed ‘scope for abuse’, where we are told that ‘most applicants will never be seen by an entry control officer’ (the correct term is entry clearance officer) as ‘the application process is outsourced in most countries’ – this just isn’t true (while in some countries, reception and delivery of applications is outsourced, consideration of applications never is). We are also told that unskilled workers can get in under Tier 1 of the new points system – again, not true; this category is reserved for highly-skilled workers. An alarmist scenario of a system collapsing under the weight of half a million applicants a year evokes the ‘collapse’ of the asylum system, failing to point out that applicants will be waiting abroad for their applications to be processed, not queuing up in Croydon. Throwaway comments about ‘meal tickets for life’ for successful applicants for work permits fail to mention the ‘no recourse to public funds’ rule, and benefits legislation which excludes all immigrants, whether visitors, students, workers or family members from all non-contributory benefits and social housing. Then there are statements of the obvious trotted out to support the proposals, such as the one that says most business leaders believe ‘there should be a limit of some kind on the number of migrants from outside the EU entering the UK each year’. One thing that comes through clearly is that the unnamed authors of the report love deploying statistics. The inside cover proclaims that 60 per cent of Asians believe that there are too many immigrants in Britain’ (although strangely, by page 20 the number has gone down to 47 per cent). We are presented with statistics about how much immigration has grown in different regions; where the immigrants come from (mostly from the euphemistically named ‘New Commonwealth’ and other parts of the ‘developing world’, although one-third ‘share a European heritage’); how much it would cost to regularise illegal immigrants (a billion pounds, apparently); in how many schools English is not the first language of the majority of pupils (1,338), the percentage of new TB and Hepatitis B cases brought in from abroad (65 and 96 per cent, respectively), the net economic benefit of immigration to you and me (62p per week), the number of new cities the size of Birmingham which will have to be built to accommodate all the new immigrants (seven). We get graphs, pie charts, projections, all hammering home the central message that there are too many immigrants – too many for public services to cope with (although a solution which cuts back on the number of public service workers admitted seems somewhat short-sighted), too many for ‘community cohesion’ (perhaps because two-thirds don’t ‘share a European heritage’), too many for the environment (because of population density and/or the extra homes which will be needed to house them, albeit only a third of the required total) – in fact, just too many. The authors point out that the numbers coming in represent the biggest mass migration for over 1000 years – since the Norman conquest in fact. Déja vu on numbers The feeling of déja vu for the reader is inescapable. We have been here before, many times, since free entry for Commonwealth citizens was abolished in the 1960s, and Enoch Powell stopped recruiting Caribbean nurses and became the father of British popular racism with his apocalyptic visions. Things have moved on since then, of course. The authors of this report recognise the benefits of immigration (while simultaneously observing that these are vastly overrated); they point out that Black and British can be synonymous, and find Asian respondents who complain of too many immigrants and Muslim informants on forced marriages. The report paints such a fearful picture as to make the reader expect – perhaps even demand – an immediate and total ban on all immigration. So the answer – annual settlement quotas – comes as a bit of an anti-climax. Until we cotton on that it’s just about cherry-picking and exploitation again. The report doesn’t call for annual migration quotas – just settlement quotas. Of course we must continue to import the best and the brightest to fulfil the temporary needs and skill shortages, until British employers train British workers – but we just mustn’t let them stay, to have their babies here, or start using the services their taxes are paying for. So the main proposal is that those coming for work-related purposes should be required to leave after four years. Demand for settlement quota There is enormous hypocrisy at the heart of this report. It’s all about getting the benefits of immigration – all those overseas doctors trained at the Indian or African taxpayers’ expense – without paying any of the social costs. The authors complain about the cost of educating these British unemployed graduates – but don’t mention the savings brought about by employing ready-made foreign ones. They even complain that British graduates have been prevented from getting jobs by foreigners – as if employers don’t have a choice. Even the fact that immigration expands the economy by creating new demand and new jobs is somehow turned into a dis-benefit – as if it’s the fault of the immigrants that the skills shortage is never filled. And so to the oldest complaint in the book – again, ascribed to an astonishingly high percentage of the population – that there is never a ‘sensible debate’ about immigration. Funny isn’t it, how people like Migrationwatch chairman Sir Andrew Green never complain about the lack of sensible debate over the Americanisation of our culture. When did we last discuss all the shopping malls, the homogenous town centres, the ubiquitous iPods draped round everyone under 30, the internet café culture – which arguably has had a far more profound effect, in a far shorter time, than ‘mass’ migration? But one thing’s for sure – the cause of sensible debate isn’t helped by alarmist reports like this. 1. Migrationwatch Briefing Paper 10.12 (http://www.migrationwatchuk.com/Briefingpapers/other/transnational_marri…) Balanced Migration: a new approach to controlling immigration can be downloaded from the Migrationwatch website.

Another Labour is possible
21 Sep 2008
Most of us are only spectators as we watch the latest and deepest crisis of capitalism being played out in Wall Street and the City of London. Bewildering discussions take place about a range of exotic financial instruments -? which even many senior figures in financial institutions now admit they failed to comprehend, and which proved to be disastrous. The majority of us can only look on with growing unease as the storm begins to break over our heads, bringing with it the unemployment, wage cuts and falling living standards associated with all past major crises of our economic system. There are two conferences convening in Manchester this weekend which could help to explain why this crisis has occurred, what its potential consequences are for us, and what could be done to avert future turmoil. Delegates from local Labour parties and trade unions assembling for the Labour conference will be looking to hear Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling’s take on the nightmare on Wall and Threadneedle Streets. They will be desperately seeking assurances about the actions the government plans to take to protect our people from the dire combination of rapidly increasing food, energy and fuel prices and recession-led rising unemployment. Leadership questions are being put to one side in the hope that Gordon Brown demonstrates a real understanding of how this crisis has occurred, and commits to an urgent programme of policy changes needed to safeguard and reassure our people in these difficult times, Labour party members and trade unionists will also be attending the Convention of the Left, bringing them together with socialists and radicals outside the Labour party, with greens, with campaigners for civil liberties, peace, public services and against deportations, with representatives from the resurgent women’s movement, from LGBT groups and from new social movements like the climate camp and with the many international solidarity campaigns supporting progressive movements in countries from Venezuela to the Chagos Islands. In the past many of those attending the convention would have been active in the debates and discussions taking place -? either on the Labour party conference floor or in the many fringe meetings that used to be packed with rank and file delegates. Alienated by New Labour’s policies in office on issues like the war in Iraq, the privatisation of public services and the attacks on civil liberties, many have just dropped out or turned away. The closing down of democratic debate and policy making at Labour’s conference has also left many natural Labour supporters feeling that attending conference is futile. The event which is rapidly degenerating into a mixture of trade fair and US-style televised rally for the leader. The contrast between the conference and convention couldn’t be starker. The Labour conference is isolated behind a high security wall and stage managed for televisual perfection. The convention, on the other hand, is open to all, rejecting the status of top table speakers and encouraging everyone attending to participate. But the contrast in politics between the rank and file delegates attending conference and those at the convention is likely to be a great deal less. The majority of delegates to both will have opposed the war and the renewal of Trident, will be opposed to the privatisation of public services and will have supported demands for the protection of civil liberties and trade union rights. They are all part of the same radical, progressive, socialist movement that has been divided by the policies of New Labour. The aim of the convention is to explore how socialists ? within a range of organisations and none ? can reunite to promote an understanding that there is an alternative to the crisis-ridden economic system we live under. It is not just threatening our jobs, public services and civil liberties but is also creating wars and putting the sustainability of our planet at risk. It is not a call to establish a new party or to displace existing campaigning organisations. Instead it is a refreshing and exciting attempt to find ways to develop and promote alternative policies of peace, social and environmental justice, public ownership, workers rights, civil liberties and equality. The finance crisis and the emerging recession have made these ideas as relevant as ever.

Bail of the Century
20 Sep 2008
As Governments step in to prop up the global financial system SchNEWS never thought that Neo Labour would do so much to boost the welfare state. Over the last six months the government has pumped an unprecedented (and gigantic) amount of cash into the welfare system. The only trouble is that this money is not heading for the needy, but the greedy as we?re talking about the welfare state…for big business. The country?s wealth is being squandered supporting the very company shareholders that have been arguing for years that, in Maggie Thatcher?s words, ?the business of government is not the government of business.? Interfering politicians hell-bent on regulating the market only serve to hamper the competitive spirit, say the profit-hungry capitalists. Unless, that is, the interference comes in the form of hard cash designed to prop up their ailing investments at a time of crisis. Following ?Meltdown Monday? and the ensuing turmoil in the corridors of global capital earlier this week, rampant free-marketeers are now clambering for more government cash to bail out the banking and financial system. And we are talking intergalactic telephone numbers. After years of sucking out huge commissions, profits and bonuses (Krug all round!), recorded losses for the banking and insurance sectors are now running at 275,000,000,000 – and it is estimated that this figure will double over the next twelve months. So far the most ?market friendly? governments in the world have pumped enough money into the system to cover 80% of these losses. Some analysts are estimating that Western governments will spend $1 trillion of public money bailing out the financial corporate sector and it?s shareholders. Shareholders who have been only too happy to reap the benefits in recent years, without ever worrying about how their miraculous wealth was actually being created. It?s worth remembering how this whole mess started. Offering loans at ?normal? rates of interest was just not profitable enough for some banks. They chose to lend to people on lower incomes and adverse credit histories, charging a much higher interest rate. If you can borrow money at 4%, why lend it at 8% if you can charge 40% plus fees? Typically such loans were secured on people?s homes, so if they defaulted the bank could get the money back via repossession. But alas, the value of property has crashed, reducing the banks? ability to claim the cash back upon the sale of a house (the classic confidence supported pyramid scheme collapses) ? meaning they have to write off all these debts. The cost of these ?write downs? has sucked up all the available cash in the system, meaning that there?s hardly any money available to borrow, leading us into the ?credit crunch?. With two-thirds of the UK economy based on consumer spending (and most of that consumer spending taking place on the back of rocketing house prices) the system soon fell apart and we are now heading into recession – all because of the short-term profit aspirations of a banking sector we have no control over. Now the crisis is deepening as the value of these write offs start to exceed the value of the companies themselves ? leading to their bankruptcy. But never fear, the taxpayers can pay the price of all those failures! With government bailouts, shareholders? investments are being protected at the same time that the poorest in our society will bear the brunt of any economic downturn. On Tuesday alone, the Bank of England pumped twice the annual Housing Benefit budget into the banking sector. The debt owed by Northern Rock (17bn) would be enough to pay for 900,000 nurses for a year! CASH CONVERTERS Over the pond in the heart of Neo-liberal capitalism ? the US of A – the numbers get even bigger. In an unexpected twist to their economic policy, the Bush Junta has brought three huge private companies into common ownership. Of course we don?t use language like ?nationalisation? any more ? this is a much more market-friendly form of ?conservatorship.? In the US Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (two of those recent purchases) are the biggest providers of secondary mortgages and they?ve really come a cropper in the recent economic crisis. Earlier in the month the US-treasury bailed them by guaranteeing their balance sheet to the tune of $3.5 trillion ? that?s 200 times bigger than the Northern Rock bung and is the equivalent to ten years of US government spending on welfare. For some time UK plc has been bunging its own wads of cash into business in the form of regeneration funding and hundreds of grants schemes for small and larger businesses alike. As the already-rich receive a new subsidy, the working poor are given a kick in the teeth. Back in April 2005, the Blair government said that it was ?inconceivable? for it to ?interfere in the market place? to prevent MG Rover going bust. While a billion couldn’t be found to save 18,000 jobs (not that SchNEWS really minded a car company going bust), somehow they could sling 40 times that amount to bail out Northern Rock, 28 months later. One of the arguments put forward to not helping Rover was that the business was going to make a loss of 200m. But last month Northern Rock confirmed that its loss for the last year was 585m. Clearly the message is that if you?re working class you can take a hike, but if you?re a member of the business elite you can hold the government to ransom and there?ll never be a need to worry about not having enough cash to pay your kids private school fees. Against this backdrop, welfare benefits for the sick and disabled are, according to Neo Labour , – “no longer affordable in the modern age.” (See SchNEWS 516) Now ministers are planning to push people off Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance and into dead-end menial McJobs. If they refuse, a US-style welfare-to-work scheme is proposed where people who?ve been out of work for more than two years without ?good cause? will be forced to work on the cheap for various corporations in order to get their benefits (See SchNEWS 614). So a lone parent on 125 per week would earn less than 3.50 an hour for a full time working week ? just 40% of the minimum wage. The UK spends 20bn a year on these sickness and disability benefits – 5bn less than the ?loan? fund it donated to the banking sector in just one day. Meanwhile new cash injected into the Social Fund ? a source of interest-free loans for people on low incomes, including grants to help the mentally ill return to the community and emergency loans to re-house families who?ve lost their homes due to fire or flood ? stood at just 81m for the whole year. Whilst there has been a little talk about more regulation, nobody has stood up in parliament and called for a major rethink about the way we run our economy. And no wonder ? all their pensions are linked to the value of shares in the very businesses the government is propping up! But the hypocrisy doesn?t stop there. For years we heard the same old story about how there?s never any money for a liveable benefits system or a decent minimum wage, but somehow UK plc finds billions of spare cash to support corrupt businesses that are in a mess only because of a greed that has benefited no one but their shareholders. For years we?ve heard the mantra that the free market must be allowed to run unfettered ? yet the most ?capitalist? governments are nationalising huge companies left, right and centre. It just goes to show that capitalism is a myth and the sooner we stop wasting money propping up a failed system that will never work – the better.

Cluster Bomb Treaty
20 Sep 2008
The UK has been the third biggest user of cluster bombs in the last decade, but was among the 111 governments that adopted the treaty in Dublin and played a significant role in ensuring that the negotiations were successful. Two days before the end of the negotiations, Gordon Brown announced the withdrawal from service of the UK?s remaining cluster bombs, influencing the decision of many other governments participating in the conference. Now the UK must sign the treaty in December and implement national legislation. Expectations Considered the most significant disarmament and humanitarian treaty of the decade, the final text exceeded all expectations, banning the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster bombs and containing the strongest provisions for victim assistance ever agreed in international humanitarian law. Campaigners from around the world, survivors of cluster bombs, former military personnel, Nobel Peace Laureates and clearance operators cheered alongside government delegates as, one by one, 111 nations formally endorsed the treaty. Just the beginning Delivering the Cluster Munition Convention was a momentous and historic step, but the work of governments and individuals around the world is really just beginning. To become binding in international law, 30 governments must ratify the treaty after it is signed in Oslo in December 2008. The UK government has confirmed that it will be among the countries that sign the treaty in December. Now the UK must implement national legislation to prohibit cluster bombs enabling early ratification, encourage other countries to sign the treaty and take national steps to start abiding by the terms of the treaty. Taking a leadership role in this way will help to internationally stigmatise the weapons and prevent other countries that have not signed from using cluster bombs, notably the US. Cluster bombs Cluster bombs have consistently caused excessive deaths and injuries to civilians both during and after conflict. Designed to break open in mid-air and scatter up to hundreds of smaller bombs over wide areas, cluster bombs cannot distinguish between military targets and civilians. Many do not explode on impact, thus continuing to kill and injure innocent people long after conflict has ended. Furthermore, widespread contamination of residential, agricultural and industrial land makes it virtually impossible for people to rebuild their lives after conflict. Often it is the poorest communities that are the most victimised by the weapon. In signing the treaty governments are committing not only to prevent future harm to civilians from cluster bombs, but, in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian law, also to ensure clearance of contaminated land and medical, financial and socioeconomic support to those people who should never have been harmed. By signing the treaty our government will directly improve the lives of thousands of people worldwide. All governments mustvnow turn the treaty?s text into reality. Support needed Every signature is needed in Oslo later this year if the world is truly going to set a new international standard. Only with wide adherence to legally binding international law will the world stigmatise cluster bombs so that it is no longer politically or morally acceptable for any country to use them. Stigmatisation is key to ensuring that states, like the US, China and Russia, abide by the standard set by the treaty even though they refuse to sign it. The Cluster Munition Coalition, the global network of organisations campaigning to ban cluster bombs, launched the People?s Treaty as soon as the treaty had been negotiated in May. It is a worldwide petition urging governments to honour their promises and legally commit themselves to banning cluster bombs but also to clearing contaminated land and providing victim assistance. People across the world must sign the petition to show their intention to make sure governments live up to their obligations. You can sign the People?s Treaty at http://www.minesactioncanada.org/peoples_treaty. For more on the Cluster Munition Coalition see www.stopclustermunitions.org

Brown goes nuclear
20 Sep 2008
The problem with the Labour government is not the unpopularity of Gordon Brown, as measured by successive opinion polls, but the policies being pursued. Let me take one important example. Last Wednesday Gordon Brown held his monthly prime-ministerial press conference. The reports by the Guardian’s current and former political editors (‘Producers may pass on cost of energy package to consumers’; “Brown comes up with a cones hotline moment” and the supporting editorial, ‘Lofty ideals’ ) overlooked the fact that in the press conference launching the energy support package, Brown chose on no less than three occasions to praise nuclear power. He said: “I think people may have forgotten that we made the right decision about nuclear power, I think very few people now doubt that”. Actually, the prime minister might be surprised that many do still oppose an energy source that produces dangerous plutonium as an unavoidable byproduct, and sometimes uses it in new fuel too, requiring methods of transport that are vulnerable to terrorism. Some 105,000 kilograms of this stuff is stockpiled at Sellafield: it takes but 5 kilos to make a bomb of the size that devastated Nagasaki in 1945. As Dr Bennett Ramberg, security advisor to the state department in the 1980s, has argued, nuclear regulators are unfortunately not likely to implement appropriate protective insurance strategies “as long as they cling to the view that attacks are improbable and plants are well protected. The annual commemoration of the Chernobyl accident should serve as a useful reminder of what can happen if the presumptions prove wrong.” Some think that Brown, hitherto sceptical about the benefits of nuclear power, may have been unduly influenced by the fact that his brother is public relations chief for EDF-UK, whose parent company in France ? a company 78% dependent on nuclear power ? is in the final throes of buying the majority share in Britain’s main nuclear generator, British Energy. Brown added “I am encouraging other countries to go ahead with nuclear power, France and Britain are leaders in nuclear power … “ This is inconsistent with Brown’s insistence on fighting international terrorism and the foreign secretary’s oft-stated determination to curb nuclear proliferation. More, France has been a major industrial partner in the controversial Iranian nuclear industry. A little known report prepared last year by Paris-based analyst, Mycle Schneider, for the Green group in the European parliament, revealed that in 1974 Iran took a 40% share in a special purpose nuclear company Sofidif, the other 60% owned by the French Government owned nuclear giant, Areva. The next year, Schneider reports, Sofidif took up a 25% share in the international Eurodif consortium that built a large uranium enrichment facility in Pierrelatte in the south of France. Sofidif still exists, still holds the same share in Eurodif and is still active. In a letter dated 13 February 2006 (reproduced by Schneider), addressed to the CEO of Sofidif, Reza Aghazadeh, vice-president of Iran and president of the Iranian atomic energy organisation, announced the changeover of the Iranian representatives on the board of Sofidif, demonstrating their contemporary involvement. Is this the kind of international nuclear partnership Brown wants to promote? And on broader geopolitical energy matters Brown asserted: “Russia must maintain the obligations and commitments it makes to the international community … I do say there is another thing that has arisen from not only what has happened in Russia, but it is happening in other countries as well, we cannot allow a country like ours, given the need for energy security, to be wholly dependent on the supply of one resource. Instead of being wholly dependent on oil and gas, which of course is not going to be the best way of us proceeding as North Sea oil declines, we want a balanced energy policy, and so in my view does the rest of Europe. That will mean more nuclear building … “ Brown finds himself a curious political bedfellow with none other than the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Copeland, the constituency containing Sellafield. In a letter to his local newspaper, the Whitehaven News, on September 11, Councillor Chris Whiteside wrote: “But if we don’t support nuclear or coal, how are we to keep the lights on? Are we going to rely on buying gas from Vladimir Putin? I don’t think that’s a good idea”. You can dress up nuclear power stations however you like: they are still inevitable generators of nuclear explosives and nuclear waste, alongside electricity. Ducking under the duvet won’t change these facts, Brown.

HBOS takeover
20 Sep 2008
Lloyds TSB?s 12 billion takeover of Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) Thursday followed a collapse of the UK?s largest mortgage lenders? shares, which threatened to destablise the entire British banking system. With 20 percent of the mortgage market, HBOS has some 22 million customers and 72,000 employees. Lloyds is the fourth-largest mortgage lender with an 8 percent share. The rescue package came amidst panic selling of shares on Wall Street, as confidence in the US and global financial system collapsed. In events that led many to recall the Great Crash of 1929, leading US financial institutions Merrill Lynch and AIG were bailed out in billion-dollar deals by the Bank of America and the US Treasury, while Lehman Brothers, America?s fourth-largest investment bank, filed for bankruptcy protection. Writing on the scale of the crisis in the Times on September 17, Anatole Kaletsky noted, ?Two weeks ago nobody would have imagined that, before the end of the month, the Bush Administration would have nationalised the world?s biggest insurance company, that two of the four biggest global investment banks would be out of business and that the US Government would take responsibility for three quarters of the country?s new mortgage loans.? ?Sadly,? he went on, ?the events of the past two weeks may be only the prelude, not the climax, of this amazing crisis.? This was clearly the concern of the markets and the Brown government in Britain. In two days of trading beginning Monday, HBOS had seen its share price fall by more than two thirds?recording a 7 billion loss by Tuesday evening?and at one point stood at just 88 pence. According to the Guardian, after the Bank of England was informed by the US Treasury that Washington had decided not to bail out Lehman Brothers, the city?s Financial Services Authority ?trawled through the finances of British banks to see which were particularly vulnerable.? The failure to rescue Lehman Brothers meant that the banks would not lend to each other, and the interbank lending rates was already beginning to rise rapidly. In February, the Brown government had been forced to nationalise Northern Rock, the UK?s eighth-largest bank, at the cost of more than 80 billion to the taxpayer. With HBOS almost 10 times the size of Northern Rock, neither the government nor the City wanted a similar scenario this time round. The Guardian reported that during a private event sponsored by Citigroup in London on Monday evening, Prime Minister Gordon Brown had met Sir Victor Blank, the chair of Lloyds TSB, and asked for his help. Lloyds TSB had been looking to expand and had been involved in tentative talks since July with HBOS. On Tuesday morning, Brown met with Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, and Alastair Darling, chancellor of the Exchequer. The Bank of England announced it would extend the special liquidity scheme it had introduced after the collapse of Bear Stearns for a further three months until January?a move previously ruled out by King. In the meantime, the FSA scouted for other potential buyers for HBOS, including HSBC. With HBOS shares continuing to slide, it appears that only Lloyds TSB was willing to take on the ailing bank. As soon as the stock market closed Tuesday, talks began in earnest, paving the way for the deal to be announced Wednesday. HBOS had been resisting Lloyds TSB?s approaches for months. Since it was formed in 2001 as the outcome of a merger between the Bank of Scotland (formed in 1695 and the oldest surviving bank in the UK until this week) and the Halifax Building Society, HBOS had sought to position itself as a significant challenger to the ?Big Four? high street banks of Lloyds TSB, Barclays, HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland. But HBOS was dependent on money markets to fund 40 percent of its operations and had been partcularly hit by the credit crunch following the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Earlier this year, several hundred of its senior managers had clubbed together to purchase 1.4 million shares at 446.25p. That 6 million had reportedly been reduced to just 2 million this week Only a few weeks ago, HBOS raised 4 billion in a rights issue where there was only an 8 percent take up, leaving the underwriters, mainly the high street banks, holding the rest. The government intends to break the rules governing competition and mergers in order to ensure that deal goes through. Business and Enterprise Secretary John Hutton is to use emergency powers to prevent the deal being referred to the Competition Commission on the grounds of national interest. Fearing speculation on HBOS and other banks, the government also banned short-selling of bank shares aimed at driving down share prices to make a killing for three months. Under the deal, Blank will become chairman of the greatly expanded entity, the Bank of Britain, controlling almost one third of the UK?s savings and mortgage market and four times larger than any other bank as regards savings. Lloyds TSB and the government dismissed reports of redundancies involving one third of the workforce and pledged to continue using HBOS headquarters in Scotland, but the deal sets out that ?significant cost savings can be made by combining the networks and back offices of Lloyds TSB and HBOS.? With plans to slash costs by 1 billion a year?equivalent to 10 percent of the banks? combined costs?union leaders believe the job cuts will be in the region of 21,000 and 28,000 out of a 140,000 workforce. Such cuts take place under conditions in which the latest government figures showed the largest rise in the number of people unemployed and claiming benefit for 16 years. In the three months to July, some 138,000 were made redundant?a sharp increase over the 28,000 laid off in the three months to April. Some 1.72 million were officially registered as unemployed in July, taking the official unemployment rate up from 5.3 percent to 5.5 percent. In the last week alone, jobs have also been shed at the collapsed travel firm XL?the UK?s third-largest travel operator?and Lehman Brothers in London. Referring to earlier warnings by David Blanchflower of the Bank of England?s monetary policy committee that 2 million people could be out of work by Christmas, the Guardian editorialised, ?at this rate we will be lucky if…[his two million forecast] is all that happens.? Even with such extensive government backing, it was immediately apparent that the crisis had not passed. Kaletsky had warned, ?Even the apparent rescue of Halifax Bank of Scotland may result in a bigger crisis, if the drowning HBOS drags down its rescuer, Lloyds TSB.... If this fails, it will take down all Britain?s banks.? He expressed little confidence in the viability of the new bank if it was not offered ?some kind of firm government safety net??paid for, of course, by the taxpayer?for shareholders and was instead a ?pure private sector solution.? If not, then ?market attacks against HBOS will soon be revived and redirected against the merged bank,? leaving ?only one solution? nationalisation of the entire British banking system.? These predictions were swiftly confirmed when almost 2 billion was slashed off the value of Lloyds TSB?s takeover of HBOS in initial trading and the bank?s shares fell by 15 percent. Attention has also turned to other potential fatalities?most notably the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was also recently forced to raise additional finance through a rights issue and whose shares fell by 10 percent. The Scotsman reported, ?A source familiar with the situation yesterday warned that Scotland may be in danger of losing both its banks. ?This is a revolutionary day for the banking sector,? the source said. ?Nothing is ever going to be the same. Look at the state of the markets. There?s still another shoe to fall?a merger of Royal Bank of Scotland with HSBC.? ? It is somewhat disingenuous to described RBS as merely a ?Scottish? bank. One of the top 10 banking groups in the United States and amongst the largest in Europe, RBS is a target for speculation because, like HBOS, its loan book exceeded its deposit base. Reports indicate that the funding gap at RBS is 161 billion (HBOS was 198 billion) while it also ?has a heavy exposure to the United States via its Citizens Bank subsidiary,? the Scotsman reported. Only the announcement by the US that it would buy billions of bad mortgage debts held by American banks produced a rally of Britain?s banking share prices and of the London shares market. But the long-term picture remains fraught with danger, given the massive sums involved. The credit agency Standard & Poor?s has predicted that US and European banks will suffer a second massive wave of losses from the credit crunch in the next few months, raising the present total from US$378 billion to something nearer US$500 billion.

Nick ****ing Cohen
19 Sep 2008
The following review was originally solicited by the Observer but was never used. On What’s Left What splendid timing. Out pops a book applauding the virtues of the invasion of Iraq, just when even the invasion’s last bedraggled supporters in the American establishment are giving up on it. Even the head of the British Army has declared it a disaster. The United Nations have revealed that among the occupation’s magnificent achievements is there is more torture in Iraq now than under Saddam. The debate about the scale of the slaughter concerns how many hundreds of thousands are dead. So here Nick Cohen not only cheers the decision to invade but declares his bemusement about why everyone else didn’t join him. Maybe he’s got another one coming out called “Why can’t everyone see England are bound to win the 2006 World Cup?” Much of the book comprises accounts of Iraqis who supported the invasion, with scorn for those opponents of the war who “wouldn’t listen” to Iraqis who’d experienced Saddam’s tyranny. But even the Iraq Survey Group sponsored by George Bush reported that 60% of Iraqis now support attacks on occupying troops, and amongst the most strident are those who suffered under Saddam. So does Cohen still think we should follow mainstream Iraqi opinion. If he does, presumably he’s training to go out there and start firing, is he? But there’s also an extraordinary element to this book. As well as being a re-hash of all the insipid arguments used by fans of the war, (the anti-war movement didn’t want Saddam to be deposed because they “Might have faced a Middle-East running short of dictators for them to salute” etc.), he claims his pro-war mania should be the true agenda for the left. So everyone vaguely connected to the left is reviled in this book for opposing the war: Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, human rights lawyers, the lot. Everyone was wrong except Nick. Cohen WAS impressed however by Paul Wolfowitz, co-creator of the “Project for the American Century,” and Bush’s choice to head the World Bank for his uncompromising dedication to big business and militarism. Cohen met him in London, and admired his “warmth” and “coherence” and “sense of purpose.” So – the left should denounce everyone with a record of valuing humanity above profit and war, and revere the most prominent champions of profit who are prepared to fight wars to defend this. It would be like someone cheering all season for Arsenal in an Arsenal shirt, then saying he was doing this because he was the only true supporter of Tottenham. And what a bizarre world he lives in, which writes off all those millions who oppose the war as either twisted lefties, or dupes of twisted lefties. So there we are – Cohen is the only true person on the left, despite the fact that on the defining issue of our times he is angrily to the right of two ex-presidents of America, the Liberal Democrats, Joanna Lumley, Leo Sayer, Zoe Ball, Jimmy Hill, Pope John Paul II, Jacques Chirac, Dolly Parton, almost everyone in Africa and South America, the head of the British army and Cat bloody Stevens. It might be worth reading a book explaining the ‘virtues’ of this war by Colin Powell, or even Paul Wolfowitz, as an insight into the thinking of those behind it. But this represents no one but himself. If you’re really bored and fancy reading it, do something more useful, such as counting the ants in your garden or pushing an onion round the perimeter of Surrey.

Bankers should bail themselves out
19 Sep 2008
Thirty years we’ve had, of unfathomably wealthy bankers and dealers being justified as part of the free market. So they boasted: “I’ve just got my summer bonus and spent part of it on a small African nation which I burnt down for a laugh,” or went to restaurants that charged a thousand pounds for meals such as “asparagus boiled in panda’s tears” or bought cars that ran on liquified diamonds, and it was all proof we lived in a free society in which we were paid what we were worth and couldn’t rely on state handouts. Then the minute their scam falls apart, they’re straight on to the Government squealing “Can we have a free state handout please, our bank’s gone bust.” They’re like spoilt students who go back to their Dad for more money because they’ve blown a year’s allowance in one week. But this soppy government will go “You already had fifty billion quid, what have you done with that? Well alright, here’s another fifty billion we were saving for kidney machines, but this time be careful.” It’s so obscene you get comments such as the one yesterday that went “The money men have made fools of us. In the years of their dominance they insisted the markets were the highest judges and must be left to rule. Now the markets are signalling their downfall, they’re running sobbing to governments and taxpayers, begging for our money.” And that piece of class-hatred came from Max Hastings in the Daily Mail. Because the explanation for the current crash from people like that is they were right to demand an unregulated free market, as society could only be run efficiently if the world’s finances were put in the hands of these bankers. But then it turned out these bankers were more interested in their private wealth than in the good of society as a whole ? and fair’s fair, no one could possibly have anticipated that. So, as Gordon Brown has become so friendly with Thatcher, maybe he can put her to use. He should tell her she’s about to make a speech at the Conservative conference, but fill the room with city executives, who’ll be told “You can’t go on paying yourselves more than you earn. We can’t allow those who can’t stand on their own two feet to sponge off the state.” Then they should all be sent down the job centre. At first they’ll complain “There’s nothing for me in there. I trained for two whole hours to get my qualifications as a parasite and there’s no parasite jobs going at the moment anywhere.” Then, just as people who claimed benefits when they were working have to pay the money back, all the bonuses they received for boosting their company’s shares will have to be returned, now the shares are worthless. And if they haven’t got it they should be herded into a new social category called “pension slaves”, in which they spend the rest of their lives doing errands for all the people whose pensions they’ve ruined. Instead the politicians and businessmen will all join together in saying: “It seems that everything we’ve been saying for 30 years has turned out to be shite. In these circumstances, it is imperative that those people who became immensely rich out of creating this shite should be compensated heavily. It is also of great importance than we pay no attention to anyone who warned us this was bound to end in shite, as the only people trustworthy to get us out of it are those that put us in it. Carry on everyone.”

Money in the water
19 Sep 2008
Access to and control of water, have been contentious issues for centuries. Most recently this struggle has taken the form of a conflict over the increasing commercialisation, privatisation and liberalisation of fresh water goods and services. This shift in regulation, which has been introduced throughout much of the world, can be characterised not only by its nature ? an increase in private sector participation in the water sector and thus a reliance on the free market as the model upon which society structures the governance, production and distribution of socially necessary goods and services ? but also the geo-political climate within which this shift takes place, namely, the era of economic globalisation. Indeed, this shift has been facilitated by processes of economic globalisation ? processes that are defined by the dominant neo-liberal policies of deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation. Economic globalisation has done more than just facilitate the shift from public to private sector however. When it comes to governing resources which hitherto were considered public goods or part of the global commons, neoliberal policies have changed the nature and structure of governance. The shift in regulatory power has meant a reduction (and in some cases an outright eclipse) in the planning capacity of local, regional and national authorities. By using the EU and its water policies as an example, this article considers how supranational governing arrangements and institutions act as mutually-protective associations and were formed so as to enshrine legally the right to accumulate capital, through the right to private property and legally raid public goods and services and the global commons, such as water and its provision. There has been, and indeed there still is, much debate and contention about what is, or should be, the purpose, role and responsibilities of the European Union. What?s not in doubt is from its original inception the EU was always designed to underpin legally, grow, protect and sustain capitalism in Europe and beyond. This was made clear in the Treaty of Rome. Steve Mcgiffen, describes the role and purpose of the EU: ?In the main The Treaty of Rome set out to make western Europe safe for capitalism and in particular for the biggest corporations? Since then, the power of corporations has grown and that of other social forces has diminished. This is reflected in the four major treaties, which have carried integration ever further since the mid-1980?s and reached its apotheosis in the text of the so-called constitutional treaty, in reality no constitution at all but a neo-liberal political programme, an audacious attempt to transform a temporary political ascendancy into a set of permanent arrangements and institutions?The consistent theme is that what?s good for business is good for everyone, and what?s good for business is to be able to make profit with as few restraints as possible ? even where these restraints involve the well-being of the environment or the people and other beings which inhabit it? (Mcgiffen, 2005:180-181). A key area of focus here is how the political and policy direction has been charted in the EU, and our concern is how this relates to water policy in Scotland. The increasing commercialisation, privatisation and liberalisation of water in Scotland is taking place incrementally by introducing legislation – in the form of EU directives alongside national policy ? which, taken together, can create the impression of being an irresistible force that?s thrusting water policy, governance and ownership down a private sector path. Evidence of the EU?s preferred route in water policy is seen in their activities in and out of Europe. Outside Europe the EU has encouraged privatisation through bi-lateral agreements where conditionalities have been placed on Trade and Aid agreements: benefiting European companies, the market leaders in private water provision. This mindset is displayed in the European Commission Research programme. FP7 supports research in selected priority areas – the aim being to make, or keep, the EU as a world leader in those sectors. One of these sectors is water: through the Water Supply and Sanitation Technology Programme (WSSTP). This combines members from the European Commission, the Private Water Utilities, the private scientific community and national water associations. The water policy direction promoted by the EU in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) acceding and candidate countries is also evidence of the underpinning mindset prevalent in the EU. Privatisation, commercialisation and ?institutional reform? which benefit existing Western European Companies, such as Veolia and Suez, is the medicine most prescribed by EU institutions in CEE countries. The European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) are key proponents of such a path. The remit of the ERBD is clear: to invest mainly in Private Companies to help central and Eastern Europe and ex-soviet countries nurture a new private sector and market based economy. The EIB, a part owner of the EBRD, promotes values and so-called institutional reform in public utilities, which corporatise and commercialise and, arguably, lay the foundations for potential future privatisations. Loans to CEE Water Utilities are often given alongside grants from the European IPSA funds. Yet still there is a modern day scandal of 20-22 million CEE people who do not have adequate sanitation provision: unsurprising, as those going without proper sanitation are amongst the poorest Europeans and would not be able to ensure ?full cost recovery? and so-called ?bankability? for private investors and operators. In its Paper ?Global Europe: Competing in the World? The European Commission, DG Trade, and its Commissioner Peter Mandelson, asserted that European Companies require competitive markets at home to create globally competitive companies in the EU. This includes services: though water is currently exempted from the Services Directive it is constantly under threat of inclusion though it is considered a service to be exported beyond Europe?s borders. They claim how ?Services are the cornerstone of the EU economy. They (services) represent 77 per cent of GDP and employment, an area of European comparative advantage with the greatest potential for growth in EU exports. Gradually liberalising global trade in services is an important factor in future economic growth including in the developing world?. The words of the European Commission Paper mirror almost identically those of the European Services Forum (ESF) set out in a position paper in 2007. Indicating the influence of big business on the policies of the EU, they state: ?Services account for over 77 per cent of both European GDP and employment but to date represents only 28 per cent of European external trade. Simply put, the growth potential implied by this disparity requires that all new trade agreements concluded by the European Union include a comprehensive package of services liberalisation. The EU must ensure that this fact is made explicit to all potential negotiating partners before talks are opened.? (ESF Position Paper on Trade Agreements, (28 February 2007) An important driver of the gradual liberalisation of water provision is the use of EU directives. Many of the directives related to water appear benign and technocratic and indeed progressive. Intended to improve the environment and human health, the likes of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, Drinking Water Directive, the Nitrates Directive, and the Water Framework Directive (WFD) are individually sound directives in improving human health and water sustainability. They have been introduced, however, just as some utilities are downsizing and sticking only to their core services, such as in Stockholm, and/or commercialising operations still in a public framework, such as Scotland or Northern Ireland. Thus, adherence to the complex needs of such directives necessitates an increased role for private companies: whether it be multi-faceted private operators or specialised technological companies who offer a particular service needed to meet the requirements of the directives. Alarmingly, EU Directives make up approximately 80 per cent of UK Water legislation. In Scotland there have been three significant consequences of EU policy and legislation. The Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive required the Regional Water Authorities at that time to seek finance through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) as their funding from borrowing and charges was not enough to cover the costs of the new Waste Water Treatment Plants. The possibility of additional borrowing or indeed extra spending from government was not countenanced. This powerfully demonstrated ?a reluctance to raise taxation to cover much needed investment means that private sector investment is required to modernise facilities and pay for EU-mandated modernisation? (Global Water Report). The environmental and social impact of rolling out with PFI was shown last year when the Seafield Treatment Works leaked a catastrophic amount of sewerage into the Forth over a whole weekend ? due to the breakdown of a pump and the then operator, Thames Water, not having a spare pump in place. This incident led to essential council workers being taken from front-line duties in order to patrol Edinburgh?s beaches and fisherman being grounded. Despite the risk being ? apparently ?transferred to the operator they were fined only 13,500, while Fishermen in Pittenweem are still fighting for compensation with no agency or organisation taking responsibility to pay them their lost earnings. When considering the Water Services (Scotland) Act 2005 the Parliament at that time allowed Competition in the non-domestic sector (to bill, charge and deal with customer issues) out of a concern that the Competition Act, modelled on articles 81 and 82 of the European Community Treaty, could foist on them an arrangement not conducive to the wants and needs of the Scottish industry. The STUC argued for an exemption in 2000, but the then Scottish Executive believed and decided otherwise. Stating in their consultation Managing Change in the Scottish Water Industry that, ?The Executive is keen to ensure that Scottish water and sewerage legislation and UK competition legislation, taken together provide, an effective framework for the development of competition in the Scottish water sector?. Worryingly, but not surprisingly, in June this year, Alan Sutherland – the Chief Executive of the Water Industry Commission – called for competition to be rolled out to domestic customers of water. Moreover, not content with calling for water to be further liberalised in Scotland, he advocated a full UK market for all domestic and non-domestic services. Sutherland denied this as a departure from Scotland?s publicly owned status. One can only wonder what Mr Sutherland believes constitutes public ownership? The Water Framework Directive plainly affects Scotland as well. And, while it is inconclusive in terms of its prescription of how the governance and ownership of water should take shape, it does enshrine particular substantive principles that exceed simply technocratic solutions thereby giving institutional legitimacy to ideological initiatives such as full-cost recovery. This was transposed into Scottish law through the Water Environment and Water Services (Scotland) Act 2003. What?s more, the WFD has had a profound affect on the way in which Scotland sustains its water services. It is clear that the WFD is being used to support the notion that general taxation should not pay for the essential public need of water. There are other directives, not necessarily explicitly water related, that facilitate the commercialisation and privatisation of water in Scotland. The Utility Procurement Directive tries ?to ensure a real opening up of the market and a fair balance in the application of procurement rules in the water, energy, transport and postal services sectors?. The directive goes on to state, ?It should be ensured, therefore, that the equal treatment of contracting entities operating in the public sector and those operating in the private sector is not prejudiced?. In one sense this legally affirms the current direction of water in Scotland as Scottish Water continues to decrease its in-house workforce and capabilities and increasingly outsources its work. On the other it should be noted that this directive legally enshrines such a direction. The policy direction inside Europe indicates a layered and complex path is taken; whilst actions outside Europe illustrate, ultimately, the ideological predisposition of the EU. The current direction is no accident: it follows a clear political trajectory that promotes a ?Public Bad/Private Good? ethos. This is of fundamental importance: particular political choices drawn from a particular strain of free-market ideology is the order of the day. As Robert Kuttner notes, ?The decision to allow markets, flaws and all, free rein is just one political choice among many. There is no escape from politics?. (Kuntner,1999:329). Alternatively, political decisions can be made in a progressive manner whereby public authorities seek to re-appropriate public goods and services. In Paris the municipality has chosen to re-municipalise water supply, as they have also done in Grenoble. What?s important here is that these were deliberate political choices made by governing authorities. In Scotland EU directives have been used to affirm and introduce policies conducive to the dominant political ideology that sees the penetration of public goods and services as progressive . If we are to strive for a genuine political alternative and outlook that employed a strategy of legally enshrining universal access to water – and other such public goods and services for that matter. A constitutional amendment, impregnable to the private sector, which is based on guaranteeing equitable access to water for everyone irrespective of an individual?s financial wherewithal is needed? then, and only then can we be sure of such universal access now and in the future. Tommy Kane and Kyle Mitchell are PhD candidates at Strathclyde University and are members of and contributors to the Reclaiming Public Water Network.

Brown inches closer to ingsoc
19 Sep 2008
The use, misuse and downright abuse of the word ‘Orwellian’ seem to be a prerequisite for much of modern discourse, political and otherwise. One wonders how the man himself would react, having fervently expressed his disgust at the linguistic imprecision prevalent in political commentary. He bemoaned the promiscuous application of the word ‘fascism’ to things as diverse as youth hostels, astrology, homosexuality and Gandhi, so one can only imagine his reaction the to the use of the word ‘Orwellian’ to describe Indian brain scans, employment equity, a recent Jimmy Page album, and a TV programme in which George Galloway wore a leotard and lapped milk from a saucer. Orwell lamented that “it is often easier to make up words…than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness…the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” Orwell was invoked recently in AC Grayling’s Guardian piece, which commented on the Brown government’s proposal to implement a system whereby every email, text message, phone call, VOIP call and web usage in the UK will be recorded, centrally stored, and made accessible to government entities, including those outside of law enforcement. The measure will require a billion incidents of data exchange to be recorded each day. Grayling described this astonishing proposal as an ‘Orwellian nightmare’, and went on to assert that “not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised.” The objection here is, unfortunately, that (for once) the commentator has undersold the extent to which Brown’s proposal accords with Orwell’s imagined dystopia. It is pertinent to place this proposal alongside other New Labour surveillance initiatives. Firstly, the police are planning to expand their automatic number plate recognition systems to enable them to read 50 million licence plates a day, reconstructing and recording the details of drivers’ journeys, which can then be held for five years. Secondly, the DNA of wrongly-arrested innocent citizens is now held on file indefinitely in a national database (as happened to Darren Nixon in February of this year ? his black mp3 player was mistaken for a handgun, and for the rest of his life the national DNA database will testify that he was arrested on suspicion of a firearms offence). Thirdly, the Telegraph revealed this month that local councils are offering rewards of up to 500 to individuals, including children as young as eight years old, who snoop on their neighbours and report minor infractions, which can include crimes as petty as failure to recycle. The description of the role ranges from council to council, from ‘street scene champions’ and ‘street hawks’ to ‘covert human intelligence sources.’ Southwark Council employs 400 such volunteers. Add to this mix the forthcoming nationwide introduction of compulsory ID cards containing biometric data, the proposed extension of pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects to 42 days, and, of course, that the fact that London’s citizens are caught on CCTV on average every six seconds (with facial recognition technology very firmly in the governmental pipeline). Suddenly the need to consider Grayling’s claim more seriously becomes apparent. Has the UK finally reached a point where comparisons with 1984 are genuinely appropriate? Brown’s vision of the UK comprises a nation-state where every type of electronic communication (and car journey) of every person, all the time, everywhere, is recorded, with this information being made available to a list of entities that is distinctly shadowy in its precision. In 1984, the Thought Police achieved this level of surveillance by way of the ubiquitous two-way Telescreen, through which party messages were beamed and citizens observed. Siemens’ telecommunications monitoring technology ? already sold to 60 countries ? hadn’t been conceived in 1948 when Orwell wrote his book, but when combined with an estimated 4 million CCTV cameras, it is arguably more effective than the fictional Telescreen at capturing the day-to-day interactions of the populace. Telescreens could in some quarters be switched off, and paid only cursory attention to the ‘proles.’ Brown’s proposal is all-encompassing. Furthermore, the ‘covert human intelligence sources’ employed by local councils bear more than a passing resemblance to the youth leagues of spies in Orwell’s book, taught from an early age the value of betraying fellow citizens for the all-seeing state. Finally, consider the plight of an individual detained under the anti-terrorist powers, like Rizwaan Sabir: a postgraduate in International Relations at the University of Nottingham studying terrorism, detained without charge for six days, for possessing an Al-Qaeda document available in paperback at both Amazon.com and the US Justice Department website. The Thought Police in Orwell’s novel would pluck potential dissidents ? those yet to actually offend, as in Sabir’s case – from their daily lives, based on covert surveillance, depositing them in the Ministry of Love for re-education through torture. Thankfully, we are not at the stage of re-education through torture ? yet ? but the mere possibility of a reasonable comparison with the Thought Police is cause for grave concern. So was AC Grayling right to claim that “not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised”? Well, no. However his error was not the usual hyperbolic cooption of Orwell’s legacy, but a mere error of fact. Orwell did conceive of such a world. However, he did so in the context of a cautionary tale about the imagined excesses of a fictional totalitarian state – not a description of proposals to be included in the next Queen’s speech. In 1984, “there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.” Did Orwell’s title miss the boat by 24 years?

Stripping the Tories
18 Sep 2008
Luckily enough for the Tory party, quite a few international markets went boom on the day that this story broke. Strip club vouchers offering discounts for Tory delegates, in with the brochure for the upcoming Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. Let’s not wallow around in anyone’s gloopy moral residue. Sex work isn’t nice work, but it isn’t immoral, and a visit to a strip club is simply a statement that you are happy to cash in on the privileges of your wealth and gender in the most sickly self-indulgent of ways, and that you are comfortable enough in that privilege that you don’t mind buying other people’s bodies for your personal sexual gratification in a room full of your colleagues. Hey, there’s a big market for that sort of thing, and markets, as we’ve all been reminded this week, are amoral, not necessarily immoral. Markets merely allow the flow of wealth and power to seep a little more smoothly towards the top. And hey, since it’s the annual Tory piss-up and we’re all very pleased with ourselves, why not flaunt that philosophy, especially if, in the words of Ian Taylor of Marketing Birmingham, the vouchers were ‘produced to help maximise the economic impact for local businesses’. What angers me about this sordid little story isn’t the fact that Tory MPs might enjoy visiting strip clubs. Statistics suggest that well-paid, powerful white men will number most patrons of these newly-licensed ‘entertainment establishments‘ (A legal loophole means that since the introduction of the Licensing Act 2003 lap dancing clubs currently only require a Premises Licence for the sale of alcohol to operate, despite being part of the commercial sex industry. The number of lap dancing clubs across the UK is estimated to have doubled since 2004). There is always, always going to be a market for the more culturally and fiscally powerful to buy sex. What adds insult to time-worn injury, however, is the fact that it’s a buyer’s market. This was not an advertisement, but a voucher: a voucher offering conservative delegates a 66% reduction in entry price to Birmingham’s Rocket Club. Now, these are bloody hard-working girls. The women who staff strip-clubs and brothels don’t do it for kicks, whatever the makers of Secret Diary of A Call Girl may say. They do it for the money, and they earn every penny of that money by laying the most intimate parts of their personhood on the line and risking their physical and mental health every day within a profession that earns them ostracization from friends and family. These women deserve better than to be offered up as discounted goods. These women deserve to be treated with respect. In the vast majority of cases, women don’t become sex workers – prostitutes, lap-dancers, streetwalkers, strippers or porn stars – for the kicks. No, they do it for the money. They do it because there is simply no other way to earn that scale of living wage as a woman under 30 in the current UK job-market. In the Guardian today, most commenters seemed to miss the point of a heart-rending article by a prostitute and single mother. Her point was that she became a prostitute because her former job as an office PA was not paying her enough to support herself and her two children and was, at the same time, taking up so much time and energy that she barely got to see them. Her decision to go into full-time sex work was, as it is for many women in her situation, entirely an economic one. We need to start respecting women’s work, whether or not they have made the difficult decision to enter the gloomy world of sex-work. If Tory MPs such as Anne Widdecombe really feel that the inclusion of the voucher in the brochure represents the party ‘throwing every value out of the window,’ if they don’t want to face the escalating realities of sex work for women of every class and background in the economic real world of contemporary Britain, then maybe they should start to analyse why women make these choices. Eighty three per-cent of sex workers, according to recent studies by Object and Fawcett, want to leave the profession; but thousands of women every year make that career choice, and they make it because the country in which we live is currently fostering a gruelling long-hours culture in which women make up the bulk of lower-paid, exploited workers. Women are still paid 17% less than men in full time work and 33% less in part-time work, and when they get home they are still expected to perform the bulk of domestic chores, especially if they are single parents, as many sex workers are. But the Tory delegates who have been so warmly invited to enjoy the bodies of the low-paid women of Birmingham at a discount price do not think this is a priority. In fact, a key part of current Tory policy proposes an end to equal pay audits, insisting that ‘only those firms which lose sex discrimination cases will be subject’ to them. Until the Tories get serious about offering low-paid workers decent living wages, then any paltry statement blaming the City of Birmingham for putting entirely appropriate adverts in the back of their brochures will be crass hypocrisy. Until that day, they may as well schedule complementary sessions with hookers into the official programme and stuff a few fivers into Lady Thatcher’s pearly g-string whilst they’re at it. Any less is pure hypocrisy.

Renewables do add up
18 Sep 2008
“I can’t do the sums any way without having a slice of nuclear power in the mix. It doesn’t work. I ask my enthusiastic green friends if they’ll do the sums ? and they can’t” said Professor Ian Fells on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday. As a stalwart member of the nuclear lobby it’s unlikely Fells has many green friends. Last year we did the sums and found that through a radical rethink of how we use energy and massive investment in renewables, the UK could meet its energy needs without fossil fuels or nuclear. “The sums”, as Professor Fells calls them are contained in our report, Zero Carbon Britain. Fells’ comments coincide with the release of his report, A Pragmatic Energy Policy for the UK. The report claims that without a nuclear revival and investment in coal the UK will face an “energy gap” within the next decade. The report also states that renewables have a role to play, but the hope that they could provide large amounts of energy is “wishful thinking” and demonstrates a “staggering lack of understanding of the technical and engineering reality of what can be built”. Zero Carbon Britain provides exactly the “technical and engineering reality” that Professor Fells claims is missing. The report models current UK energy demands across all sectors of the economy and assesses the potential for different renewable sources to replace fossil fuel and nuclear generation. This isn’t wishful thinking; we’ve carefully modelled exactly where and when we use energy, and how we could replace current generation with renewables. The scenario uses a broad spread of different sources ? onshore and offshore wind, solar, small-scale hydro and tidal power. It’s true that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But we’ve mapped the UK for renewable energy potential and found that by distributing the generation around the country, using storage and managing our energy use intelligently we can even out the ups and downs in supply and demand. Energy saving is crucial. The scenario requires us to reduce ourenergy use by almost half. This won’t mean a few energy saving lightbulbs and washing your clothes at 30C. It means big changes in our energy infrastructure ? switching to electric cars and public transport, serious investment to insulate our existing buildings, and rethinking how we use energy to deliver our wellbeing. The combined threats of energy security and climate change mean that these changes need to happen quickly. The latest climate science suggests that we need to make reductions in greenhouse gases much faster than government targets ? faster even than most campaigners and NGOs are calling for. If we want to avoid seriously destabilising the climate we’ve got roughly 20 years to reduce our emissions to zero. Zero Carbon Britain proves that this is technically possible. Because the timescale is so short this energy scenario only uses technology that is developed and ready to go. The urgency of the situation means we need to invest our limited resources in technologies we know are going to deliver within this 20 year timeframe. At the Centre for Alternative Technology we produce all our electricity from our own renewable sources. I’d say we are pretty in touch with “technical and engineering reality”. We know what works and what doesn’t. We’ve been building, installing and living with these technologies for 35 years. Zero Carbon Britain shows that the UK can achieve energy security without fossil fuels and nuclear power. If Fells wants some new “enthusiastic green friends” to do the sums for him, he should come and visit.

Student living – this isn?t Hollyoaks
18 Sep 2008
With the beginning of the 2008/09 academic year fast approaching, students will soon be settling in to the realities of student life. For new students this means at some point they?ve made a choice: between studying away from home on the one hand and continuing to live with their parents on the other. Almost a third of students choose the latter option. This often means a long commute to a university chosen on the basis of its location instead of its merits ? but at least these students have the security of a roof over their head. For those who have chosen to study away from home, often unaware of the true cost of student life, this means moving in to student accommodation and an ongoing struggle against poverty, unscrupulous landlords and, more often than not, appalling living conditions. From the first day of the first semester there is one thing that all students can be sure of: their maintenance loan won?t be enough to keep body and soul together. Students are entitled to no more than 3000 non-income assessed, which rises to a mere 4600 for students from the poorest backgrounds. Compare this with an average rent of 60 per week (which works out at 3120 for the year) and then add on the rising cost of utilities, food and other necessities and the loan system is exposed for what it really is ? a disgrace. The only way for most students to make ends meet is to work at least part of the time during the semester and burden themselves with overdrafts and credit cards the rest of the time. During the summer holidays when the loan has dried up students are forced to seek out whatever work they can get and have none of the usual rights to Job Seekers? Allowance or other benefits that most workers can fall back on. The Government has done nothing to make student housing more affordable. Most first year students looking to live away from home for the first time look to move in to university owned halls of residence. In this way they are guaranteed good quality housing at a cheap price. Thanks to PFI, these residences are now being opened up to profiteering vultures from the private sector. To give an example from a 2002 Unison report; at Luton University student nurses were told they had to leave their halls of residence and move into new PFI-built halls. Their rents shot up from 177 per month to 244 per month with at least one student being forced to sleep in their car! Besides incredibly inflated prices, these profiteers also force students to sign longer contracts, so that students living at university during term time are forced to sign 52 week contracts and pay rent even when they know they won?t be living there. Besides being unaffordable, private housing is also a playground for bad landlords. Surely students ought to be able to expect landlords to fulfil their contracts as an absolute minimum? Apparently not. More and more students are living with damp, infestation, poor or nonexistent heating and unsafe appliances ? to the complete indifference of landlords. Landlords therefore often get away with breaking the law ? the long and arduous process through the courts will always favour the landlord in the long run. All this begs the question: why is student housing in such a bad state and what needs to be done to improve it? The question of housing isn?t, after all, isolated to students. In the current economic climate more and more people are finding it difficult to keep up with their rent and mortgage repayments. The Tories and New Labour have no solution beyond opening housing up further to the private sector. PFI and private landlords only succeed in driving students to the breadline and ultimately out of education altogether. The only way to win our rights for both a decent education and decent housing is through the organised labour and student movements. The NUS and the Unions must organise together at the grassroots and fight to force the Labour government to act on the housing disgrace. The Labour government must adopt socialist policies now to assure workers and students alike affordable and secure housing: No to privatisation of student halls of residence! Begin a massive programme of decent social housing! A living grant for all students!

Europe gripped by fear of global crash
18 Sep 2008
Europe?s ruling elite has reacted with shock and disbelief to what they fear will be the most serious crisis for world capitalism since the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The European Central Bank (ECB) responded to the bankruptcy filing by the US investment bank Lehman Brothers with a massive infusion of liquidity aimed at propping up European stock markets. On Monday, the ECB announced a one-day tender for 30 billion euros and declared in a statement that it ?stands ready to contribute to orderly conditions in the euro money market.? The action of the ECB was followed by that of the Swiss National Bank, which provided further liquidity as Asian and European stock markets tumbled. Anticipating sharp falls in the British stock market, the Bank of England released 5 billion in fresh liquidity to ease markets on Monday. The German finance ministry, the Bundesbank (central bank) and the Bafin financial supervisory authority all tried to restore calm in German markets with a joint statement saying the exposure of German banks to Lehman was manageable. Such reassurances by European central bankers, combined with massive infusions of cash, did little to calm fears on the markets. On Monday, the London-based FTSEuro First 300 index of leading European shares fell 5 percent, while the German Dax index fell by 4.7 percent?reaching its lowest level in two years. Bank stocks were especially hard hit. Following the huge stock market losses on Monday and growing fears of a collapse of America?s largest insurance group, American International Groups (AIG), European banks intervened once again on Tuesday, with the ECB pumping in an additional 70 billion euros and the Bank of England a further 20 billion. Once again, the massive infusions of cash failed to re-stabilise markets. On Tuesday, London?s FTSE 100 fell below 5,000 for the first time in seven years. German stocks continued to fall. The blue chip Dax index fell by 98.99 points to 5,965.17, a 1.63 percent decline. The main French CAC index also registered heavy falls of 3.78 percent on Monday and 1.96 percent on Tuesday. Contrary to official protestations in Germany, the full extent of the involvement of Europe?s major banks in Lehman Brothers is massive. On Tuesday, for example, it was reported that the German state lender KfW had transferred 300 million euros in swaps to Lehman Brothers on the very day it applied for bankruptcy, while the Swiss UBS financial group announced that it expects similar losses of at least 300 million euros due to its involvement in Lehman Brothers. UBS is the world?s largest wealth manager and has already been forced to write down assets of $37 billion in connection with the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. According to the German business newspaper Handelsblatt, it is probable that the entire emergency fund set up by a consortium of German banks to guard against financial crises will be absorbed by the collapse of Lehman. The Deposit Guarantee Fund of the Association of German Banks (BdB) is estimated at $4.6 billion, a sum that is swamped by the 6 billion euros required to cover the liabilities of Lehman?s bankrupt subsidiary in Germany. The 6 billion euro loss from the collapse of Lehman is the largest single loss in German financial history. Britain is even more exposed to the US financial crisis. Following the collapse of the Northern Rock bank earlier this year, Britain?s largest mortgage lender, the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) also faces bankruptcy. Its shares plummeted by 40 percent on Tuesday and it looks set to be acquired by Lloyds-TSB. Other major European banks could be swept into the financial maelstrom, under conditions where between April and June the combined economies of the European Union already shrank by 0.2 percent. Britain and Spain, which have been hit by a severe housing crisis, are both estimated to already be in recession. According to the Kiel Economic Institute, Europe?s single biggest economy, Germany, will also be hit by recession this year. With inflation on the rise throughout Europe, in many countries exceeding 4 percent, economic commentators have already raised fears of stagflation within the European Union. French and German politicians have issued reassuring bromides declaring that the fundamentals of the European economies and banking system are sound and in better shape than the US. But economic commentators have sounded dire warnings to the contrary, emphasising that it is not possible for Europe to insulate itself from the ongoing collapse of US financial institutions. Pointing out the implications of the threatened collapse of the insurer AIG, the New York Times noted that European banks owned three-quarters of the $441 billion in unregulated AIG securities held by a consortium of banks. These securities are tied to the plunging sub-prime mortgage market and expose European financial institutions to enormous risks in the event of an AIG bankruptcy. Writing in the Frankfurter Rundshau on Monday, Jan Pieter Krahnen spoke of the ?great dangers of a shock wave? enveloping German and European banks should confidence in the type of credit default swap deals favoured by Lehman Brothers and AIG be shaken in Germany. On Wednesday, the Sddeutsche Zeitung headed its interview with a leading finance expert, ?The Worst is Yet to Come.? A number of near apocalyptic commentaries have appeared in the British media, stating that the current crisis is at least comparable to the financial collapse of 1929. Writing in the Guardian on Tuesday, economics editor Larry Eliot headlined his piece ?This Week the Crash Went Nuclear, and Britain Will Feel the Worst of the Fallout.? He wrote: ?Clearly, the events of the weekend now make a prolonged and deep recession far more likely. Forget all the talk about soft landings, or a recession so short and sharp that it will barely be noticed. The way things stand, it is now a question of whether there is a complete meltdown of the financial system, with institutions crashing like ninepins, or whether a severe rationing of credit over a prolonged period leads to falling house prices, weaker consumer spending, lower investment and rising unemployment.? ?This is without doubt the most serious financial shock since 1929,? he continued. In an article for the right-wing Daily Mail, Alex Brummer recalled that the first indications of the swelling international crisis began with troubles at a European bank. ?The crunch began,? he wrote, ?on August 9 last year after the leading French bank BNP Paribas announced it could not value assets in two of its investment funds because of the toxic securities they contained.? He went on to refer to ?tens if not hundreds of billions of assets which have turned bad and might be worthless,? and concluded, ?Only now at Lehman, Merrill Lynch, AIG and elsewhere is the true size of the black hole being recognised. At Lehman, for example, the figure for suspect or toxic assets more than doubled from 17 billion to 44 billion in the course of last weekend alone.? The Mail?s editorial declared, ?For decades, we have worshipped at the shrine of gold. Prime ministers and presidents have bowed before its keepers. The monarchs of cash, arbiters of wealth, supposed founts of all wisdom, have bestridden Europe and the United States, humbling all in their path… Today, we awaken to discover that like so many wizards of Oz, these supremely confident figures are in reality foolish old men?and some young ones?mouthing hollow incantations from behind curtains.? ?A vision of capitalism stands discredited,? it concluded. Willem Buiter, professor of European political economy at the London School of Economics, made one of the clearest statements on the global implications of the financial meltdown in the US. In the Financial Times, Buiter said of the $85 billion bailout of AIG by the US government, ?The largest insurance supermarket in the world, with a balance sheet in excess of $1 trillion, nationalised because it was seen to be deemed too big and too globally interconnected to fail!? He continued, ?The fear that drove this extraordinary decision is that AIG?s failure would increase counterparty risk, actual and perceived, throughout the financial system of the US and the rest of the world, to such an extent that no financial institution would have been willing to extend credit to any other financial institution. Credit to households and non-financial enterprises would have been the next domino to fall, and voil!, financial Armageddon.?

Facing up to the crisis
18 Sep 2008
The scale of the crisis engulfing the global financial system can no longer be in doubt. The events of the past few days have confirmed that we are living through the greatest meltdown since the Wall Street crash of 1929. For the second time in barely a week, an avowedly free market government in the citadel of laissez-faire capitalism has been forced to nationalise a linchpin of American finance – this time the world’s biggest insurance company, AIG – in an effort to prevent the toxin of collapse spreading further through the US economy. That followed hard on the heels of the nationalisation of the mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; the bankruptcy of the country’s fourth largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers – corroded by bad debt and bonus-fuelled speculation – and the forced takeover of Merrill Lynch. And a year after the credit crunch triggered the fatal run on Northern Rock, British high street retail banks are being sucked into the crisis: at one point yesterday the country’s largest mortgage lender, HBOS, had lost almost 70% of its share value since the start of the week. Meanwhile, the impact on the real economy is becoming stronger: output in Britain is falling and official unemployment is likely to rise above 2 million next year – the real figure will be significantly higher. More than 100,000 jobs are expected to go in finance alone. The only question is how deep and prolonged the recession will now be. What is certain is that the dominance of the free-market model of capitalism, which has held sway across the world for more than two decades, is rapidly coming to an end. When its high priests in Washington are forced to carry out the largest nationalisations ever undertaken outside the communist world, while intervening on an unprecedented scale across markets that were supposed to be self-regulating in order to keep the system afloat, the neoliberal order is transparently falling apart. Naturally, market fundamentalists and ideologues will continue to preach the old religion. The Times argued yesterday that the unfolding of the banking crisis showed that capitalism and markets were working, however “brutal and unforgiving” that might sound. Such otherworldly dogma is not a luxury candidates standing for election can afford – and even John McCain felt obliged this week to attack Wall Street’s “casino [of] greed, corruption of excess”, while Barack Obama blamed McCain’s economic philosophy of deregulation and called for wide-ranging reform. That is exactly what should be happening in Britain. But instead, across the main political parties, there is a striking and continuing failure to face up to the extent of the economic crisis or the sea change in policy it must herald. Britain’s political class appears to be wedded to the politics of the 1990s and the glory days of neoliberalism, clinging to the economic legacy of Thatcherism and unable to make the shift from deregulation to intervention that the times demand. The government has the most to gain and least to lose by doing so. But it’s hamstrung by Gordon Brown’s paralysing caution and New Labour’s original Blairite embrace of market ideology, private provision and corporate privilege. When Alistair Darling declared on Tuesday that he was “extremely anxious” about speculative manipulation of the markets, he invited the obvious question of what on earth he plans to do about it – and why he and Brown insisted on the “light-touch regulation” that created the destructive derivative whirligig in the first place. The Liberal Democrats could be capitalising on the early warnings from Vince Cable, their new superhero, about the debt crisis and his calls for the public ownership of Northern Rock. But instead of building on the tradition of Keynes and Lloyd George, their leader Nick Clegg has chosen this of all moments to orchestrate a symbolic return to economic liberalism, forcing through a commitment to cut both taxation and spending. The issue is not, of course, the Lib Dems’ welcome proposals to redistribute the tax burden from the low to the high paid – it’s the new plan to pay for extra tax cuts by reducing the overall level of public expenditure. Not only are spending cuts the last thing the economy needs as it sinks into recession. But underpinning the new policy is Clegg’s personal ideological conviction that state intervention is dead – exactly the opposite of what is required in the face of the storms now sweeping away the neoliberal nostrums of the past. It also gives political cover to David Cameron’s parallel enthusiasm for a smaller state, backed up by more charity provision for the poor. Much has been made of the Tories’ latter-day conversion to social liberalism, their new enthusiasm for fairness and their self-proclaimed “progressive” agenda. Certainly, their rhetoric is a long way from the confrontational style of the Thatcher era – even if the word “progressive” has, as the social democratic sage David Marquand argues, been largely gutted of any meaning. But when it comes to the core social and economic choices, all the signs are that Cameron’s Tories plan to follow precisely the same agenda of corporate privilege, deregulation, privatisation of public services and low taxes for the rich inherited from his Conservative predecessors via Tony Blair. Already George Osborne is moving away from his commitment to stick to Labour’s spending plans, while Cameron has declared that redistribution of wealth and income is an “approach that has run out of road”. But that agenda is precisely the model that has delivered today’s financial breakdown. And as a result, the leaders of the party expected to win the next general election – tied as they are to City and corporate interests – have even less to say about the crisis carving a swathe through finance and the wider economy, and what to do about it, than Brown and his unfortunate chancellor. Beyond calling for better bank deposit protection, Osborne seems to be utterly at sea. This all represents a woeful failure of institutional politics. But it is also a gift to anyone prepared to push a new agenda that breaks with the failed market orthodoxy and faces up to the reality of our times: that only decisive public intervention and regulation can begin to deal with the economic – or, for that matter, environmental – crises we face. For any Labour politician thinking of standing against the prime minister, that has to be the starting point. s.milne@guardian.co.uk