Break with the US war drive20 Jul 2008This autumn marks the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, by British and US troops, and next March will be the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Both wars have now lasted longer than all theatres of operation of World War II. The total death toll in Iraq hovers at around three quarters of a million, with two million people living in internal exile, and 2.5 million in external exile, mainly in Syria and Jordan. The total death toll in Afghanistan is not known but runs into many thousands, and both wars have been accompanied by an abuse of international law on a grand scale, through the use of illegal imprisonment, extraordinary rendition, deception of allied governments, and of course the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, where the US president has personally intervened to enable water boarding torture to continue. Britain has been the most loyal cheerleader for the US in both these countries, and therefore makes us culpable in the disasters that have followed. The total of the war, so far as Britain is concerned, runs into 1 billion according to answers to parliamentary questions I have asked. The past six years have also seen a huge increase in concerns about international politics and peace, and this led to the first ever global demonstration for peace in 2003 and continuing pressure on the British and US governments. Tony Blair lost office as a result of the war, and George Bush leaves in disgrace in a few months time. That pressure for peace in the US, where over 4,000 families are grieving for their lost sons and daughters in Iraq, forced Congress to vote for the immediate withdrawal of all US troops, a decision subsequently vetoed by President Bush. This pressure also forced both Democrat candidates Clinton and Obama to declare opposition to the war, and support for a withdrawal from Iraq strategy. This strategy, whilst on the face of it highly commendable, is deeply flawed by the Bush administration plan to withdraw the troops but leave behind a large number of virtually sovereign US bases. The US press are touting the figure of 50, which would undermine any claims of Iraqi independence. Clinton and Obama have both said the real war is in Afghanistan and indeed the pressure from the military establishments on both sides of the Atlantic are for some kind of reduction in direct military involvement in Iraq, in order to shift the emphasis eastwards, where they believe the real war is taking place. Afghanistan has shown that the opposition is based on a search for national identity, and whilst the Taliban, who are a far from unified force, are leading the battle, there is clearly a political agenda that the occupying powers must contend with. The Taliban tactics have now switched to guerrilla war. The number of NATO forces are continually increasing, and the death roll rising. The fighting has spilt over into Pakistan, and the Pakistan army has shown itself to be unwilling to intervene in any conflict in the Pashtun areas of the borderlands with Afghanistan. Meanwhile, back in London, our own Ministry of Defence talks grandly of a 30 year strategy. These two wars have cost billions, taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and have made the world more dangerous and less secure. The only people who have profited to date have been the arms manufacturers and supply companies, as well as the burgeoning industry of private security firms that are acting more like mercenaries every day. The real long term winners are the oil companies, who were expelled from Iraq more than three decades ago, and are now proposing to re-enter and cream off the profits of record high oil prices at the expense of the Iraqi people. The millions who opposed the war in 2003 still feel angry, misled and unrepresented by the British political system. The Labour Party has been the most damaged by the war in Iraq. It is past time that the government learned the lesson and set a specific and absolute timetable to withdraw from both countries, with a promotion of politics rather than mass destruction as a way forward for peoples in both countries.
Just when you thought it was safe20 Jul 2008Iran, the world’s apparent resident evil, according to the axis theme brigade at least, is at it again: ‘Iran test-fires long-range missile capable of hitting Israel’ was the headlines in the British Daily Telegraph (Wednesday, July 9 th 2008) but no mention of Israel’s estimated 150-200 nuclear warheads in the text; no mention of Israel being the nuclear power in the middle-eastern region; no mention either of superior British or US nuclear capability. Images of nine medium and long-range missiles without nuclear capability were screened globally courtesy of Iranian television … oh dear the secret is out! The headline capture for most media was a deliberately placed quote from Hossein Salami the Air Force Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard: ‘Our hands are always on the trigger and our missiles are ready for launch’ ... chill winds are apparently blowing across the middle-eastern sands, as if they weren’t already. Whatever we may think about the US and European approach to Iran, particularly the British and French wing of Europe at least, it’s always worth bearing in mind that the incumbent Iranian leadership use Israel and the US as justification for its continuation in power not so different, tactically at least, from the way Mugabe uses the British as justification for his repugnant reign to continue also. It’s often the case that many on the Left jump to the wrong conclusions once Israel and the US are mentioned in the same sentence, often forgetting that the Iranian leadership, and Hizbollah whom they support, aren’t what we would call enthusiastic advocates of democracy even in a socialist sense. However, despite the fact that Iran has a pretty deplorable human rights record and is continuing to harass women activists fighting to defend the rights of women detailed by Amnesty International (see link below), nevertheless it’s not entirely unreasonable for Iran to indicate to the world, as it is so obviously and publicly doing currently, that it has a right to defend itself from both Israel and the US, who both have far superior weaponry power. An Associate Press (AP) report (Thursday, July 10 th , 2008) created their own version of events quoting ‘official analysts’ who claimed that the show of strength wasn’t just about ‘retaliation’, as the Iranian’s have constantly claimed, but also about going on the ‘offensive’, which the Iranian’s have claimed would be nothing short of a farce, not to mention suicidal. AP wheeled out Suzanne Maloney from the so-called ‘independent’ Brookings Institution based in Washington D.C., who spoke of the danger posed to Israel by Iran. But it’s always worth remembering that one Haim Saban donates generously to the Brookings Institution, funding the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Saban and Director of the Center Martyn Indyk, described by ABC News ‘On the Issues’ as a ‘Brookings Expert’ are fervent pro-Israeli supporters, with Saban also a major financial backer of the Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign, who spent many hours of the campaign lecturing on pro-Israeli issues. Maloney is also a Senior Fellow on Foreign Policy at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy… it’s making a lot more sense now! And the right wing in the US are also at it again; yes it is time to think about how fear can be generated amongst the public once again. Here’s a clip from an interview with Ivo Daalder conducted by Diane Rehm that demonstrates this point clearly (Thursday July 10 th 2008): Rehm: Ivo, if I could start with you, talk about these missile tests. What’s going on, are there new capabilities about which you believe the U.S. needs to be concerned? Daalder: Well anytime someone shoots a missile off we have to be concerned. These are systems that, if deployed with weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical or biological), could do a lot of damage — and they could do a lot of damage over significant ranges. Ah yes, it’s the old ‘weapons of mass destruction’ routine happening all over again. If at once you don’t succeed, try and try again! But perhaps the real player who may just have most to lose is Russia, because for all the blustering of Iran many in the US are using the Iranian ‘threat’ as justification for the missile defence system they wish to strategically place in Europe. According to Seymour Hersh on BBC’s Newsnight (Wednesday, July 9 th 2008, 10.30pm) whilst power shifts between Cheney and Rice on a casual basis, he believes that Cheney has the upper hand recently. Russia will therefore only be too aware that Iran, whom they support, may have handed Cheney and Co., the ideal excuse they were so desperately looking for. And perhaps we now know why Russia refused to back the US and Britain on new sanctions against the Mugabe led regime in Zimbabwe. But perhaps the ‘show of strength’ has been exaggerated as Mark Fitzpatrick of the Institute of Strategic Studies has claimed in an interview with the BBC: ‘It very much does appear that Iran doctored the photo to cover up what apparently was a misfiring of one of the missiles’ claims Fitzpatrick … but will anybody be listening? Links The Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2273986/Iran-tests-fires-long-... Amnesty International Report Women act against repression and intimidation in Iran
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/women-act-against-repr… ABC News ‘On The Issues’ Martha Raddatz interview with Martin Indyk
http://www.brookings.edu/multimedia/video/2008/0506_issues_indyk.aspx SourceWatch on Haim Saban
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Haim_Saban Rehm-Daalder Interview under ‘Iran and U.S. Missile Defense’
http://www.brookings.edu/interviews/2008/0710_iran_daalder.aspx Mark Fitzpatrick interview on the BBC under ‘Iran faked missile test image’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7500917.stm
US tells lies about torture, say MPs20 Jul 2008Britain can no longer believe what Americans tell us about torture, an MPs’ report to be published today claims. They also call for an immediate investigation into allegations that the UK government has itself ‘outsourced’ the torture of its own nationals to Pakistan. In a damning criticism of US integrity, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said ministers should no longer take at face value statements from senior politicians, including George Bush, that America does not resort to torture in the light of the CIA admitting it used ‘waterboarding’. The interrogation technique was unreservedly condemned by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who said it amounted to torture. A change in approach would have implications for extradition of prisoners to the US, especially in terror or security cases, as the UK has signed the UN convention which bars sending individuals to nations where they are at risk of being tortured. During waterboarding, a person is tied to a board with their feet raised and cellophane wrapped around the head. Water is then poured on to the face, causing the victim to start to drown. Today’s committee report said there were ‘serious implications’ of the striking inconsistencies between British ministers continuing to believe the Bush administration when it denies using torture. ‘The UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future,’ said the committee. ‘We also recommend that the government should immediately carry out an exhaustive analysis of current US interrogation techniques on the basis of such information as is publicly available or which can be supplied by the US.’ It also urges the government to press the US authorities for information on whether any American military flights landing in the UK were part of the ‘rendition circuit’, even if they did not have detainees on board at the time. The government has repeatedly accepted US assurances that UK territory has not been used for ‘rendition’, the extra-judicial transfer of suspects between countries. But in February, Miliband told the Commons he had been informed by the US that two rendition planes refuelled on the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The MPs also urged the Foreign Office to investigate a Guardian report that six British nationals claimed to have been detained and tortured by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, where they were also interrogated by British intelligence officers. Foreign Minister Lord Malloch-Brown told the committee: ‘We absolutely deny the charge that we have in any way outsourced torture to Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] as a way of extracting information, either for court use or for use in counter-terrorism.’ The report also called on the Foreign Office to seek consular access to all British citizens, including those of dual nationality, detained in Pakistan and asked for an explanation from ministers why one of those detained was apparently denied consular access but was visited by a British official, who may have been an intelligence officer.
Channel 4 ?did not mislead? on global warming20 Jul 2008Ofcom will rule next week that Channel 4 did not mislead the public over the science of climate change with its programme the Great Global Warming Swindle, according to Owen Gibson in the Guardian this morning. There is some criticism of Channel 4 and the GGWS programme, produced by Michael Durkin: Ofcom is expected to censure the network over its treatment of some scientists in the programme… Complaints about privacy and fairness from the government’s former chief scientist, Sir David King, and the Nobel peace prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be upheld on almost all counts… But the bigger story is around what Channel 4 won’t be censured for: But it is understood that Channel 4 will still claim victory because the ultimate verdict on a separate complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, will find that it did not breach the regulator’s broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers. Have a look at an example complaint made to Ofcom from Josie Wexler (via Flet) which suggests the programme broke the “Broadcasting code clauses: 5.5, 5.7, 5.8, 5.9, 5.10, 5.11, 5.12, 7.1, 7.6, 7.9, 7.10, 7.11 and 7.13.” As Josie points out in her letter: The director Martin Durkin is well known for his unscrupulous approach as shown by the fact that he has a previous ruling against him for his programme ?Against Nature.? And yet despite having had to apologise for broadcasting this Channel 4 have now broadcast another of his programmes on the same subject without warning the public. [my emphasis] So, Channel 4 had already had to apologise for a previous misleading programme of Martin Durkin’s? What is even more worrying is that, again, the ’six-to-one’ evidence (six times more people supported the programme when phoning in or leaving messages on the message board) was used as a justiification of airing this programme: Channel 4 justified the broadcast by saying it was a useful contribution to a timely debate… The producers claimed that after it was broadcast, Channel 4 received a record number of phone calls that were six to one in favour of the arguments made. The film was subsequently sold to 21 other countries. Why this justification is wrong This justification suggests that a particular percentage of a particular number of members of the pubic with a phone and a gripe is enough to warrant a progamme that flies in the face of over 2,000 of the world’s leading scientists publishing the 4th Assessment Report for the IPCC. So, a couple of questions for Ofcom and Channel 4. 1. How many people phoned in exactly, and what percentage of the audience figures is this? 2. What is the average repsonse to a political/provocative programme such as this? 3. What kind of people would self-select to watch a programme called the Great Global Warming Swindle? 4. What kind of people would want to phone in to support or criticize such a programme? 5. The Royal Society, scientists, academics, press, columnists, at least 1/7th of people who watched the programme, and media monitors have all come out against the programme. Do around, for example–and I’m guessing here–600 people who phoned in to watch the programme, 6/7ths of all those that phoned in, mean that Channel 4 can extrapolate out so that “6/7ths more people in the country” are behind them on this? 6. Or, in reality, do ONLY, say, 600 people who watch Channel 4 support them on this? In total. And if Channel 4 get this many viewers for one programme, does it justify its airing? (That last one is probably unfair. Different polls at different times show different levels of support and understanding for, or disbelief and scepticism in, global warming.) But I think Ofcom has made a mistake here. I’d like to see the numbers, so will come back to this when the report is out. I’m also going to do some digging around the code, and the definition of ‘material’ misleading. But it may be the case that they a) either do not have the scientific experience to weigh up whether or not the programme misled the public, or b) they’ve been cowardly. Want more? Some reviews from the time: Robin McKie in the Guardian condemns Channel 4 Martin Durkin defends his programme The Royal Society’s Rebuttal the Independent attempts a he-said-they-said balancing act
A Just Transition?20 Jul 2008In the past few months, outbreaks of industrial unrest and protest have been occurring throughout Europe in the industries most affected by the rising price of oil. Starting with Grangemouth refinery, Unite workers in went on strike over reduction in pension rights. Workers in haulage companies delivering to petrol forecourts followed in a dispute over pay. More recently we have seen the protests of the haulage companies themselves demanding special reductions in tax on fuel ? by the time this article goes to press, we will know whether Gordon Brown has held his nerve on that. In France, railway workers and fishermen have been involved in industrial action and in Spain public transport workers have likewise struck over the impact of the rising price of fuel. Meanwhile, oil companies continue to make record profits. These are signs of things to come. At the end of June, the list of oil companies invited to tender for lucrative contracts in Iraq was published. On the same day, the price of oil increased to $140 a barrel, the highest ever recorded. Each month for the past six months, the price of oil has been the highest on record. As we approach peak oil, when supply cannot meet demand, the price of oil is spiralling upwards, and the distribution of the costs and benefits of this are profoundly unequal and increasingly contested. Ten years ago, the economist James O?Connor described how states treat oil as not just a commodity but as an extension of state security, backed by military apparatus. These are elements of the supply side of the oil industry. If we look at the waste stream, the carbon dioxide emissions which are accumulating in the atmosphere and disrupting the climate, we are seeing increasing frequencies in the occurrence of cyclones, hurricanes, floods, although the debate often takes an apparently more arcane, esoteric form. Is it possible for the climate to withstand a carbon dioxide concentration of 450 parts per million, or will it be necessary to reduce to 350 ppm or less? Just how disrupted will the climate be with each 0.1 degree Celsius and at what point do the changes become irreversible? Essential though these debates are ? and each scientific report which hits the public domain points towards more worrying scenarios ? it should not be forgotten that two thirds of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere originates from the G7 countries, with currently 13 per cent of the world?s population. There is no doubt that there is a crisis, and that the rich countries need to cut oil consumption almost to nothing. Currently, the principal mechanism for cutting carbon dioxide emissions is carbon trading, which essentially entails enclosure of the last remaining commons ? the carbon absorption capacity of the atmosphere ? by allocating property rights to those who are already destroying it. This is none other than a neoliberal extension of commodification of the atmosphere, whilst shifting costs onto the poorest who are dispossessed by ?green development projects?. Ideological justification is provided by individualising responsibility as a form of consumer choice. Climate disaster is happening because western consumers made the wrong choices! Whatever happens to the climate, the interests of global capital cannot be jeopardised. How are we going to get out of this mess? In short, we don?t know, but the solution must be radical, it must be socially just and it must challenge the interests of big business. We can transform this oil-drenched economy and overturn poverty and have decent jobs. Potential solutions are emerging in debates across the left, but a solution must emerge from social processes more than ideas. As we stand in Scotland, the only party in Parliament which is opposed to the interests of big business is the Green Party whose support comes, more or less, from the professional middle classes who support the NGOs and the ?new? social movements of which they are part. The most directly affected working class movements are challenging the oil companies, but in terms that ignore the climate crisis that we are facing. The other left parties are recognising the ecological challenge, and despite their current relative weakness, remain active in community and working class struggles. We need the collective knowledge of all political movements critical of or operating out with the neoliberal framework of economic growth, all groups whose interests are being actively damaged, in Parliament, in communities, in the social movements and in the trade unions. Only by working towards some kind of bloc will we shift the hegemony sufficiently to implement change. We need such a broad alliance like never before if we are to work out a just transition to a sustainable solution. Justin Kenrick, in SLR earlier this year, argued for a transitional alliance to tackle climate change. This has been interpreted in different ways and stimulated an important debate, generating significant connections across the left as well as raising fears. As a result of these debates, a conference is being organised by activists from across the left and green movements to explore how we can move forward. None of the parties which might form a government in the foreseeable future will implement a radical changes needed on their own, and to imagine that they can be persuaded otherwise before the damage is done is unfortunately a false dream. The damage is already well underway, and it?s time for a new dream. Conference: transition to tackle climate change, Edinburgh, 18th ? 19th October 2008 Eurig Scandrett is a member of the Scottish Green Party and Democratic Left Scotland
Claudia Jones and the ‘West Indian Gazette’19 Jul 2008This is an edited version of an article that appears in the current issue of Race & Class. Contrary to popular belief, London carnival did not start in Notting Hill at the end of the 1960s, neither was the West Indian World the first Black newspaper in Britain. And it is appropriate, in a year that has seen the fortieth anniversary – and commemorations – of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, to reflect on a fiftieth anniversary that is highly significant, in a positive sense, to the Black community in Britain, but is shamefully little known – the founding of the West Indian Gazette (WIG) under the inspiring leadership of Claudia Jones. Fifty years on, those whose job was that of midwife to WIG are nearly all dead. Claudia Vera Cumberbatch Jones was born on 21 February 1915 in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad. She joined her parents in Harlem, New York when she was 9-years-old, they having migrated to the USA in 1924. Her mother died in 1927 when Claudia was 12. It is said that the Cumberbatch family was so poor that although Claudia did well at school, she did not attend her graduation as they could not afford a graduation gown for her. In 1936 she joined the American Communist Party largely on account of its uncompromising defence of the Scottsboro ‘boys’. By 1937, Claudia (now aged 22) was on the editorial staff of the Daily Worker and in 1938 became editor of the Weekly Review. During the second world war, the Young Communist League (YCL) was transformed into American Youth for Democracy, and she became editor of its monthly journal, Spotlight. In 1947, she was made executive secretary of the National Women’s Commission and, in 1952, of the National Peace Commission. In 1953, she took over the editorship of Negro Affairs. In 1948, her communist activities led to her arrest and incarceration on Ellis Island and threatened deportation to Trinidad, then a Crown Colony. In 1951, aged only 36, she suffered her first heart attack and, between then and 1955, went into hospital several times. In 1955, the Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal against conviction and Claudia began her sentence of a year and a day at the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. The next step was for her to be served with a deportation order. So, on 7 December 1955 at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, some 350 people met to bid farewell to Claudia. She arrived in London two weeks later and, until her death nine years later in December 1964, she was to be a selfless and indefatigable fighter for the rights of peoples from Africa, Asia and the West Indies. Or, as the masthead of WIG would have it, ‘Afro-Asian Caribbean [peoples]’. Before WIG there were, of course, what could be called the house journals of organisations such as the Caribbean Labour Congress and Harold Moody’s League of Coloured People, which brought out The Keys. There might have been many such organisations with their newsletters, but apparently none had reached the high street newsstands. Between WIG and the coming of the West Indian World were Link, Carib, Anglo- Caribbean News, West Indies Observer and Magnet. Almost all of these papers had writers who were at one time or the other associated with WIG. To understand the role of WIG in its time, you must remember that there were, for example, only about half a dozen or so Black cricketers playing for the first-class counties. In football, there was a Black footballer at West Ham. There were no Black newsreaders or disc jockeys on the airwaves. White passengers would bounce straight up out of their seats on buses if a Black (‘coloured’) passenger was bold enough to sit next to them. Some public houses still operated a colour bar, covertly or otherwise. Many employers would say that they did not hire coloureds or darkies (if they were being polite). Landladies blamed the fact that they could not rent a room to a coloured person because the White neighbours would object. The British Union of Fascists, with its lorry draped in the Union Jack, frequented the area opposite the Orange Luxury Coach Station, Brixton (now Windrush Square), from where its members would warn of the weakening of the sturdy British race through sexual liaisons. It would be reduced to the status of the Cape Coloured. Landlords and landladies still advertised rooms for rent under the legend: ‘No Irish! No Coloureds!’. Brave White women who went out with coloured men were roundly insulted. White passengers still rubbed their hands on the coloured bus conductor’s hair, for luck. For several years, the wall opposite St Matthews Church in Brixton, bore the legend ‘Keep Britain White’! The calls for the control of Black immigration were regular. Of course, no one in authority would declare himself as prejudiced. The British never were! It was just, as the excuse went, that it would have been better if these people were kept in their own countries and helped by grants from the British Exchequer. One Conservative MP, he with the sweeping moustache and a knighthood to boot, gave voice (on BBC Radio’s Any Questions) to the thought that was apparently perplexing thousands of White parents. Asked Sir Gerald Nabarro, ‘What would you do if your blonde blue-eyed daughter came home with a buck N****r and said she wanted to marry him?’ It was the right of each citizen to express his or her opinion that he/she did not want to live next door to one of them. In this atmosphere, you did not expect the shopkeeper to be civil and he/she invariably was not. You did not expect the policeman to be sympathetic when you asked for directions, and quite often he was not. Into this world was the West Indian Gazette born, like the goddess of mythology, fully armed ready for battle. It was not long in coming. In April 1958, four months after that famous flyer announcing WIG, Notting Hill, West London, and Robin Hood Chase, Nottingham, exploded with racial hatred. The normally liberal national dailies analysed the situation to the satisfaction of their readers by pointing out that what had taken place was an inevitable clash between White hooligans and Black criminals. That brought home the shallow depth at which racism lurked under the social facade. None of this was strange to Claudia Jones. She was a seasoned campaigner who had won the support and admiration of such towering characters as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. During those months from late summer to the autumn of 1958, the Gazette’s office did more business meeting worried Blacks than did the Migrants’ Service Department. As we went into 1959, politicians from what was referred to as the British Caribbean were seen going up those stairs to talk to Claudia or she was invited to their hotels. Some of those whom she met were Norman Manley of Jamaica, Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana, Phyllis Allfrey and Carl La Corbinire of the ailing West Indian Federation. It was in this climate of expectations dashed that the idea of a carnival was conceived. Claudia asked for suggestions which would wash the taste of Notting Hill and Nottingham out of our mouths. It was then that someone, most likely a Trinidadian, suggested that we should have a carnival – in winter? It was December of 1958. Everybody laughed, and then Claudia called us to order. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Could it not be held in a hall, somewhere?’ Yes it could, and it was held in St Pancras town hall in January 1959. The BBC televised it. The London papers were not pleased to see and hear hundreds of Blacks doing the jump-up in a hall near you, or them. Five more carnivals followed annually, up to 1964. For the second carnival, held at Seymour Hall, the great calypsonian the Mighty Sparrow was brought over from the land of carnival, Trinidad. None of those who were active in helping to bring the first Caribbean-style carnival in modern times to St Pancras on 31 January 1959 – including Sam King, Jimmy Fairweather, Nadia Cattouse, Cy Grant, Gloria Cameron – argued that Claudia started the Notting Hill carnival. But it seems incredible that those who took carnival on to the streets of Notting Hill in the late 1960s were unaware of the six carnivals between 1959 and 1964, albeit in halls. WIG took its role as a newspaper seriously. It was not merely a vehicle to bring the news of what was happening back home and in the diaspora to Britain. It also commented on the arts in all their forms, at a time when Black performers were getting the crumbs, which fell from the production tables. WIG was talking up Cy Grant, Nadia Cattouse, Pearl Prescod, Edric Connor and Pearl Connor, Nina Baden-Semper, Corrine Skinner-Carter, Bascoe Holder, among others. It reviewed the novels of George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, E. R. Braithwaite and Jan Carew. It reviewed the works of artists and sculptors such as Aubrey Williams and Ronald Moody. It published poems and stories. Its trenchant editorials did not stop at Britain but had an opinion on the what, where and why of the cold war’s hot spots. The Gazette did not make enough to pay for contributions. Claudia herself was not a salaried editor. She had rent and other bills to pay, so her upkeep was another burden on the wobbly finances of the paper. There is evidence enough from letters of demands and threats of lawsuits among her papers to satisfy any sceptic. Only two people brought money to the Gazette in the early days. Sam King, who later became mayor of Southwark and the second Black man (after J. R. Archer during the first world war) to hold that post in a London borough. King sold the first 100 copies of the first edition of WIG and did not take a commission. And James Fairweather, WIG’s advertisement manager, badgered the proprietors of furniture stores to give something back to the community after doing so well out of Black householders. They bought advertisements in the paper, which also brought them more custom. The Gazette struggled on, hardly able to keep its publication deadlines three months consecutively. Yet looking over Claudia’s papers and photographs, there were events which WIG sponsored that were public spirited and appealed to the community, and not only to raise funds for the paper. One such event was in response to Hurricane Flora which devastated Jamaica in 1963. As always, Claudia was able to get the endorsement of leading Black figures from the literary and entertainment fields, including C. L. R. James, George Lamming, Andrew Salkey, Samuel Selvon and, from entertainment, Edric and Pearl Connor, Nadia Cattouse, Pearl Prescod and Gloria Cameron. Perhaps what the Black community at the time remembered most were the Paul Robeson concerts at Lambeth town hall, Brixton, and St Pancras town hall, when the great man revealed his generosity to a fellow fighter and friend by using his immense talent and precious time to promote a good cause. WIG was present to celebrate Castro’s revolution by promoting the film Island Aflame. It shook its fist at the Congo civil war and the abandonment of Patrice Lumumba. It printed the picture of Lumumba without his spectacles, bound and in a truck to be delivered into the hands of his rival Moise Tshombe, the West’s place-man in Katanga. It reported the Sharpeville Massacre and the Rivonia Trials. The names of Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Robert Sobukwe were known to WIG’s readers – freedom fighters labelled by the British national broadsheets as troublemakers at best and terrorists by definition. There was no louder voice than WIG’s on Commonwealth issues or on decolonisation. There was the expectation of the West Indies Federation which sent visiting politicians climbing those stairs at the back of Theo’s record shop [at 250 Brixton Road, SW9] up to the Gazette’s editorial office. And then there was the racial hatred of Notting Hill and Nottingham. Looking back, it seems preposterous that the only coherent voice from the Black community in Britain was a monthly paper that was so strapped for cash, it often could not find the 100 needed to pay the printers. And, thinking back, it is frightening to contemplate which was in worst shape, the appalling finances of the paper or Claudia’s health. They were inextricably bound together and the death of one hastened the demise of the other. The paper finally folded eight months and four editions after Claudia’s own death, in December 1964. Donald Hinds was among London’s first Black bus conductors, worked with Claudia Jones on the West Indian Gazette (1958-1965); wrote Journey to an Illusion (Heinemann, 1966) trained as a teacher; wrote Black Peoples of the Americas (Collins Educational, 1992); and, with Marika Sherwood and Colin Prescod, contributed to Claudia Jones: a Life in Exile (Lawrence & Wishart, 1999). This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in the Race & Class July 2008 issue.
The unsurprising casualties of capitalism19 Jul 2008Fatherhood is back in the political ring. In the right corner, David Cameron’s comments about black fathers revive the Conservative instinct for a scapegoat. In the left corner, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s Working Better initiative has joined with Mumsnet.com and Dad Info to launch ‘Home Front: What do mums and dads need to make life work?’ For the right, paternal responsibility is the bedrock of patriarchal social order. For the left, paternal responsibility is about a new kind of democratic settlement between men and women. Fatherhood today is measured against the model of the man as family provider, the breadwinner supporting wife and children. This is a modern invention of the middle classes and only became the norm in the 1950s. In the past paternity was never enough to qualify men for fatherhood. Patriarchy was limited to propertied men. Colonialism ensured it was further restricted to white men. There were plenty of biological fathers who lived without families. This was not about men’s moral failings, but a structural problem. Since the 1950s historic changes in the economy and in gender relations have returned us to this age. Paternity no longer means fatherhood. In the 1980s, mass unemployment and the closure of manufacturing industries destroyed many men’s role as family breadwinner. Capitalism restructured around a low-wage, flexible labour market. Men’s ‘family wage’ and job for life disappeared and large numbers of women were drawn into the workforce. As men’s incomes stagnated or fell, women took on a double shift of paid work and unpaid domestic labour. Working class survival and middle class lifestyle once managed on a man’s single income now require two incomes, and often multiple part-time jobs. The role of family breadwinner is now unattainable for the majority of fathers in Britain. For many young working-class people, marriage and setting up a family home has become a distant dream. Low wages and a lack of affordable housing makes it increasingly difficult for many young men to create an independent life of their own. The traditional rites of passage into adulthood ? leaving home, entering employment, establishing a family, and taking on legal obligations and rights ? have disappeared. Research by the centre right think tank Civitas suggests that the higher rates of single parenthood and cohabitation in low income areas are not about feckless fathers or an anti-marraige trend but to do with the structural problems of poverty and a low wage economy. Debates about fatherhood in recent years have all failed to recognise the structural changes within which men and women are forced to make choices and take decisions. Politicians of all parties go along with tabloid explanations of ‘deadbeat dads’. The Right wants to rewind 200 years and reimpose the patriarchal roles of mothers and fathers. Labour, despite the best efforts of feminism, is silent and evasive about both masculinity and fatherhood. The growing popularity of Cameron’s Conservatives has emboldened them to revive the old right wing ‘responsibility agenda’. Chris Grayling, the Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions has made a number of eloquent speeches on the subject: “We have a growing generation of young men, alienated and drifting without a purpose in life; They are causing trouble; Welfare programmes don’t work and the criminal justice system is too soft; Many have grown up without fathers and many are becoming ‘fathers in name but not in action’; The lack of fathers is a huge problem for all of us.” Grayling is good at describing the problem, but pointing the finger of blame at individual behaviour does not confront the bigger problem. He has no solutions. Nor, for that matter, does Labour. The fact is that the kind of democratic fatherhood society aspires to is not compatible with our economic and class system which leaves men with either too little or too much work. Only one in five men takes advantage of the new paternity leave provision of two weeks off, paid at 117 a week. Because of financial pressures 40 per cent don’t take up the right. As the EHRC’s NIcola Brewer has argued, “The central issue is that the economic penalty for fatherhood is too high.”
Down, Wembley Way19 Jul 2008Campaigners against a new city academy in Wembley (see SchNEWS 639) are keeping up their protest despite the camp they set-up being evicted on Wed 16th July. On Tuesday, a court hearing against Wembley Tent City in North London served an injunction against one of the protesters, Hank Roberts, and fined him 3,500. Undaunted Hank and others swiftly returned to the camp and moved their tents on to the roof of one of the buildings facing demolition. He was later joined by other protesters resisting the eviction. City academies were dreamt up by the government as a way of offloading some of that terribly burdening cost of education, and turning it into a money-making scheme for wealthy types wanting to set up their own schools. As they are privately owned they don?t come under the same strict guidelines faced by state schools, allowing them to come up with their own curriculum. And, of course, there is no evidence that they are any more successful than standard state schools. The Tent City is part of the campaign against the Wembley Park Academy, an American and British educational charity sponsored and run by The Ark, a group of millionaire merchant bankers and hedge fund speculators. It will still require 30 million of taxpayers money as initial funding. If the building gets the go ahead it will see the demolition of a community centre and a sports field used by local children. On Wednesday, cops turned up to issue an injunction to the protesters with threats of arrest if they were ignored. Displaying their usual over-zealous tendencies, they even threatened to arrest some journalists who had joined the protesters on the roof. As well as getting a lot of media coverage for their campaign – with journos from the BBC and ITV turning up to have a nose around, Wembley Tent City has also received a great deal of support. A spokesperson for the camp said there were over a hundred supporters on-site after the court case on Tuesday, and there were still about 50 people there when council bailiffs turned up later in the day. Perhaps in light of the strong support, the bailiffs slunk away without removing so much as a tent peg. Much of the support has come from the neighbourhood, with many recognising the good the campaign is doing for the local community. Bailiffs are expected to remove the last of the protesters on Friday at the just plain unnecessary time of 6:30am, but protesters are quick to point out that this is just the beginning of the campaign and on Friday the High Court will decide whether their court case against the company will be heard. Find out more about the campaign and how you can get involved at www.tentcityoccupation.co.uk
Crime and punishment in the neoliberal twilight19 Jul 2008Last year it was gun crime, this year it is knife crime, and next year it will be blunt object crime. There is hardly a day that passes without a headline about another young man who has been stabbed, usually in south London. And this is not to be dismissed. It is a serious issue. Regardless of the overall statistics, which show violent crime to be quite low compared to, say, the early 1990s, the problem is concentrated in a number of run-down working class areas and the risk is experienced in an elevated way there. And while it is true that people generally overestimate their own chances of being subject to violent crime, an artefact of a politically-driven campaign to frighten and demoralise people, in some areas and for some population groups the risk is very real. Yet, to have the issue serialised as a tabloid shriek-fest is possibly the least appropriate way to address the problem. Joan Smith pointed out the other day that serious and ongoing violent crime against women isn’t receiving this treatment (apparently she has forgotten that misogynistic violence is only a media topic if Muslims are involved). Endemic violence against children by authority figures is also generally ignored. Nonetheless, this being the topic du jour, and quite a serious one, what is the cause of it? One hears from pundits that young black men in particular are prone to violence because they exist in a survivalist subculture that values macho behaviour and endorses violence (blame Fifty Cent again). One also hears that they often come from ‘broken homes’ (those ‘deadbeat dads’ and ‘absent black fathers’) and thus don’t form a strong identification with social norms. Various associated explanations – drugs, ‘gang culture’ etc – are posited with equal gravity. I simply take it as obvious that these kinds of explanations, more often than not, are about scapegoating population groups deemed in the ruling culture to be somehow ‘alien’ and a problem in and of themselves. Moreover, these explanations are incoherent. There are those who have listened to the So Solid Crew without blasting someone’s head off. There are those who have bought and even sold drugs without knifing someone to death. And some people from single parent families are perfectly average human beings who don’t carry knives with them. Again, the fact that these explanations neither explain nor cohere is not strictly relevant, since their purpose is to create an overriding impression of menace and disorder. A problem whose boundaries are not defined by race is given a racist twist in such analyses. It is the ‘New Barbarism’ thesis transplanted into New Cross and Stockwell. Even where it isn’t explicitly racist, it is doggedly reactionary, as when commentators recycle Blair’s old speeches on ‘respect’ and its putative breakdown. Can’t we just go back to the 1930s, when everyone knew their place and the kids could get a clip round the ear from a disgruntled bobby if they misbehaved? The scholarly research points to alternative conclusions, with radical policy implications. For example, one recent study by Fajnzylber et al on the causes of violent crime took a trans-national analysis of various trends and found one outstanding factor: income inequality raises violent crime rates dramatically. This is backed up by earlier research. Related factors such as educational inequality, and ‘ethnic polarisation’ (racism in the society) contribute as well, while the rate of such crimes fluctuates with the economic cycle (much of violent crime being property-related). The dry statistics point to a reality that is palpable for anyone who lives in London, where all of these social ills co-exist, and where inequality of all kinds is glaringly apparent. It is not so surprising that there are a relatively small number of extremely damaged individuals who, as Yuri Prasad argues, “see little value in human life ? neither theirs, nor anyone else’s”. What about drugs? Andrew Resignato at Florida State University has summed up a wealth of literature on this topic, and concludes that there is in fact scarce data to support the thesis of a positive correlation between drug use and violent crime. On the contrary, there is a much stronger correlation between the enforcement of drug laws and violent crime. Drug users who do have to support the cost of their habit (inflated by dint of its control by criminal cartels) through crime tend to opt for non-violent means. On the other hand, the more investment in policing to control the sumptuary habits of the poor, the more likely there is to be violent crime. This is unsurprising. Create an illicit capitalist economy in the hands of extra-legal cartels embroiled in competition with one another, with that competition delegated down to those lowest in the hierarchy, and you get a great deal of violence in the process. I strongly suspect that states which impose drug laws are well aware of this, and that their function is to facilitate a strongly interventionist police force with ready-made pretexts for detaining and imprisoning people considered dysfunctional to the society’s requirements. It keeps ‘problem’ populations, generally the urban poor, under tight surveillance. It criminalises them before they have necessarily even broken the law. If talking tough and ratcheting up repression, with heavily policed schools and widely used stop-and-search applied in a racist fashion, worked, then American cities would be the safest in the world. Yet this is exactly what New Labour, and the Tories after them, will continue to do. Can we even take them seriously when they claim to want to deal with the problem? Is it not obvious that the periodic episodes of hysteria on what are chronic problems are opportunistic attempts to expand the state’s repressive capacities? Isn’t this just what we have seen in other fields, such as ‘anti-terror’ legislation, whose dystopian precepts were being driven through parliament by New Labour well before 9/11 or 7/7? We now have a criminal justice system with an extraordinary scope for control, with such disgraceful policies as curfews and ASBOs, in which non-criminal behaviour becomes the subject of sanction. Given that crime rates are not soaring, given that the risks that people face of encountering violence have not substantially altered, the most likely explanation is that as the neoliberal era enters its most decadent phase, states are attempting to manage the adverse social by-products of the descent with an iron fist. And next year, when they’ve got round to blunt object crime, the newspapers and politicians will pretend that it’s all new again, that we’ve never been here before, and that whatever repression is in place isn’t enough.
Call for system to ensure proper use of CCTV19 Jul 2008A new system should be introduced to ensure that the growing number of CCTV cameras are used properly, Ann McKechin, the Labour MP for Glasgow North, will propose in the House of Commons this week. She said: ?Seventy percent of CCTV is operated by private companies. There are 16 different types of system operated by public authorities in the Strathclyde Police area. We need a system that makes sure that cameras are used properly.? The back bencher is proposing a statutory duty for public bodies such as local authorities, transport groups and housing associations to work together with their local police forces to achieve streamlining of public systems. Ms McKechin wants shops, shopping centres and licensed premises to agree a code of conduct on the use and storage of CCTV images. Her proposals would require private organisations which control large areas open to the public such as cinemas, hotels and shopping centres or large bars and clubs to provide the local police force with up-to-date information on the type of CCTV systems that they use and how they use them. The 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain has led to accusations that the nation has become a ?surveillance society?, which was one of the issues at the centre of the campaign by David Davis, the former Shadow Home Secretary, who last week regained the seat of Haltemprice and Howden in a by-election. Last week, the latest row over CCTV cameras emerged in the idyllic fishing village of Elgol on Skye, where locals have complained over the siting of a 1200 camera by the local council, claiming it was an intrusion into the area?s tranquility. However, Highland Council has made clear that the only reason it has installed the camera is to monitor a dispute between two rival boat-trip companies. Ms McKechin will use the parliamentary device of the 10-minute rule bill on Wednesday to raise the issue of CCTV cameras. Without the backing of the UK Government, it will not become law.
Union Militancy and New Labour18 Jul 2008This week’s big two-day public sector strikes (detailed coverage with pics and on-scene reports here) is to be followed up by further local actions by PCS workers. There are picket lines by the Coastguard and Home Office employees across the country today. A nationwide three-day strike is now planned for Autumn. Passport workers in Northern Ireland have just voted for strike action as well. Employers are predictably talking down the success of the strike, saying only 100,000 turned out, but they protest too much. As Socialist Worker points out, the BBC regional correspondent reported 70,000 on strike in Yorkshire and Humberside alone. Much as one may wish that strike actions were not so brief and the period between them so long, there is evidently something bigger percolating away here. The rate at which public sector workers are opting to fight the government is not just a manifestation of reviving industrial militancy in the most unionised sectors of the economy. It is poison for the government’s electoral chances, who are now positioning themselves as the class enemy of some of their key constituents. Yet New Labour is so wedded to this policy that it is trying to defend a heartland Glasgow seat with a mountainous but threatened majority with a candidate who will not say a single word of criticism about the policy, preferring to rely on contrived prolier-than-thou credentials. Clearly, the SNP would have to fight a serious battle to take the seat, but the difficulty for New Labour is that its voters won’t turn out to match their standing in the polls. The union leadership is evidently still hoping to force a change of policy with this rank-and-file pressure as an added bargaining lever. They know the governing party is short of cash and will be tapping them for it, just as surely as they know they will provide it unless the members force a decisive break with Labour. Despite the calamitous state of would-be alternatives for the time being, the scale of the government’s attack on workers is likely to intensify moves in that direction. Absent a viable national alternative, funding may well tend to be distributed in a more fragmented fashion with some even going to the Liberals (yech, can you imagine?). The opposition, despite its venomous hostility to trade unions, is keeping relatively quiet about this. In fact, it is bigging itself up as the party of the poor. Not only that, but when David Cameron made his lousy statement about absentee black fathers, he got the backing of a selection of ‘community leaders’ (how I hate that phrase and everything it implies), who said that the Tories were more progressive on social investment than Labour. This probably doesn’t forebode an upsurge of working class conservatism as in 1979. After all, the Tories are concealing their agenda, not aggressively propounding it as the way forward. But with every passing day and every new action by the government, which has never seen a bungled attempt at right-wing ‘populism’ that it didn’t like, it becomes more and more obvious that Labour voters are going to stay at home in droves, repelled by the government and unafraid of the Tories. New Labour is about to discover the true meaning of the phrase ‘things can only get better’.
Interview: Moazzam Begg: Operation end your freedom18 Jul 2008The government won the House of Commons vote to extend detention without trial to 42 days. What do you think about this attack on civil liberties? It’s important to remember that the government didn’t want 42 days – they wanted 90 days and they’ve settled for less than half of that. What’s really bizarre for me is that I was at the protest close to Downing Street when George Bush visited and I actually caught a glimpse of him. In 1996 the IRA fired a home-made mortar very close to Downing Street. Despite all of that and the whole of the period of the Troubles in the 1970s, detention without trial – other than internment, which I think was terrible – never went beyond three days as far as the law was concerned. That it’s now 42 is unbelievable. The government do have the power – regardless of whatever it wants on pre-trial detention – to detain people without charge or trial, and they’ve done that in the case of several people held in Belmarsh prison who have been detained for seven to eight years plus. One lawyer has said it’s tantamount to torture because of the conditions under which people are kept, often without light or contact with people. The United Nations convention against torture defines it as being both physical and psychological. It’s not just about fingernails being pulled out or being waterboarded or hooded. The psychological effects of being detained without trial are very real. They destroy not only the individual – they destroy their family; they destroy the individual’s ability to reintegrate back into society, to get a job. I know many individuals who have never been charged with anything and yet they can’t be cleared to do any of the jobs they were trained to do to begin with. It’s a bizarre concept because the government is always harping on about how Muslims need to integrate. How have you been treated by the government and media since your release from Guantanamo? The government hasn’t treated me in any particular way, other than not allowing me to leave the country without express permission – a condition for my release and the release of others at the same time. Other than that the government hasn’t really put any stops on me at all and hasn’t caused me any problems. I have even spoken inside the House of Commons many times. The public has been fine. I spend most of my time speaking up and down the country to thousands of people and I get a tremendous response from the average person. I get very little, if any, hostility from people at all. As far as the media is concerned, it varies. Most of the time they call on me to comment on one thing or another, but what I often have to say is that it’s sad that we’re walking into a situation nearing that of a police state. Samina Malik, the “lyrical terrorist”, has recently won the appeal against her charges. There was a big furore when she was first convicted and very little coverage now that she has won the appeal. I’ve met people, from the heads of the BBC to ITN, and spoken to them about these specific issues – the sensationalist style of reporting on issues surrounding Muslims – and they’ve often said that they have to get there before the Sky News helicopter. There doesn’t seem to be an onus on good quality reporting. It seems to be more about what fits the pattern. So when a former member of the British National Party was arrested for possessing a huge haul of chemicals which could be used for explosives in Pendle last year, they felt it wasn’t newsworthy in the same way that it would have been had he been a Muslim. It is sad, but it’s the reality. Sensational reporting will take place when there’s an arrest but there will be very little if that person is released or found not guilty. The media decides to take upon itself to become the mouthpiece of government policy. What has been the impact of all this on young Muslims today? Has it got to the stage where people don’t know what’s legal and what isn’t? I don’t think it’s just Muslims actually. I think most people are confused as to what they can and can’t do. How does somebody avoid the sort of prosecution cases we’ve seen against the “lyrical terrorist” or people who’ve downloaded things from the internet? People don’t really know what the parameters of the law are any more. I remember discussing this with some former IRA prisoners of war who were released as part of the Good Friday Agreement, and one of the things they said was that at least in their time they were convicted of things that they did, or were planning to do. Today people are being convicted literally for thoughts; for looking at things, for having something on a computer or having a copy of the Al Qaida manual downloaded from a US government website. It’s ludicrous. What was your aim when you started writing your book in Guantanamo? I wanted people to learn from it. In a sense the book was about my experience with the US and of the US. I’d never been there before it came to me. But it was for US soldiers and also British soldiers who are in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also for the British public, both Muslim and non-Muslim. For the Muslims it was to give strength and hope, and for the non-Muslims to give a glimpse of a world parallel to them but that perhaps they don’t know very well. We’re not so different; we all want the same things. We want security; we want happiness. We love; we get angry; we get upset. That was my intention, to make people understand. Not necessarily to empathise or sympathise – not everyone is going to be my friend just because they think I’ve been tortured or abused. I want to look beyond that and look at the society we’re in. It’s not just about tolerance – we can tolerate anything – it’s about acceptance. If they can accept difference, then that’s the Britain that I thought we were heading towards and wanted. Are you surprised at the support you have when you give talks? The support is tremendous. It’s so difficult to quantify. It’s massive, and it’s continuous. Last night I was speaking in Cambridge and a lady came up to me at the end and said, “I’ve never been at political meetings, I’ve never been involved in these sorts of things, but just listening to you has made me want to be involved more than I ever was and I am going to make it a point upon myself to learn about things before I ever make judgements.” Some people may have some fixed views, but once they face them they’ll find that they’ve been mistaken. I’m trying to break stereotypes, to explain to people that we are not, and I am not, representative of what they may have assumed. The US still claims that it does not use inhumane treatment at Guantanamo. How does this sit with your own experiences? We have a detention site in Cuba where there is no freedom, and outside the walls and the cages you have written on the plaques “Honour bound to defend freedom”. They called it “Operation: Enduring Freedom”, but freedom isn’t something that you endure. Freedom is a right for every creature on this planet, from the point that it’s born to the point that it leaves its life. The things that you have to endure are torture; cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment; being beaten, punched and spat at; humiliation; pain without charge or trial; being falsely imprisoned; being held away from your family. They should call these things “Operation: End Your Freedom”. It would be nearer the truth. Guantanamo has become untenable. Even Colin Powell, one of the architects of the “war on terror”, has waded in. He wasn’t one of those further on the right, but he was certainly there. He called for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. It has become chic to call for its closure – everybody’s doing it. But Guantanamo is the tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath is much more sinister and causes much more damage – the secret detention sites where the majority of the people held in the “war on terror” are. After going through some of those secret detention sites, I was looking forward to going to Guantanamo. What impact have organisations like Liberty and Reprieve made in highlighting the conditions of prisoners and people who’ve suffered rendition? I think they have made an impact – there’s no doubt about that. Clive Stafford Smith, of Reprieve, was the first person I met in Guantanamo. There is also my own organisation, Cage Prisoners, which consists of prisoners. The organisations are very good but they speak on our behalf and they need to hear what we – the prisoners, the people who went through and continue to go through the process – have to say about what happened. One thing that has surprised people is your level of sympathy with the Guantanamo prison guards. The important thing to remember is that they are individuals, and I dealt with them and judge them according to my experiences with them. There are some good, some bad and some in between. People are complex characters. Many of the soldiers treated me and other detainees in a decent way. It’s important not to let any personal experience of torture or witnessing murder cloud my judgement of the others who were appalled that it was taking place, are appalled now, and have apologised for their wrong – even though they didn’t take part in the torture. I think it’s important to recognise that many of these people have now become outspoken against the “war on terror” and their own government, which requires a level of courage and bravery which should be commended. But as far as the system they were part of then, yes, it is one that destroys lives and continues to do so. If the argument is that this has happened as a result of the 11 September 2001 attacks, well, it happened seven years ago. The deaths in the US stopped on 11 September. Deaths have not stopped in Afghanistan and Iraq from the day they were invaded. You cannot justify the deaths of untold numbers – millions perhaps. But who knows? who cares? who counts? – because of the tragic deaths on 11 September. I spoke to one of the Guantanamo guards, and suggested organising a speaking tour. He said he was happy to do it. I’m concerned for his safety more than anything else – particularly on his return to the US having spoken on a platform with a former Guantanamo detainee. After all, his president did designate us as “the worst of the worst, most dangerous men on the planet”. But if he’s able to do so then I will be too. You wrote about how you heard about the Stop the War demonstrations in Britain when you were in Guantanamo. What effect did that have on you personally and on British society today? The Stop the War movement has become a buffer between people who may want to carry out acts of violence on innocent Westerners, and the government itself that does carry out acts of violence against people in the Middle East. I had a conversation with the only self-described member of Al Qaida I’ve met, in Guantanamo. He said that people in the West are not innocent because they vote in their leaders and therefore must share part of the blame. I explained that most people vote on domestic issues like the health service and roads. I said that you’ll probably find a great number of them don’t support the war, but when you strike you don’t discriminate. Then he started thinking about it a little bit. The Stop the War movement is a buffer which helps prevent terrorism in a way that the government would never conceive; when they see people demonstrating against the war it helps to pacify some of the radical elements who would otherwise have said, “They’re all the same – go and bomb the whole lot of them.” After your experiences many might have opted for a quiet life, to recover and rebuild your family life and everything else. What inspires you to keep fighting? On the day I returned from Guantanamo I was welcomed back to the country in a cell especially prepared for me in Paddington Green police station. Shortly after that I met the solicitor Gareth Peirce – the first really friendly face I’d met in all these years. She couldn’t be there for me for the next day as she had to go the House of Lords for a historic decision was going to be passed about the detention of terror suspects who had been held for three years. That’s the same amount of time I had been held in Guantanamo, but in this country. I realised what sort of situation I returned to. I couldn’t just sit around. People I knew were being held in Guantanamo and secret detention sites, and I was a witness in history to what had taken place. To remain silent would be doing a great disservice to myself and people being held, especially in the wake of the 7 July bombings, the racist Islamophobia that has resulted, and foreign policy. It’s been important for me to speak out. It has given me a great sense of strength and moral support to see that there are a great number of people in this country who haven’t given in to the ludicrous attitude of the government and some forms of the media, and have stood bravely challenging both of them. As long as that remains in this country, I’m very pleased to be part of it.
The crisis fuels discontent18 Jul 2008Where did it all go wrong for Gordon Brown? Was it his failure to call a general election last October? Was it the attempt to impose a pay freeze? Was it the vote in parliament to extend detention without trial to 42 days? Just one year into Brown’s premiership a recent Gallup poll showed Labour’s popularity at its lowest ebb of support since Gallup first asked people to declare their voting intention in 1943. The government is in a crisis that appears out of control and the central issue that is derailing Brown is the economic crisis. This crisis is not confined to the boardrooms of big companies and the financial markets. This is a crisis that affects every single household in Britain. Rocketing price increases have become the topic of conversation on every bus, in every workplace and college. When basic foods go up by 12 or 14 percent everyone but the very rich feels it. One Daily Mirror front page stated: “Cost of living up 11.6 percent… Mirror index shock increase: food up 15 percent; transport up 16 percent; utilities up 13 percent.” The housing market, which once fuelled the boom, is now helping to precipitate the crisis. Repossessions have doubled in the last year, house prices are falling but at the same time people’s mortgage payments are actually rising as fixed payment deals expire and interest rates rise. The Guardian financial pages reported that there has been a 60 percent fall in people buying new build houses in the last year. Rising fuel, food and transport prices are causing misery for millions. But how has the government got into this mess? Only a few years ago Brown was boasting that his economic policies had got rid of the boom and slump cycle. This is not an economic crisis confined to Britain: it is a world economic crisis creating instability across the globe. Capitalist crisis links the teaching assistant in Bradford who can’t pay her gas bill with the woman who joins food riots in Senegal. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation states that the world’s poorest countries could see their annual food import basket cost four times as much as it did in 2000. According to the World Bank, food riots have already hit more than 30 countries in the past year. There have been major strikes and protests across the world, including South Korea, Egypt, Spain and France. Last year right wing ideologue Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidential election. He was being hailed as the new Margaret Thatcher, but one year later his plans to break the French unions and privatise industries lie in tatters as strikes and protests have shaken his government. The rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland is further evidence of increasing resistance to the political establishment and its neoliberal priorities. This crisis and the resistance to it are not only creating a crisis of political legitimacy for mainstream parties but also creating the conditions in which many people begin to question the very nature of capitalism. It is important to understand that Britain is not immune to this process. The struggle may not be as bitter and deep as some countries, but nonetheless it is growing and creating massive problems for the government. Many media pundits are already warning of a “summer of discontent”. The detonator for this panic was the victory of tanker drivers employed indirectly by Shell. This small group of workers organised a militant strike that forced the bosses to concede a 14 percent pay rise over two years. The strike showed the willingness of private sector workers both to join the pay revolt and to give solidarity, even if it meant breaking the law. This victory is also being used as a benchmark for other workers. In fact, the Financial Times expressed the growing concern of bosses that so many inflation busting deals are part of two and three year deals linked to the Retail Price Index, which a year or two ago employers clearly believed was a safe bet to stay low. But it reported that four out of five deals over 4 percent were not linked to the RPI and so have been won by unions. “Mr Darling and John Hutton, the business secretary, argued last week that the Shell settlement was a one-off. But other recent deals include Drax Power, which in April agreed a 7 percent pay rise for 600 workers [plus a 1,500 lump sum], forming the second year of a two year deal. Babcock Engineering recently agreed a 7.6 per cent increase with 500 workers. Barclays has implemented a 5 per cent pay increase for 55,000 workers at the bank, as the first leg of a three year RPI-linked deal”. This wage fight is continuing to escalate. As Socialist Review went to press half a million local government workers in Unison voted to strike over their pay. The action planned for July has the potential to intensify the wage fight, and unlike previous strikes this involves a Labour affiliated union. This will take place alongside action by other unions. The PCS civil service workers’ union passed a motion that is likely to lead to a national ballot over pay and other issues in September. The NUT teachers’ union conference backed a ballot for further strikes as a follow up to the stunningly successful multi-union strikes on 24 April, which drew new layers of militant workers into the movement. Pay cuts The CWU postal conference supported a strike ballot over pensions, mail centre closures and defence of the post office network – and the leadership responded positively to calls for a mass demonstration at the Labour Party conference. The fury over pay cuts – and the fact that those cuts are driven centrally by Gordon Brown – combines with a wider disillusion with Labour to produce an unprecedented questioning of the unions’ links with the party. At almost every conference the issue of whether (or at least to what extent) to continue supporting Labour was raised openly. The firefighters’ FBU union broke from Labour in 2004 after the government had behaved so aggressively against the union during its national strike. At last year’s conference some delegates called for renewed affiliation to Labour. This time there were only a handful of votes against the decision to remain separate from the party. The GMB union voted overwhelmingly to remove funding from up to 35 Labour MPs who had not measured up to a union assessment of their “value for money”. GMB leader Paul Kenny dryly remarked, “We’ve examined the records of MPs both at local level and national level and many are doing a fantastic job, but there are a number who seem at times to be embarrassed by their relationship with the union. We don’t want to embarrass them by giving them union money.” Kenny also told the conference, “We are going to consider our affiliation levels to ensure they represent the realistic level of support within the union for the party.” At the CWU, motions to disaffiliate from Labour or to democratise the political fund were defeated heavily. But this was largely because the leadership had supported an emergency motion which said that unless the government had sharply changed its policies towards privatisation and the running of Royal Mail by March 2009 “then the CWU membership will be balloted on whether they believe the union should fund the Labour Party at the next general election”. Speaker after speaker (including several Labour members) spoke to underline that this was the party’s “last chance”. Setting this deadline defeated those who wanted an immediate change in the relationship with Labour. But it is now a ticking time bomb that could explode and cause serious damage to the party. Even at Unison, where the leadership worked hard to prevent a discussion about Labour, the issue was forced on to the agenda. Towards the end of the conference the delegates have a chance to vote for motions they think should be shunted up the order paper. This year every region of the union decided that the priority was a motion on having a review of the union’s political fund and support for Labour. In the event it was defeated, but only very narrowly. Earlier, Unison general secretary Dave Prentis had to declare that the pay deal in the NHS (which the union leadership had pushed) would have to be renegotiated if inflation continues to rise. He warned Brown, “It’s time for the government to raise our people up, or our people will bring Gordon down.” The background to the conferences is a collapse in support for Labour among its core supporters and a widening sense of opposition to the system – challenging neoliberalism is now common currency among trade unionists. For example, the NUT and UCU conferences both agreed to campaign against military recruitment in schools and colleges, and the question of how best to build opposition to the fascist BNP was discussed at every conference. The bitterness about Labour was underlined by an opinion poll commissioned by Unison just before its conference which showed Labour’s traditional supporters deserting the party in their droves. Almost half of those who have regularly voted Labour at past elections now say they are less likely to vote Labour than they were in 2005. In addition, 51 percent of the general public say they are less likely to vote Labour than they were at the last general election compared to 4 percent who say they are more likely. Who could have believed that the man who replaced Tony Blair would have managed to drive Labour support down so far and so quickly, by his handling of the economic crisis? Bank of England governor Mervyn King made it clear that things are only going to get worse when he said, “Rising fuel, gas, electricity and food prices mean that average real take-home pay will stagnate this year. It will not be an easy time, and I know that some families will find it particularly difficult.” A new study by accountants Grant Thornton reported that official figures show that income inequality under Labour so far is already higher on average than it was under Thatcher. One thing is certain. As with any economic crisis in history the government and bosses want workers to pay the price. This has sometimes been successful in the past. Attacks on conditions and financial hardship in times of crisis can have the effect of subduing class struggle. But such attacks can also lead to people questioning the system and fighting back. Such periods of instability polarise society, as we are seeing now. But polarisation does not necessarily mean that people move to the left. The election results for the BNP and the rise in anti-immigration sentiments are proof of this, and a warning. Polarisation is exactly what the word means – a move away from the centre of politics. The government is on the rocks. Millions of workers want to see a serious battle to defend living standards, to take action for affordable housing, to halt the spread of privatisation and to defend secure jobs. What socialists do and how they react to events will make a difference. The left has already played a major role in shaping the pay revolt as it has developed. The anger felt by ordinary members in unions like the PCS, NUT and UCU found expression in the lead given from the unions’ leading bodies. This in turn has increased the pressure on Labour affiliated unions like Unison to move. The left has won an argument over the idea of joint action and turned it into a reality. Socialists have to continue to place themselves at the centre of the moves for action and unity across the unions. That means pushing for joint action where we can and supporting initiatives like Public Services Not Private Profit, Organising for Fighting Unions and the National Shop Stewards Network that attempt to build unity between trade unionists nationally and in the localities. The left also needs to be able to raise a political as well as an industrial response to the crisis. We need to popularise a set of demands that activists from different political backgrounds, or none, can rally round. And we have to continue to raise the urgent need for political alternatives to New Labour, no matter how difficult they are to construct. This year’s union conferences with the increasing attacks by New Labour make this project more important than ever.
Israel’s Amber Light18 Jul 2008ISRAELI STRIKE ON IRAN NOT IMMEDIATE: BUSH TRIES DIPLOMACY HALF-HEARTEDLY
JNV Anti-War Briefing 115 (17 July 2008) BUSH SENDS DIPLOMAT TO MEET IRANIANS On 16 July, US President George W. Bush stunned observers by agreeing to send a high-level US diplomat to Geneva to meet Iranian negotiators face-to-face as part of the EU-led talks to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis. As the Independent pointed out, State Dept. spokesperson Sean McCormack had said just the month before that the US would boycott such meetings unless ‘Iran suddenly has a change of tune’. (17 July, p.23; http://tinyurl.com/633cn3) In the event, it was the US that ‘changed its tune’. Analyst Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation said: ‘I think it’s clear that Bush has pushed Cheney back twice now’ (referring to the recent decision to remove North Korea from the US ‘terrorist’ list). (FT, 17 July, p.5; http://tinyurl.com/6jwgmj) The Bush U-turn on Iraq had two features. First, he dropped the demand that Iran suspend uranium enrichment before being allowed face-to-face meetings on the subject (US officials have met Iranian diplomats, but only to discuss security in Iraq). Secondly, he accepted the EU ‘freeze-for-freeze’ proposal, whereby the West holds off on further sanctions for a set period while Iran holds off on escalating uranium enrichment. ‘Previously, Washington had stated that if Iran continued enriching uranium, the international pressure would only increase.’ (Telegraph, 17 July, p.15; http://tinyurl.com/5emnvj) The Bush diplomatic opening is very limited, however. William Burns, the third most senior State Department official, an undersecretary of state, is indeed being sent to Geneva to sit in the same room as Iranian negotiators, but his role is officially to do no more than reiterate the US line – on this one occasion. THE OTHER PROPOSALS The coverage of these recent developments has conformed to the Chomsky-Herman propaganda model of the mass media, demonstrating once again the key role of media self-censorship in maintaining what they call ‘brainwashing under freedom’. In the current reporting, the starting point of discussion is invariably the EU-led proposals put to Iran on 14 June, and the question is whether Tehran will accept this framework for negotiations. What is almost totally absent is any awareness that Iran had made its own highly significant proposals on 13 May this year. One rare recognition of this simple reality came in an important commentary by Sir John Thomson. Thomson, a former UK Permanent Representative at the UN, was told by Iranian Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, in early July that EU negotiator Javier Solana ‘had assured him the Iranian package could be part of the agenda for substantive negotiations between Iran and the 5-plus-1’ (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany). (Independent on Sunday, 13 July, p.56; http://tinyurl.com/59jth3) So the negotiations are proceeding because Iran’s negotiating proposals (which have been almost entirely erased from history by the Western media) have been admitted to the negotiating chamber. RED LINES Ali-Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister who advises Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, on foreign affairs, made a critical point on 1 July. Apart from saying it was ‘expedient’ for Iran to resume nuclear negotiations on the 5-plus-1 offer, Velayati said: ‘They say Iran should not make an atomic bomb and we say Iran needs nuclear energy. These two principles are your and our red lines which should be the basis for negotiations and [can be] agreed on’. (FT, 2 July; http://tinyurl.com/5ejuqk) But how can these two ‘red lines’ both be agreed as a basis for negotiation? By going back to Iran’s 13 May proposal for uranium enrichment to continue on Iranian soil?but under international control. On the basis of his discussions with Foreign Minister Mottaki, Thomson believes that Iran is ‘ready to make some compromise agreements (as yet unspecified) on Middle Eastern issues that worry the west’. And on the nuclear issue ‘it is ready to compromise to the extent of putting its enrichment-related facilities under the control of an international consortium?including, for example, France, Germany and the UK?which would then operate a modern, commercially oriented business producing nuclear fuel in Iran for sale globally. This is not what the 5-plus-1 are asking for, but in my view it is the best that is obtainable, and so long as it remains in force it precludes Iran from making a nuclear weapon.’ (IOS, 13 July, as above. See also http://mit.edu/stgs/irancrisis.html.) WHAT OF THE ISRAELI THREATS? So while Ayatollah Khamanei gives the ‘green light’ for negotiations on the basis of rather vague 5-plus-1 proposals, President Bush is reported to have given the ‘amber light’ for an Israeli airstrike on Iran. Despite this, an Israeli strike looks unlikely, for the next few months at least. The Sunday Times reported: ‘ “Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you’re ready,” the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support.’ This is not a formality: ‘Nor is it certain that Bush’s amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran’s test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets. “It’s really all down to the Israelis,” the Pentagon official added. “This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn’t believe that anything but force will deter Iran.” The official added that Israel had not so far presented Bush with a convincing military proposal. “If there is no solid plan, the amber will never turn to green,” he said.’ (Sunday Times, 13 July; http://tinyurl.com/6gppuc) Retired US Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, concluded from the Israeli aerial exercises in June that ‘Israel does not have the capability to effectively attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.’ Interviewed by Robert Naiman of the Huffington Post website, Gardiner pointed to a 2006 MIT paper by Whitney Raas and Austin Long, assessing Israeli military planners’ think ing. Raas and Long believe Israel would want to attack the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, the uranium conversion facility at Esfahan and the heavy water plant at Arak?with a combined total of 36 aircraft. (With supporting aircraft, this would match up with the reports of a 100-aircraft exercise in June.) ‘An Israeli strike would not be much of a strike,’ Gardiner says. The US would probably think in terms of about 10 times more aim points for a similar strike, he observes. (Robert Naiman, ‘Is Israel Really Preparing to Attack Iran? Col. Gardiner Says No’, 20 June; http://tinyurl.com/4r5y43) On this analysis, an Israeli strike could not destroy even the three best-known Iranian nuclear facilities, never mind facilities which might be hidden. The strike could not meet the minimum required by the US, which would want the assault to ‘set back the Iranians by at least five years for an attack to be considered a success’, according to the Pentagon source consulted by the Sunday Times. It appears, therefore, that there will never be a ‘solid’ Israeli plan to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, and so, if it acts rationally, the White House will never green light such an attack. OBAMA MANIA The danger, of course, is that the White House will not act rationally, particularly if it sees the Bush ‘legacy’ being lost to an incoming Obama administration. Hence, perhaps, the startling decision to mimic the Democratic presidential candidate in his popular decision to offer unconditional talks with official enemies. In Nov. 2007, before the publication of the NIE that Iran had no nuclear weapons programme, a poll found 73% of people in the US favouring nonviolent options in dealing with Iran; 45% opposed violence even if diplomacy and sanctions failed (only 46% favoured force in those circumstances). http://tinyurl.com/5no6ox
Investigation into Pakistan torture allegation17 Jul 2008An official complaint alleging that British intelligence officers colluded in the torture of a British medical student who was detained in Pakistan after the July 2005 suicide attacks in London has been lodged with the tribunal that conducts investigations into MI5 and MI6. Labour backbencher John McDonnell has complained to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) that the student, his constituent, was picked up by a Pakistani intelligence agency and tortured for two months in a building opposite the British deputy high commission in Karachi. The student told McDonnell on his release that he was questioned by British intelligence officers, who he believes were from the Security Service, MI5, after he had been tortured. McDonnell believes that British officials “outsourced” his mistreatment to the Pakistani agency, and wants the IPT to examine the matter. Earlier this year four British nationals claimed they were mistreated after being detained by Pakistani intelligence agents, and that they were then questioned by British intelligence officers in between or after torture sessions. One has since been convicted of terrorism offences after being returned to the UK, a second is awaiting trial, and a third absconded while subjected to a control order. Yesterday the Guardian reported that three other Britons – including McDonnell’s constituent – have also alleged they were mistreated after being detained in Pakistan, and were eventually released without charge. MI5 asked the Home Office to issue a statement which said: “The Security and Intelligence Agencies do not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture or inhumane or degrading treatment. For reasons both ethical and legal, their policy is not to carry out any action which they know would result in torture or inhuman or degrading treatment.” It is unclear how many Britons have been held in Pakistan for questioning during counterterrorism investigations in recent years. Earlier this year the Foreign Office responded to a parliamentary question from Andrew Tyrie, Tory MP and chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, by saying there were six such cases since 2000. But the Guardian is aware that there have been at least 11, and there are unconfirmed reports that there may have been more. Some of the detainees received no assistance from British consular officials. The Foreign Office maintains that it had no duty to represent them while they were in Pakistan as they have dual nationality. The men’s lawyers said this claim is undermined by the strenuous efforts that British diplomats make on behalf of the 200-plus dual nationals forced into marriage in Pakistan each year. When Tyrie asked about MI5’s ability to visit and question detainees to whom consular officials claim to have been denied access, Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister, replied: “Priority was given to the welfare of the detainees.” A number of the detainees themselves deny this, saying that the British intelligence officers who interviewed them appeared to ignore their complaints that they were being tortured.
Nothing is more important17 Jul 2008There is a tangible shift occurring in British politics. Gone are the days of traditional class politics, when the working class voted en masse for Labour and the more privileged for the Conservatives. A new force is emerging, which will, if left unchecked, prove disastrous for both Labour and the left in general. Magnus Marsdal?s article talks about the changing politics of Norway and finds comparisons with the rest of western Europe. It is a phenomenon that is also taking place in Britain, albeit a few years later than in some other countries. The British National Party (BNP) was formed in 1982 out of an earlier split within the National Front and for many years it languished on the fringes of politics. In 1999 Nick Griffin became its leader and his more political and media savvy approach enabled the party to exploit rising racial tensions in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001. Since then, against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia, a growing eastern-European migrant workforce and New Labour?s fixation with Middle England, the party has risen steadily. It now has 55 councillors and last month secured a seat on the London Assembly. And all this in a period of supposed economic success. The BNP has long been dismissed as a cranky fascist party, made up of thugs, criminals and Nazis. While it is true that the leadership has its ideological roots in fascism, it is time we had a better explanation for the party?s rise and appeal. Society in Britain, like much of the industrialised world, has become dislocated over the past few decades. Globalisation and the increasing dominance of international finance and corporations have shifted power far away from local communities. This, coupled with the loss of empire, Britain?s changing place in the world and even the possible break-up of the United Kingdom have all challenged the identity of many, particularly those towards the bottom of the economic ladder, who naturally are more concerned about change. Politically, there has also been the growing divorce between the political parties and their electorates. The preoccupation with a small number of voters in a few key marginals has resulted in New Labour echoing the whims and prejudices of a mythical Middle England. Class has been removed as an economic and political category in Westminster discourse. Labour?s traditional voters feel ignored, taken for granted and even abandoned. At the same time, the Tories have for decades ceased to offer a real opposition in many traditional Labour areas, leaving a dangerous vacuum. In 1968 US sociologist Don Warren described the emergence of the ?middle American radical? to explain the rise of right-wing presidential candidate George Wallace. He saw a radicalised group of voters, drawn largely from the skilled working class, who opposed the political and economic elites while simultaneously despising those who they regarded as undeserving poor. A white identity emerged that had no political articulation. A similar phenomenon is occurring in today?s Britain. The Labour Party too often fails to articulate the concerns of large swathes of its traditional working class supporters. Over the past 20 years turnout has slumped in Labour heartlands. Suddenly, as the BNP has emerged as a political force, many are now turning out to vote for them. Towns like Stoke-on-Trent reflect this change. Only a few years ago Labour held every seat on the council. Today, it holds just 16 out of 60, with the BNP close behind with nine. The local ethnic minority population is comparatively small, suggesting that voters are flocking to the BNP for some far more fundamental reasons. Nor is there much comfort for parties to the left of Labour. It is easy to blame New Labour for the rise of the BNP but few have questioned why the far-left parties fail to attract significant support from white working-class voters. If anything, the far-left vote has actually shrunk since 1997 and the occasional successes of Respect or the Greens have been based on specific ethnic minority communities or middle-class liberals. Race is a prism through which many voters view their world but it is not the underlying issue. That is why immigration minister Liam Byrne?s attempts to quicken the introduction of the Australian points system will ultimately fail to deal with the political problem. He might hope to appease voters? concerns over immigration but unfortunately he, like many others, is misunderstanding the rise of the BNP. Britain might have been slower to see the emergence of a major far-right party than elsewhere but this could change very quickly. Next year?s European elections, contested under proportional representation, will give the BNP its greatest chance to break into the mainstream. The rise of the BNP is not a passing phenomena. We must now debate new strategies for organisation and policy, counter- organise on the ground and deal with the material issues that lie behind its popular support. Nothing is more important for this movement. Jon Cruddas is the Labour MP for Dagenham. Nick Lowles is editor of Searchlight magazine
Time for a serious debate on Islamophobia17 Jul 2008Every journalist owes the Daily Mail?s Peter Oborne a debt of gratitude for last week?s Dispatches documentary exposing Islamophobia in our media. From the journalists on the Express and Star who refused to publish a page of inflammatory nonsense about Muslims, to the staff on the Barking and Dagenham Recorder facing foul-mouthed abuse from the BNP, every media worker who is concerned about anti-Muslim racism in the media will be uplifted by Oborne?s work. This was a very serious piece of journalism, broadcast at an extremely sensitive time – on the anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London. Channel 4 made sure the documentary was copper-bottomed by commissioning accompanying research (.pdf) by the excellent Cardiff School of Journalism team under Prof Justin Lewis. Moreover, Oborne produced his own pamphlet to go with the film, “Muslims Under Siege? (.pdf). Both should be required reading for journalists. The mainstream media?s response to Oborne?s challenge, however, has so far been disappointing, and by no means matches the seriousness of the issues he raises. The Independent gave Oborne space for two major articles, one of which in its media section, and columnist Mark Steele last week demolished the Sun?s response to Oborne. The Mail gave him a double page spread. But apart from a few comment pieces by Muslims praising the documentary in the Guardian, the Observer and the Times, and a splendid piece by the Guardian?s Seamus Milne, the response has been either silence or hostility. The Observer?s Andrew Anthony slagged it off, accusing Oborne of ?blasting himself in the foot?. In the Sindy, Hermione Eyre accused Oborne, of all people, of ?white liberal piety?. To add insult to injury, Oborne was disgracefully thrown out of parliament for distributing his pamphlet to MPs. Readers of this blog might wish to questions aspects of Oborne?s approach, which, for example, doesn?t make explicit the link between the rise of Islamophobia and the ?war on terror?. But we share his criticisms of the war in Iraq. In his Dispatches documentary in March, ?Iraq?s Lost Generation?, he said: ?The British Government has misled us in the run-up to war and is in denial now about what we are leaving behind. It has failed to bring liberal democracy to Iraq, brought danger to the streets of London, damaged our international reputation, alienated millions of our fellow citizens and betrayed the values we stand for in a moral and strategic disaster.? It is time for the dangerous Islamophobia that is rampant in the British media to be recognised and debated. We must not let the issues that Oborne has raised be brushed under the carpet. N.B. Last week the Independent reported record numbers of racist incidents ? from verbal abuse to stabbings ? are being reported to police, fuelling fears that levels of Islamophobia are rising.
Gordon Brown’s tough talk won’t stop knives17 Jul 2008It seems that in the last week the entire political establishment has jumped on the issue of knife crime. Gordon Brown used his monthly press conference on Monday of this week to announce his new get-tough approach. There are to be tough ?community payback? schemes, tough plans to deal with ?problem families?, and tough curfews for the under-16s. But beneath all this robust language it is clear that none of our politicians have a clue as to how to reduce the number of young people carrying knifes, only the vague hope that by talking tough they can prevent their political rivals from outflanking them. Brown?s community payback scheme is one such example. Here those convicted of carrying, but not using, a knife will be forced to undertake up to 300 hours of work over 50 days. ?Communities? should have a role in deciding what they should do,? says Brown. ?Cleaning up parks or scrubbing graffiti, and what time they should do it, such as cleaning the streets on Friday and Saturday night.? The overwhelming majority of young people who carry knifes do so out of an acute sense of fear that unless they are armed, they may become the next victim of a stabbing. Some are scared for their lives every time they leave their house. Does Brown really believe that people in such a situation will be deterred by this scheme? Is it the case that the very small number of people who have become so alienated from the society that they see little value in human life ? neither theirs, nor anyone else?s ? will now think twice before reaching for a blade? Surely even New Labour knows this is rubbish. Programmes Brown is attempting to lay the blame for knife crime at the feet of the families of the 110,000 children he claims have been found guilty of anti-social behaviour. ?I think all of us recognise that the first responsibility where a child is in trouble or in danger of getting into trouble rests with the parent,? he argues. Now up to 20,000 of those families could face ?parenting action? programmes, and even removal to residential accommodation for retraining. Those that refuse the scheme could find themselves evicted from social housing and their children taken into care. How making families homeless, turfing their belongings out in the street, and then sending their kids to a care home will make the situation better is anyone?s guess. Nevertheless the idea does have a specific ideological purpose. It says social problems in our communities are the result of personal and family failure, rather than being connected to any wider concerns. If knife crime is the product of families that are out of control, then there need be no discussion of other issues, like the levels of exclusion from schools, unemployment rates, crap jobs and lack of apprenticeships. There need not be any understanding about the way many working class young people feel completely undervalued and under siege. Above all it means that the state can absolve itself from any responsibility for providing real remedies to the situation. By accepting such a right wing agenda on crime, Brown has given credibility to David Cameron?s talk of a ?broken society?. Failed He has allowed the Tories to suggest that some problems may not stem only from failed individuals but from a society whose values have failed ? an idea that can masquerade as both left and right wing. But we cannot afford to allow the right to dominate the debate over crime. Many people rightly feel that anti-social behaviour and violence grow when the idea of community is undermined. This notion of community rests on the idea that we are not just atomised individuals, but people capable of collective action. Struggles to improve our estates, build community centres and challenge the way our education system is developing as a test factory have the potential to unite people in ways that no mainstream politician seems capable of. But the success of such campaigns is dependent upon rejecting the idea that young people are the problem and that a crackdown is the answer.
European style: nobody loves it16 Jul 2008Imagine a man on trial for his life. The jury brings in a verdict of not guilty, so the judge immediately invites counsel for the prosecution to complete his closing speech, and then the accused is found guilty and sentenced to death. The Irish rejected the Lisbon Treaty on 12 June by a large majority. The treaty cannot come into force unless it is adopted by all 27 member states of the European Union, but most European leaders immediately announced that the ratification process would continue, yet promised to ?respect the will? of the Irish people (see ?Ireland votes no?). Europe is used to attacks on the sovereign power of the people by their overlords. That is now its style, even if it likes to be seen as the kingdom of democracy on earth. The Irish rejected a ?simplified? treaty so big the prime minister, Brian Cowen, confessed he had not managed to read it cover to cover. A member of the European parliament said the Irish reminded him of a ?people?s democracy?. Another remarked: ?It?s no accident that dictators love a referendum? (1) and the president of the European parliament, Hans-Gert Pttering, concluded: ?The Irish no vote cannot be the last word? (2). So there will be a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and possibly a third. Voting in Dublin will continue until the result is a yes, because that is what the other states want, those states where the electorate has not been consulted at all. Blame the Irish! Ungrateful, selfish, working-class militants, incapable of the generosity and unselfishness shown by their rulers. Except when they vote them in and give them a mandate to carry out ?bold reforms?. No need for a second ballot then. The Irish are thoroughly European in that respect. Something has gone wrong. The European style has been exported and sold on the strength of claims to peace, prosperity, justice and equality. It has produced charming posters with blue skies, loving mothers and happy babies; it has an army of journalists and artists campaigning for it; Europe is being created by symposiums and meetings. But nobody waves its flag. Its identity seems to be so insubstantial that all it can think of to put on its banknotes is the cost of living. It talks about peace but prepares to join the US forces in dubious wars. It talks about progress but deregulates employment. It talks about culture but produces a television without frontiers directive that will result mainly in more advertising slots. It talks about ecology and safe food but lifts an 11-year ban on imports of US chickens washed in chlorine (3). It talks about freedom but adopts a shameful directive under which foreigners without the right papers may be held in detention centres for 18 months before being expelled, including minors and even unaccompanied minors. Keeping Europe?s promise called for harmonisation at the highest level: freedom, employment law, progressive taxation, independence. Instead, the gains achieved by the most advanced states have been diminished in the name of unification and we are left with extended detention, free trade and Atlanticism. This has produced the beginnings of a social Europe, the Europe that says no. Noting that in Ireland a majority of women, people under 29, and workers firmly rejected the proposed text, a columnist in The Economist observed that: ?A 19th-century-style electoral roll, restricted to older, male property-owners, would have produced a handsome yes for Lisbon? (4). But what kind of Europe can we hope to construct if we go back to the property qualification?
Saudis had ?advance information? on BAE case16 Jul 2008THE Saudi governments seemed to have advance knowledge of the probability of Britain halting a bribery investigation before the official decision was taken, the former British ambassador to Riyadh revealed this week. The disclosure appeared in evidence submitted to court by the Serious Fraud Office, as the House of Lords heard its appeal against a High Court ruling that it acted unlawfully in ending the inquiry against BAE Systems, who allegedly bribed Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia with 1 billion. Lawyers for the SFO told the court that fraud office director Robert Wardle stopped the investigation in December 2006 because he believed that Saudi Arabia would cut off counter-terrorism co-operation with Britain, putting national security at risk. Jonathan Sumption QC, for the SFO, said Mr Wardle only became aware of the full scale of the ?threat? after receiving a minute in December 2006 from then Prime Minister Tony Blair, together with information from Government departments, warning of an ?immediate risk of collapse in UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic co-operation?. Six days later he announced the investigation had been stopped. But according to evidence presented by the Foreign Office, then British ambassador to Saudi Arabia Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles wrote three months earlier that he had discussed the SFO case with an unnamed senior Saudi government representative, who was ?more optimistic about the SFO enquiry than seemed justified on the facts available to me?, and ?always gave the impression that he had his own information?. The representative suggested the inquiry could be stopped on public interest grounds. Lawyers for Campaign Against Arms Trade and Corner House Research, who are opposing the appeal, attacked the SFO and the Government for claiming that they had not broken international law in dropping the inquiry. Government documents disclosed last year revealed that the Saudi threats were considered so grave that the inquiry would have been stopped even if that breached Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development?s anti-bribery convention. Article 5 of the convention bars states from allowing economic interests or foreign relations to influence bribery investigations. Dinah Rose QC, for the campaigners, said it was illogical for the Government to ?maintain the position ?We acted in accordance with Article 5? while saying, ?You can?t consider that [in court] because we would?ve acted the same way if it was a breach?.? The Attorney-General, who advised the SFO and Mr Blair, had misinterpreted the convention, Ms Rose said, adding: ?If the decision maker has misunderstood the legal effect of the instrument he?s purporting to take into account, then his decision is flawed.? The SFO?s lawyers deny all wrongdoing and insist that Mr Wardle?s decision was rational and informed. The judgment is expected this autumn.
The Great City Academy Fraud16 Jul 2008book Review The Great City Academy Fraud, by Francis Beckett It is impossible to commend this book highly enough. When the whole City Academy saga started Brent was chosen as one of the first 3 proposed in the country. As local NUT Secretary I was intimately involved from the start. We witnessed the deceit, the spin, the secrecy, the bribery and the downright dishonesty and lying. I collected the papers and the evidence and thought of writing a book. In common with most people I never got round to it. I?m glad I didn?t, I couldn?t have done the job a tenth as well. It?s an elegantly written book packed with killer quotes and facts. I have the rather desecrating habit of turning the ears of pages down if they have a particularly important or germane fact or quote. By the end of the book almost every other page had been dog-eared. I read the book whilst camping out at the occupation ?tent city? we have set up to oppose an Academy on the Wembley Park site. You can imagine that I and my colleagues have been absorbed in studying and finding out as much information as possible about the academy programme, yet still I found out so many things I didn?t know and gained more insights into the depth and perfidy of these would-be state education privatisers. Amongst many things, the book shows how Primary schools will not escape and will be included in the academies? increasing trend to be all-through 3-18 schools (the bigger the school, the cheaper the cost per unit ? sorry – child); how private schools are being allowed to become academies; how academies are now being built entirely with public money with so-called sponsors only being expected to make annual revenue contributions to the academy trust; how Local Authorities, as being responsible for education, are to be ended; how democratic consultation and procedures have been trampled into the dust and the legal goalposts bent, ignored and moved with the regularity and speed of atomic clocks; and how there is a determined plan by religious groups to turn the clock back. So, to quote two brief extracts from the book, the first regarding the role of religion in education, and the second regarding the role of charity, or rather the role it shouldn?t have, in education (but if you use them I want you to promise me that you won?t do it without buying the book, because you?ll miss so many other good ones). He points out that long before the academies became the vehicle for it (1995) a booklet from a Mr Burn and Mr McQuoid, now involved with the Vardy foundation, said, ?In Britain the Christian churches were active in the field of schooling long before the state took over?.in retrospect it is a matter of regret that the churches so readily relinquished control of education to the state?.?. And there you have it says Francis, ?the state must be driven out of education and it should be handed back to the churches, our function as tax payers should be confined to providing the money with which people like McQuoid and Burn can make sure we can bring up a generation in their own image?. He quotes Clement Atlee, who was later to become Labour prime Minister in 1945, writing in 1920. He said, ?If the rich want to help the poor then they should pay their taxes gladly. A right established by law, such as that to an old age pension, is less galling than an allowance made by a rich man to a poor one depending on his view of the recipient?s character and terminable at his caprice?. He quotes Robert Louis Stevenson who called taxes ?the true charity, impartial, impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all?. ? Charity? , Atlee wrote, ?is always apt to be accompanied by a certain complacency and condescension on the part of the benefactor and by an expectation of gratitude from the recipient which cuts at the root of all true friendliness? Francis then writes, ?For these reasons, in the early part of the 20th century it became the view of the Labour Party ? and broadly speaking remained so until 1997 ? that the rich should aid the poor through the tax system, rather than by charitable gifts; and that education, health care, social security ? all the elements of the 1945 Atlee settlement ? should be paid for from taxation?. ?What city academies represent, therefore, is a return to the idea, condemned by Atlee, that the rich should contribute voluntarily, rather than through the tax system. But there is a new twist. The sponsor can get all the things a nineteenth-century philanthropist could get, and which Atlee grudged him: control of how the money is spent, a ?monument? to himself, the gratitude of the recipients. But unlike the nineteenth-century philanthropist, he does not have to pay the cost of the thing he is ?giving? ? or even a substantial contribution towards the cost?. Francis, you have done a service to all of us, full credit to you. As you point out, ?Each funding agreement contains conditions upon which the Academy can be returned to the public sector?. We should repay you by defeating this attempt to end state education. This means all out war to stop new academies being built, and campaigning and fighting by any and all means to bring all existing academies back into a fully integrated state education system. Over to you, readers. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. We have started and this is an excellent guide.
Talking Warheads16 Jul 2008When Saddam Hussein?s forces occupied Kuwait in August 1990, the US led a massive coalition to oust them. Having assembled 600,000 troops and 1,000 planes from more than 30 countries, Operation Desert Storm started in January 1991 with a huge air assault that was confidently expected to force out the Iraqis. Within 24 hours, however, things had begun to look very different. Iraqi Scud missiles started hitting Israel, leading to a sustained diversion of effort as the Americans and their coalition allies tried to defuse this new threat. To make matters worse, the Iraqis also aimed Scuds at Saudi Arabia, one of them hitting a Marines depot killing 28 people, the worst US loss of life in the war. Eight years later, it was revealed that another Scud strike had very nearly been catastrophic, and might have affected the outcome of the entire war. It landed in the sea 300 yards from a US Navy aviation support ship and near the amphibious warfare ship USS Tarawa. Both were moored alongside a pier complex at the Saudi port of Jubayl, which included a large ammunition storage dump and a parking lot for petrol tankers. If the Scud had hit its target instead of landing harmlessly in the sea, it could have set off a huge chain of explosions and fires, killing thousands. Uncomfortable lessons The 1991 Iraq War was widely seen as a great victory for the West, but behind the scenes in military circles some serious lessons were being learnt. What was expected to be a new world order, in which the ending of the Cold War and demise of the Soviet bloc would lead on to international stability rooted in Western economic and military power, now looked much less certain. One far-sighted American writer, a former submarine commander called Roger W Barnett, succinctly highlighted the impact of ?high technology weapons and weapons of mass destruction on the ability ? and thus the willingness ? of the weak to take up arms against the strong?. A most uncomfortable lesson of the 1991 war was that a middle-ranking state such as Iraq (previously a close ally of Washington) could use crude 1960s missile technology to probe weak points in the armed forces of the world?s most powerful country. As a result, during the 1990s, missile defence got a new lease of life. Billions of dollars were poured into ?theatre missile defence systems?, designed to protect US forces and their allies when they are engaged in military operations in regions such as the Middle East. But the missile ?threat? was just one part of a much wider predicament that has brought nuclear weapons right back into the frame for the West. Nukes for peace The core problem is that maintaining a world peace centred on Western interests must involve a willingness to use force when those interests are threatened, whether that be in the Middle East, South West Asia or elsewhere. The US may now spend more on its military than every other country in the world combined, and its forces may be pre-eminent in their capabilities, but that does not prevent their use being constrained by crude but powerful deterrents fielded by otherwise weaker states. Iraq?s Scud missiles were early examples of this, but a much more worrying combination, from the Pentagon?s perspective, is the development of small nuclear arsenals by potentially hostile states such as Iran and North Korea. The Pentagon gets even more concerned when these uncontrolled weapons are combined with delivery systems such as ballistic missiles. The Scuds that hit Dhahran and narrowly missed Jubayl were armed with conventional warheads, but even crude nuclear devices would be far more potent deterrents against Western military interventions. One response is to call for a nuclear free world in which, cynics might say, conventional military power would rule supreme again; but most strategists don?t buy this. They call instead for robust nuclear forces to be retained indefinitely. This does not mean that arsenals will be kept at anything like the stupefying Cold War levels, but it does mean that nuclear weapons will be with us far into the future. Just don?t mention the warheads Britain is a good example of this thinking. It plans to replace its current Trident system of nuclear missiles in a couple of decades with new weapons designed to see the country through to the second half of the 21st century. Alongside them, the UK is planning to build two giant new aircraft carriers, the largest warships ever built for the Royal Navy. These will give Britain a warfare capability that will be second only to the United States, enabling it to continue to fight alongside its ally in what it sees as crucial regions such as the immensely oil-rich Persian Gulf. But what is the use of such warships if regional opponents have their own nuclear arsenals, however small? A 65,000-tonne aircraft carrier and its surrounding flotilla could be destroyed by a single nuclear weapon, so there has to be a back-up. This is where nuclear forces come in useful. Britain, like the US, France and Russia, has been very careful not to rule out using nuclear weapons to attack first rather than limit their use to self-defence. It has also developed small nuclear warheads whose destructive power falls far short of the feared global cataclysms of the Cold War. Last year?s White Paper on the Trident replacement did its best to avoid admitting to such thinking, but also had to avoid lying. It therefore limited discussion of such considerations to a couple of short phrases in an otherwise lengthy and detailed document ? but these two phrases allowed Britain to maintain the option of first-use of a nuclear weapon as well as the need to have small nuclear weapons, without engaging in an embarrassing public debate as to why. Moreover, to avoid all talk of nuclear war-fighting, the term ?tactical? nuclear weapon was abandoned a decade ago, to be replaced by the more anodyne ?sub-strategic?, but even that has now been banned from the nuclear lexicon. In polite circles it is simply not the done thing to talk about actually using nuclear weapons. A slippery slope These new nuclear realities make it much more difficult for activists to campaign against a world in which nuclear weapons still play a central role. During the Cold War there was a small risk of an all-out nuclear war that would have devastated the Northern hemisphere and much of the rest of the world. We were peering into a nuclear abyss and although the risks might have been relatively small, the consequences would have been utterly disastrous. Now it is more like a slippery slope ? a slow descent in which the lead nuclear states refuse to countenance any end to their nuclear dominance. The risk is that some time in the next couple of decades, a regional crisis will ?go nuclear?, with two possible outcomes. One is that it might escalate to a global nuclear war. Even if we are down to a few thousand warheads instead of the tens of thousands of the Cold War era, just a fraction of them would cause utter devastation across much of the world. The other outcome is that a nuclear war stays within a particular region, killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of people but not escalating to a global catastrophe. Apart from the dreadful immediate consequences, that could mean that we become accustomed to using nuclear weapons as instruments of warfare. The taboo that has held since Nagasaki
will have been broken, leading to a formidably more insecure world. For the Western military establishment, nuclear weapons must remain at the centre of their overall approach to security. From their perspective, the coming decades will be fraught with unplanned and uncontrolled developments in which terrorism, extremism, rogue states, mass migration and many other threats all have to be contained. With the ending of the Cold War we had ?slain the dragon? ? but in the words of one former CIA Director, James Woolsey, we now live in ?a jungle full of poisonous snakes?. That jungle has to be tamed and controlled. That means we must have the back-stop of nuclear forces for the indefinite future. Changing the Cold War mindset The alternative is to recognize that such an outlook is self-defeating. It is best described as ?liddism? ? keeping the lid on things rather than acknowledging the underlying problems. The main security issues for most of the world?s people are matters such as the widening socio-economic divide, climate change and resource scarcity. If the world?s lites try to close the castle gates and preserve their lifestyles, they will simply end up with an embittered environment in which everyone becomes less secure. The very fact that nuclear weapons retain their salience is evidence of an utter lack of new thinking by our political leaders. We are still stuck with Cold War attitudes that are at least two decades out of date. But changing this mindset and moving towards an outlook that addresses the real security threats facing the world will require not just the efforts of dedicated anti-nuclear campaigners but the combined work of development and environment activists, North and South. Paul Rogers is Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University.
The end of the world is nigh. Maybe?16 Jul 2008As speculation mounts as to whether the Israelis will be given the green light to bomb Iran later this year, so too do the number of articles warning of how the cunning Iranians are just playing for time and are running rings round the clueless European powers. Now I have no idea whether the Iranians are being entirely candid when they say their nuclear programme is for civilian purposes only or whether they in fact intend to follow in the footsteps of the Israelis who are the possessors of the only actual nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I would have thought it would be in everyone’s interest for the whole of the Middle East (and indeed, the whole world) to be a nuclear weapon-free zone. The one thing I do know, however, is that over the years a number of our UK-based newspapers have been more than willing to play up the threat of alleged Iranian weapons while downplaying the danger of the very real Israeli ones. One journalist who writes regularly on the theme of Iran’s presumed quest for nuclear weapons is Con Coughlin, a senior executive in the Telegraph group. Just last week he wrote a piece for the Daily Telegraph headlined Iran has resumed A-bomb project, says west. A look at the sources he listed in his story and many of his other similar stories about Iran only turned up assorted unnamed “officials” and western “defence experts”. In September 2003, in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion and just a few months after Bush’s “mission accomplished”, speech, a news story by the very same Con Coughlin was telling us: Iran is not only working hard to develop an atom bomb, but, left to its own devices, could achieve its stated goal of acquiring a nuclear arsenal within two years. Get that? “Within two years”. And acquiring nuclear weapons was a “stated goal” of the Iranians. That was in 2003. Again, the sources were listed as “weapons experts” and once again they were unnamed. Just over a year later, another alarming story from Coughlin was headlined Five N-bombs within Iran’s grasp as West prevaricates. How long “within grasp” actually meant in real terms was this time left unsaid, but presumably it must have been very, very close indeed if Coughlin’s previous story from 2003 was correct. The implication was clearly that the west should stop pussyfooting around and ? well, I think you can work the rest out yourselves. In January 2006, Coughlin informed us of a revised timescale. Now we were told that Iran “Could go nuclear within three years“. This is what his sources had to say: Intelligence sources say Iran will begin feeding converted uranium into 164 centrifuges at Natanz this week. That could enable it to create enriched uranium of sufficient quality for nuclear weapons production within three years. Previous estimates of the minimum time required had ranged from five to 10 years. The “intelligence sources” must obviously have overlooked reading Coughlin’s own news reports. And in January 2007, Coughlin reported about growing cooperation between Iran and North Korea in the field of nuclear weaponry and he kindly provided us with yet another frightening timescale: Intelligence estimates vary about how long it could take Teheran to produce a nuclear warhead. But defence officials monitoring the growing cooperation between North Korea and Iran believe the Iranians could be in a position to test-fire a low-grade device ? less than half a kiloton ? within 12 months. Within 12 months. And that particular story was written 18 months ago. You do the maths. I recall that Con Coughlin been writing these kinds of stories about Iran since at least the early 1990s ? but I couldn’t find the earlier stories archived on the Telegraph’s website. Just who are his sources and how credible are they? As ordinary readers of a newspaper we normally have no real way of knowing. But Nick Davies’ excellent book, Flat Earth News, contains a revealing passage about Coughlin and the close ties he has cultivated over the years with MI6. Back in 2002, the Sunday Telegraph settled an action brought by Saif al-Islam Gadafy, the son of the Libyan leader, over a 1995 story in which they had accused him of being involved in a huge Middle Eastern currency sting. The Sunday Telegraph admitted that allegations they had printed about Saif al-Islam were untrue. The author of that original article was ? you guessed ? none other than Con Coughlin, and we are told in Flat Earth News that Coughlin had in fact obtained his story from sources in MI6. So how can we go about holding our own spooks to account for their mischief-making? Remember the depressing example of Sir John Scarlett, who for his sins in the notorious sexed-up Iraq dossier affair was punished by being? er? promoted to become head of MI6. Well, that’ll teach them, eh?
The Police force with a 320 million budget ? but no crime!16 Jul 2008Northumbria Police is one of Britain?s biggest and busiest forces. It employs more than 4,000 officers and has a budget of around 320 million a year. Of that, more than 1 million is spent on its PR department. However, as a freelance journalist based in Northumberland, I am frequently amazed at how peaceful the area is ? or at least if you believe the force?s press office. Despite the force now paying to staff its press office on Saturdays and Sundays, there are whole weekends when not one crime is released to the media. It would be easy to argue that, as a journalist, I only believe in the police being more open because it will help me to do my job. Yes, that?s true. But there is a more fundamental principle here and that is the age-old tradition of the police using the media to warn the public about what is going on ? and to help them catch criminals. For the last decade, I have campaigned for Northumbria Police to be more open with the public ? i.e. the people who pay their wages. I have collected hundreds of examples of serious crimes that have either not been released to the media or have been released weeks or even months later.These include rapes, armed robberies and other horrendous attacks that have been kept hidden from the public. After having a number of meetings with the Chief Constable Michael Craik over the years, I have been repeatedly promised the service would improve. And yes, the budget for the press office, has been boosted ? growing from 620,000 two years ago to the 1 million it now consumes. There has also been a big increase in the number of stories about how senior officers are cutting crime figures. Indeed, every time there is a horrific crime ? such as a murder or a knife attack ? the PR machine kicks into life with a quote from a senior officer stressing how ?rare? such crimes are. As well as stretching credibility, some of these statements are appallingly insensitive. One chief inspector recently went as far as describing a double murder as an ?isolated incident?. In fact, it would appear they are cutting them so dramatically that one recent weekend saw not one crime worthy of being given out by Northumbria. Not one incident from Friday afternoon to Monday morning that was worth putting on the tape-recorded telephone ?voice-bank? which journalists now have to rely on for their information. However, through an application under the Freedom of Information Act, I discovered there had been more than 4,800 incidents that weekend, including 161 serious crimes. So why may you ask were none of these released to the public ? A good question ? and one I?ve been trying to have answered for nearly 10 years now. In the past, I have taken the liberty of occasionally writing to or telephoning the senior officer concerned. There then usually followed a reasonable and well-mannered debate in which they would either quote particular ?operational reasons? or admit there was no good reason why the public had not been warned. But now, following the publication of a series of articles in The Guardian, The Times, Press Gazette and other publications, I have been banned from even daring to ask such questions. In a letter, Deputy Chief Constable David Warcup claims crimes are not released for ?operational reasons? and the force does not have to ?justify? such decisions. Needless to say, my correspondence on the issue now goes unanswered. As a journalist with more than 23 years? experience ? most of it spent specialising in crime ? I appreciate there are times when crimes might have to be held back for genuine ?operational reasons?. But there is no way they have to be held back in such huge numbers. No, the simple truth is that the 1 million spent on Northumbria?s press office is more interested in promoting the image of the force?s senior officers. My contacts tell me that, as part of that strategy, they have to reduce the ?fear of crime? and, if that means telling the public less, then so be it. Mr Warcup recently defended the force?s expenditure on PR by saying: ?Although crime in Northumbria has fallen significantly in the past 10 years, our research shows that the perception of crime has not. ?We have therefore invested a significant amount in services which aim to make sure people have a better understanding of crime in their region.? In other words, he is spending more money making sure people believe the crime figures they put out. Ironically, since the publication of my comments, I have been contacted by a number of police contacts who agree with my stance. Like me, they are not anti-police. However, as well as being police officers, they are also members of the public ? and taxpayers. And, like me, they believe that, in a democracy, the likes of Mr Warcup should have to justify why the public are kept in the dark about what is happening in their area.
Mistaken Identity16 Jul 2008It is one of the biggest complaints about globalisation: that as market forces sweep across the world, so does Western culture. In the end, many fret, whether you are in New York, Rome, Beijing or Mumbai you will buy the same pair of jeans in the same shopping mall, drink the same overpriced latte in the same coffee shop, and watch the same dreary Hollywood blockbuster. Local culture will be no more. Ironically, though, the greatest Western cultural export is not Disney or Starbucks or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of local culture. A notion that originated in late-eighteenth century Europe, in the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment, has today the whole world in its grip. Every island in the Pacific, every tribe in the Amazon, has its own culture that it wants to defend against the depredation of Western cultural imperialism. You do not even have to be human to possess a culture. Primatologists tell us that different groups of chimpanzees each has its own culture. No doubt some chimp will soon complain that its traditions are disappearing under the steamroller of human cultural imperialism. We?re All Multiculturalists Now observed the American academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer. And indeed we are. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics – these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies. At the heart of most multicultural philosophies is the belief that an individual?s cultural background frames their identity and helps define who they are. If we want to treat individuals with dignity and respect we must also treat with dignity and respect the groups that furnish them with their sense of personal being. We cannot, in other words, treat individuals equally unless groups are also treated equally. And since, in the words of the American theorist Iris Young, ‘groups cannot be socially equal unless their specific, experience, culture and social contributions are publicly affirmed and recognised’, so society must protect and nurture cultures, ensure their flourishing and indeed their survival. One expression of such equal treatment is the growing tendency in some Western nations for religious law – such as the Jewish halakha and the Islamic sharia – to take precedence over national secular law in civil, and occasionally criminal, cases. Another expression can be found in Australia, where the courts increasingly accept that Aborigines should have the right to be treated according to their own customs rather than be judged by ‘whitefella law’. According to Colin McDonald, a Darwin barrister and expert in customary law, ‘Human rights are essentially a creation of the last hundred years. These people have been carrying out their law for thousands of years’. Some multiculturalists go further, requiring the state to ensure the survival of cultures not just in the present but in perpetuity. The philosopher Charles Taylor suggests that the Canadian and Quebec governments should take steps to ensure the survival of the French language in Quebec ‘through indefinite future generations’. The demand that because a cultural practice has existed for a long time, so it should be preserved, is a modern version of the naturalistic fallacy – the belief that ought derives from is. For nineteenth century social Darwinists, morality – how we ought to behave – derived from the facts of nature – how humans are. This became an argument to justify capitalist exploitation, colonial oppression, racial savagery and even genocide. Today, virtually everyone recognises the falsity of this argument. Yet, when talking of culture rather than of nature, many multiculturalists continue to insist that ‘is’ defines ‘ought’. Part of the problem here is a constant slippage in multiculturalism talk between the idea of humans as culture-bearing creatures and the idea that humans have to bear a particular culture. Clearly no human can live outside of culture. But then no human does. To say that no human can live outside of culture, however, is not to say they have to live inside a particular one. To view humans as culture-bearing is to view them as social beings, and hence as transformative beings. It suggests that humans have the capacity for change, for progress, and for the creation of universal moral and political forms through reason and dialogue. To view humans as having to bear specific cultures is, on the contrary, to deny such a capacity for transformation. It implies that every human being is so shaped by a particular culture that to change or undermine that culture would be to undermine the very dignity of that individual. The biological fact of Jewish or Bangladeshi ancestry, it suggests, somehow make a human being incapable of living well except as a participant of Jewish or Bangladeshi culture. This would only make sense if Jews or Bangladeshis were biologically distinct – in other words if cultural identity was really about racial difference. The relationship between cultural identity and racial difference becomes even clearer if we look at the argument that cultures must be protected and preserved. The political philosopher Will Kymlicka argues that since cultures are essential to peoples’ lives, so where ‘the survival of a culture is not guaranteed, and, where it is threatened with debasement or decay, we must act to protect it’. For Charles Taylor, once ‘we’re concerned with identity’, nothing ‘is more legitimate than one?s aspiration that it is never lost’. But what does it mean for a culture to decay? Or for an identity to be lost? Kymlicka draws a distinction between the ‘existence of a culture’ and ‘its “character” at any given moment’. The character of culture can change but such changes are only acceptable if the existence of that culture is not threatened. But how can a culture exist if that existence is not embodied in its character? By ‘character’ Kymlicka seems to mean the actuality of a culture: what people do, how they live their lives, the rules and regulations and institutions that frame their existence. So, in making the distinction between character and existence, Kymlicka seems to be suggesting that Jewish, Navajo or French culture is not defined by what Jewish, Navajo or French people are actually doing. For if Jewish culture is simply that which Jewish people do or French culture is simply that which French people do, then cultures could never decay or perish – they would always exist in the activities of people. If a culture is not defined by what its members are doing, what does define it? The only answer can be that it is defined by what its members should be doing. And what you should be doing, for cultural preservationists, is what your ancestors were doing. Culture here has become defined by biological descent. And biological descent is a polite way of saying ‘race’. As the American writer Walter Benn Michaels puts it, ‘In order for a culture to be lost… it must be separable from one’s actual behaviour, and in order for it to be separable from one?s actual behaviour it must be anchorable in race.’ The logic of the preservationist arguments is that every culture has a pristine form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that form. There are echoes here of the concept of ‘type’ that was at the heart of nineteenth century racial science. For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism, invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms. Both sides of the race debate have their own dialect of difference. The right has appropriated the language of diversity to promote its message of racial exclusion. Liberals often turn to the idiom of exclusion to articulate a pluralist idea of culture. ‘Every society, every nation is unique’, claimed Enoch Powell, the most vocal opponent of black immigration in postwar Britain. ‘It has its own past, its own story, its own memories, its own languages or ways of speaking, its own – dare I use the word – culture.’ This is why, he argued, immigrants, who belong to different cultures and different traditions, could never be fully British. In France the far right has astutely exploited the idea of cultural differences to promote its anti-Muslim message. ‘It is a tragic mistake to want to have communities representing different civilisations live together in the same country’, argued former Gaullist minister Michel Poniatowski. ‘I love North Africans’, Jean-Marie Le Pen has declared, ‘but their place is in the Mahgreb’. Through the language of diversity, racism has been transformed into just another cultural identity. If the right has taught itself the grammar of diversity, liberals have adopted the idiom of racial identity. Will Kymlicka is anything but a xenophobe. Yet his pluralism leads him to adopt the language of exclusion. ‘It is right and proper’, Kymlicka believes, ‘that the character of a culture changes as a result of the choices of its members’. But, he goes on, ‘while it is one thing to learn from the larger world’, it is quite another ‘to be swamped by it’. What could this mean? That a culture has the right to keep out members of another culture? That a culture has the right to prevent its members from speaking another language, singing non-native songs or reading non-native books? Kymlicka’s warning about ‘swamping’ should make us sit up and take notice. The right has long exploited fears of cultural swamping to promote the idea that Western nations should pull up the drawbridge against immigrants whose cultural difference make them unsuitable. It is an argument that Kymlicka undoubtedly abhors. Yet once it becomes a matter of political principle that cultures should not be swamped by outsiders, then it is difficult to know how one could possibly resist such anti-immigration arguments. Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today’s multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have ‘conflicting credos but the same vision of the world’. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to ‘confine individuals to their group of origin’. Both undermine ‘any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples’. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.
UKWatch.net