Reflections on the March17 Mar 2008The power of anti-war movements As I stood by the side of the road in Whitehall, a woman came up and bought a copy of Peace News from me, saying: I’m buying this for sentimental reasons. I used to be a Peace News seller. (In fact, she used to sell Peace News in Charing Cross Road outside Foyles, when the regular seller was off sick.) I wonder how many of us on the march were also there for sentimental reasons. There were thousands of us to be sure. There was genuine anger over Palestine, many more young people than I was expecting, and some controversy over Iran (George Galloway was heckled over his recent remarks over gay rights in Iran) but otherwise, in my view, are somewhat flat tone to the demonstration. It is nothing in comparison to the agony of the people of Iraq, but I think it is worth saying that we, that is the anti-war movement, are still traumatised by the invasion of Iraq. The invasion, in the face of global opposition, was a huge blow to the confidence of what the New York Times called the world’s second superpower. It was a huge blow to democracy. (The blow to the stability and security of the people of Iraq hardly needs mentioning.) What is hidden from us, what is hidden from history, is the story of how we nearly derailed the war. When we go back and look at what happened in 2002 and 2003, what we see is that the North American anti-war movement was strong enough to force President Bush to need Tony Blair; the British anti-war movement was strong enough to force Tony Blair to need a UN Security Council resolution; and the global anti-war movement – particularly in Mexico and Chile – was strong enough to deny Washington and London the resolution that they could craved. The invasion was delayed for months. This delay nearly gave the UN weapons inspectors the time they needed to deal with Iraq’s weapons issues nonviolently (I wrote about this in my book Regime Unchanged). It gave the anti-war movement in Britain the chance to shake the government to its core. Just days before the invasion, the Ministry of Defence was having to draw up contingency plans for not taking part in the invasion, in case the government lost the vote in the House of Commons on the 18th of March. The Defence Secretary was phoning Donald Rumsfeld to warn him of this dire possibility. Tony Blair was telling his children he might be losing his job. The British government was no doubt frightened by the precedent in Turkey, where on the first of March the government had lost a vote on a resolution to allow the US to use Turkish land and air corridors for the invasion of Iraq. Democracy worked in Turkey, but unfortunately it didn’t work in Britain. The movement that was successful in Turkey was made up of people like us, those of us standing by the side of the road – and marching in it – in Whitehall yesterday. (For more on all of this see the latest JNV briefing.)
The Power and Patronage of the British News Media17 Mar 2008Does the power and patronage of the British news media constitute a democratic safeguard? Any attempt to try to understand what is so different — dare I say unique — about the relationship between British politicians and the news media, has to begin by acknowledging the impact of campaigning journalism. Unlike the press in so much of the world, British newspapers are quite prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to expose wrongdoing and to promote what they believe are popular causes. Once a newspaper puts its full weight behind a chosen campaign, the news of the day can take second place to the propaganda. Over the years, the popular newspapers have claimed many a scalp: they can — and quite regularly they do — force policy changes to be made by the government of the day. Editors of mass-circulation tabloids like to stress the importance of their role. They believe they are on the side of the public, against the might of the state, and they use their power and influence in ways which we don’t often see in the press of other leading countries. British politicians do acknowledge the significance of campaigning journalism and although they are often ridiculed and damaged in the process, they do grudgingly defend the freedom of the press. This leads on to other important questions: Does the British news media, despite its trivialisation and sensationalism, serve the democratic process? Is Britain governed more effectively because the media — and especially the newspapers — exercise the power of political patronage and support, especially during general election campaigns? There is nothing new in the way the newspaper owners — the press Barons as they were once described — have used their papers for propaganda purposes. It has been happening for years. Nor is there anything new about the close relationships which have developed — and sometimes foundered — between Prime Ministers and media proprietors. Rupert Murdoch is the latest in a long line of media bosses who have chopped and changed in their political allegiances in order to protect their commercial interests. But we should not under-estimate the power of the press in the British context. I have long argued that a Prime Minister with a large Parliamentary majority and the support of the press can be all-powerful. In the 1980s, the then Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had an overwhelming majority at Westminster. But it was the near-unanimous support of the press which made her nigh on invincible in the early years of her Premiership when she succeeded in virtually smashing the power of the trade unions; when she pushed ahead with privatisation by breaking up the state-owned industries and selling them off; and when she introduced the flexible employment laws which gave the British economy such a boost in comparison with European neighbours such as France, Italy and Germany. Equally powerful was the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair who went ahead in 2003 in committing British troops to support the American invasion of Iraq despite widespread public opposition. What has to be remembered was that despite the unpopularity of the war against Iraq, Blair still retained widespread support in the press for military action, especially in the newspapers of Rupert Murdoch. So here we see a clear illustration of my belief that for good or for ill, the newspapers of Britain do play a significant role, they do exercise considerable influence when governments seek to act decisively. We do not see the same degree of interaction in many other European democracies, where the press is not so powerful and where there are weak, coalition governments. So a strong British government, working hand in hand with a sympathetic press, can bring about significant change within the country. The question that has to be answered is whether you think this constitutes a democratic safeguard, whether you think it leads to better government. The power of the press explains why Britain is one of those countries — again for good or for ill – which is at the cutting edge in the development of media manipulation, most recently through the use of spin doctors like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell. Britain has always been strong on advertising and public relations and that is why the communication techniques used here — especially when it comes to the government trying to influence, even dictate the news agenda — attract so much interest. The point which we have reached is that the state — and especially the opposing political parties — believe they have to compete in the media market place if they are to stand any chance of securing public attention. No wonder that in 1997, once he was installed in Downing Street as Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell’s first task was to re-write the rule book for government information officers, instructing them to "grab the agenda" by leaking new policies and decisions even before ministers had made their announcements to Parliament. But first let me put the work of the spin doctors in context, to explain why they are considered so necessary. If there is one characteristic which marks out British newspapers from their counterparts around the world it is their ability to command the news agenda. Indeed the British press is by far the most inventive and perhaps the most sensational when it comes to the art of manufacturing exclusive stories which are often very effective in grabbing the headlines. And, more often than not it is the news media which has the upper hand. Editors of mass circulation newspapers and producers of popular television programmes believe they are serving the democratic interest by exposing the inadequacies of government administration. It is in this way, by forcing British politicians to answer the questions posed by the news media, that journalists believe they help make the government of the day more accountable to the public. British newspapers are quite prepared to manufacture their own news: no investigation or publicity stunt is off limits; and such is the lack of respect and deference for the national institutions of the country that nothing is sacred when it comes to challenging authority. Officials working for the state, whether at a central or local level, are always a favourite target. Indeed anyone in British officialdom is well aware that exposure in the media for wrong doing can be extremely embarrassing and can often result in their dismissal from employment. If journalistic endeavour fails to deliver a story there is always what is known as cheque-book journalism to fall back on. British media companies are among the most profitable in the world and certainly have some of the deepest pockets when it comes to buying up sensational information, pictures or interviews. Such is the strength of the competition between media outlets, that it is exclusive stories which command the highest price. While the popular papers delight in printing dramatic and often intrusive disclosures, especially about the private lives of footballers or celebrities, the serious press have their own distinct preferences. Stories based on campaigns and investigations; exclusive interviews with politicians and prominent public figures; and the findings of opinion polls and surveys provide a regular supply of editorial material for what is known as the quality press. British newspapers are often outrageous and irresponsible but they do have the knack of treating important issues in popular ways and because the daily readership of the press is far higher in the United Kingdon than in many comparable countries there is a high level of public awareness on topical issues. Because of the impact they can achieve, newspapers in the United Kingdom exercise a considerable degree of influence over the way stories are covered on radio and television. Indeed the front pages of next morning's papers are often news items in themselves and the varied press coverage is discussed regularly in late-night and early-morning current affairs programmes. But the desperate desire of the media to try to dictate the news agenda has become such an overpowering addiction that it has opened the door to all sorts of influences which are not always understood by readers, viewers and listeners. Perhaps not surprisingly British journalists are not at all keen to discuss the behaviour of the hidden information pushers who have become so successful in feeding their habit by supplying exclusive stories. It is difficult to know where to start in the hit parade of "world exclusives" which have filled the front pages of the popular press. Perhaps I should begin at the top with the Queen and Buckingham Palace. Under the red banner headline "Intruder" over the picture of a palace flunkey, the Daily Mirror published its scoop about the "biggest royal security scandal ever". It was the story of how a Mirrorman, reporter Ryan Parry, had been working as "a palace footman for two months….and was able to prepare the Queen’s breakfast and take pictures of the bed which President George Bush slept in" the previous night. ( Daily Mirror 19.11.2003) The aim of the story was to expose the lack of security at Buckingham Palace but using a reporter to invade the Queen's privacy was not a tactic which would have been permitted in many other countries. For example, such is the respect for the office of the American President and the sanctity of the White House that such an escapade would have been unthinkable in the USA. But the trick of asking a reporter to fool the authorities so as to expose weaknesses in security and highlight potential dangers to the public is hardy perennial for British newspapers. The Sun used the same technique two years later in another world exclusive on the eve of Prince Charles’ wedding to Camilla: "Gatecrasher in the Castle: 72 hours before the wedding…Sun man drives fake bomb up to the Queen’s apartment" (Sun 7.4.2005). We see the same ploy again in the aftermath of the row about whether Muslim women should be asked to remove their veils and the news report that a terrorist suspect had left the country disguised as a woman in Islamic dress. "Wearing a burka and carrying a handbag, bomber at bus station" was the Sun's headline. The temptation was irresistible: "Hidden Danger" was the subsequent headline on an exclusive story about the "veiled Sun girl waved through UK airport" in a security shambles which revealed that airport staff had failed to ask her to lift her veil. (Sun 9.10.2006). What was so troublesome about this particular stunt was that the Sun knew full well that it was not only being alarmist but was also perhaps making life uncomfortable for Muslim women who choose to wear veils. Whenever the popular papers are challenged about the ethics of their reporting the editors insist their job is to reflect public opinion. Some British people do fear that Muslim extremists might be terrorists and no doubt the Sun would claim vindication with its headline the following year "Bomber in a Burka" reporting precisely what it had claimed. (Sun 16.1.2007) The issue of veiled women excites the tabloids. One picture used again and again is of a group of young Muslim mothers in Birmingham, all veiled and one of whom gives the V sign when they were stopped in their tracks by a newspaper photographer. The headline says it all: "Raging against decadent Britain. And hungry for the harshness of Sharia law." (Daily Mail 3.2.2007). But the tabloids do make a stand against racism, especially in sport. "Lewis in Racism Storm" was the Sun’s front-page headline (4.2.2008) when it broke the story about racists at the Barcelona circuit blacking their faces to taunt the Formula One racing driver Lewis Hamilton. No expense is spared when it comes to some of the imaginative stunts which take place. "The End: Moment justice caught up with Ronnie Biggs thanks to the Sun" (8.5.2001) was the headline over the exclusive story about how Sun tracked down the Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs at his hideaway in Rio de Janeiro, hired a private plane and flew him back to Britain where reporters handed Biggs over to the Police. The News of the World was equally enterprising when one of its reporters was told to get a job as a warder at Woodhill Prison. Using the access he gained, he took photographs of the Soham School murderer Ian Huntley languishing in his cell. (15.6.2003). This behaviour would not be tolerated in most countries. More likely than not a deception like this would result in a journalist going to jail. But the British newspapers are so powerful and so strong is the belief that Britain needs a free press, that the authorities dare not retaliate. This gets to the heart of campaigning journalism: politicians who find themselves in the firing line often have no alternative but to give way or at least appear to do so. It explains why Prime Minister Gordon Brown is often only too keen to dance to the tune of the tabloids. Let us look at the example of the humble plastic carrier bag and a campaign by the Daily Mail which had the Prime Minister falling over himself to give his support. "Banish the Bags" was the front-page headline (27.2.2008) and the following nine pages told the ecological damage that plastic bags were inflicting on nature. On day two of the campaign, the Daily Mail claimed its first victory: "M&S banish the free bag" (28.2.2008) and on day three the Prime Minister was rushed in to give his support: "Brown: the bags will be banished" (29.2.2008). Day after day the campaign continued culminating in the pre-Budget exclusive and one word banner headline: "BANISHED". The storyline was triumphant: "Budget will introduce a law compelling every supermarket to end the scourge of free plastic bags." (Daily Mail 11.3.2008) However much we might be amused that the country’s second largest daily paper can devote so much space to plastic bags, what one cannot deny is the brilliance of the campaign and the dramatic effect it had on government thinking. Some campaigns take years rather than days to affect government thinking. And when it comes to awarding the accolades, I suppose the News of the World has to be the newspaper that remains head and shoulders above its competitors. "Named, Shamed" was the front-page headline eight years ago when it published the photographs of fifty "highly dangerous paedophiles". (23.7.2000). It was this edition of the News of the World which itself became headline news. It triggered a political storm by provoking a witch hunt for paedophiles, although in one case protestors mistook a paediatrician for a paedophile. The newspaper justified its campaign for what it called "Sarah’s Law" on the grounds that Britain needed an equivalent of the American legislation known as "Megan’s Law" which provides parents in the United States with access to information on sex offenders living in their locality. It took a long time but in the face of continued pressure the government gave ground. In December 2006 the Home Office finally agreed that parents would be allowed access to some limited information about sex offenders residing in their neighbourhoods. It was the police who finally made the first move. They agreed to publish on the Internet the names of known sex offenders who were not obeying compliance orders. The Sun's headline could not have been more explicit: "PERV HUNT.COM" (17.12.2006). Several of the paedophiles identified on the Most Wanted Website have now been caught. No wonder civil liberty groups are so concerned about possible witch hunts. Just look at the Daily Mirror headline "The Paedo Hate Mob" (12.12.2006). But a couple of months ago the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith finally accepted the News of the World’s argument and agreed — that at least in certain parts of the country — parents can be told whether there are paedophiles living in their neighbourhood. "It’s a victory for Sara" was the inevitable headline. (17.2.2008). There is, it seems, no limit to the ingenuity of the British press when it comes to whipping up pressure for instant action by the authorities. We saw again in October 2006 how the News of the World demonstrated that same flair for exploiting public fears by launching its "Devil Dogs Campaign" (1.10.2006). It demanded that dog owners should be made criminally liable for attacks by dogs like Rottweilers. That campaign was just a foretaste of the tabloid fury unleashed a couple of months later after a pitbull terrier savaged five year old Ellie Lawrenson on New Year’s Day. Merseyside Police have now rounded up dozens of pit bulls amid demands that the Dangerous Dogs Act should be strengthened and properly enforced. Another government scalp for the Daily Mail has been the campaign it waged against government plans for a whole series of Las Vegas style casinos. One memorable front page said: "Gambling with out Futures" (15.10.2004). Ten days later the government backed down — there would not be a gambling free-for-all: "Labour retreat over Super Casinos" (25.10.2004). Only one Las Vegas style casino was approved — for Manchester — and the story continued to cause ministers grief. Finally, after Tony Blair resigned and Gordon Brown became the new British Prime Minister in July 2007, one of his first acts was to abandon the plan for a Las Vegas style casino in Manchester. "A very moral victory" said the Daily Mail (12.7.2007). Another successful media campaign, helping force a U turn by the government. While it is the mass-circulation papers which can force ministers to dance to their tune, we must not forget the power of the serious, quality papers. National and local elections, party conferences and other fixtures in the political calendar provide a peg for one of the sure-fire ways for political journalists to create news. Opinion polls are a regular feature in most newspapers and as the date of their publication is entirely at the discretion of the editor, they can be timed to cause maximum embarrassment for the political parties. What always infuriates the politicians is that it is the journalists who pose the question and they do it in a way that allows the newspaper to keep control of the story. Opinion surveys provide a rich harvest for the press because for an outlay of a few thousand pounds the questions — and results — can be tailored to address the burning issues of the day. "Stand up to US, voters tell Blair" was the Guardian's front-page lead (25.7.2006) over a survey which showed that 63 per cent of the electorate believed Blair had tied Britain too close to the White House. "Ten million want to quit ‘over-taxed’ UK" was the finding of a poll for the Sunday Times (27.8.2006) which revealed that one in five Britons was considering leaving the country. The pro-Conservative Sunday Telegraph pre-empted a clutch of polls about the need for a separate English Parliament. Scotland has its own Parliament and it is the Scottish Nationalists who are in government. Talk about breaking up the UK so that Scotland achieves full independence is a regular issue for the opinion pollsters. One poll was decisive: "End of the Union? England wants its independence" (Sunday Telegraph 26.11.2006). Religion is not sacred as far as the newspapers are concerned and in a pre Christmas jibe at the churches, an opinion poll in the Guardian showed that 82 per cent of people think faith causes tension: "Religion does more harm than good" (23.12.2006). Another illustration of how the newspapers can create talking points for the people was a poll for the Independent last December which showed that 80 per cent of us plan to cut our carbon footprint in 2008. "Britain demands a greener Christmas" was the seasonal front-page headline. (Independent 23.12.2007). So the newspapers believe that by commissioning these opinion polls they can influence government policy. The Times had a poll a month ago indicating that 76 per cent of us want the surgeries of family doctors to be open for longer (23.2.2008)…and that is precisely what the government announced a couple of weeks later. Consequently with so many weapons in their armoury you can understand how difficult it can be for the state to compete in such a crowded media market place. The competition is so great that governments have been forced to employ the smartest communicators — the political spin doctors of today — to put across their message. Sometimes unpopular governments are fighting a losing battle. In the long run-up to the 1997 British general election — which ended in defeat for the Conservatives after 18 years in power — there was no doubt that many journalists were doing all they could to excite the public interest in the prospect of a change of power. The journalists were in effect voting for change. They knew that if the Conservatives were defeated and Tony Blair became Prime Minister it would be in the journalists self interest. It would be good news for the news industry as a Labour government would seek to bring in new and perhaps controversial policies. You can see this same process underway in the US Presidential elections. Long before Super Tuesday when Barak Obama came from behind and closed the gap between himself and Hilary Clinton, the British newspapers were already right behind him and castigating the Clintons. "The dangers for Britain if this poisonous pair triumph" (Daily Mail 2.2.2008) was in sharp contrast to the page after page of favourable coverage for her opponent. "My America: By Barak Obama" was the front page of the Independent Extra (4.2.2008). Much of the coverage in the states for Obama has been so positive that the Clinton campaign has complained that he has been given an easy ride. But it is because managing the media is a such a fickle business that Tony Blair went to great lengths to ensure that he had the best possible team around him. Alastair Campbell, a former Daily Mirror journalist, was appointed Blair’s press secretary and the new Prime Minister doubled and then trebled the number of what are known as special advisers. These are largely politically-appointed spin doctors. They are committed Labour Party supporters and many were formerly journalists who were sympathetic to Blair. The first thing Campbell did was change the rules for the civil servants who work as information officers. They were told that they had to "grab the agenda" by trailing announcements. That is the art of official leaking: supplying information exclusively to certain journalists in the hope they will give the government favourable coverage. Trailing is important: it helps the government set the agenda, it creates a favourable impression, that something is being done, and as with the Budget yesterday, it helps calm the financial markets. So over the weekend there were plenty of official leaks: Yes, there would be more on alcoholic drinks, the tax would be increased on 4×4s and other gas-guzzling cars. But on the eve of the Budget the Treasury confirmed that the 2p a litre increase in the duty on petrol would be postponed. That provided a good news headline for the Sun on Budget morning: "2p petrol hike is frozen…for now" (12.3.2008). Obviously the Chancellor Alistair Darling wanted to sweeten up the public ahead of the bad news that was to come: "Tax Hikes of booze and 4×4s" (thelondonpaper 12.3.2008). The art of trailing announcements is all too apparent in the Sunday newspapers. They thrive on speculation, on stories which look ahead to what the government is proposing which explains why Tony Blair’s spin doctors were so determined to seize the agenda. The biggest selling quality Sunday paper, The Sunday Times was the favourite, hence a string of exclusive previews, all dominating the front page: "Blair to toughen rape laws" (15.10.2006) "Blair wants super-Asbos for violent thugs" (14.1.2007) "Blair crisis summit on teen gangs". (18.2.2007) Gordon Brown and his ministers have been equally assiduous in supplying exclusive agenda-setting stories to the newspapers. The government’s campaign to stop binge drinking among young people produced a front-page exclusive for the Daily Mirror: "Blitz on shops peddling booze to kids" (3.3.2008). The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith floated a similar initiative on gun crime with the News of the World: "War on Guns – government launch amnesty" (26.8.2007). These are calculated attempts to influence the news agenda and in what is now a mirror image of Labour’s strategy, we see the Conservative Party promoting its new leader David Cameron in precisely the same way. Soon after his election as leader, Cameron moved to distance himself from the legacy of the Thatcher years and he has often used The Observer as the platform to signal that his party is changing. Here we see a typical trick in media manipulation. By giving the story exclusively to a newspaper that traditionally might be hostile to the Conservatives, Cameron has achieved the maximum possible prominence. The Observer was the Sunday paper which protested the loudest about the Conservatives’ support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. So when the moment came to dump the Thatcher legacy, that paper was the ideal vehicle and its front-page lead story demonstrates the point: "Cameron: We got it wrong on apartheid" (The Observer 27.8.2006) Here was Cameron securing the front-page splash for his declaration of support for the ANC leader Nelson Mandela, whom Margaret Thatcher had denounced as a terrorist leader. Another objective of Cameron is to persuade voters that a future Conservative government could be trusted to support the National Health Service. It helps explain why The Observer was the chosen recipient for another exclusive: "Tories plan nurses at home for all new babies" (3.2.2008) The biggest prize of all for the Conservatives would be to win back the support of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers which deserted the Tories under John Major and switched Tony Blair in the lead-up to the 1997 general election. Two months before polling day, New Labour was celebrating: " The Sun backs Blair — give change a chance." (18.3.1997). The importance of the support of the Murdoch press should not be underestimated. Despite the unpopularity in Britain of Blair’s support for George Bush in the war against Iraq, The Sun remained steadfast and in fact all four of the Murdoch’s newspapers urged readers to vote Labour in the 2005 general election. Two front pages illustrate the closeness of that relationship. On the eve of the general election The Sun declared that it had got "deep down and personal with the Blairs" and the front-page headline, "Why Size Matters" (4.5.2005) led on to an inside spread which showed a tanned Prime Minister in his torso alongside some intimate quotes from his wife Cherie. In return for granting this titillating interview, The Sun repaid the compliment on polling day with a front page that urged readers to "Vote Labour Today"(5.5.2005). It showed the Prime Minister and the Chancellor dressed in red strips like Manchester United footballers and the headline said it all: "Come On You Reds" with Blair in the No.10 shirt and Gordon Brown as No. 11. Where The Sun’s support was so critical has been over the Iraq war and its consistent support for "Our Boys" or "The lions of Basra" (4.9.2007) as they tended to be dubbed in Sun-speak. The supposed invincibility of the British troops was encapsulated in the report over the arrival of the Black Watch regiment in Basra: "Watch it: Our Boys off to the battle zone. We beat Napoleon, Kaiser and Hitler…it’s just another job." (25.10.2004). When the action switched to Afghanistan, there was the same Boy’s Own style of coverage when a reporter was sent to join troops on the front line: "The Sun takes on the Taliban" (9.10.2006). So the closeness of the link between politicians and media proprietors should never be overlooked and while there is no doubt that newspaper sales are declining at some speed, the owners are doing all they can to ensure they retain their dominant position as news and information providers. Their first significant victory has been to ensure that not just text but also all audio-visual material on their websites has escaped regulation by Ofcom and will instead be subject to self-regulation by the Press Complaints Commission. This means that newspaper websites can take full advantage of the growth in internet television. The Daily Telegraph is ahead of the pack and has begun streaming its own programmes via its website. Right On is Telegraph TV’s weekly political programme and unlike the traditional mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV and Sky which have to remain politically impartial, the newcomer is blatantly partisan. It is the "show that’s politically right, not politically correct". Right On is chaired by the Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe and she is joined by a trio of right-wing journalists, Simon Heffer, Andrew Pierce and Jeff Randall. The Murdoch press is concentrating most its push on the internet into developing the websites of The Sun and the News of the World which regularly feature full length videos of topical and exclusive interviews obtained by the two papers. "Burrell: I lied to Di inquest" was The Sun’s front-page headline (18.2.2008) over a report about a secretly-filmed video in which the former royal butler Paul Burrell was said to have admitted perjury at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. "Amy On Crack" was another of The Sun’s secretly-filmed videos which provided a world exclusive (22.12008) and boosted the number of hits on the website. Footage of the "troubled Amy Winehouse plumbs the depths" provided exclusive after exclusive: "Cops Seize our Amy drug film" (23.1.2008) and "Cops grill Amy over crack video" (6.2.2008). Within a month the Amy Winehouse video had secured nine million hits on The Sun Online. The scramble by the newspaper owners to protect their businesses is underlined by the fact that the total spend on online advertising has been doubling every year and by next year is likely to exceed the amount which UK advertisers spent on television. What has yet to be established is whether the media proprietors will continue to exercise the same degree of political influence which they achieved with their newspapers. I believe they will: the power of political patronage of the press barons is moving into the electronic era.
Resisting New Labour?s ?hard labour?15 Mar 2008Few readers of Variant will be unaware of New Labour’s welfare ‘reform’ and public sector ‘modernisation’ agendas. Since 1997 the restructuring of welfare and public services has been a central component of the government’s political project. Welfare reform was viewed by Blair and is presently by Brown as contributing to a neoliberal vision of the UK as a modern, lean, flexible and competitive economy. Much has been written about the many and varied forms that privatisation has taken, of the contracting-out of public services, of Public Private Partnerships/Public Finance Initiatives (PFI/PPP), and of the increasing encroachment and indeed take-over by the private sector in the delivery of many key ‘heartland’ public and social services. In contrast, there has been much less concern with how these reforms are impacting on the workers involved in delivering services. Our concern here is to draw attention to some of the many ways in which welfare workers are being adversely affected by the restructuring of the welfare state and, more importantly, how they are resisting New Labour in new and significant ways. Welfare Workers on the Frontline Our focus is on workers in what we call the ‘welfare industry’ – that is, workers who are involved in diverse ways in both the production and delivery of social and welfare policy and practice. In short, ‘welfare industry’ is not just an umbrella label for those six million or so workers employed in what’s left of the welfare state in the UK – such as NHS workers, teachers, university workers, social workers and care workers – but it also includes important sections of the civil service, in areas of criminal justice and public administration. Beyond a narrow focus on the traditional institutions of the welfare state, the notion of a ‘welfare industry’ also encompasses non-state sectors, chiefly the voluntary sector and private provision. Speaking of a welfare industry also helps to focus attention on the specific way that welfare functions are being further industrialised and degraded using technological systems, such as call centres, and centralised managerial commands and targets to restructure the welfare labour process. This has involved the flexible intensification of worker effort during working time. Work time has also been elongated in a variety of ways with the loss of ‘porous time’ and breathing space in both worker-worker and worker-user social interactions. Additional duties have been imposed on welfare workers, especially administrative burdens, creating tensions with their core duty for the care and well-being of welfare users. That this is having morbid consequences is amply testified by the scores of deaths1 in British hospitals as a result of the managerialist obsession with cost-cutting and targets. Many workers in the welfare industry deliver services to some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society. However, what is also significant is that such workers, themselves often low waged, are central to the delivery and maintenance of public services, in the process supporting other disadvantaged groups, including those who struggle to survive on what the state provides through benefits. Public sector workers, and in particular those involved in the welfare sectors, are not simply delivering services, administering benefits and managing poor people. They are also tasked with the delivery and implementation of government social policy initiatives, such as workfare/work activation programmes which force those in poverty into low paid employment and vulnerable forms of work. ‘Work’, understood as paid employment, underpins New Labour’s vision. Public services are central to achieving the goals that this vision generates. Public servants are therefore critical to delivering not only services but also central to implementing New Labour’s political and ideological objectives. Work, Work, Work! – The World of New Labour ‘Work’ lies at the heart of the entire New Labour project. With Gordon Brown’s new found ‘Protestant ethic’ being rather self-consciously aligned to the ‘spirit of neoliberal capitalism’, work is seen as the most morally elevating means through which poverty can be alleviated. Work represents the ‘best’ form of welfare! Work is central to ‘social inclusion’. Work is salvational; its morally uplifting properties enables the ‘socially excluded’ to be transformed into model citizens, exercising the opportunity to make choices and consume as part of ‘respectable’ or ‘mainstream’ society. However, at the very time when New Labour has sought to valorise work as a central dimension of daily life and personal existence, what is going on in the workplace, the site where society’s ills are going to be cured, has, with a few honourable exceptions, been neglected across large swathes of academic, media and political discourse. This, despite the fact that much welfare work is carried out in full view of the public. In the meantime, waged work has not stopped being an exploitative social relation. For many groups of workers in the welfare industry things have, if anything, deteriorated in the last decade. But this also throws up its own contradictions as it rubs up against certain limits to how far services can be degraded, not least the permanent tension between the depreciating nature of the welfare labour process and the end product of enhancing the capacities of welfare users. Public sector workers and the services they help to provide have undergone profound changes in recent decades. To name only some of the more obvious forms that this has taken: Privatisation, Marketisation, Contracting-out, Outsourcing, Profit centres, Competitive tendering, PPP/PFI, ‘Best value’, Managerialism, Targets, League tables, Performance indicators, Audits. The consequences of these ‘reforms’ for welfare workers has been far-reaching. Workers now fear that the loss of a contract will lead to redundancies or a wage cut or both. Private companies attack collective bargaining and place constraints on effective trade union organisation. Against employer and government hostility to collective organisation is their preference for exercising ‘control at a distance’ to advance the project for the individualisation and atomisation of the workforce. This works through pseudo-market mechanisms, performance related pay, increased pressures to ‘self-manage’, a greater emphasis on ‘emotional’ skills wage and qualities, regrading and reclassification, casualisation, increased workplace regulation, and inspection, and flexibility in its various guises. In the process, work intensification and extensification is advanced, in some cases to breaking point. Job devaluation, a declining sense of personal worth and job insecurity leads to increasing levels of workplace stress and related illnesses. Alongside deskilling and the loss of autonomy there is also employer-led demands for reskilling and upskilling, often leading to ‘qualification inflation’ and therefore a loss of market value for credentials, directly contradicting claims that engagement in lifelong learning will equip workers with the human capital so as to make them into highly marketable assets. And then there are the growing numbers of cases of the substitution of labour through the use of new technologies and ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies), from NHS call centres to online educational packages. New Labour’s social policy agenda demands ‘more and more’ from public sector workers as they struggle to meet the bewildering myriad of targets and strategies that have been deployed since 1997. As Fairbrother and Poynter argue: “State employees are increasingly entreated to take on tasks that their occupation previously did not require – teachers are engaged in health promotion activities, university lecturers are encouraged to ensure the employability of their graduates and doctors are called upon to advise on healthy life styles rather than specifically treating illnesses….In this sense, the social and moral dimensions of the customer-oriented approach have been deployed to reform the relationships between professionals and their various publics and erode the monopolies of skill and discretion over decision-making and job content that professional staff traditionally exercised.”2 Market modes of delivery along with aggressive and pervasive managerialism are restricting the ‘space’ that many welfare professionals once enjoyed to provide the services and support that service users require, resulting in a significant deskilling of work tasks. Routinisation and work degradation is contributing to what Richard Sennett calls “the spectre of uselessness” that is now gripping increasing numbers of professional workers in the welfare industry.3 Work intensification under New Labour has led to millions of workers facing increasing demands on their work time. Successive and multiple policy measures – ‘initiative-itis’ – has led to already hard pressed workers undertaking additional responsibilities. In some local authority nurseries, for instance, nurses find themselves taking on additional tasks to meet newly implemented nursery curriculum targets, regular inspections and workplace audits. Such examples prove that New Labour has today made satire seem superfluous, since these very same low-paid, over-worked female workers are also expected to play a strategic role in ‘helping’ young unemployed mothers back into the labour force – often in low paid childcare work! The story here is all too often one of more-and-more for less-and-less pay. In other areas of the public sector, for example in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), maintaining service provision against a background of large scale redundancies has been achieved only by fewer-and-fewer workers doing more and more. The DWP has struggled to achieve the same level of service provision with less and less of a workforce. It is important to recognise, however, the unevenness of reform and modernisation (and worker unrest and resistance) that exists across different sectors, for instance in relation to the use of PPP/PFI or the vastly different levels of contracting out and redundancies. This awareness, however, does not detract from the point that public sector work in the UK is a world that has undergone far reaching change, change that has all too frequently been detrimental to and at the cost of the workers delivering public services. Managerialism and the drive to restructure and intensify work while curtailing wages and worsening conditions is a self-contradictory process that relies on the emotional, intellectual and bodily creativity of the labour that it attempts to dominate through managerialist regimes and controls held at a distance. Degrading the work process also invites resistance at the point of welfare production in ways that cannot be captured by even the most strenuous supervisory regime. Workers may elect to mechanically follow orders to protect themselves from managerial opprobrium. In which case, the affective embodied side of worker interaction with user groups like patients, clients or student, suffers. Measuring output in the form of targets and internal audits gives little indication that worker commitment has been withdrawn and disaffection increased. So long as boxes are ticked and numbers are massaged then managers are protected and the embodied nature of the welfare labour process becomes a matter of mutual indifference. The changing nature of public sector work is part and parcel of New Labour’s Third Way/Neo-Liberal reconstruction of the idea of the ‘public’ itself, a process that crucially involves blurring the boundaries between public and private forms of provision. This involves a shift towards the privatisation of public goods and services and the greater involvement of the private sector in ‘public’ service provision. Neither should we forget that much welfare work, particularly caring work, is dependent on unpaid forms of labour in the private realms of family, household and community, overwhelmingly carried out by women, many of whom are also providing paid labour in public and welfare services outside the home. Co-existing with the emphasis on paid work this there is also an attempt to reconstruct the ideal citizen both as a citizen and a consumer.4 Here the overarching context is one of consumerism and the extension of ‘choice’. Under Blair and Brown ‘consumer choice’ had something of an occult quality about it – the more fervently it was invoked the less its ideological magic worked! To quote Blair: “In reality, I believe that people do want choice, in public services as in other services. But anyway, choice isn’t an end in itself. It is one important mechanism to ensure that citizens can indeed secure good schools and health services in their communities. Choice puts the levers in the hands of parents and patients so that they as citizens and consumers can be a driving force for improvement in their public services. We are proposing to put an entirely different dynamic in place to drive our public services; one where the service will be driven not by the government or by the manager but by the user – the patient, the parent, the pupil and the law-abiding citizen.”5 The promotion of choice reflects a desire to reconstruct the role of the state, no longer always and everywhere the provider of services – except at times as a last resort – but as an ‘enabler’ and regulator of services provided by other ‘partners’ and ‘stakeholders’. In repeated speeches and announcements the emphasis on choice at the heart of New Labour’s project contained a sometimes implied and sometimes explicit threat of dire consequences for public sector workers. Public sector workers often exist as an ‘absent presence’ in political discourse. It is noticeable, for instance, that Blair’s ‘belief’ about ‘people’ wanting ‘choice’ that other ‘people’, namely welfare workers, are curiously absent at a denotative level while they are clearly present at the connotative level. Implicit in this comment is a stark warning to public sector workers that they have to become more customer focused, and this requires far reaching changes in the working lives of those concerned. It is well understood that New Labour views public sector workers as an outdated obstacle to modernisation and reform, therefore undermining social policy objectives. At Labour’s Spring Conference in Cardiff in February 2002, Blair drew a distinction between ‘reformers’ and ‘wreckers’, the latter category referred to public sector workers and unions who were resisting ‘modernisation’. Speaking to the British Venture Capital Association in London in 1999, Blair also talked of the bearing “the scars on my back” from trying to reform welfare. This was followed up at the Labour Party Conference in 1999, where Blair made his now infamous “forces of conservatism” speech in which he identified some groups of education and health professionals as holding back the government’s reform programme. And again in 1999 Blair attacked what he saw as a “culture of excuses” among school teachers who were resistant to aspects of his reform agenda. Such views played a significant role in helping to ferment the growing disillusionment with New Labour among public sector workers, fuelling continuing and growing resistance.6 Welfare Workers: Resisting New Labour Increasing numbers of public sector workers are challenging the government’s reforms. In the process they are contesting some of the core ideological assumptions of New Labour. Opposition to New Labour’s policies varies considerably across different areas of the public sector and within hierarchically-organised welfare sites, for instance, between different groups of workers in the NHS. However, since the mid- to late-1990s, there has been continual and recurring episodes of industrial action of various kinds involving social workers, teachers, lecturers (both in further and in higher education), nurses, hospital ancillary staff, nursery nurses, home helps and care workers, and local authority librarians among others. Welfare delivery has become a central point of industrial relations disputes across the devolved UK. Few would have predicted that New Labour’s reforms would have met with the levels of resistance from across the public and welfare sectors that have been witnessed since 1997: Selected Industrial Action in the Welfare Industry 1998-2007: • Library Workers -1998 • Social Workers – 1998, 2004, 2005
• Care Workers – 1998, 1999, 2000, 2007
• Teachers – 1999
• FE College Lecturers – 2001, 2006
• Local Government Workers – 2001, 2006, 2007
• Hospital Ancillary Staff – 2002
• University Lecturers – 2004, 2006
• Civil Servants (PCS) – 2004, 2005,2006, 2007
• Nursery Nurses – 2004
• Housing Association Workers – 2006
• School Ancillary Staff – 2006
• NHS Logistics Workers – 2006
• Local Government Workers – 2006, 2007 Highlighted are some of the key disputes and struggles in the ‘welfare industries’ that have featured since 1997, but this list is by no means exhaustive of all forms or instances of resistance to New Labour’s reforms. What is notable is the ways in which groups of workers, once often viewed as ‘passive’ or unlikely to take action, have found themselves under attack and have organised to fight back and challenge New Labour head on. The case of librarians in Glasgow in 1998 is one example of this, as are strikes among university lecturers and nurses. A particularly important example is the Scotland-wide local authority nursery nurses strike in 2004 which saw around 5,000 mainly female and relatively low paid workers take action to preserve conditions while challenging employer demands for local pay agreements.7 In the case of lecturers, nurses, social workers and other ‘professionals’ – that is, those often classed and sometimes dismissed as middle class, white-collar workers – organising to contest welfare restructuring has also become a permanent feature of working life. As was widely documented at the time, during its first two years in government New Labour remained committed to the tight public sector spending constraints put in place by the previous Conservative administration. That this did not lead to widespread resentment and anger among public sector workers is largely due to the ‘honeymoon’ period that Labour enjoyed during the first few years in office, subsequently helped by the easing of public sector spending restrictions from 1999 and after. The promise that New Labour would deliver, however, was soon followed by a growing disillusionment with the New Labour Government among some groups in the public sector workforce, traditionally among Labour’s core voters. It was to become increasingly evident that although there would be considerable increases in public expenditure, especially for education and the health service, this would not signal an end to privatisation. Instead it would be accompanied by the increasing penetration of the market (and in some cases also by the voluntary or ‘third sector’) into heartland areas of public and welfare services provision, moving well beyond the role accorded to the private sector even by the Tories. Pay would increase for public sector workers, that is for those that were not transferred to private firms through outsourcing. However, the growing pay differentials of the 1980s and 1990s between public and private sector employees was largely unaffected. The public sector has become a central battle ground of New Labour under Blair. It is already shaping up in similar ways to characterise the Brown administration. New Labour’s celebration of choice and of the consumer-citizen is likely to remain central to the ongoing programme of welfare reforms; not least that such a figure is central to the government’s vision of a ‘modern’ welfare state. The government has sought to legitimate this on the grounds that it will deliver ‘better’ services and more customer orientated services. Such thinking informs much of the rhetoric that accompanies announcements of ‘modernisation’. However, it is clear that under Brown New Labour is seeking to develop this much further, in no small part through its ‘personalisation’ agenda. Personalisation is now informing important areas of government policy making, taking the emphasis on the individual as consumer to a new level. Perhaps not surprisingly this allows for a greater role for private providers and firms in the development of more personalised services. So, on the one hand, decentralisation and personalisation and, on the other, the further centralisation and concentration of impersonal corporate control over welfare production. This is radically at odds with the demand for ‘bottom-up’ involvement as advanced over the past two decades by service user movements. The Re-emergence of ‘Political’ Trade Unionism? In many of the disputes that have taken place in recent years the struggle to preserve wages and conditions, and also for better pay and conditions, has at the same time folded into campaigns to protect public services. Public sector workers and trade unions have played a leading role in campaigns against privatisation, against hospital closure, cuts in local services and so on. In organising to defend the integrity of the NHS, for example, or to save hospitals and other amenities up and down the country, workers and other campaigners have sought to make direct links between privatisation and profits from illness and disadvantage, the erosion of services and attacks on workers pay, employment conditions and jobs. There are a growing number of examples we can use here to illustrate this. The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) run a high profile ‘public services not private profit’ campaign (http://pcs.org.uk) while Unison (www.unison.org.uk) have been at the forefront of contesting PFI/PPP projects. Both have involved non-union members and users groups as well as the wider public. Keep our NHS Public (www.keepournhspublic.com) brings together NHS workers, unions and the users of NHS services. Defend Council Housing (www.dch.org.uk) has also mobilised tenants and public sector unions in defence of state provision of affordable housing to rent. ‘Privatisation’, in all its guises, has worked to re-energise debates around health and other public services over the past decade and this has given rise to a large number or more localised campaigns and organisations that fight to prevent hospital closures or reductions in health and other public services. There is a further dimension to this. As with the Tories, New Labour has inadvertently repoliticised the whole question of welfare and public sector provision in a multitude of ways. One of the most important aspects of this is that the increasing use of PPP/PFI alongside welfare provision by the market, often involving large multinational firms, has brought the question of ‘profits from illness’ onto centre stage. For-profit forms of provision remain highly unpopular. This has contributed to the re-emergence of political unionism, challenging in the process the ‘division’ that has existed until the early 1990s at least between a trade union concern only with ‘bread and butter’ issues such as pay and conditions and not with more ‘political’ matters. Such a divide – which was often more apparent than real and which tended to characterise the union bureaucracy more than ordinary members on the ward, the office or the classroom – now looks seriously dated in the face of New Labour’s political agenda of the past decade. Trade union leaders have also been driven to question the continuing funding of the Labour Party from members’ contributions. We do not have to look far to see union leaders and union-sponsored campaigns making direct links between pay and conditions; of the importance of good quality services for those in need; for a well funded and free at point of delivery NHS and issues of progressive taxation, pensions; and, in not a few instances, between ‘cut-backs’ and service withdrawals alongside massive expenditure on wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Campaigns for global social justice and for environmental sustainability similarly fold into the opposition to public sector modernisation. New Labour is being challenged ‘head on’ here: its entire social and economic agenda is under serious dispute and questioning. The challenge here is also to the Third Way project itself and New Labour’s neo-liberal underpinnings. Such campaigns frequently bring together the ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ of welfare in ways that are far removed from claims of an unbridgeable gulf between the demands of each. Among New Labour politicians and not a few policy makers and academics, the idea that public service workers may take action to defend both their jobs as well as services to a wide spectrum of UK society including the most impoverished is something that is all too readily ignored or otherwise obscured from view. It also overlooks the point that public sector workers and their families are also themselves consumers of welfare. In another sense the growing campaigns of resistance to New Labour’s public sector modernisation and welfare reforms also illustrate that far from being ‘passive recipients of welfare’, clients and users can and do take action to both defend and to fight for public service provision. The Shape of Things to Come? The significance of the struggles that have taken place across the public and welfare sectors since New Labour came to power in 1997 should not be underestimated – though all too often this is exactly what has happened. Against the general downturn in strike activity and in other forms of ‘industrial action’ during the past twenty or so years, the re-emergence of widespread, large-scale and continuing action in the public sector shows that oft repeated assumptions and claims that workers would no longer struggle or resist in the ‘new’ conditions of the early twenty first century to be very wide of the mark. This is not to be taken that we are implying that there is a return to the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s but simply to counter the general rejection of the capacity of labour to resist that has been a stock in trade for much academic and wider commentary in recent years. The important point of all of this for us is that contrary to the myriad of assorted ‘end of class’ or ‘death of class’ proclamations of the past few decades8, public sector workers in the UK today now comprise some of the key sections of the working class. Our image of the working class is constantly changing as the workforce is replenished as more ethnically diverse, with more recognised women workers, and from recent movements of migrant labour. Welfare workers are just as representative of this shift, indeed more so as it employs women in greater proportions and traditionally recruits from abroad to occupy positions in the welfare state that are difficult to fill from the local labour market. Women, migrants and ethnic minority groups are of course often found at the very bottom of the welfare industry hierarchy. Finally, and against much of the doom and gloom that pervades the discussion and analysis of neo-liberalism and of New Labour there are different ways of thinking about the developments and events which are unfolding and of the potential opportunities for the future. Against neo-liberalism’s central drive to corrode and erode social and political solidarity, new forms of struggle and resistance have emerged and are emerging – locally, nationally and multinationally. Certainly this is not undertaken in conditions of their own choosing but in active response to welfare restructuring. Welfare workers and their unions are challenging the fundamental neoliberal premises advanced by New Labour using tried-and-tested forms of action as well as new, imaginative participatory strategies with their allies in the wider social and welfare movements. Alex Law is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Abertay Dundee; Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Staff Tutor, Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University. They are editors of ‘New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance Inside the Welfare Industry’, Policy Press, 2007, available from www.policypress.org.uk
Notes 1. Healthcare Commission (2007) Investigation into outbreaks of Clostridium difficile at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHSTrust, London: Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection: http://www.healthcarecommission.org.uk/_db/_documents/Maidstone_and_Tunbridge_Wells_investigation_report_Oct_2007.pdf
2. Fairbrother, P. and Poynter, G. (2001) ‘State Restructuring: Managerialism, Marketisation and the Implications for Labour’, Competition and Change, 5: 311-333, p. 319
3. Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism, London: Yale University Press.
4. Clarke, J., Newman, J., Smith, N., Vidler, E. and Westmarland, L. (2007) Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services, London: Sage.
5. Blair, T. (2004) ‘Choice, Excellent and Equality’, Speech at Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital, London, June 23.
6. See Chapter 1, Mooney and Law (2007) New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance inside the Welfare Industry, Bristol: Policy Press.
7. Mooney, G. and McCafferty, T. (2005) “Only looking after the weans’? The Scottish Nursery Nurses Strike, 2004’, Critical Social Policy, 25, 2: 223-239.
8. See Ferguson, I., Lavalette, M. and Mooney, G. (2002) Rethinking Welfare, London: Sage.
Marching in March14 Mar 2008There’s not much good to be said for those grim days in March 2003 when American and British troops invaded Iraq. But one of the few positive things to happen during an otherwise dark time was the extraordinary reaction to the war by Britain’s supposedly apathetic and feckless youth. Tens of thousands of children in the UK, myself included, walked out of school to say no to the war. At my Welsh comprehensive, 50 or so sixth formers marched out together only to be followed by a less disciplined rabble of Year Sevens, who took their protest up to the local chippie and skived off several of the day’s lessons. The action spread far and wide: in Birmingham more than 4,000 school-uniformed protestors took to the streets; in Edinburgh around 300 12- to 15-year-olds tried to occupy the castle, and in Manchester over 400 students sat in the road, peacefully blocking the traffic. For many of us it was our political awakening. Not old enough to vote it was our first chance to try to change the world we were living in. The few hours off class were simply a bonus. Despite all our best efforts we failed – Bush and Blair ignored us, and the 2 million who subsequently marched in London; it seemed I’d missed French for nothing. This month, for Red Pepper magazine, I spoke to a number of young people who had joined the demos five years ago, asking them how they felt that British troops were still holed up outside Basra. Had the continuation of the war made them more politically engaged or rather increased their disillusionment? Predictably most of them still felt as strongly; polls show that over 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds are against the war. And, to my delight, many said the issue was way too important to give up protesting. One young activist I talked to said, that even though it might appear we had been unsuccessful, being part of the biggest demonstration ever held in the UK was not something we should quickly forget. He thought our action then had helped to stop us going to war with Iran, “It made them think before doing it again”. But, as I suspected, the events of 2003 left some with a distinct sense of disillusionment about politics and the possibility of change. One asked, “How can such an illegal, destructive, counter-productive and divisive operation like the Iraq conflict have been allowed to happen?” When, earlier this week, I sent out a text asking for friends to join me on today’s march, I received a worrying number of messages back saying, “We’re marched out” or “What good will it do?” Some of these were from people who’ve been quite politically active in the past few years. One person even said they were playing rugby, another that they had a lunch date in Kensington. Of course I texted back, giving them the hardest possible time. Quite a few are coming now. With no one with policies to represent us, voting turnout among the young is destined to stay low. In the 2005 election only 37% of under-25s turned out to vote. Some see cultural interventions as the way forward. With anti-war anthems like the Ugly Rumours gaining chart success and films like Nick Broomfield’s Battle of Haditha getting rave reviews, perhaps this is a new way to focus and spread dissent. But I’m firmly in the camp of not giving up on getting out on the streets. I’m disappointed, of course, that our breaking out of school didn’t get us further in 2003. But I still remember the great feeling that came with making our voices heard, by doing something together. And I’m worried that if we stop marching it allows those in power to presume we don’t care any more – WE DO!
It fucks you up, your country.13 Mar 2008Every now and again, the government has a policy review about how it will deal with the national childhood problem. There are a range of themes taken up, but the basic problem is that they are violent, clubbish, bestial and need to be controlled. Britain is, as studies have shown, a particularly harsh place for children to live in. New Labour, representing a virulently authoritarian version of neoliberal social-democracy (if that’s possible), proposes a combination of modest poverty-reduction strategies (which fail, both in the specific goal, and in the intended effect), curfews, control orders, ASBOs, hoodie bans, stop and search mechanisms, and more detention. Blair wanted to spy on potential ‘problem families’ (apparently identifiable through the warning signs of track suits, tatoos, Lambert & Butler cigarettes and an insufficiently appreciative attitude toward the government). The heavily punitive accent of government policy is supported by a culture of child-hating, which is ironic given the late capitalist infantilization of adults (in which capital tries to convert us into impulsive, needy, irrational consumers, cultivating nonsensical enthusiasms so that we part with our money more quickly). A direct corollary of the sentimentality about ickle children is the incredible amount of aggression toward the young in popular culture, especially as they reach their adolescent years, and especially if they’re working class. Behind the scenes, if you like, this aggression more frequently takes the form of child abuse by parents than one might think. For example, a study in the UK found that 11% of boys and 21% of girls experienced some form of child abuse. I would have thought that most of this is emotional abuse or neglect, which is horrendous enough, but the study found that when it is narrowed to ‘contact’ abuse (sexual or physical), 16% of women and 7% of men said that they had experienced this kind of abuse. Obviously, this is not simply an unpleasantness that one can ‘walk off’ and ‘get over’. It exacts a long term psychological toll – shrinking the hippocampus, which deals with emotional responses, and producing abnormal levels of cortisol, which deals with fight or flight responses – and the younger it happens the more severe the effects. Beyond the family, it is also expressed in the other institutions in which a child might be raised: foster care, obviously, and penal custody. On average, two children died in penal custody every year since 1990, and a controversy has recently erupted over the officially sanctioned abuse of children known euphemistically as ‘restraint’. The ‘Children’s Commissioner’ has become an easy target for rightist polemic after he criticised the use of painful ‘restraints’ in custodial institution, which are designed to control behaviour with the application of pain. He spoke of the rights of children, and he lamented some of the authoritarian measures used by the government. Melanie Phillips blustered in the Daily Mail: Children’s rights? What about the rights of those who live in fear of young thugs? This was only a particularly forceful version of the raised media heckles of ‘dimwit’, ‘who-does-he-think-he-is’, ‘waste-of-taxpayers-money’, ‘we’ll-smack-our-kids-if-we-want-to’, and so on. (These people do get terribly exercised about their inherent right to beat their children. When a smacking ban was first proposed, they went absolutely bonkers. The comedian Jack Dee, by contrast, suggested that it was a good idea to stop beating kids, but “maybe we should stop fucking them first”). For this particular persuasion, children have only one right: the right to remain silent. Here is one ‘young thug’ who won’t be around to bother the nice people. A fourteen year old boy, who suffered enormous trauma due to deaths in his family, experienced emotional turmoil, and was locked up for ‘behaviour difficulties’ after allegedly wounding a man. He survived a month in his prison until he was violently ‘restrained’ by officers, who broke his nose, leaving him terrified, as well as sickened and depressed: he hung himself. But that’s just one example. There was also Joseph Scholes, a mentally unwell young man given to self-harm, who was imprisoned for a minor street crime, despite multiple expert witnesses telling the judge that the boy would kill himself if he was put in that kind of environment. Of course, even those witnesses couldn’t have known that he would be forced to wear a loose garment resembling a horse blanket, and demeaned and driven to his death within a week. Then there is Gareth Paul Myatt, who died four days into a one year sentence at a ‘training centre’ run by Group 4 following an ‘incident’. Shortly after that death, the government announced 16m for more child prisons. Now these examples are not incidental. Gordon Brown’s twee catchphrase is that “children are 40% of the population, but 100% of the future”. We can either collectively vomit over this phrase or try to extract some literal truth from it (or both). The truth is that fucked up children make for fucked up adults. Brutalising children is not going to produce a nation of well-adapted citizens. The clinical psychologist Oliver James points out that one of the most alarming statistics of recent years is the discovery that 90% of the prison population was in some way mentally unwell. As he further elaborates, the causes of this are not rooted in the poor genetic stock of the working class, who are vastly over-represented in all penal institutions. Far more often, it is the result of a particular kind of nurture experienced especially but not exclusively in the first three to six years of childhood. You raise a kid in a comfortable bourgeois home with lots of attention, you get a comfortable bourgeois person. You raise a kid in a strict, authoritarian home with parents trying to break his will through the application of regular violence (tough love) all for his own good, you get a young fascist. You raise a kid in a chaotic household with episodic, rather than structured, violence and abuse, you get manipulative people with poor consciences prone to acting out physical or sexual violence. You raise a kid in a tough working class household with a survivalist mentality and regular insecurity, you get Monty Python’s bragging Yorkshiremen. Sorry, I’ve lost my thread, where was I …? Oh yes. To extend the logic, suppose you raise children in a cruel, aggressive country with: violent, manipulative, sanctimonious hypocrites in charge; a virulent ethos of social competitiveness saturating the culture; underfunded schools with over-worked teachers and kids bored or stressed through banal lessons and routine examination; few and degraded amenities and hostile over-policing in the remaining public spaces such as shopping centres; violent ‘control’ of children encouraged on the one hand, with violence exalted in the culture as a means of empowerment on the other; with manifest injustice coupled with powerlessness to do anything about it; and so on. Violence, neglect, hypocrisy, wilful manipulation, insecurity, competition as the sole source of self-esteem, abuse, injustice, indifference – it’s a recipe for disaster. Yet the program appears to be more of the same: cut benefits, close facilities, install CCTV, impose stricter discipline in schools, toughen policing, lock more kids up in violent penal institutions, threaten their parents with benefit-cuts if they bunk off school, intensify social competition through more testing – and now, on top of it all, Lord Goldsmith wants kids to swear allegiance to the Queen so that they’ll feel more British! If Goldsmith epitomises ‘Britishness’, then our elusive national ‘values’ can now be summarised as naked corruption, criminality, careerism, arms dealing, warmongering and a facade of blustering pomposity. Of course, I would be the first to admit that children are awful people. Having a sensible conversation with anyone under nine years old is almost impossible, and they are as a rule unbelievably tactless. The smaller they are, the less they know about anything. As Randy Newman once sang about rednecks, they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. On the other hand, most population groups have flaws, especially those in the armed forces, and I wouldn’t wish the amount of crap kids go through on them either.
Iraq: teachers told to rewrite history13 Mar 2008Britain’s biggest teachers’ union has accused the Ministry of Defence of breaking the law over a lesson plan drawn up to teach pupils about the Iraq war. The National Union of Teachers claims it breaches the 1996 Education Act, which aims to ensure all political issues are treated in a balanced way. Teachers will threaten to boycott military involvement in schools at the union’s annual conference next weekend, claiming the lesson plan is a “propaganda” exercise and makes no mention of any civilian casualties as a result of the war. They believe the instructions, designed for use during classroom discussions in general studies or personal, social and health education (PSE) lessons, are arguably an attempt to rewrite the history of the Iraq invasion just as the world prepares to mark its fifth anniversary. Steve Sinnott, the general secretary of the NUT, said: “This isn’t an attack on the military ? nothing of the sort. I know they’ve done valuable work in establishing peace in some countries. It is an attack on practices that we cannot condone in schools. It is a question of whether you present fair and balanced views or put forward prejudice and propaganda to youngsters.” At the heart of the union’s concern is a lesson plan commissioned by an organisation called Kids Connections for the Ministry of Defence aimed at stimulating classroom debate about the Iraq war. In a “Students’ Worksheet” which accompanies the lesson plan, it stresses the “reconstruction” of Iraq, noting that 5,000 schools and 20 hospitals have been rebuilt. But there is no mention of civilian casualties. In the “Teacher Notes” section, it talks about how the “invasion was necessary to allow the opportunity to remove Saddam Hussein” but it fails to mention the lack of United Nations backing for the war. The notes also use the American spelling of “program”. Addressing whether the MoD should be providing materials for schools, Mr Sinnott said that he did not object, as long as the material was accurate, presented responsibly and contained a balanced view of opinions. The union has protested to the Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, who has referred the complaint to the MoD. In a letter to Mr Balls, Mr Sinnott said: “I have to say that were the MoD pack to be distributed and followed without the legally required ‘balanced presentation of opposing views’ there would, in my view, be very serious risk of a finding of non-compliance with section 406 (of the 1996 Education Act) at least. “I do not doubt that there would be many members of this union who would not accept as ‘fact’ the assertions made particularly in the Teacher Notes, nor, I think, could some of the assertions made in the Student Worksheet be regarded as non-controversial.” Mr Sinnott reminded Mr Balls that a High Court judge had ruled that the film An Inconvenient Truth, by the Oscar-winning former American vice-president Al Gore, could not be used in schools without teachers counteracting some of the assertions made in it. Mr Balls sought to distance himself from supporting the material. He said: “I am sure you are aware my department does not promote or endorse specific resources or methods of teaching for use in schools but I appreciate you drawing this to my attention.” Mr Balls added that he had instructed his officials “to take this matter up” with the MoD. A spokesman for the MoD said the ministry had consulted with interested parties over the proposed lesson plan in order to ensure it had the support of the education community. “We did ask the Stop The War coalition to take part although it refused.” The spokesman added that the programme was “a set of web-based resources” whose use was “completely voluntary”. “We have consulted widely with teachers and students during the development of these products and feedback from schools has been extremely encouraging,” he added. “Teachers and students found them to be valuable and fun resources for applied learning. “They are designed to support teachers in delivering a whole range of subjects across the national curriculum and its equivalents in Scotland and Wales. “We are happy to engage with the NUT and we will be writing to them.” Union members say they are also worried that armed forces recruitment fairs in schools glamorise the job by citing exotic countries that recruits will visit but fail to mention that they may be required to kill people. According to an independent assessment of the MoD’s recruitment material by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, however, the material concerned was “very dubious”. The trust said it had used misleading marketing with advertising campaigns that “glamorise warfare, omit vital information and fail to point out the risks and responsibilities associated with a forces career”. Mr Sinnott said: “On their recruitment material, it tells what an exotic lifestyle this can be, but it doesn’t mention that being in the military involves killing people. These things don’t feature as they should in a proper, balanced view of what it is like being in the armed forces.” What the MoD’s guide says… and what it omits “Iraq was invaded early 2003 by a United States coalition. Twenty-nine other countries, including the UK, also provided troops… Iraq had not abandoned its nuclear and chemical weapons development program”. After the first Gulf War, “Iraq did not honour the cease-fire agreement by surrendering weapons of mass destruction…” The reality: The WMD allegation, central to the case for war, proved to be bogus. David Kay, appointed by the Bush administration to search for such weapons after the invasion, found no evidence of a serious programme or stockpiling of WMDs. The “coalition of the willing” was the rather grand title of a rag-tag group of countries which included Eritrea, El Salvador and Macedonia. “The invasion was also necessary to allow the opportunity to remove Saddam, an oppressive dictator, from power, and bring democracy to Iraq”. The reality: Regime change was not the reason given in the run-up to the invasion ? the US and UK governments had been advised it would be against international law. Saddam was regarded as an ally of the West while he was carrying out some of the worst of his atrocities. As for democracy, elections were held in Iraq during the occupation and have led to a sectarian Shia government. Attempts by the US to persuade the government to be more inclusive towards minorities have failed. “Over 7,000 British troops remain in Iraq… to contribute to reconstruction, training Iraqi security forces… They continue to fight against a strong militant Iraqi insurgency.” The reality: The number of British troops in Iraq is now under 5,000. They withdrew from their last base inside Basra city in September and are now confined to the airport where they do not take part in direct combat operations. “The cost of UK military operations in Iraq for 2005/06 was 958m.” The reality: The cost of military operations in Iraq has risen by 72 per cent in the past 12 months and the estimated cost for this year is 1.648bn. The House of Commons defence committee said it was “surprised” by the amount of money needed considering the slowing down of the tempo of operations. “Over 312,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained and equipped (Police, Army and Navy).” The reality: The Iraqi security forces have been accused, among others by the American military, of running death squads targeting Sunnis. In Basra, the police became heavily infiltrated by Shia militias and British troops had to carry out several operations against them. On one occasion British troops had to smash their way into a police station to rescue two UK special forces soldiers who had been seized by the police. “A total of 132 UK military personnel have been killed in Iraq.” The reality: The figure is 175 since the invasion of 2003. A British airman died in a rocket attack at the airport two weeks ago despite British troops not going into Basra city on operations. Conservative estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the beginning of the invasion stand at around 85,000. “From hospitals to schools to wastewater treatment plants, the presence of coalition troops is aiding the reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq.” The reality: Five years after “liberation”, Baghdad still only has a few hours of intermittent power a day. Children are kidnapped from schools for ransom and families of patients undergoing surgery at hospitals are advised to buy and bring in blood from sellers who congregate outside.
Abortion: Their Morals and Ours12 Mar 2008The right is seriously mobilising around the issue of abortion. Tory leader David Cameron has stated that he wants to bring the limit down to 20 or 21 weeks and Tory ex-minister Anne Widdecombe has been taking her “pro-life” road show around the country in an effort to rally the troops. This is not something a Tory has been confident enough to do on any issue for many years – though, thanks to local activists, these meetings did not happen without noisy protests outside. It is clear that the right have been waiting for the opportunity to challenge the abortion law for some years. They have partly succeeded in focusing the debate about the time limit, currently set at 24 weeks, around the issue of viability and away from a women’s right to choose. There have been regular stories in the press claiming that new scientific developments prove the need to bring the time limit down. The medical establishment has rejected this view. Last year’s inquiry into the abortion time limit by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee reported: “We have seen no good evidence to suggest that foetal viability has improved significantly since the abortion time limit was last set, and seen good evidence that it has not.” The arguments about why a small minority of women might need to access an abortion at this stage in a pregnancy get little coverage and need to be constantly restated. It is a fact that some young women simply don’t realise they are pregnant, some go into denial until they can’t hide it, and, in the case of older women, some mistake missed periods for the menopause and don’t realise for some months that they are pregnant. One other major reason that women need access to abortion at a later stage is the discovery of severe foetal abnormality. For example, one important test for impairments such as Down’s syndrome is amniocentesis. This cannot be carried out until 16 weeks, the results may take two to three weeks, and then the woman may need counselling and advice. If she decides to have an abortion it may be yet another week or two before this can be arranged. The truth is the anti-abortionists are not concerned with any of this. They want to stop all abortions happening but they are faced with the fact that an overwhelming majority, 83 percent of the British population, support legal abortion. So they are left with trying to chip away at the time limit where they think they can make gains. If they win this time they will come back for more. The anti-abortionists will have gained confidence from the defensiveness voiced by some pro-choice campaigners in recent months. Even David Steel, the man responsible for bringing the 1967 Abortion Act onto the statute book, has been quoted as saying that “everyone can agree there are too many abortions” and “there is a mood now which is that if things go wrong you can get an abortion, and it is irresponsible”. The implication is that women are frivolous about having abortions, and it repeats the myth that women use them as a form of contraception. For socialists the key argument is that women are more than incubators: they have the right to control their own bodies. No woman should be forced to continue a pregnancy if she feels she cannot cope. So there is no optimum or “normal” number of abortions to aim for. Every woman who needs one should be able to access one speedily and safely. When abortion was illegal no one knew how many took place. Many women never told anyone for fear of the law (see below) and so the pre-1967 numbers were based on speculation and the number of women who ended up in hospital with sometimes life threatening complications. Neither will it ever be known how many women went through with pregnancies simply because they didn’t want to take the physical or legal risk of a backstreet abortion. Sex education Today, far from being too easy to get an abortion, there is massive unevenness in access across the country, which is why any new amendments to extend and improve provision are to be welcomed. The 1967 act was never about giving women full choice. As David Steel himself said at the time, “We want to stamp out the backstreet abortions, but it is not the intention of the promoters of the bill to leave a wide-open door for abortion on request.” Politicians claimed that opening up abortion provision too much would encourage sexual activity. Today the right still argue that access to sex education, contraception and abortion is too open, claiming it has led to Britain having the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe. Every year almost 50,000 young women under 18 fall pregnant in Britain – six times that of Holland, four times that of Italy and three times higher than in France. In the 1970s rates of teenage pregnancy were similar across Western Europe. The idea that this is because of too much sex education and the availability of contraception and abortion would be laughable if it didn’t have such tragic consequences. The example of the US is telling. Over $1 billion has been spent on abstinence programmes in schools yet the rates of teenage pregnancies are the highest in Western industrialised countries. Britain comes second. One way Holland has achieved the lowest rate of teenage pregnancies across Western Europe is by having compulsory sex education in schools from the age of five and continued explicit and supportive sex education from then on. In contrast, comprehensive sex education is still not a required part of the curriculum in Britain, making provision uneven. What is needed is more openness about sex, and systematic and sympathetic sex education in schools from a young age. Of course, some teenagers choose to become parents and they should not be demonised. But society needs to make it as easy as possible to avoid unwanted pregnancy, and attempting to repress natural sexual behaviour will not do that. We are a long way from the crushing morality of the 1950s, when any women who got pregnant outside of marriage faced stark choices: illegal and dangerous abortion, have the baby and then feel there was no alternative but to give it up for adoption, or keep the child and face society’s opprobrium. It is hard to convey the stigma that went with being an “unmarried mother” – a pejorative description which used to be commonplace. The term “unmarried father” was never used. Happily, today millions of us have relationships and babies without feeling the same pressure to marry or conform, and no serious section of the ruling class can argue that women should be pushed back into the home. Women are now a permanent part of the workforce and women’s paid work is vital to the economy. Yet despite all the advances and changes in women’s lives, ideas about the family, and a woman’s role, still persist. We are told that the family is a vital cornerstone of society, and women’s role within it as child bearer is central. Such ideology still plays an important part in shaping expectations and consciousness. It helps ensure that people continue to see it as natural that the family carries the bulk of the economic burden of bringing up the next generation. This lies behind the moral panic about single mothers and working class families that politicians still regularly whip up. If you have a baby on your own it will be financially difficult, unless you have a very highly paid job and good maternity leave. But the state makes you go through hoops to get assistance. You are seen as feckless and undeserving, and in some way hardship is still judged as an appropriate state for you. Women can’t win. If they have children young they will struggle to be financially secure but will get little support. If they wait to have a baby until financially stable later in life they will receive little sympathy if they then face problems with fertility as they have tried to “buck their biology”. When women do have children they can only stay at home without criticism if they are not a “burden” on the state. Any single parent on benefits will, from October, be forced to look for work when the youngest child is 12 rather than 16 as in the past. New Labour wants to bring this threshold down to seven years by 2010. This completely ignores the reality of the lack of affordable and flexible childcare that means some low paid workers can’t afford to leave the house to work. In contrast, middle or upper class women can make other choices. They can leave their children with nannies or send them to boarding school at a tender age and not be accused of neglect. Imagine if Madeleine McCann’s parents had been manual workers rather than doctors and had been staying on a package deal in Benidorm, leaving their children locked in a flat while they went to a pub. I believe the media would then have taken a very different stance. Instead of sympathy and global support we would have witnessed at best a wave of vitriol about selfishness and irresponsibility, and possibly even the prospect of legal charges. But the other side of this is that women today have more economic independence and are more sexually liberated than 40 years ago. Whatever the state or politicians say about our lives we are not going to go back to a time when our lives were totally restricted and repressed. Women are not going back in the box. The enthusiasm for the pickets against Anne Widdecombe’s rallies and the success of the 300-strong Abortion Rights meeting in London in January show that. Veteran activists are being reinvigorated, but most importantly a new layer of young women are getting involved in the campaign to defend and extend abortion rights. Many are hearing these arguments for the first time. There is no time to lose. Every trade unionist and activist needs to raise the issue of abortion rights at work, in the trade unions and at college. During the last serious battle to defend abortion rights the bigots were pushed back by the collective strength of the trade union movement. We need to be prepared to make such a mobilisation again. But by taking on the wider arguments about women’s oppression, morality and class we can do more than stop the current attacks. Already there are thousands of women, and men, who are angry about women’s position in society, about the rise of raunch culture, unequal pay and the lack of childcare. Right now we have a real opportunity to win this new generation to socialist politics and the fight for women’s liberation. Judith Orr is the author of Sexism and the System published by Bookmarks, 3. To join Abortion Rights go to www.abortionrights.org.uk. Before abortion was legal For the first 30 years of my life abortion was illegal in this country. Almost as soon as I got involved in politics in the late 1950s, a friend came round to my flat and asked to stay with me for a few days. She had just had an abortion; the foetus had come away in the toilet. She had to borrow lots of money and was frightened she would be found out and imprisoned. We sometimes had telephone calls from teenage girls giving false names and asking if they could come and stay. They were afraid they would be chucked out of their home or arrested after having abortions. In the late 1970s I interviewed an old lady who had had an abortion as a young woman. She insisted I did not give her name or anything that could reveal her identity. Even though abortion was by then legal she was still worried that she might get into trouble. I have friends who have told me horror stories after they realise I am in favour of a woman’s right to choose, but they always say I am the only person they have ever told and I must not tell anyone else. It is terrible that people are still frightened of the law, even though it no longer applies. Mary Phillips
The British Government Runs Scared of Israel12 Mar 2008On 18 February 2008, the British Government was forced to release a draft dossier on Iraq?s so-called ?weapons of mass destruction? under the Freedom of Information Act. But it succeeded in persuading a Freedom of Information Tribunal to allow a handwritten reference to Israel in the margin of the document to be suppressed. The Foreign Office sought this redaction because the person who wrote ?Israel? in the margin of the document was implying that Israel was on a par with Iraq in its pursuit of ?weapons of mass destruction?. Since the author must have been a high ranking official in the Foreign Office in order to have access to the draft dossier, the Foreign Office argued that UK relations with Israel would be damaged if the document was published intact and, as a consequence, the Israeli government became aware of the existence of such an outlandish opinion in the senior ranks of the Foreign Office.
A photocopy of the document is now available on the Foreign Office website [1]. At the time of its publication, it was known that a ?minor redaction? had been made to the document, but the nature of the redaction was not known until it was revealed by The Guardian on 21 February 2008 [2]. At the same time, The Guardian published in full the Foreign Office statement to the Tribunal making the case for the redaction [3]. Freedom of Information request The draft was written in early September 2002 by John Williams, a former Daily Mirror journalist, who was Director of Communications at the Foreign Office from 2000 to 2006. A Freedom of Information request for its publication, which was made by Chris Ames on 9 February 2005, was turned down by the Foreign Office under Section 36 of the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that its publication would ?inhibit the free and frank provision of advice and the free and frank exchange of views for the purposes of deliberation? (see Chris Ames? website here [4]). However, the Information Commissioner ordered its publication on 3 May 2007. The Foreign Office appealed against this decision to an Information Tribunal seeking, in the first instance, to prevent publication altogether and in the second instance, if the Tribunal ruled in favour of publication (which it did), to have the handwritten reference to Israel suppressed under Section 27 of the Act. This Section allows an exemption from publishing material that would do damage to the UK?s international relations. On 22 January 2008, almost three years after the initial request, the Tribunal ordered publication but accepted the Foreign Office case that the reference to Israel be redacted. The Tribunal?s published decision stated that ?a minor redaction [is] to be made to the information to be disclosed? [5], but didn?t reveal the nature of the redaction nor the Foreign Office argument for requesting the redaction. However, all this was revealed by The Guardian a few days after its publication. The Foreign Office case for redaction
The case for the redaction of the reference to Israel was set out in a witness statement to the Tribunal by Neil Wigan. At the time, he was the head of the Arab, Israel and North Africa Group in the Foreign Office and therefore responsible for UK relations with Israel. Wigan wrote: ?On page 3 of the document, I refer to the marginal references in the first paragraph to Israel. The reference to Israel is linked (by a hyphen) to a sentence which reads: ?No other country has flouted the United Nations? authority so brazenly in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction?. I interpret this note to indicate that the person who wrote it believes that Israel has flouted the United Nations authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.? (paragraph 3) He went on to point out the difficulties that this would pose for the UK?s relations with Israel: ?I believe that if these comments were released into the public domain, this would seriously damage our bilateral relations with Israel. In my view, Israel will, in seeing these comments believe that the FCO has firstly, compared the Israeli regime to that of Saddam Hussein?s Iraq, and secondly, suggested that Israel has flouted the authority of the United Nations in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Although the author of the marginal notes is unknown, I believe that the Israeli government would consider it likely that they would have been written by a senior figure. The assumption could, and I believe would, easily be made that these marginal notes represent the views of the FCO in relation to Israel.? (paragraph 5) ?Both the comparison with Saddam Hussein?s Iraq and an implied accusation of a breach of the UN?s authority by Israel are potentially very serious. In my view it is inevitable that the relations between the UK and Israel would suffer if the reference in page 3 of the Williams draft were allowed to enter the public domain.? (paragraph 6) Having worked the British Embassy in Tel Aviv prior to his present job, he had seen Israel get upset at a lot less: ?I have seen that far more minor matters than this have been of great concern to the Israeli authorities. Unfortunately there is a perception already in Israel that parts of the FCO are prejudiced against the country. These notes would therefore confirm this pre-existing suspicion and would increase the damage. During the last five years there were approximately 10 substantial incidents and 20 more minor ones relating to Israeli concerns over perceived attitudes about their regime within the British government.? (paragraph 7) There?s nothing of consequence in the Williams document itself (and later drafts of the dossier were brought into the public domain by the Hutton inquiry), so it is almost certain that the Government?s resistance to its publication was driven solely by worries about Israel?s reaction to the handwritten reference in the margin of the document. This whole incident demonstrates the extraordinarily craven attitude of the Government towards Israel. If it is running scared of Israel learning about an unconsidered comment written more than 5 years ago in the margin of an unimportant document, it would be unwise to expect a major UK policy change that would really upset Israel, such as a decision to talk to Hamas or Hezbollah. Did Israel deserve comparison with Iraq? But did Israel deserve comparison with Iraq in its pursuit of ?weapons of mass destruction? in defiance of the UN? As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, Israel didn?t violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in developing nuclear weapons ? since it refused to sign up to the Treaty in the first place. Had Iraq followed Israel?s example, it too would have been free to develop nuclear weapons without breaching any international treaty obligations. However, Iraq did sign up to the NPT (in 1968) and clearly breached its obligations under the Treaty by attempting to develop nuclear weapons in the 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike Israel, it failed in its attempt ? and it abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 1991 after its defeat in the first Gulf War. In the 1980s, when the West supported Iraq in its aggression against Iran, the West turned a blind eye to Iraq?s development of non-conventional weapons and its widespread use of chemical weapons on the battlefield against Iran. The moral outrage from the West about Iraq?s alleged possession of these weapons that was prevalent in the 1990s, and was worked up to fever pitch before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, was completely absent in those days, when Iran was on the receiving end of Iraq?s ?weapons of mass destruction?. Security Council Resolution 487 Israel has flouted, and is flouting, one Security Council resolution about its nuclear programme. This resolution was passed in reaction to the Israeli bombing of Iraq?s Osirak nuclear reactor on 7 June 1981. In response, the Security Council unanimously passed resolution 487, which ?strongly condemns the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct? and said that ?Iraq is entitled to appropriate redress for the destruction it has suffered, responsibility for which has been acknowledged by Israel? [6]. Crucially, in paragraph 5, the Security Council called ?upon Israel urgently to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards?. None of Israel?s nuclear facilities were then under IAEA supervision. Nothing has changed in the interim. So, for nearly 27 years, Israel has flouted the authority of the United Nations as expressed in resolution 487. Perhaps, the senior official in the Foreign Office had this in mind when he wrote ?Israel? in the margin of the Williams document. Of course, 487 was a Chapter VI resolution with no enforcement measures to attempt to compel Israel to do what it was told. And, when Israel ignored the demand to put its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards, no pressure was put on Israel to comply: unlike Iraq no economic sanctions were applied and there were no threats of military action to enforce compliance. Joining the NPT Resolution 487 didn?t specifically demand that Israel sign up to the NPT. To do so, Israel would have had to give up its nuclear weapons. The NPT allows states that ?manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to 1 January 1967? to sign up to the Treaty as ?nuclear-weapon? states and retain their nuclear weapons. This is built into Article IX(3) of the Treaty itself [7]. Only, five states ? the US, the UK, France, Russia and China ? qualify for this extraordinary privilege. All other states must join as ?non-nuclear-weapon? states and undertake not to develop nuclear weapons ? and place their nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards. So, any state that possesses nuclear weapons, other than the privileged five, must give them up and join as ?non-nuclear-weapon? states. Neither Israel (nor India nor Pakistan) is going to do that, particularly since the penalty for staying outside the NPT, and remaining nuclear armed, isn?t onerous. It is limited to being unable to trade in nuclear material and equipment, a restriction that the US is trying to have lifted in the case of India (see my article The US-India nuclear agreement: A triumph for India [8]). Williams? role played down The Government has been at pains to play down the role of John Williams, and his draft, in the production of its dossier on Iraq?s ?weapons of mass destruction? in September 2002. It has been at pains to do so because Williams was a Foreign Office spin doctor and the Government?s story was that the published dossier was the work of John Scarlett, the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the (unwarranted) implication being that, whereas a Government spin doctor might be expected to sex up a document in order to serve the Government?s purpose, as an intelligence professional, John Scarlett, would never do such a thing. The existence of the Williams draft became public knowledge through the Hutton inquiry but, unlike later drafts which were said to be the work of John Scarlett, it wasn?t published by the Hutton inquiry. In view of this, it is difficult to believe that the Foreign Office would have resisted its publication so stubbornly for three years if it hadn?t been for the reference to Israel in the margin. A Government dossier A great deal of effort has been expended in trying to discover the dramatis personae involved in the drawing up of the dossier and the precise role played by each in the drafting process. To me, none of this matters much. The Government published the dossier ? its title is Iraq?s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government and it carried a foreword in the name of the Prime Minister. So, the Government is responsible for every word in it, no matter who wrote it, be it the Prime Minister himself, or Alistair Campbell, or John Scarlett, or the humblest civil servant. The dossier was the Government?s responsibility ? and crucially it didn?t accurately reflect the intelligence about Iraq?s ?weapons of mass destruction? at the time it was published. In other words, the Government deceived Parliament and the public. That became clear a year later when the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) published its report Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction ? Intelligence and Assessments [9] on 11 September 2003. Despite being a Committee appointed by the Prime Minister and reporting to the Prime Minister, the ISC was remarkably critical of Government?s dossier (see my article The Intelligence and Security Committee Report: Dossier not justified by intelligence [10]) It is very revealing about the gaps and uncertainties in the intelligence about Iraq?s proscribed weapons, and the degree to which these gaps and uncertainties were glossed over in the dossier to paint a much more coherent and threatening picture than was justified by intelligence. Specifically, the report was critical of the way the dossier presented: The 45-minute claim ? the dossier didn?t say it referred to (unknown) battlefield weapons and, in any case, it was of no significance; The claim that Iraq continued to produce chemical and biological weapons was based on very flimsy evidence ? the intelligence services hadn?t a clue as to what agents, if any, had been produced and in what quantities, and what quantities had been put into weapons: they just thought Iraq was producing something; The almost non-existent strategic threat from Iraq: the dossier failed to point out that the most likely use of chemical and biological agents was in battlefield weapons, rather than in strategic weapons that could hit Cyprus, or even London A dossier which out of care for the intelligence evidence contained these doubts would never have been published ? because it would have greatly diminished the case for military action. According to the Government, the dossier was compiled by the Chairman of the JIC, John Scarlett, and approved by the JIC, and they were free from political pressure in doing so. Scarlett concurred with this proposition in evidence to the Hutton inquiry. The only possible conclusion is that he, and the JIC he chaired, was grossly incompetent ? since between them they made a pig?s ear of a straightforward job of taking JIC assessments and turning them into a document that the public could understand. As a result, Parliament and the public were misinformed on very serious matters relating to peace and war. For this service, the Government promoted Scarlett to be head of MI6. On Saddam Hussein pretence On 18 February 2008, The Guardian published an article by John Williams [11], in which he wrote about his part in drawing up the dossier. He said that at the time he hadn?t questioned the Government?s case for invading Iraq. One factor that convinced him was apparently the following: ?I still find it hard to understand why a dictator who had possessed and used illegal weapons should have continued pretending he still had them, up to the point when his deception cost him his job and his life.? Did the man who was the Director of Communications at the Foreign Office from 2000 to 2006 not know that, far from pretending to have forbidden weaponry, for many years Iraq stated repeatedly (and truthfully) that it had none? It appears that this profound ignorance existed in the highest echelons of the Foreign Office at the time when in March 2003 the UK joined the US in invading Iraq in order, we were told, to rid Iraq of its forbidden weaponry. Listen to this: ?Even after reading all the evidence detailed by the Iraq Survey Group, it is still hard to believe that any regime could behave in so self-destructive a manner as to pretend that it had forbidden weaponry, when in fact it had not.? [12] Those are the words of Jack Straw in a statement to the House of Commons on 12 October 2004 after the Iraq Study Group had reported the absence of forbidden weaponry in Iraq. He was Foreign Secretary in March 2003. Does the Foreign Office also believe the earth is flat? References: [1] www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/wmd_jul_2002.pdf
[2] www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/21/israelandthepalestinians.iraq
[3] www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/21/israelandthepalestinians.iraq1
[4] iraqdossier.com/foi/williams
[5] www.informationtribunal.gov.uk/Documents/decisions/fco_decision_website….
[6] www.david-morrison.org.uk/scrs/1981-0487.htm
[7] www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/Others/infcirc140.pdf
[8] www.david-morrison.org.uk/india/indian-triumph.htm
[9] www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/upload/assets/
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/publications/reports/isc/iwmdia.pdf
[10] www.david-morrison.org.uk/iraq/isc-report.htm
[11] www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/18/foreignpolicy.iraq
[12] www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo041012/debtext/410…
Either Labour represents its core voters – or others will12 Mar 2008You’d never know it from the way these things are discussed by politicians and the media, but most people in Britain – 53% at the last count – regard themselves as working class. And however hard it may be to agree on definitions of class, that majority is reflected across a range of statistical breakdowns of modern British society. Getting on for 40% of the workforce are still manual workers, for instance; add in clerical workers and you’re getting on for two thirds. Yet despite the fact that class continues to dominate the country, it’s treated almost as a taboo by the political elite. Even when working-class life does make it into medialand, it’s typically in the form of contemptuous “chav” caricatures, as in the comedy show Little Britain. And when politicians do stray into class territory, they use euphemisms like “hardworking families” or proxies such as child poverty – the object of Alistair Darling’s best pitch to his own party in yesterday’s budget. So the BBC’s decision to commission a series of programmes about the marginalisation of the working class in New Labour’s Britain should have been a rare opportunity to shine a light on the heart of modern life. Instead, under the banner of “The White Season”, the programmes have been focused entirely on the impact of immigration and race on the white working class, as if it were some sort of anthropological study of an endangered tribe. The message was unmistakeably clear in the series trailer, where a shaven-headed man’s face is blacked up with writing by brown hands over the words: “Is white working-class Britain becoming invisible?” White working people were being written out of the script, we were given to understand, and multiculturalism and migration were to blame. But in reality, it is the working class as a whole, white and non-white, that has been weakened and marginalised in the past two decades. By identifying the problems of the country’s most disadvantaged communities as being about race rather than class, the BBC has reinforced stereotypes and played to the toxic agenda of the British National Party. It’s also wrong. Of course, mass immigration in the past few years – overwhelmingly from eastern Europe – has had a disproportionate impact on working-class communities: in housing, public services and pay. The government has deliberately used the unregulated European Union influx as a sort of 21st-century incomes policy, and employers have ruthlessly exploited migrant labour to hold down wages. No one should be surprised if demoralised and powerless people reach for the nearest scapegoat – and it’s no coincidence that some of the worst racism is found in the most economically deprived areas. But it wasn’t immigration that ripped the guts out of working-class Britain, white and non-white. It was the closure of whole industries, the rundown of manufacturing and council housing, the assault on trade unions, the huge transfer of resources to the wealthy, the deregulation of the labour market, and the unconstrained impact of neoliberal globalisation under both Tories and New Labour. Almost none of that has had a look-in so far in The White Season. Hopes that Gordon Brown would take the government in a different direction look increasingly forlorn. Labour MPs who invested heavily in Brown are now concluding that Brownism is little more than Blairism without the glitz. Diehard Blairite ministers such as the new work and pensions secretary James Purnell, and business secretary John Hutton, have been given free rein to promote an aggressive pro-corporate and privatisation agenda. Hutton’s declaration this week that Labour should celebrate “huge salaries” and individualism was almost a parody of the early days of high Blairism. But Brown himself went out of his way on Monday to commit the government to accelerated privatisation in health, education and welfare. Meanwhile, Darling’s budget confirmed his watering-down of the plan to tax the non-dom super-rich and his retreat on capital gains tax under corporate pressure, while Brown has resolutely resisted demands from trade unions and Labour MPs to give equal rights to agency and temporary workers as a way of relieving some of the worst abuse of migrant labour to undercut existing pay and conditions. The prime minister will only allow the issue to be considered by a commission with an employers’ veto. Corporate lobbying has also seen off the threat of a windfall tax on the grotesque profits of the energy companies – which could have given Darling some of the cash he would need to halve child poverty by 2010. With a gathering economic crisis likely to deliver lower growth next year than Darling predicted and a continuing squeeze on public-sector pay, the political price of Labour’s failure to deliver for its core voters can only grow. The New Labour outriders used to argue that working-class voters could be taken for granted because they had nowhere else to go. Since the 2005 general election, that can no longer wash. Of the four million votes Labour lost, the largest number were from the working class, north and south, white and non-white. As Jon Cruddas, who ran a powerful challenge for Labour’s deputy leadership last year, points out: “Those voters didn’t go to the Tories, they went to the nationalists, the BNP, the Liberals and Respect – or they stayed at home”. Blairites who insist Labour must once again concentrate on swing voters in southern marginals and “run up the flag” to pacify the rest are, he argues, 15 years out of date and threaten the social coalition needed to win – which can only be rebuilt by focusing far more on housing, insecurity at work, inequality in public services and public-led investment in deprived areas. This is the faultline that is now emerging in the parliamentary Labour party, with the revived centre-left around the pressure group Compass increasingly making the running and Brown tilting unmistakeably towards the Blairite right. The next test of where this is leading will be the local elections in May, when the BNP, among others, is expected to make significant gains. Unless Labour is prepared to represent the interests of increasingly angry working-class voters, others will certainly fill the vacuum – and the ever narrower three-party stitch-up risks blowing up in the faces of the whole political class.
Budget Defeat Over Child Poverty12 Mar 2008In 1999 the Government said it would halve child poverty by 2010 – taking 1.7m children out of poverty. To date it has missed its targets and only removed 600,000 children from poverty. In the pre-budget briefings pouring out of Number 10 and the Treasury we were all led to believe that the Chancellor would make a major announcement today to get the Government back on course to meet its target. Instead, the Chancellor has admitted defeat in the war against child poverty and has confirmed that the Government will not meet its 2010 target – and will leave over 2.5m children still living in poverty in the fifth richest countries in the world. The measures announced today will only remove at most a further 250,000 children from poverty by 2010. Some of the media and other agencies have grasped at this straw argung that at least the Government’s budget proposals aren’t as bad as some thought they would be . But on analysis the situation is even more disappointing. In calculating child poverty the Government has massaged the figures by removing housing costs from the calculation. If these costs are put back the real assessment of child poverty confirms that in fact 3.5 million children will remain in poverty in our society. The TUC has rightfully expressed the deep disappointment of the trade union movement at the failure of the Government to prioritise effective action against child poverty. At the same time the Chancellor has done virtually nothing to tackle the unfairness of our tax system. Big business benefits from the lowest corporation tax in this country in decades, which is to be cut further on 1st April. Proposals to tackle the scandal of non doms, some of whom are paying less tax than their servants, have been watered down and there are no measures to address the 97 to 150 billions the Treasury now admits to losing each year from tax avoidance. If after eleven years in office, a Labour Government cannot meet such a basic aim of lifting our children out of poverty, many will judge this period of government as the greatest missed opportunity in the history of the Labour party. There is a growing feeling that the Government is running out of both time and ideas.
Back to the 1980s11 Mar 2008Anyone hearing business and enterprise minister John Hutton this week might be forgiven for thinking they?d been transported back to the 1980s. All you?d need to complete the picture is Kylie Minogue?s dulcet tones on the radio and Harry Enfield?s Loadsamoney sketch on telly every week. Mr Hutton, in case you?re wondering which millennium we?re in, has been waxing lyrical about ambition. Greed is good, he almost said. What he did say was that there?s no conflict between aspiring to the lifestyle of the super-rich and tackling child poverty: ?Our overarching goal that no one should get left behind must not become translated into a stultifying sense that no one should be allowed to get ahead.? Having just seen my team of super-rich so-called footballers thumped 4-0 three times in succession, I?m not so sure about the value of ce
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