Behind Flat Earth News20 Feb 2008On 1 February, MediaWise, one of The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom’s associated groups, released online the Cardiff University research report that underpins Nick Davies’ devastating critique of British journalism, Flat Earth News, previewed in the current issue of Private Eye and this week’s edition of Press Gazette. The report can be downloaded here The quality and independence of British journalism has been severely damaged since the Wapping Dispute in 1986, when Rupert Murdoch challenged the power of the print unions. Over the last 20 years, the research shows, profits have doubled and pagination has trebled, across the industry, while the number of jobs is about the same and productivity, in terms of the number of stories produced by journalists, has trebled. Many journalists now have to feed a 24-hour news operation, producing copy for a variety of media ? print, online, television and radio. Increasingly deskbound, they have no time to go out and find or properly research stories. Our report suggests that less than 1 in 5 stories is now independently sourced. As a result the public relations industry exerts an unduly powerful influence over the news agenda. And with each medium feeding off the content of its rivals, the public has no way of knowing which news items may have originated in an unchallenged press release. Profits may be up but there has been no corresponding investment in the actual business of journalism. This is one of the complaints of striking journalists at the Milton Keynes Citizen, who have queried their management’s commitment to quality journalism. Johnston Press, now has 18 daily newspapers, 291 weekly newspapers and 317 local websites, acquired and developed over recent years. Take-overs, merged titles and shared newsrooms and overheads have improved balance sheets across the industry to the detriment of journalistic integrity. Yet few members of the public can be expected to appreciate the complex mesh of media ownership that controls the flow of information they receive, and may indeed influence news content. They may be familiar with News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch’s massive global interests in media production, but what about Newsquest, the UK end of the US publishing giant Gannett? It owns 17 regional dailies, some 300 local weeklies and 180 local websites. The Daily Mail General Trust includes 50 companies with more than 100 local newspapers, 28 local websites, as well as radio, TV, teletext outlets and its national titles. Their influence over public discourse is immense, so it is not surprising that Daily Mail executives were among the first to try and rubbish Nick Davies’ book and the Cardiff research. Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, our report is a major contribution to the debate MediaWise initiated in 2004 on Journalism and Public Trust. We were pleased to assist Nick Davies, since those who object to criticism of journalism standards constantly demand hard evidence. Cardiff’s research contains evidence in abundance. Its closing section, ‘The View from the Newsroom’, offers perhaps the most dispiriting evidence – a collapse in confidence among even then most experienced of journalists. Only last weekend (26 Jan 08) former Independent on Sunday Editor Peter Wilby reflected this mood, when he told the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom conference on ‘New Threats to Media Freedom’ that marketing managers are now taken more seriously than Editors. “Is it any wonder that public trust in journalists is declining?” responded Jeremy Dear, General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists. The situation is not peculiar to the UK. A poll in the US has revealed that fewer than one in five Americans is willing to trust the accuracy of news reporting, and four out of five are convinced that the media seek to manipulate public opinion. One third of Americans believe the media is biased and unfair, according to research by Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. The House of Lords Communications Committee members need to read the Cardiff research and Nick Davies’ book before they complete their current deliberations on Media Ownership and the News. We shall also be submitting it to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport, and renewing our call for a Fourth Royal Commission into the state of the UK media. For more information or interviews, contact 07968 031 531 Flat Earth News by Nick Davies (Chatto & Windus) was published on 7 February 2008 – for more information visit www.flatearthnews.net
Parties, Movements and Radical Change20 Feb 2008I am constantly struck by the failure of the radical left to explicitly seize the moral high ground. The right (especially the evangelical right) are not averse to doing so when it suits them, yet socialism, internationalism, ecological sustainability, feminism, anti-imperialism all have very strong ethical foundations. Appealing broadly on key issues to a very basic humanity and compassion potentially connects us to audiences that for some years have been removed from radical left politics- the many people in various religious and moral camps. This may cause some on the left to question long-held beliefs, such as on the use of violence, but that?s no bad thing. The enormous success of the London Citizens movement in bringing together trade unions and religious groups should be a lesson to us all. We tend to focus too much on detail and not enough on the big ethical issues underlying our politics. For example, half the world?s GDP is routed through tax havens which means half the potential tax revenues are lost. This is so grotesquely unfair to people who pay their taxes that it allows us to explain to them that there is enough money in the world- it?s just who?s got it and the tax systems set up to protect them that?s the problem. Identify the issues We need to identify the issues where there is real possibility of a broad anti-capitalist, anti-establishment consensus emerging in the UK (and internationally) and focus on these. It is possible to change mass consciousness on certain issues in a relatively short space of time. They key then is to turn this into a permanent (or near to permanent as possible) step forward, ideally framed in law as well as in the popular consciousness. It?s been noted in other contexts how social attitudes to drinking and driving changed dramatically in a generation to one of outright hostility to such selfish and dangerous behaviour. The same is now happening on global warming and living within environmentally sustainable limits. Radical left activists must build the broadest possible unity around such issues and be at the heart of arguing for such transformations, using them to explain the links to other social, economic and political issues. Respond rapidly and create permanent resources Insufficient time and effort goes into translating successes into permanent acquisitions, not just ideologically but also physically and virtually. To be able to respond rapidly and effectively, the radical left needs embedded resources and infrastructure. This will take many forms such as resource centres, websites, socio-political networks and funding sources. Rather than forming another party or newspaper a shrewder investment may be to create and sustain permanent resources for the range of needs the radical left needs for its activities. Remove the barriers There are some structural issues that are critical barriers to progress for radical left politics. The most obvious is the electoral system. Proportional representation is no panacea but crucial if radical left politics is to enter the mainstream electoral and political arena. Another barrier is the party system and elections. The party system, especially in local elections, is a major barrier to making radical breakthroughs at a local level. The radical left needs to develop proposals and campaign to make it much easier for independent candidates and small parties to stand in local, national and European elections. Recognise opportunities As Hilary Wainwright hints in her article it is also crucial to seize any opportunities to create and sustain forms of local democratic debate and accountability as ongoing spaces. For example, for its own reasons this government has decided to promote participatory budgeting but is it just a panacea? No, current developments in Porto Alegre show this. To incorporate local processes of structured debate and discussion about what needs to be done and how money should be spent locally would represent a huge step forward for the UK. Potentially it could raise debate about the need for structured discussion of the national budget and priorities, weaken the power of the traditional local parties to have exclusive access to this discussion and help reawaken interest in politics. The crucial thing is for the radical left to recognise such opportunities when they arise and to seize them rather than sneer from the sidelines at the government?s motives. This article is one of a number, in what Red Pepper describes as ‘not so much a debate as a collaborative inquiry’ on Rethinking Political Parties. Join the debate here.
The Dreaming City19 Feb 2008Gerry Hassan discusses the innovative Glasgow 2020 project. What Glasgow? – The city, not the film. The city
is the film. – Oh come on. – I tell you. – Right then,
look. Renfield Street, marchers, banners, slogans.
Read the message, hear the chant. – Lights, Cameras! Edwin Morgan1 Yes I know the city like a lover
Good or bad it?s hard to love another that I?ve found
This is no mean city, no mean city. Maggie Bell2 Thinking about the future is part of being human. For as long as human beings have lived they have begun to think, dream, imagine, hope and worry about the future. Imagining different worlds has been a central creative theme in art, literature and film. The world of ?futurology? is far removed from such accounts, however; it has its origins in the vast research spending of the US military-industrial complex in the second world war, when policy boffins such as Robert McNamara worked to produce detailed analysis of the effectiveness of bombing Japanese cities. Then in 1946 this new way of thinking about warfare gained focus with the establishment of the RAND Corporation, a federally funded research facility, which during the cold war developed ways of thinking about the future that included the theorising of nuclear weapons scenarios.[3] Analysts such as Herman Kahn began to develop some of the key tools of future thinking – for example scenario-building and visioning – and in 1967 the World Future Society was established. Future thinking mostly takes place within the narrow and elitist world of those with power, influence and status. Governments, corporates and big institutions future scan, trying to identify possible new trends, discussing possible, probable and preferred futures, as well as unforeseen events that may unsettle their plans, with the aim of controlling the future as much as possible. This is not an open, democratic set of conversations; it is about those with power looking to maintain it and second-guess any challenges, or emerging threats or rivals. My argument is that the rest of us need to join in this debate. In the last couple of years I have been involved in two major projects looking at a much wider sense of how we imagine the future: Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020. The Scotland 2020 project looked to overcome the prevalence of negative accounts of Scotland?s devolved government, and to identify positive possibilities through the idea of story; and from this came the impetus to set up a much more ambitious and daring project to test the public appetite for imagining the future through story, this time at the level of a city.[4] Glasgow 2020 had three dimensions: it was about the city of Glasgow; it was about cities generally; and it was about how we think about the future. These three strands came together to make Glasgow 2020 something of a unique project and intervention, and as far as we know a world first – an attempt to reimagine the city through the idea of the stories people tell. It involved the support of virtually every public agency in the city – including the city council, Scottish Enterprise, the Health Board, the universities, art school and music academy, and the fire and police services. Each gained a perspective of the city they would not otherwise have been able to get (and none asked for a veto on its findings). Glasgow is a fascinating city in which to attempt such an experiment. It is Scotland?s first city in terms of size, still being significantly larger than Edinburgh. It likes to see itself as a ?big city? – a place bigger and more important than its population or status might imply. It is a city that has undergone huge waves of expansion, growth, change, reinvention, challenge and decline. While its formal council area has seen a population decline from 1.1 million in the 1950s to 600,000 today, the wider Glasgow conurbation still contains 1.2 million people, and is one of the most vibrant and varied parts of Scotland and the UK. It has left behind its role as the Second City of Empire – when it made its wealth from transatlantic commerce and trade. It is now the Second City of Shopping – reflecting its retail power. This is a city rich with stories and tales. Some of these can be problematic: the city is variously known as ?the sick man of Europe? and ?the murder capital of Europe?. In the 1930s Glasgow gained opprobrium as ?No Mean City? – for its gang culture that was over-sensationalised in the novel of the same name. In the 1980s the city?s swagger and sense of importance saw this phrase reappropriated as part of Glasgow?s cultural reinvention, in the opening credits of the TV series Taggart. Then there is the football, which no discussion of the city can be without. The city has never been, as some have claimed, a ?Belfast without the bombs?, but the sectarian divide between Celtic and Rangers undermines the efforts of the city authorities to promote images of the city as cosmopolitan, modern and welcoming. Alongside all this there is the upbeat picture of the city: a place of culture, creativity and innovation, a city filled with vibrancy and buzz. This is a city of artists, writers, musicians, dreamers, and of Glasgow characters and humour: the place that gave the world Stanley Baxter, Lulu, Billy Connolly and so much more! Glasgow 2020 aimed to look beyond these images and accounts, and to find perspectives of the city that opened up possibilities and addressed some of the fundamental questions about the future: what kind of city do you want to live in, what kind of values do you want your life and city to be shaped by, and, ambitiously, how can we begin to mark out a route map to get there? An age of urban renaissance? The Silver Tree was an impossibility in a rational landscape. It mocked our city, our civilisation, which was the most advanced in the history of the world. As it grew it reminded us of our morality, our limitations. All my life had been about the focusing of the will. In search of perfection, the architect had fused the human with the inhuman – but along with the wonderous buildings, there came this infernal tree! Suhayl Saadi, The Icarus Tree5 This is, according to some analysts, a golden age for cities. Regeneration. Redevelopment. Renaissance. Across different societies and cities, skylines are changing, and the same faceless, shiny buildings are rising, often owned by the same corporations. A new era of cities located in the once ?Third World? – Dubai, Shanghai, Seoul – see themselves as the ?hot? places of tomorrow. The once dominant cities of the West are reinventing and redesigning themselves to stay ahead, anxious that complacency will mean they will lose their competitive edge. This has had the cumulative effect in ?the West? of producing an identikit city that you can practically buy off the shelf. The urban formula of success – first tried and tested in places like Barcelona and Bilbao – has become an increasingly narrow one, with diminishing results. It reduces cities to participation in a kind of cultural arms race, competing with iconic buildings, galleries and museums, riverfront developments and squinty bridges. This is the model of development advocated in Richard Florida?s over-hyped The Rise of the Creative Class, a frequently referenced but rarely read book, which instrumentally appropriates ?culture?, ?creativity? and ?diversity? for economic policy – an urban manifesto for the globally mobile and successful. In this model creativity and culture become nothing more than a commodified adjunct of economics. At the 2007 ?Imagining the City? symposium held at the newly reopened Southbank Centre, two very different ideas of the future of cities were put forward. Richard Sennett offered a critique of the contemporary urban orthodoxy, and the grip of a monoculture that is shaped by tourism and finance; as he argued, a city shaped by such forces becomes a site of inequality: a lived-in space filled with lots of people doing well and lots of people struggling to survive. A very different model was put forward by Peter Head, Director of Sustainability at Arup (www.arup.com), a global design and business consulting firm. Head offered us a glimpse into the world of Arup in China, in a presentation of ghastly and near Hollywood-style sentimentality, with soft focus, dewy colours and ?new age? music. Head focused on the monster project for the new city of Dongtan, in which Arup are strategic partners with the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation. Dongtan is being built as an ?ecocity? in the Yangtze River delta, near Shanghai, and Arup see it as a potential ?Chinese Manhattan?, or alternatively a ?new Venice?: the beginning of ?a new paradigm? in cities. This project is part of the export of the identikit consumer city; it benefits western business interests and promotes consumerism, in a partnership in which both sides are able to ignore issues of democracy and equality – a lack of concern for such matters being a common bond between Leninist vanguardists and market fundamentalists. The bright green aspects of the project only add to its charm. Dongtan is not all it appears, however; it has been called the equivalent of a ?Potemkin eco-village?, an attempt by China to showcase its eco-conscience while all the time, down the road in Shanghai, 18-20 million people live without any environmental regulations.[6] There is also the issue of how a sustainable eco-city can be built upon the flatlands of a river delta, barely two metres above sea level: by the time the model city hits its target of 500,000 people in 2050, it could be an underwater city. The proposals clearly appalled Sennett but Head could find nothing to criticise in them. The Dongtan example illustrates a number of wider issues about cities, development, politics and public debate. Firstly, there is the compromised nature of our political classes. The deal to bring about Dongtan was signed at No. 10 Downing Street with Tony Blair present. John Prescott, as Deputy Prime Minister, made several trips to Dongtan, and there have been rumours that his retirement may see him join Arup?s Board as a Non-Executive Director. The lack of discussion about such issues is highlighted in the uncritical way that this deal, and others like it, are presented in the media and public debate – from the Financial Times to Wired. People want to do business with China and want to get their feet in the door, and are prepared to compromise their ethics to achieve this. Dongtan is the ultimate in trying to have your cake and eat it: building a new Chinese city while dressing it in eco-camouflage. Dongtan is an extreme example of tendencies in the mainstream city discourse, but it embodies the main outlines of the official-future view of the city. The presentation of this dominant vision may be sweetened with creative industry mood music, but it has little to do with the world of people, imagination and democracy. The official future versus the world of mass imagination ?. ?Sur, what does GDP mean? Ah?ve just downloaded ma news page here, in it says that Scotland?s goat the highest GDP in the world. Is that good Sir or bad Sir?? John Daly, Allowed, Able and Willing The ?official future? is the place where the public discourses of government, public agencies, mainstream media and the corporate world coalesce into a relatively coherent worldview.[7] It increasingly points in one way – towards a model of the world centred on economic growth, determinism and the primacy of competition and markets. ?The official future? is a place filled with its own jargon, buzz words and bright, shiny documents, which promise an upbeat, glorious world of optimism and prosperity. Beneath this panglossian promise, however, there is an innate and deep-seated pessimism – which acknowledges that this is a soulless, friendless and loveless world. It is a world filled with such word games as ?inviting people to do the step-change?: sadly, not a new dance craze, but an example – one of many – of consultant-class speak. The concepts of change inherent in this official future are imbued with words and values from business models and the primacy of economic development. Ideas of change that are social, cultural or ecological, or organic and community-centred, just don?t get a look in. Given the power of this worldview in public discussions, most people feel they have little choice but to accept the ?There is No Alternative? mindset; and yet they do so with little real enthusiasm, and with a sense of resignation. There is a sense that ?the official future? has already been decided by forces more powerful than you and I – and this makes people feel like instrumental agents, and brings a feeling of powerlessness. Glasgow 2020 set out to challenge this feeling, to explore the possibilities of people thinking, conceiving and developing their own futures. We called this a mass imagination exercise – drawing on the ideas of the 1940s mass observation surveys, but with the aim of something more pro-active. We ran a total of 38 events, nearly all of these in Glasgow, involving over 5000 local people – nearly one per cent of the city. We reached out across geographies, generations, identities and socio-economic backgrounds – from taxi drivers and hairdressers to journalists and entrepreneurs, from people living in social housing, to asylum seekers and commuters. This was an imagination exercise, not a consultation: animation, fun, humour, creativity and fuzziness were the main characteristics in our events. Discussions did not focus on people?s identities – as ?single parents? or ?creative entrepreneurs?, etc; instead they developed a general, structured conversation about the future, using the techniques of philosophical inquiry. This meant that discussions that began with people stating their usual views on a subject typically ended up somewhere else. A variety of public spaces were used. Some were everyday public spaces such as libraries, museums and community centres. Others were disruptive spaces – for example Glasgow-Edinburgh trains were taken over for two days; a Saturday of events was run in the city?s biggest art gallery and museum, Kelvingrove; and a boat equipped for a day as an office sailed up and down the River Clyde in stormy weather. Tales of the city Glasgow – Green City?
No since they built hooses on hauf the parks and ran a motorway
through what was left.
Glasgow – Clean City?
Graffiti City mibbe.
Or Chuggie City?
Aye you cannae walk down a street wioot gettin it stuck tae your
shoes. Anne Donovan, Glasgow?s Pants One of the central pillars of Glasgow 2020 was the power of story. Stories matter. People relate to and identify with the idea of story. Our lives, loves and world are made sense of by the various stories which make them up. Politics used to be shaped and defined by a set of over-arching and potent stories that offered to make sense of the world. The centre-left in Britain once had a story in socialism, along with an idea of how this was to come about through ?the forward march? of ?the labour movement?. One of the fundamental changes of the Blair era has been the near complete disappearance of this story, and the subsequent Brown administration also seems unsure of its moral compass and mission.[8] Cities are shaped by the myths and potencies of stories, as Armistead Maupin recognised in his famous Tales of the City set in 1970s San Francisco. Glasgow 2020 looked to encourage the non-institutional stories of the city to find their voice. We ran events where people, after their initial discussions, created characters who inhabited the city in 2020, and embryonic storylines; from these seeds many fullyfledged stories of the city of the future emerged. There is a direct relationship between people?s disquiet about ?the official future? and the way they see public institutions, from government to the corporate sector. More and more people say that they suspect that the values which inform institutions are not the values they would like them to be informed by. People also suspect that the public face that these organisations present to the world, with all their talk of being sensitive and informed by the public, is not what really influences them. This is not a perception that can be addressed by better communications or transparency. This is about something much deeper: an emerging values gap between people and institutions. There is a general sense that institutions have bought into a view of the world that has a set of values far removed from notions of public service and public duty, or from any sense of real consumer sensitivities and power. It is revealing that the scepticism that people feel is often articulated in hesitant and unsure ways – as if they wish they could be proved wrong by the facts. And the manner in which people state their views shows that the language of this doubt and disquiet – after the demise of socialism – has yet to find a full form. In every event across Glasgow 2020 people expressed hope for themselves, their neighbourhoods and city. From the poorest to the most affluent areas, people had hope and showed that they had individual or neighbourhood ways they acted upon this. What was missing was the sense of a city-wide collective agency joining this up. Across the city this tale was shaped by gender. More women than men ?did? things. Women had tales of doing things to take hold of their lives, support their children and change their communities. Frequently they had a very different and more immediate idea of change and politics than the more conventional ideas expressed by many men, who tended to have a view of politics and social change which was rooted in others – i.e. politicians – bringing about change. The seven cities of the future And the film makers. The city?s teeming wi? them! Everybody wants
to make their films about Glasgow these days. Or write books set
in Glasgow. And you wouldnae mind so much except it?s no your
old Glasgow they?re writing about. It?s this new European Glasgow.
Cosmopolitan Glasgow. Kirsten Anderson, A Tale of Two Cities From the range of discussions and activities of Glasgow 2020 seven very different cities of the future emerged. All these possible future cities – unlike utopias or dystopias – were already present in some way in the city of the present. The seven cities merely took different aspects of the present and accentuated them or crossfertilised them with other forces. They were: The Two Speed City The Soft City The Dear Green City The Slow City The Lonely City The Hard City The Kaleidoscope City This futures diverge widely. In the Two Speed City, the two halves of the city, evident now, become virtually separate, two distinct communities living side by side. In the Soft City, the city shaped by feminine values and nurturing comes to the fore, changing how both men and women act. In the Kaleidoscope City, the changing nature of the city – affected by everything from migration to sexual liberalism – radically alters the mainstream culture. A fundamental difference emerged between these seven cities of the future and the way the official future portrays the city. The official version of the city emphasises factors such as shopping, tourism and culture alongside economic and cultural regeneration. It is shaped by the importance of sectors and promoting them as a dynamic manifestation of the creative city. But across the Glasgow 2020 project very few individuals talked for very long in such ways. This is partly because people just take these things for granted as part of modern life; and partly because they recognise that shopping and tourism et al are not part of what makes a city unique because everywhere has that. Instead, the manner by which people talked about the city and the future was informed by addressing questions about the meaning and purpose of life, and the question of values – what kind of values people would like to see their city represent. Running through all of this was the question of what vessels and sense of agency people can create, that they themselves can own. Glasgow 2020 offered the beginnings of a road map on how to begin to tentatively answer this huge question. It showed that people have the capacities, creativities and imagination to think deeply and profoundly about their city and the future. The book of the project, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, contains a collection of stories about the future which emerged from our events. It also contains a critique of the way we think about cities, and lessons and implications for thinking about the future. A number of independent initiatives spun out of the project. The seven cities of the future that emerged were summarised into individual postcards and distributed around the city as part of the Scottish Executive?s Six Cities Festival. A music album of the same name, The Dreaming City, brought together the work of nine musicians and groups, who took some of the stories and used them to create new artistic pieces of work.[9] The resulting album involved the artists creating a series of musical landscapes which were about Glasgow and Scotland, but evoked a distant, magical or imagined city in a far-off land. Assemblies of hope While beneath this ball Glasgow swings
With bass rhythms and cathedral rings
Franz Ferdinand and Barrowland kings
Country and western under angel wings
John Maclean and his George Square noise
Charms Gregory?s Girl and the Glasgow Boys Jim Carruth, St Mungo?s Mirrorball Glasgow 2020 suggested as one possible answer to the issue of agency the idea of ?assemblies of hope?. These are fluid, flowing networks bringing together an array of people – alchemists, campaigners, imaginers – people with ideas, creative energies and the desire to do something. Their aim would be to develop dialogues that don?t normally happen, to cross boundaries and divides, to aid individual action into collective action, and to support communities of interest into communities of action. These assemblies – and there are already in existence many nascent ones – would not define people as mere props of economic policy. For them, human action, interaction, art and creativity have worth on their own terms, and should not be seen as instrumental and subordinated to the needs of economic determinism. Many of us feel increasingly squashed and pressurised by the inexorable logic and insatiable appetite of the market, and by being defined by economic logic. The aim is to create spaces, zones, discussions, deliberations and ways of being which aid us to define ourselves in different ways. The reality of much of city life and public space is the all-pervasive pressure of consumerism, advertising and the hustle and bustle of a fast life. There are few places within cities where an individual is not defined as a consumer. A more daring notion of city spaces would perhaps see the encouragement of ?quiet zones?, in the manner found on some train carriages; these would be advertising, brand-free zones, where people could go to find a slower, gentler, more contemplative mood. Imagine the positive effect for the first major city in the UK that began such a process: of recognising that life wasn?t all about getting faster, smarter and leaner, and arguing that ?life in the slow lane? had some advantages. The city and the left ?Change?? The word echoed in Jack?s head. He felt the money in his clenched fist and thought he probably had enough for an Underground ticket, a day spent dozing round the clockwork orange. Ewan Gault, That Change is Nothing The Glasgow 2020 project was a unique and wonderful project; it was a pleasure and privilege to watch it flourish and grow. Its rich tapestry of ideas, insights, processes and findings showed that people do increasingly question the current orthodoxies in policy, politics and society. The old-fashioned wisdoms of the right – of the market as the solution and government and the state as the problem – and of the left – of the state and government as the solution and the market as the problem – are increasingly out of touch with the challenges of modern society and the planet. The conventional left and right are united in a narrow economistic view of the world; they have similar ideas of human nature, and similarly restricted notions of progress, founded on materialist values; both are oblivious to the coming environmental crisis. This is an age where mainstream politics across the Western world operate in an increasingly narrow bandwidth. The language, values and priorities of the official future have become an intolerant, inflexible orthodoxy, with little room for manoeuvre or dissent. The power and hold of this worldview is directly linked to the demise of the Soviet bloc, Soviet Union and socialism in 1989-91: from this set of events a belief in the possibilities of another kind of social order has been discredited. In this vacuum a newly confident and triumphalist ideological perspective has arisen about the attractiveness and appeal of a certain kind of capitalist economy and order: one which is increasingly divided into winners and losers; which celebrates wealth, status and power; and which is shaped by massive structural inequalities, with poverty sitting side-by-side with wealth undreamt of in human history. One of the great tragedies of the last decade and a half is that so many, many people have gone along with this warped, flawed and horrid view of the world. Figures from the centre-left across the Western world have become the leading cheerleaders of this perspective: from Clinton, both Bill and Hillary, to Blair and Brown. People in leading positions in public institutions in the UK, US and Europe have embraced the language and mindset of this world. They have given sustenance to the notion that we live in an age where ?There Is No Alternative? , where words such as ?knowledge economy?, ?globalisation? and ?step change? are bandied about without any critical understanding. The Glasgow 2020 project shows that people don?t want this state of affairs, and nor do they believe in their hearts and souls in the official future. They recognise that the world on offer is a pretty unattractive, soulless and pessimistic one, where every person is a potential economic threat and competitor, rather than a friend and neighbour. They recognise that relationships have to be about more than economic logic, and that we cannot go about the world viewing everything else – other cities, countries and institutions – as threats that we need to trash and undermine. There is a very definite message of optimism and hope within the Glasgow 2020 project. Firstly, there is this deep-seated lack of faith in the values, aims and aspirations of the official future. Secondly, there is a profound sense of creativity, imagination and play, something which is not touched upon or recognised in mainstream debates. If we are to live in future societies that we can identify with, connect with, and feel some sense of ownership of, we need to fundamentally change direction as a society. This has to be centred on a concept of progress, and a version of the future, that we wish to nourish. Once upon a long time ago the left had a sense of certainty, even arrogance, on such positions. Now it has a sense of doubt, silence and unease. Throughout human history cities have been places where different versions of humanity have contested a multitude of versions of the social order and the future. The city has been a place of social change, upheaval and dislocation, the place of capitalism?s greatest triumphs and potential demise. For the left, historically, it has been a place where it feels more at home, and has more to say. But we now need a very different model of a city: one that renews an idealistic, optimistic and forwardlooking idea of humanity and the future. One that is imbued with a green sensitivity and an ecological concept of the planet. We cannot leave the utopian imagination to the free market modernists, unchallenged. We have reached a nadir in the official conceptions through which public agencies, corporates and developers think of cities. Our cities are the product of an age that is filled with talk of change, innovation and diversity, but is defined by conformity and fixed mindsets. We have to dare to dream of cities and communities in which people live, work, love and interact in ways which nurture and nourish the best in all of us, rather than play to our worst and most base instincts. Notes 1. Edwin Morgan, ?A City?, in H. Whyte (ed.), Mungo?s Tongues Glasgow
Poems 1630-1990, Mainstream 1993, p262. 2. Maggie Bell, No Mean City (Theme to Taggart), www.taggartfanclub.
co.uk/nomean.htm. 3. On RAND and the American military-industrial complex see
Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are
Seduced By War, Oxford University Press 2005. 4. Gerry Hassan, Eddie Gibb and Lydia Howland (eds), Scotland 2020:
Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation, Demos 2005; Gerry Hassan,
Melissa Mean and Charlie Tims, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, Demos 2007. 5. From The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass
Imagination. Hereafter all quotations without citations are taken from
this collection. 6. For a critical overview of Arup, Dongtan and the British
political classes see the analysis of the Ethical Corporation at:
www.ethicalcorp.com/resources/downloads/20076411627_
Paul%20French%20Cast%204.mp3 7. On the idea of ?the official future? see: Richard Eckersley, Well and
Good: How We Feel and Why It Matters, Melbourne: Text Publishing
2004. 8. Gerry Hassan, Introduction, in Gerry Hassan (ed), After Blair:
Politics After the New Labour Decade, Lawrence and Wishart 2007. 9. The Dreaming City, Glasgow: Sub-Urban Collective 2007. Available
from:www.sub-urbancollective.co.uk.
Alex Wheatle Remembers ‘Stop and Search’19 Feb 2008When I heard last month about the government?s plans to give police more powers to stop and search, my mind flicked back to the early 1980s and all that happened in the days running up to the riots in south London on 10 and 11 April 1981 that we call the Brixton Uprising. The police stopped thousands of people at that time under the ?sus? laws, which allowed them to stop and search people ?suspected? of wrongdoing, and to arrest people for ?loitering?. They were used to systematically harass black people. I remember going down to Brixton and being stopped maybe two or three times a day. I wasn?t totally innocent ? I was a bit of small time hustler ? but the huge police operation hit many innocent bystanders who were going about their daily business. That fuelled the resentment we felt. Just before the uprising, the police launched Operation Swamp ? a massive police operation in Brixton. In just four days the police stopped 943 people and arrested 118 ? over half of them black. That added to the anger. Of course there was anger already ? going back a number of years ? at how the police treated black people. But that tension was really cranked up with Operation Swamp and with the experience of the fire in Deptford, a few miles from Brixton, in January 1981. The fire, which happened in New Cross Road, killed 13 young black people. We felt that the police didn?t bother to investigate it properly. Protest We strongly felt that a crime had taken place, but that the police were not using their powers to try and solve it. So there was a protest march. I was on that march and I remember the police trying to intimidate us. We had a police ?escort? all the way along the route. There were confrontations on the fringes ? though I never saw any of that. The way it was reported in the press was as if we were ?public enemy number one?. We had marched peacefully, but the next day the press called us thugs and hooligans. We really felt that although we were born here, we might as well not have been. We were made to feel like outsiders and that we were not wanted. It was driven home to us that we didn?t belong. The far right never had much sway in Brixton. But we had our ears to the ground so we knew there had been incidents in nearby Lewisham where the far right wanted to march. We heard about the police killing activist Blair Peach during an anti-Nazi demonstration in Southall in west London in 1979. Blair Peach changed everything in a way because that?s when we realised that they could kill us on the street and nothing would be done. Blair Peach was a white teacher from New Zealand. He was killed in the broad daylight. So we started to fear. We began to resist arrest even more because we feared that we would be killed too. Music played a big part in the events of the time. We were listening to Burning Spear, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. We had album covers with clenched fists. I was politicised in a way that is maybe not normal for 17 or 18 year olds because of the music I was listening to. It made you aware of the political landscape around you. It made you think about what Margaret Thatcher was trying to do when she made her speeches. For us it felt like the Tories and police just wanted to purge us off the streets. We were expendable. That?s how we felt ? expendable rubbish. The uprisings didn?t just happen in Brixton. All over Britain people erupted with fury at the police ? not just in the big cities, but in many smaller towns. Many of us involved in the uprising were quite young ? I was 18 at the time. We were in conflict with an older generation. Our parents didn?t quite believe what we were telling them ? that we were being physically abused by the police. They thought this couldn?t really be happening. So there was conflict there all the time. This made us feel even more isolated and when a young generation feels isolated then you get to a stage where you don?t care any more. That?s how many of us felt on the first day of the rising. We looked into our futures and we thought we would probably end up in a prison cell anyway. When you reach a point where you don?t care anymore you can do dangerous things. The uprisings didn?t change things straight away. In Brixton, it was still very much a ?them and us? situation with the police. But the uprisings forced the Tories to hold an inquiry headed by Lord Scarman. His criticisms of police racism were not acted on. Racism It wasn?t until the Macpherson Report in 1999 into the investigation of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence that we saw any change in the establishment and the recognition of ?institutional racism? in the police. I was arrested soon after the Brixton Uprising and spent three months in prison. That?s when I started to turn my life around. I had spent most of my childhood in council care. I was in a care home in south London from the age of four to 14. I was living in a hostel in Brixton Hill and hustling to survive. I wasn?t really going to school much and got expelled a few times. A social worker did get me a job once as an apprentice carpenter but I messed that up. I started to read in prison ? that was what really changed me. I had a mentor ? a Rasta friend who I shared a cell with ? and he encouraged me to read. I remember reading the Black Jacobins by CLR James about the slave revolt in Haiti and that really changed my mindset. I started listening to different sorts of music, not just reggae, and that set me on course. I started to think that I could contribute to society rather than being outside it. I began thinking that maybe I could achieve something, that I am worthwhile. I see so many black youngsters today who feel that they are not worth anything. They need to be told by someone that they are. Instead they have a government that seems to despise them, calls them ?hoodies? and fears them. My son wears a hoodie, and he graduated from university last year. Young people need less of the fear ? they need encouragement. If the government effectively brings back the ?sus? laws, it will bring back all the old anger and resentment again. Any work that the police have done in recent years to try to engage with the community will be lost. The calls for more stop and search are not about stopping crime. They are about politicians trying to show off their muscles to ?Middle England? to say how tough they are. Both Labour and the Tories seem to be scared of losing authority. They want to be seen as the ones that control what?s going on. It seems they are chasing after each other?s policies. They don?t seem to realise that they are playing with fire. It makes me think they learnt nothing from what happened in 1981.
Aerotoxic Updates19 Feb 2008In the last issue of the Corporate Watch Newsletter we revealed how the air supply aboard commercial jet airliners is regularly contaminated with highly toxic chemicals which can poison and seriously injure pilots and passengers. This contamination can happen because, as a cost-saving measure, airliners take compressed air for the cabin from the engines. Jet engine oil, however, contains powerful toxins, including organophosphates, a chemical linked to Gulf War Syndrome. In spite of a powerful and growing body of evidence presented by aircrews, campaigners and independent doctors and scientists, the airline industry has issued blanket denials of all such allegations. Meanwhile government committees such as the UK?s Committee on Toxicity seem determined to ignore any evidence that might threaten airline profits. Now two recent stories threaten to blow the lid off the industry?s dirtiest secret… or would if the mainstream media had the guts to write it up. FLYBE PILOTS ?FUMING? PROTEST In October, news broke that crew working for Flybe were boycotting some of the airline?s planes, after several very serious toxic fume incidents. According to BBC Five Live, ten incidents had occurred on Flybe?s ageing BAe 146 planes in the last 15 months. Several of these incidents resulted in hospitalisations, when air crew were incapacitated by fumes, and in one case a plane flying from Belfast was forced to make an emergency landing on the Isle of Man, with the pilots using emergency oxygen supplies. A well placed source told Corporate Watch that a number of Flybe air crew have been given letters by the company doctor saying that they should not fly on particular planes for health reasons. Flybe, which has been rebranding itself under the slogan ?low cost… but not at any cost?, is reluctant to talk about the issue. Flybe?s press enquiries are handled by The Red Consultancy, a leading UK PR company. We asked them the following questions (which they would only take in writing): Can you confirm or deny that Flybe?s company doctor has issued letters for air crew saying that they should not fly on particular planes for health reasons? Does Flybe accept that there were hazardous ?fuming incidents? aboard flights, (as described in the Radio 5 report ?Cabin Fever?)? Has Flybe conducted any cabin air monitoring tests aboard its BAe 146 aircraft? Did the company?s crisis communications plans include dealing with ?fuming events? aboard the aircraft? If so, how long has this been planned for? Flybe (and Red) directly refused to answer these questions. Instead they issued the following statement: Flybe is completely confident that its aircraft are operated and maintained to the highest industry standards. We have over 700 commercial pilots within Flybe and to date, not a single one has ever refused to fly one of our aircraft. In line with many previous public announcements, Flybe took a commercial decision several years ago to reduce the number of aircraft types it operated from three to two. As a result the BAe 146 fleet will have been withdrawn by February 2008. In spite of the seriousness of this potentially lethal hazard, this appears to be the only statement made to the press at the time of writing. BAEs GOLDEN GAG In another twist to the tale, documents were recently presented to the Australian Senate which show that the manufacturers of the planes, BAe Systems, were aware of the fuming problem with the 146 model as early as 1993 and acted to suppress the story. Two Australian airlines, Ansett and EWA, had brought legal action against BAe claiming that a design fault in the BAe 146 airliner was producing ?obnoxious oil and other fumes? in the cabin. The documents show that BAe agreed to pay out A$750,000 in a settlement. Allied Signal, the US company which manufactured the engine parts responsible for the leaks, also paid out US$1,235,000. Confidentiality clauses were included in both deals so that the story was kept out of the public domain. The agreement also blocked any future actions: ?Ansett and EWA hereby jointly and severally agree that the said sum of A$750,000 shall be paid by BAe to EWA as liquidated damages in full and final settlement of any and all claims which Ansett or EWA may have against BAe either now or in the future in respect of oil or other fumes adversely affecting the cabin environment?. In 1999 Ansett gave evidence to the Australian Senate?s Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport, which was investigating the contaminated air issue. An Ansett executive said that Ansett had not initiated any legal proceedings against BAe. It is currently unknown what other similar deals may have been made between other airlines and aircraft manufacturers. COT Research into the contaminated air issue is currently being conducted by the government-appointed Committee on Toxicity (COT). Their most recent report, released in September 2007, proved inconclusive and recommended further research. The campaign group the Global Cabin Air Quality Executive (GCAQE) is fiercely critical of COT?s work and produced a detailed report on errors in COT?s research. We asked COT for a response to the GCAQE?s accusations that their report is ?industry biased? and ?contains many technical inaccuracies and misinformation which were previously highlighted to the Committee On Toxicity and the Department of Transport by the GCAQE, other unions, interested parties, doctors and scientists from around the world.? We also wanted to know why COT has ignored so much evidence submitted by GCAQE and other independent scientists. The contact person for the committee, Khandu Mistry, was unreachable, despite repeated calls. We subsequently tried the Department of Health press office who said they would get back to us. They did not. We called back; the press officer responsible had gone on holiday. We were told that it wasn?t really their responsibility and that we should talk to the DoTR. The DoTR press office didn?t think it was their responsibility either and sent us to the Health protection Agency who also denied responsibility. After some discussion of transparency and public accountability the HPA spokesman promised to get back to us, with some answers. He did not. After two weeks of failed inquiries we again tried Khandu Mistry, the committee?s contact person, and were surprised to catch him in the office. He also claimed that it was not his responsibility to answer press enquiries and that he would pass on our questions to the DoH?s press department. A few days later we received a reply to one of our two questions, asserting that the ?COT review process was open for discussion… There were many observers at all meetings where this item was discussed. Importantly the COT review was considered a good piece of work by BALPA who submitted the original evidence.? They failed to answer the more important question as to why so much input from GCAQE and others has been ignored. For more information see the website of the Aerotoxic Association.
EU Lobbying – Open Letter to Barrosso19 Feb 2008To: Commission President Jos Manuel Barroso Cc: Commission Vice-Presidents Siim Kallas and Margot Wallstrm, Secretary General Catherine Day From: Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) Date: Brussels, 13 February 2008 Subject: Implementation of European Commission lobbying register Dear President Barroso, We have grave concerns over the way the Commission is currently developing the lobbying
register that you announced in the 2007 communication: Follow-up to the Green Paper
?European Transparency Initiative?. As you may know, the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU)
is a broad coalition of over 160 public interest groups, trade unions, academics and public affairs
firms, advocating, among others, effective measures that will allow public scrutiny of EU
decision-making. When we recently met with your services to present ALTER-EU?s benchmarks for the EU lobbying
register (attached to this letter), we learned that in the Commission?s current specifications for
the register, two crucial pieces of information are missing: the register will not include the names
of individual lobbyists and it will lack meaningful information on how much money is spent on
lobbying. When Vice-President Kallas presented the European Transparency Initiative, he underlined that
increased transparency on lobbying will help ensure that an Abramoff-style scandal never happens
in the EU. We wish to alert you that with the very limited information requirements currently
proposed by your services, the register would not permit journalists and others to expose such
types of lobbying scandals. We do not understand why your services wish to exclude lobbyists? names from the register.
Existing lobbying transparency registers in the US and Canada contain the names of individual
lobbyists, as does the register of the European Parliament. If the new EU lobbing transparency
register does not allow the identification of individual lobbyists, it cannot serve as a tool to
investigate ?conflicts of interest? and ?revolving doors?. Leaving out lobbyists? names would put
the credibility of the European Transparency Initiative at stake. We also wish to alert you that financial disclosure in broad ranges of ? 50,000 or ? even worse ?
flexible ranges of 10% of the total lobbying income of a lobby firm1, could allow big lobbying
funders to hide within seemingly wide strategic alliances. For example: a company spends
? 50,000 on a lobby campaign and enlists two other companies who symbolically support that
campaign with ? 1,000 each. The system would not distinguish between large and small donors
within the strategic alliance, and the register would thus fail to provide transparency. The US
register shows that it is possible for lobby firms, with little administrative effort, to report their
lobbying income related to each of their clients every six months, rounded off to the nearest US
$ 10,000 (which compares to bands of ? 7,500 ). If the EU register will not answer simple questions like ?who are the lobbyists?? or ?how much
money is spent on lobbying by whom??, it would be useless. Three years have passed since the Commission first announced a lobbying transparency register.
As EU Member States are in the process of ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, we feel it is more
important than ever for the Commission to show its commitment to deliver greater transparency in
EU decision making. We hope that you will instruct your services to go forward and launch a
register that will list the names of lobbyists, the interests they represent, and the finances involved.
These are the three most basic, objective data for public scrutiny. ALTER-EU has been broadly supportive to the European Transparency Initiative so far. We wish
to continue supporting your efforts to deliver greater transparency, and thus hope that you will
ensure the register prepared by your services will meet basic transparency benchmarks. Needless
to say, if the Commission register were to be practically useless for transparency purposes, we
would have to reconsider our support. On the basis of our recent discussion with your services, we would like to meet with you as soon
as possible. Yours sincerely, The ALTER-EU Steering Committee: - Paul de Clerck (Friends of the Earth Europe)
– William Dinan (Spinwatch)
– Marc Gruber (European Federation of Journalists)
– Ulrich Mller (LobbyControl)
– Jorgo Riss (Greenpeace European Unit)
– Erik Wesselius (Corporate Europe Observatory) The Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) www.alter-eu.org / info@alter-eu.org 1. With an annual lobbying income of around ? 2 mn in 2007 for a medium sized lobby firmt, a range of 10% would imply that
each category would represent ? 200,000 . Consequently, lobby contracts for an amount of ? 5,000 would be in the same category
as contracts for ? 190,000 , rendering the information useless.
Housing and the ‘Credit Crunch’18 Feb 2008Accountant Ross Baptie (RB) answers some of Corporate Watch?s (CW) questions CW: ARE THESE ?SUB-PRIME? MORTGAGES A NEW THING? RB: Relatively new. A decade or so there was very little mortgage lending to people who couldn?t afford them. There were rigid, self-imposed, rules governing how banks & finance companies chose whether someone was creditworthy enough to qualify to get a mortgage. As with all things in capitalism however, once a particular market (i.e. creditworthy borrowers) has been exploited and pushed to the limit, it begins to look elsewhere. This means it will seek to either deepen penetration of the existing mortgage market or to expand into areas that were previously untouched. One new area was the increase in buy-to-let mortgages and the encouragement of that whole sector (which has yet to collapse), and the other area was that of ?sub-prime? lending. A whole raft of people were watching from the sidelines during the boom in the housing market. Partly due to their own desires, but also partly from the manufactured desire whipped up by the housing boom, these people were desperate to own their own homes. Under traditional (risk averse) approaches to mortgage lending they never had a hope of getting loans big enough and affordable enough to buy a home. Normally it wouldn?t make sense for banks and building societies to lend to someone who was clearly a bad risk and had a bad credit history. However, a mixture of things caused lenders to move beyond this traditional approach: i) The massive rise in home values in the last few decades meant that even though someone who borrows money to buy a place may eventually struggle to pay back the repayments on it, the fact that in general house prices were rising, meant that if the borrower did default on the loan, the lender could simply repossess the house. The chances are it would have increased in value so they could then sell it and recover their outlays ii) As existing mortgage markets were nearly saturated there was a risk that there would be a halt of ?new? money coming into the housing market. First time buyers were finding it harder and harder to find somewhere affordable to buy; especially as money coming into the housing market from first time buyers is what props up the whole market and allows people to buy and sell at the higher end. iii) After 9/11 US interest rates were slashed from around 6% to 1% to ?stimulate? the economy. As result of this, servicing the loans on mortgages became more than 80% cheaper than before. This drew new people in to home ownership – which was now within their grasp due to the supply of cheap money being made available in the wholesale credit markets. iv) Normally the worse a borrower?s credit rating is, the higher the rate of interest charged on a loan. This is to compensate the lender for the increased risk that they take on in lending in the first place. Usually this would mean that the borrower would be unable to afford the repayment/interest payments – as they might be paying 10% interest on a loan that someone with a good credit would only pay 5% on. To get round this problem, the notion of ?credit repair? was dreamt up. This involved lending money to the borrower to buy their home, but for the first two years of the mortgage term, on a massively reduced interest rate (say 4%). The idea was that the borrower would pay this reduced rate for the first two years then when it came to the end of that period, they would re-mortgage, with their two years of good credit history allowing them to get a mortgage at a more normal rate of interest. The theory didn?t work at all well in practice. Borrowers came to the end of the two year term, found that their credit had not been ?repaired? and were then faced with a near-doubling of their monthly payments when the rate on the loan reverted back to its normal market rate. In addition, this rate rose again, as interest rates went back up to the pre 9/11 level. Therefore the bulk of people had to default on their loans. Although a nightmare for the individual, this would not have been catastrophic for the market, but for the sheer scale of it. In 2006 sub-prime mortgages accounted for about 20% of the entire mortgage market. The massive levels of defaulting led to houses being repossessed and sold off to recover the debts, causing a huge downwards pressure on house prices. The repossessed houses coming onto the market forced prices down to a level lower than the one lenders had borrowed at, which left banks and building societies facing big losses on their loan portfolios. The collapse was compounded by sub-prime mortgages being parcelled up into ?investment vehicles? and sold off to hedge funds and the like – companies which had a higher appetite for risk. This made it difficult to see where risk was concentrated, as ownership of the initial mortgage asset had been sold on countless times since the original loan. CW: IS THE NORTHERN ROCK FIASCO A RELATED ISSUE? RB: It?s related, but indirectly. The initial lenders of sub-prime mortgages – i.e. those who deal directly with the person who wants the mortgage – were mostly finance corporations set up to specialise in this type of risk. These companies got their money by borrowing on the wholesale credit markets. These markets consist pretty much of big institutional investors lending money between themselves: mainly pension funds, insurance companies and traditional banks. When the extent of the sub-prime problems became known and it looked likely that huge numbers of people would default, these institutions, that had previously happily lent to the sub-prime mortgage companies, began to sit up and take notice and became extremely cautious as to who they would now lend to/invest in, and also increased the rates of interest that they charged on the money they were lending. This led to a ?credit crunch? in the wholesale lending market, and the relatively cheap money feeding into the US sub-prime mortgage companies dried up. This put a lot of the sub-prime mortgage companies out of business. Another impact of the credit crunch was that the other banks and mortgage providers, who also borrow in the wholesale international credit market, found that they were either unable to access this market or to afford the increased interest on borrowed money. This hit all banks and mortgage lenders in the UK. Northern Rock stood out from the rest in that their massive share of the UK mortgage market (something like 20%) was mostly financed through borrowing on the wholesale credit markets. This is unlike other mortgage providers in the UK, who fund a large proportion of their mortgage lending through banking deposits from customers. As Northern Rock had such a big share of the mortgage lending market and a relatively small level of depositors, they had to rely more on the wholesale credit market to plug the gap. When this closed up, they were the first to start wobbling. Panic leads to panic and the subsequent run on the bank with depositors withdrawing their savings meant that they faced an even bigger funding gap. In the end they had to take an emergency loan from the Bank of England to keep them going. CW: WHAT IMPACT DO HOUSE PRICES HAVE ON THE STOCK MARKETS? RB: Rising house prices increase the value of home owners? assets. This in itself has no direct effect, but recently many more people have taken advantage of this increased asset in various ways i) Re-mortgaging (borrowing more money on the basis of a higher house value, and then using that money for home improvements, investing in more property, buying cars, holidays, etc.) ii) Running up higher credit card bills, safe in the knowledge that even though they have 10-20,000 debt here on various cards, their overall net asset position is still good as the rise in house prices dwarfs this debt. iii) Spending their existing savings, safe in the knowledge that they have the buffer of their main asset, their house, continually rising in value So all these factors meant that much more consumer spending could be systematically maintained by home owners during a period of extraordinary house price growth. The more consumer spending there was, the more companies benefited; their share prices also increased, due to the actual and potential future profits they could make on the back of ever increasing house prices. This resulted in stock markets surging ahead in tandem with the housing market. The opposite applies when house prices collapse.
Yes, it was Dodgy18 Feb 2008Make no mistake, the John Williams draft of the Iraq dossier, finally released yesterday, is a smoking gun. The document proves that Williams (a spin doctor friend of Alastair Campbell) who gave his own view of the affair in an article for Cif on Monday, was in the thick of drafting the document that took Britain to war. He wrote what became the dossier’s executive summary. When the dossier was published, false claims from Williams were presented as “judgements” of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). It does not get any more serious than that. The first thing the Williams draft does is to show that the government lied to the Hutton and Butler inquiries and to parliament when it claimed that the Williams draft did not influence subsequent versions and was put aside when JIC chairman John Scarlett made a “fresh start” the next day. Here’s what the Williams draft said in its bullet-point summary: “Our judgement is that iraq is covertly attempting to acquire technology and materials for use in nuclear weapons.” And here’s what Scarlett’s draft said: “Our judgement is that iraq is covertly attempting to acquire technology and materials for use in nuclear weapons.” The earlier versions of this claim referred only to technology and materials “with nuclear applications”. There was never any certainty that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons (it wasn’t). Obviously, any similarity between the two exaggerated claims is explained by the fact that one was based on the other. It is astonishing that the government is still claiming that the Williams draft was immediately “set aside”. Some of Williams’ sexing-up didn’t survive the drafting process. But some did. Williams appears to have invented the claim that the Iraqis had developed mobile biological weapons facilities, where previous wordings only said that they had sought to do so. The claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction rather than just seeking them was key to the politicians’ and spin doctors’ claim that he was a current threat. It’s clear now that Williams cherry-picked the intelligence that would make the best case and made some of it stronger. He remains a candidate for the insertion of the “45 minutes“ claim, at the meeting he attended after producing his draft. That claim also turned into a “judgement” when someone crassly rewrote the executive summary. Now, who could have done that? Scarlett told Hutton that the 45 minutes claim, which was not a judgement in internal JIC reports, “became a judgement of the JIC” when the committee allegedly approved the dossier. For a spin doctor to be putting words into the mouth of the JIC is about as serious as it gets. What is gratifying is that it is now widely acknowledged that the Williams draft was the first draft of the dossier. Anyone who can still remember the Gilligan/Kelly row will know that from the outset the government staked its case on Scarlett’s draft being both the first draft and produced without spin doctor interference. Had the Williams draft been published five years ago, we would have known they were all lying then.
Terminally ill Ghanaian woman deported and denied medical care18 Feb 2008Ama Sumani, a 39-year-old Ghanaian woman terminally ill with a malignant myeloma, was deported from Britain to Ghana on January 9. She was taken from the University Hospital, Cardiff, in Wales, where she was receiving dialysis treatment, as her kidneys were damaged by the myeloma. Five immigration officers put her on a flight from Heathrow to Ghana that day. Ms. Sumani had first come to Britain in 2003; she enrolled as a student but was unable to finish the course and took a job. Taking employment contravened her student visa status. She flew to Ghana in 2005 to attend a memorial service for her late husband. On her return to Britain, her visa was revoked. She became ill two years ago, and doctors say that without regular dialysis she has only weeks to live. A Border and Immigration Agency (BIA) spokesman claimed that ?Part of our consideration when a person is removed is their fitness to travel and whether the necessary medical treatment is available in the country to which they are returning.? Ms. Sumani attended hospital in Accra, the day after arriving in Ghana. According to reports by the BBC and Independent, the hospital in Accra will not provide treatment for her. The reports state British officials would provide funding for treatment for three months, but the hospital said that without funding for ongoing medical treatment, they would not be prepared to accept her as a patient. Her lawyer Sara Changkee said: ?It?s just so sad; her only future now is death.? Annan Cato, Ghanaian High Commissioner in London, has made an appeal to the British government to allow Ms. Sumani to be returned to continue her treatment. The treatment of the Ghanaian woman is one more example of the British government?s increasingly reactionary and punitive treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers. The Independent on January 2 highlighted the case of Adedoyin Fadairo, a three-year-old girl who has been threatened with deportation to America. The child was born in the US but has lived most of her life in London with her grandmother and has no family in America. The girl?s 32-year-old mother is also threatened with deportation, in her case to Nigeria. She has been held in the Yarls Wood detention centre and has been separated from Adedoyin for 10 months. Adedoyin has a kidney condition but is not entitled to medical treatment. The case has been referred to the European Court of Human Rights, which has ordered the British government to put the threat of deportation on hold whilst it considers the case. The right of failed asylum seekers to receive medical treatment is currently restricted to emergency care and access to a general practitioner. Other treatments, including provision of antiretroviral drugs to babies born of HIV-infected women, are prohibited. The government?s Home Office and Health Department is due to publish a review imminently that will recommend restricting medical intervention to emergency care only. The Labour government has taken an increasingly anti-immigrant stance since coming into office. The 2006/2007 annual report of the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC), published in April of last year, noted: ?The increased use of charter flights (to facilitate deportations) is very worrying; there are now 5/6 flights a month.? A BIA press release in November 2007 boasted: ?Britain?s tougher border controls have led to the lowest level of asylum applications in 15 years…. [T]his year 45,000 people have been removed from the UK…[matching] the all time high of 2003…. Between January and September 2007 there were 16,520 principal asylum applications lodged, this represents a seven per cent fall in applications compared to the same period in 2006. It is also the lowest number of applications since 1992.? In a fit of ?you ain?t seen nothing yet? hyperbole, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, said in a December press release, ?People in Britain want to see changes to our immigration system and in 2008 we?ll see them. It?s the biggest shake up for 40 years.? The plight of one of the most vulnerable sections of workers can only become more precarious.
Northern Jelly18 Feb 2008A friend of mine who works in the City and is knowledgeable about the laws, regulations and internal procedures of investment banking said to me the other day: “Investors are the most pampered people in the world. There are so many laws and regulations designed to protect their rights, it’s unbelievable.” Laws designed to protect the property rights of the owners. Who would have imagined such a state of affairs? Well, today investors are predictably furious about the temporary nationalisation of Northern Rock. If a neoliberal government like ours undertakes a nationalisation, you know it’s serious. But the owners aren’t happy. Their shares, their shares! The socialistic government has stolen their money! Somehow they promise to mount a legal challenge, just as the shareholders in Railtrack did when the government allowed the company to go bankrupt rather than bailing it out with yet further billions in public money. The City is also alarmed. The government exists, as far as they are concerned, to defend their interests and as far as they are concerned that means the guarantee of private profits with public money, and private ownership with public risk. This sort of thing gives people ideas. Nevertheless, there cannot be too much shock. Practically everyone knew that nationalisation was the only option in this case, and it was simply not plausible to continue ploughing in billions – the Bank of England has loaned the company 55bn, which is eleven times its value at its peak last year, and many more times its present value of 380m, while – while the owners floundered and frittered it all away. If anything, it would have been an obvious decision several months ago, long before a single penny of subsidy had been issued. The government has tried desperately to avoid it. And after all, the nationalisation is only a temporary measure designed as much to protect the institution and return to private capital in good condition once the economy gets back into good shape. And it will be run by highly paid individuals from the banking industry, such as Whatever the shareholders say, the rentier class will probably be quite relieved as a whole. Even Martin Wolf of the FT backs the nationalisation and gives a few reasons why the grasping bastards who have run the thing into the ground shouldn’t be given any compensation. The Tories are arguing that this decision amounts to a ‘humiliation’ for Alistair Darling, and are raising the spectre of a return to the 1970s (a much maligned and underestimated decade). On the one hand, it’s faintly embarrassing in itself that to change your mind is supposed to be a source of embarrassment, but on the other hand, Darling has sort of brought that on himself by straining so hard to avoid nationalisation. Anatole Kaletsky is predicting catastrophe on the absurd grounds that nationalisation is a form of market ‘distortion’ and anyway the government is crap at running things. Are there really people who still believe in the free market fairytales? Does he not know how his employer pays the bills? Nationalization is often a poor substitute for socialisation rather than a synonym for it. It is usually a prophylactic, in fact, against such measures, a manageable half-way house. In this case, it doesn’t even go as far as that. It is a temporary stop-gap, without any guarantees as yet for the workers in the bank, which places 100bn of public money on the line, with the company’s future co-determined by a small number of experts from the industry, in order to return the business to private ownership as soon as possible. But still, it does give people funny ideas. You know, in a world where Morales is nationalising the gas industry, Chavez nationalised much of the oil industry (and was going to nationalise the whole banking industry), and even the Scottish executive is planning to fully nationalise the railways, the convenient myth that public ownership is ‘unrealistic’ is starting to look, well, unrealistic. And that raises all sorts of questions. We were told that privatising utilities would bring us more efficient, lower cost services. British Gas has just jacked up the prices and is making record profits, while energy companies like Npower do the same. The privatization of water has been disastrous in many places, and in the UK it has led to exorbitant costs and low maintenance. The privatised airports are uncomfortable and overcrowded because they allot most space to commercial facilities and provide little seating or other amenities. Privatization also led to increased unemployment and diminished bargaining power for labour. In each of the industries privatized by the Tories, employment fell dramatically – in steel by 75%, in railways by two thirds, and in electricity and water by about a half. Right-wing economists complain about over-employment, but the danger was always in the contrary temptation – to cut necessary staff and make the service unsound. And what is the point of having ‘competition’ in the banking industry when they all provide much the same lousy service and rip you off? Wouldn’t a publicly owned and accountable industry be better for customers? And why should we have to pay for their crisis? If a company can’t or won’t keep its business running to keep people employed, shouldn’t the government use its initiative, nationalise, defend jobs and engage in industrial conversion if necessary? Oh, Jesus no, don’t start thinking like that! Winter of discontent, remember? You don’t want to go back to the bad old days, especially not when everything is so fabulous.
A mucky business18 Feb 2008THE whole Northern Rock fiasco has been a mucky business from beginning to end. What was, a year ago, the darling of the Stock Exchange, with shares priced at over 1226p each, is now a crisis-ridden mess with shares priced at under 90p. Despite all of the hot air pumped out by the money-men in the stock market, this fiasco is solely and exclusively the responsibility of greedy, profit-fixated speculators prepared to take any risk for a fast buck. And, boy, have they come unstuck. Chancellor Alistair Darling claims that he is now “nationalising” the bank because that is the only way that the taxpayers’ money, which he so freely used to underwrite the failing enterprise, can be safeguarded. But those of us who hold nationalisation dear, as a step towards the elimination of speculation and predatory capitalism, must step carefully here. What Mr Darling calls nationalisation holds about the same relationship to the real deal as a farmyard chicken does to a golden eagle. Bear in mind our treacherous Prime Minister’s description of the Chancellor’s brand of nationalisation. “We want,” he said, “a successful company that we can pass onto the private sector at the earliest opportunity.” He insisted that the problems in the US sub-prime mortgage market which, he claimed, had led to the collapse of Northern Rock, could not have been foreseen. But, despite all the talk, it was not merely the US sub-prime crisis that triggered Northern Rock’s problems. It was British banks losing their nerve and pulling the rug out from a company that had taken one gamble too many. And it is not Mr Darling’s brand of nationalisation that will save it. The issues that are important in this situation are the jobs of Northern Rock employees, which the unions are rightly concerned about. And don’t forget the stability of the British economy, which will hardly be guaranteed by stripping out the problems of Northern Rock and handing it back to the same gang of speculators that screwed it up in the first place, the vultures of the City. Putting Ron Sandler in charge of the company at over 1 million a year, with a deputy on very little less, is hardly a good sign. It is to hoped that Mr Sandler’s reputation for toughness will mean that he can stand up to the hedge-fund profiteers who, having bought and increased their shareholdings after the share price dropped through the floor, are now the loudest in their protestations that the government is trying to rip off shareholders and demanding massive compensation for their supposed losses. Hedge funds RAB and SRM involvement in campaigning for a fair deal for shareholders has raised eyebrows in light of the timing of their purchase, with many of their shares bought after the bank’s troubles began last autumn. The hedge funds have, in fact, been increasing their stake in recent days and clearly hope to talk their sticky fingers into the public purse. It will help if Mr Sandler resists both that and the temptation to cut jobs in order to slim the company’s costs. But any real solution rests on messrs Brown and Darling resorting to real nationalisation, not the cosmetic exercise that they are contemplating. And the chance of that happening with this new Labour gang is about the same as a farmer rearing golden eagles in a chicken run.
Juggle a few of these numbers, and it makes economic sense to kill people18 Feb 2008This is a column about how good intentions can run amok. It tells the story of how an honourable, intelligent man set out to avert environmental disaster and ended up accidentally promoting the economics of the slave trade. It shows how human lives can be priced and exchanged for goods and services. The story begins in a village a few miles to the west of London. The British government proposes to flatten Sipson in order to build a third runway for Heathrow airport. The public consultation is about to end, but no one doubts that the government has made up its mind. Its central case is that the economic benefits of building a third runway outweigh the economic costs. The extra capacity, the government says, will deliver a net benefit to the UK economy of 5bn(1). The climate change the runway will cause costs 4.8bn(2), but this is dwarfed by the profits to be made. There is plenty of evidence suggesting that the government?s numbers are wrong. A new analysis by the environmental consultancy CE Delft shows that the official figures overestimate both the number of jobs the runway will generate and the value brought to the United Kingdom by extra business passengers(3). In an excoriating article in the Guardian last week, Professor Paul Ekins demonstrated that the government has rigged the cost of carbon(4). (Delightfully, the web address for the consultation document ends completecondoc.pdf.) But while the runway?s opponents don?t like the results, most people seem to agree that weighing up economic costs and benefits is a sensible method of making this decision. The problem, they argue, is that the wrong figures have been used. When Sir Nicholas Stern published his study of the economics of climate change, environmentalists (myself included) lined up to applaud him: he had given us the answer we wanted. He showed that stopping runaway climate change would cost less than failing to prevent it. But because his report was so long, few people bothered to find out how he had achieved this result. It took me a while, but by the time I reached the end I was horrified. On one side of Stern?s equation are the costs of investing in new technologies (or not investing in old ones) to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from rising above a certain level. These can reasonably be priced in pounds or dollars. On the other side are the costs of climate change. Some of them – such as higher food prices and the expense of building sea walls – are financial, but most take the form of costs which are generally seen as incalculable: the destruction of ecosystems and human communities; the displacement of people from their homes; disease and death. All these costs are thrown together by Sir Nicholas with a formula he calls ?equivalent to a reduction in consumption?, to which he then attaches a price. Stern explains that this ?consumption? involves not just the consumption of goods we might buy from the supermarket, but also of ?education, health and the environment.?(5) He admits that this formula ?raises profound difficulties?, especially the ?challenge of expressing health (including mortality) and environmental quality in terms of income?(6). But he uses it anyway, and discovers that the global disaster which would be unleashed by a 5-6 rise in temperature, and which is likely to involve widespread famine, is ?equivalent to a reduction in consumption? of 5-20%. It is true that as people begin to starve they will consume less. When they die they cease to consume altogether. But Stern?s unit (a reduction in consumption) incorporates everything from the price of baked beans to the pain of bereavement. He then translates it into a ?social cost of carbon?, measured in dollars. He has, in other words, put a price on human life. Worse still, he has ensured that this price is buried among the other prices: when you read that the ?social cost of carbon? is $30 a tonne, you don?t know – unless you unpick the whole report and its methodology and sources – how much of this is made of human lives. The poorer people are, the cheaper their lives become. ?For example,? Stern observes, ?a very poor person may not be ?willing-to-pay? very much money to insure her life, whereas a rich person may be prepared to pay a very large sum. Can it be right to conclude that a poor person?s life or health is therefore less valuable??(7) Up to a point, yes: income, he says, should be one of the measures used to determine the social cost of carbon. Sir Nicholas was by no means the first to use such a formula. What was new was the unthinking enthusiasm with which his approach was greeted. Stern?s methodology has a disastrous consequence, unintended but surely obvious. His report shows that the dollar losses of failing to prevent a high degree of global warming outweigh the dollar savings arising from not taking action. It therefore makes economic sense to try to stop runaway climate change. But what if the result had been different? What if he had discovered that the profits to be made from burning more fossil fuels exceeded the social cost of carbon? We would then find that it makes economic sense to kill people. This is what the government has done. Its consultation paper boasts that ?our approach is entirely consistent with the Stern Review?(8). It has translated his ?social cost of carbon? into a ?shadow price of carbon?, which is currently valued, human lives and all, at 25 a tonne(9). Against this is set the economic benefit of a new runway. Part of this benefit takes the form of shorter waiting times for passengers. The government claims that building a third runway will reduce delays, on average, by three minutes(10). This saving is costed at ?38-49 per passenger per hour(11). The price is a function of the average net wages of travellers: the more you earn, the more the delays are deemed to cost you, even if you are on holiday. Consider the implications. On one side of the equation human life is being costed. On the other side, the value of delays to passengers is being priced, and it rises according to their wealth. Convenience is weighed against human life. The richer you are, the more lives your time is worth. The people most likely to be killed by climate change do not live in this country. Most of them live in Africa and South Asia. Hardly any of the economic benefits of expanding Heathrow accrue to them. Yet the government has calculated the economic benefits to the United Kingdom, weighed them against the global costs of climate change and discovered that sacrificing foreigners – especially poor ones – is a sensible economic decision. I can accept that a unit of measurement which allows us to compare the human costs of different spending decisions is a useful tool. What I cannot accept is that it should be scrambled up with the price of eggs and prefixed with a dollar sign. Human life is not a commodity. It cannot be traded against profits or exchanged for convenience. We have no right to decide that others should die to make us richer. References: 1. The net benefits are estimated at between 4.4bn and 5.2bn: Department for Transport, November 2007. Adding Capacity at Heathrow Airport: Consultation Document, p74. 2. Department for Transport, November 2007. Adding Capacity at Heathrow Airport: Consultation Document, p125. http://www.dft.gov.uk/162259/165220/302152/completecondoc.pdf 3. Bart Boon et al, February 2008. The economics of Heathrow expansion: Final report. CE Delft. http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/reports/4504.final.report.pdf 4. Paul Ekins, 13th February 2008. Path of least resistance. The Guardian. 5. Sir Nicholas Stern, October 2006. The Economics of Climate Change. HM Treasury, Part 1, page 28. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics… 6. ibid, Part 1, page 30. 7. ibid, Part 1, page 30-31. 8. Department for Transport, ibid, p10. 9. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, December 2007. The Social Cost Of Carbon And The Shadow Price Of Carbon: What They Are, And How To Use Them In Economic Appraisal In The UK. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/research/carboncost/pd… 10. Department for Transport, November 2007. UK Air Passenger Demand and CO2 Forecasts, p128. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/aviation/environmentalissues/ukairdemandandco2… 11. Finding the figures on which the government based its benefit estimates was a struggle. The consultation document led me to the passenger demand forecast (see note 10), which in turn referenced this paper: European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, 2005. Standard Inputs for EUROCONTROL Cost Benefit Analyses. http://www.eurocontrol.int/eatm/gallery/content/public/library/CBA-stand…
Student Debt: Selling Out the Next Generation17 Feb 2008With student debt spiralling and higher education being reduced to a commodity, Laurie Penny calls for a change of course University used to be about getting yourself educated. Now, if you?re lucky, it?s about getting in, grabbing the biggest, most career-oriented degree you can lay hands on, and getting out again ? hopefully with your sanity intact and a few weeks? holiday before you don a suit and start paying back your loan. Macro-capitalism has sold us out, turning education into a consumable ? a privilege to be bought rather than a right to be aspired to. Discussion of macro-capitalist policy making has to involve a considered look at where the money is and where it?s going, so let?s start there. Gordon Brown?s cabinet has recently, amid much public fanfare, pledged an extra 14 billion to be spent on primary and secondary education over the next three years, bringing the total education budget to 74 billion by 2010. This represents an annual increase of 2.5 per cent in real terms, compared with 4.4 per cent in recent years. Yes, that?s right ? despite all the fuss, the rate of increased spending on education is actually slowing. Moreover, it must be understood that 14 billion over three years, while it might sound like incredible riches, is in fact a paltry sum. Compare it to, say, the arbitrary figure of 28 billion conjured out of thin air to float Northern Rock last November. Next to this, or to the 128 billion (US$255 billion) made annually in legal tax evasion by the world?s super-rich, 14 billion is peanuts. And yet, how is this paltry sum being afforded? It?s being afforded at the expense of a higher education system that is now almost entirely funded by its students, via top-up fees and, most recently, by Brown?s auction of the student loans book. That?s right, 6 billion – one third of the total owed by students and graduates ? is to be sold to private investors. The NUS has been assured that the sale of the loans ?should not affect? the low interest rate currently set on graduate repayments; however, the government has provided no details of what subsidies it has planned to counter commercial rates of interest. Students have every reason to worry. As such, not only do all but the very poorest have to personally finance their higher education but the ?effectively interest-free? loans that brought this about are now in jeopardy. All so that Brown can move some money around the already under-funded education budget rather than actually implementing any radical changes in public spending. And let?s not forget: students starting university this year are set to graduate with an average of over 15,000 worth of debt, and in some cases much more ? not all of which is borrowed from the Student Loans company. To finance the increasing costs of higher education, students are becoming beholden to parents, banks and private loan providers, and working themselves into the ground outside of university hours merely to stay afloat. The net effect of this is that education has now become a commodity, and students have been transformed into consumers, entrenching social division and negating aspiration. Recent efforts to redress the balance have been too little, too late. ?Stagnation, stagnation, stagnation? Blair?s much-hyped goal of ?50 per cent in higher education? is now near to realisation. It has consistently been mistaken for a step towards higher aspirations for all; in fact, the way it has been managed makes it precisely the opposite, entrenching the stagnation of social mobility since 1970, as was recently reported by the Sutton Tust. Quite simply, the socio-economic goalposts have been moved for a generation of young people entering the workplace. Over the past 15 years, a higher degree has become more than just a useful qualification. In the words of that noted socio-political analyst, Joe Strummer, one can no longer expect even to make tea at the BBC without a BA. A degree is increasingly a necessary entrance ticket to a certain level of employment and fiscal stability, effectively extending the mandatory education period for a large and specifically privileged social demographic: the middle classes. After 10 years of Labour government, there is still only a 20 per cent likelihood of bright children from the poorest quarter of families going to university, a figure that rises to 80 per cent among the middle and upper-middle classes. Recent efforts to redress the balance have fallen pitifully short. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), the new initiative to provide limited grants of up to 2,800 per year to the very poorest students will benefit very few of those actually in need. Only the very poorest are eligible, and for those that do make it to university from households with an income under 17,500, the money is usually insufficient. In what was billed as an effort to increase social mobility, New Labour has in fact managed to entrench the social stagnation of the Thatcher years by creating a system of mandatory, effectively self-funded higher education as an entry requirement for the middle classes. Well-meant fob-off politics ? such as this year?s limited grant-scheme ? have been too little, too late. Education as a consumable Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the escalating loans system of financing higher education is the fact that university education is seen as something that should, first and foremost, provide ?value for money?. As Albert Einstein noted in his 1949 treatise ?On Education?, an erosion of personhood and negation of rounded education occurs when ?an exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. There is only one way to eliminate these grave evils ? namely, a socially-funded educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.? Students are now aware, from the moment they enter university, that they will have to earn money to pay back their borrowings for the very education that will finance those borrowings. As such, education becomes judged purely in terms of the monetary rewards it will eventually deliver. Even official press releases and loans company documents refer to a student?s degree as little more than an exciting form of ISA ? an investment purely in one?s financial future, rather than in one?s personal or social future. This, in fact, is the root of the problem. Education is not a product. It?s a process. You can pay people to teach you, yes, but you cannot pop down to your local high street and buy yourself an education. Fifty years ago, Einstein recognised that an acquisitional, fiscally-minded higher education system was a contributing factor to ?the crippling of individuals, [which] I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil?. Students in the 21st century are increasingly treated as consumers, buying on credit their ticket into a system that will, if they?re lucky, squeeze them out the other end as products themselves, boxed up with identical gleaming CVs and desperate smiles: tagged, bagged and shipped out from the warehouse onto the screeching shop-floor of life. Sold out by student politicians? What?s worrying is that our own official representatives are more interested in playing the system than in challenging it. The NUS, a deeply divided but influential union, has allowed the government cumulatively to chip away at the rights of students for one reason only ? namely, that the union has, for the past decade, been run by Labour-affiliated students with one eye constantly on their own futures in government. As such, the main NUS delegates have been reluctant to make waves to secure the educational rights of the next generation of British citizens. The 2006 NUS conference, for example, responding to the controversial introduction of top-up-fees, concluded that a small increase in means-tested grants would solve the problem ? but this has already proven to be vastly insufficient. There remains, however, a dedicated radical faction amongst student representatives who have continued to contest the increasing shift of higher education towards the status of an unequal service industry. One such sub-group is the student organisation Education Not for Sale (ENS).
ENS, like many on the student left, has come to the conclusion that a fully subsidised higher education system, with living grants available to all, is the only way to turn around the social stagnation brought about by the financial and schematic management of the UK university system. Sophie Buckland, ENS women?s officer and a spokesperson for the organisation, tells us: ?[Our organisation] fights for a grant high enough to live on for all students in post-16 education as part of a fully free education system ? at least 120 a week. Even a minimal increase in taxation of the rich and of business would create enough funds to make this possible.? Radical change is needed Brown?s government has an opportunity to make university a plane of true social levelling and real educational and personal endeavour. But only if the prime minister has the courage to radically re-think his policy on education spending right across the board. Robbing University Peter to pay Primary Paul is a pitiful attempt at instigating the sort of systemic change needed. Brown could provide the kind of higher education every young person has a right to quite easily, but only by rolling back the tax windfalls Labour has given the rich will enough public funds be generated to do so. He must invest not only in the country?s financial future, but in the social and educational legacies his government will leave to the next generation. Only radical, systemic change of the UK?s attitude towards education spending will give my young sisters? generation the choices, in learning and in life, that every youth facing an uncertain 21st-century future deserves.
Sinners/Scroungers/Saints17 Feb 2008“People’s understanding of lone mothers have been dominated by myth and misrepresentation,” asserts one display in the Women’s Library’s current exhibition about the history of lone mothers in Britian. Along with Muslims, Gypsies, asylum-seekers and black youths, single mothers have been fair game for the British press for many years, their punchbag status peaking in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Who can forget John Redwood and Peter Lilley’s infamous vitriolic attacks on single mothers when they were members of John Major’s cabinet? Drawing extensively on the records of the organisations One Parent Families and Gingerbread and using photographs, pamphlets, audio testimony, films, timelines and a visitor comments board, Sinners/Scroungers/Saints aims to right some of the popular myths surrounding lone motherhood. Although lone-parent households have existed in substantial numbers throughout history, in Britain, their numbers, in common with other industrialised nations, have increased, with an estimated 1.9 million lone parent families caring for 3.1 million children today. And, while lone parents are not exclusively women, historically, the majority of lone parents have been, with 91 per cent of lone parent families today headed by a woman. “Few women choose to become lone mothers because to do so usually results in increased poverty,” the exhibition argues. Indeed, the poverty associated with lone parenthood is exacerbated by the many thousands of fathers who fail to provide for their children. “Only around one in three lone parents receives maintenance from their child’s other parent,” reads one display. The testimony of the now best-selling crime novelist Martina Cole provides an interesting insight into coping as a single mother. “I remember being so hard up that I had to sell the tumble dryer in the middle of winter,” she remembers. Following her mother’s advice, she would post herself “5 with a second-class stamp at the beginning of the week and, that way, I’d always have a fiver for the weekends.” Insightful statistics are dotted around the walls, but, if anything, the exhibition is a little too soft. Where are the killer facts that would slay, once and for all, the pernicious myths that surround this issue? For example, while it is a popular assumption that there has been an increase in lone mothers because they have access to relatively high rates of benefits, in their book Lone Parent Families, Karen Rowlingson and Stephen McKay explain that “the US has the highest level of lone parenthood in the Western world,” but “its level of social assistance is among the lowest.” Sweden, on the other hand, “has the largest proportion of lone parents in paid work but the benefit replacement rate is also the highest.” They conclude that “this therefore contradicts a narrow rational economic model of behaviour that assumes people weigh up the financial costs and benefits of a particular course of action and then act accordingly.” Take that, John Redwood! The two academics also question the supposedly “high rates of benefits” that single mothers can receive. “Numerous independent academic studies have been carried out into benefit levels and they all show that those levels are woefully inadequate to allow people to participate in society in any meaningful way.” Furthermore, while it is often assumed that lone parenthood has detrimental effects on children, Rowlingson and McKay note: “The research that has been carried out suggests that, once poverty is taken into account, there is little, if any, independent effect of lone parenthood on outcomes for children.”
Again, Sinners/Scroungers/Saints fails to correct this popular misgiving about lone parent families. Despite these criticisms, an hour or two spent here will provide visitors with an informative and balanced corrective to the often disgusting representation of lone parenthood in Britain’s gutter press. As “Lone Mother, 2007” says, “Working mothers this, working mothers that. You’re either a benefits scrounger or you’re a man-hating career woman who neglects her children. And, actually, most of us are just trying to do the best we can.” Sinners/Scroungers/Saints: Lone mothers, past and present runs until March 29. ian_js@hotmail.com.
Sharia Law in Britain15 Feb 2008The remarks by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, have seen the media and politicians unleash a vicious wave of Islamophobia, from the ravings of the tabloid press, to the disgraceful Independent on Sunday splash about domestic violence and the shocking claims about “inbreeding” by Phil Woolas MP, who has responded to the current hysteria by leaping head-first into the racist gutter. What are the basic facts behind the Muslim-baiting? 1. Most British Muslims do not demand Sharia law. Muslim Council of Britain: ?We do not wish to see a parallel system or a separate system of judiciary for Muslims.? Shaista Gohir, government adviser: ?The majority of Muslims do not want it. Many Muslim commentators and the media are wrongly assuming that all Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.? 2. What British Muslims want is for the UK, US and Israel to end their bloody occupations of Muslim countries. 3. They want an end to the racism against British Muslims, who are overwhelmingly dark-skinned. 4. A 2004 ICM poll found 61 of British Muslims might support Sharia courts being introduced in Britain, but only to resolve civil cases within the Muslim community, and only so long as the penalties did not contravene British law. 5. Archbishop Rowan Williams argued for ?a delegation of certain legal functions to the religious courts of a community?, not for an extensive parallel legal system. The aspects of Sharia being considered by Williams are restricted to matters of family and finance law, i.e. civil matters. No one is suggesting introducing an Islamic penal code. 6. Religious courts already operate in this country for Orthodox Jews. Why shouldn’t Muslims enjoy the same right? 7. Sharia courts also operate in the UK, although without official recognition and concentrating only on mundane issues such as inheritance and divorce. Many British Muslims are already married under Sharia law, eat meat slaughtered by it, and bank according to it. 8. The UK is already amending its finance laws to allow Sharia-compliant products such as halal mortgages and Islamic bonds, in part to attract billions of petro-dollars from the cash-rich Gulf. 9. Ontario, Canada, for 15 years had a system of ?faith based arbitration? whereby family issues such as inheritance and property division could be adjudicated by religious authorities. In 2005 Ontario?s attorney general reviewed how the system worked for Muslims and ?did not find any evidence to suggest that women are being systematically discriminated against as a result of arbitration of family law issues?. 10. Criticism of Islam segues effortlessly with prejudice against black immigrants. “Niggers out” no longer wins many votes, but Muslim-bashing presses the same political buttons. For our rulers, Islam is a doubly-convenient scapegoat for resistance to the West’s “war on terror”. Any discussion of Islam today is therefore a discussion about war and about racism. By ignoring this basic fact the media join hands with the racists and the warmongers. For the latest, see the excellent resource islamophobia-watch.com
This is what the US calls Justice15 Feb 2008The US?s decision to seek the death penalty for six Guantanamo Bay detainees in connection with 9/11 is a crime against the very idea of justice. The six will face a tribunal where military personnel will act as judges. This won?t be a “fair trial” ? it will be a show trial, using evidence obtained through torture to send the men to their deaths. Civil liberties campaigners in Britain have denounced the decision ? and warned that the British and Spanish governments are also complicit with human rights violations associated with the “war on terror”. Former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg, who spent three years in US custody, highlighted the US?s routine use of torture by drowning, known as “waterboarding”. He told Socialist Worker, “Five of the six people they?ve charged were brought into Guantanamo only last year. They just materialised from secret locations whose existence is denied by the US government. “The US military accepts that it uses waterboarding, but claims this isn?t torture ? despite the fact that when the technique was used during the Spanish Inquisition it was called ?torture with water?. They?re denying it?s torture in order to pretend they have valid confessions.” Moazzam notes that the announcement of the charges against the men comes at a time when campaigning against the torture camp is reaching a peak. “We?re in a period where the whole nature of Guantanamo is being questioned by everyone from former president Jimmy Carter to the US supreme court. “They?re in a political quagmire, and there?s pressure to shut it down because there?s too much heat. These charges are intended as some kind of ?legacy? for George Bush ? he wants to say, ?We got them in the end?.” On Thursday of this week two British residents who were recently released from Guantanamo ? Omar Deghayes and Jamil el-Banna ? will appear before a magistrates court for an extradition hearing to Spain. “Throughout the time these men were in Guantanamo Bay they were never designated for trial,” said Moazzam. “Now the moment they are reunited with their families, they could be sent off to Spain. Once they are in Spain they could be charged with something that it?s much easier to get a conviction for, or even shipped off to another torture camp in Libya or Jordan.” Jackie Chase from the Save Omar campaign told Socialist Worker, “Omar and Jamil have been wrongfully detained, obscenely tortured and treated despicably for over five years by the US at Guantanamo and other secret prisons. “Omar has many medical issues, including an eye blinded by the guards at Guantanamo. It?s time to leave these men alone and let them return to some semblance of a normal life.” Demonstrate in support of Omar Deghayes and Jamil el-Banna. Assemble 10am, Thursday 14 February, Westminster Magistrates Court, Horseferry Road, London. For more on the campaign against Guantanamo Bay go to www.reprieve.org.uk and www.save-omar.org.uk
BAE Pressurised Government to Halt Investigation15 Feb 2008Documents released in the High Court today reveal that Britain?s biggest arms company, BAE Systems, wrote to the Attorney General on a “strictly private and confidential” basis urging him to halt the Serious Fraud Office investigation into allegations that BAE had bribed Saudi officials to secure the Al Yamamah arms deal. The company argued that the investigation should be dropped on commercial and diplomatic grounds.[1] The documents were released as part of a judicial review being brought by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and The Corner House, who argue that the decision to drop the investigation was illegal. The case is being heard in the High Court today and tomorrow (14-15 February) before Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan. BAE’s “Memorandum for Attorney General” set out “the reasons why the Company considers it not to be in the public interest for the SFO investigation . . . to continue.” It argues that the continued investigation would “adversely and seriously affect relations between the UK and Saudi Arabia” and would jeopardise the multibillion-pound sale of Typhoon aircraft. This Memorandum triggered a consultation within government departments on the “public interest” aspects of the investigation, even though it had been sent by BAE itself – the very subject of that criminal investigation.[2] The Serious Fraud Office began its investigation into the Saudi arms deals in November 2004, but the BAE letters released today were only written one year later in response to an SFO order that BAE disclose its payments to agents and consultants involved in the Saudi arms deals. BAE expressed concern in the released Memorandum that the Saudis would view disclosure of documents to the SFO as a breach of confidentiality and trust (although it admitted that similar information about ?the names of consultants engaged by the Company and the amounts paid to them? had previously been provided to the Inland Revenue, apparently without any adverse commercial or diplomatic consequences”). Nowhere did BAE mention the issue of ‘national security’. Another document released today indicates that even the representations subsequently made by government departments to the SFO on the public interest aspects of the investigation were made at BAE’s instigation. Robert Wardle notes of a telephone conversation with BAE’s Legal Director, Michael Lester, that BAE “would make further representations to the Ministry [of Defence] for them to make representations to us [the Serious Fraud Office]”.[3] Nicholas Hildyard of The Corner House said today: “Even though it was the subject of the criminal investigation, BAE brazenly tried to stop the Serious Fraud Office from doing its job. Nor was it alone. The letters released today reveal the hand-in-glove relationship between BAE and its friends in government. What’s more, it’s clear from these documents that ?national security? — the reason ultimately given for pulling the plug on this investigation — was trotted out as a concern only when all these other special pleadings of commercial and diplomatic consequences had failed.? Symon Hill of CAAT said: ?This is absurd. A criminal investigation was dropped at the request of the people accused of the crime. The whole BAE saga is becoming more and more like an episode of Yes, Minister. Britain’s democracy, economy and security will all be better off when BAE is no longer calling the shots.? NOTES 1. Michael Lester, Group Legal Director, BAE Systems, letter to Lord Goldsmith, Attorney General, 7 November 2005, and “BAE Systems plc (‘the Company’), SFO Investigation, Memorandum for Attorney General”, RW4, pp.3-7. 2. The normal procedure is to assess the public interest aspects of a potential prosecution after a completed investigation has revealed whether there is enough evidence for a prosecution or not. 3. File note written by Robert Wardle, Director of the SFO, 22 December 2005, RW4, p.14. 4. Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) works for the reduction and ultimate abolition of the international arms trade. The Corner House is an environmental and social justice NGO. 5. Background to judicial review 14 December 2006: The Director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) suspended the SFO’s investigation into bribery and corruption by BAE Systems since 2002 in relation to the Al-Yamamah military aircraft deals signed between the governments of the UK and Saudi Arabia in 1985 and 1988. The deals ran for 20 years and were to supply aircraft, defence system, weapons and related products and support services. The 2001 Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act made bribing a foreign official a criminal offence. The SFO began its investigation in November 2004. Some time in 2005 and 2006, Saudi Arabia threatened to cancel a further deal involving BAE’s Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft and to withdraw security, intelligence and diplomatic co-operation with the UK if the investigation continued. These threats appear to have been made when it was discovered that the SFO was about to obtain details of Swiss bank accounts linking BAE and Saudi officials. Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, one of the alleged beneficiaries of the corrupt payments being investigated by the SFO, is reported to have been the source of these threats. (The Guardian, “BAE accused of secretly paying 1bn to Saudi prince”, 7 June 2007; The Times, “Bandar Lobbied No 10 to drop Saudi bribes inquiry”, 10 June 2007) 18 December 2006: The Corner House and CAAT wrote to the UK Government arguing that the SFO decision was unlawful and should be reversed. 9 November 2007: Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Irwin granted permission to the two groups to bring a full judicial review hearing against the SFO decision to discontinue its investigation. 21 December 2007: At a Directions Hearing, the Director of the Serious Fraud Office presented his evidence to the Courts outlining why he had decided to drop the investigation. This included: a witness statement from the Director of the Serious Fraud Office, Robert Wardle letters and memos sent between the Prime Minister/Cabinet Office and the Attorney General from December 2005 to December 2006. 14 February 2008:
The Director of the Serious Fraud Office presented further evidence to the Courts outlining why he had decided to drop the investigation: 12 letters, memos, notes and emails sent from November 2005 to December 2006 from and/or to BAE Systems; Allen & Overy (BAE solicitors); Attorney General’s office; and the Serious Fraud Office. (Linked here.) a second witness statement from the Director of the Serious Fraud Office, Robert Wardle. 6. CAAT and The Corner House are bringing the judicial review on six overlapping grounds: i) OECD Anti-bribery Convention The decision to discontinue the BAE-Saudi corruption investigation was based on considerations of potential damage to the UK’s relations with Saudi Arabia, in particular, damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation. This is unlawful because it contravenes Article 5 of the OECD’s Anti-bribery Convention, which prevents signatories from terminating an investigation because of “the potential effect [of an investigation] upon relations with another State”. (For more information, see note 8 below) ii) Saudi Arabia’s international legal obligations to combat terrorism The UK effectively colluded with Saudi Arabia in breaching Saudi Arabia?s international legal obligations to cooperate and share information on terrorist activities, and thereby colluded in committing an internationally wrongful act. iii) Acting on tainted advice from government ministers Government ministers (including the Prime Minister) took into account the risk of the UK not being able to sell Typhoon aircraft, and other commercial, economic and diplomatic matters when they gave advice to the SFO Director on the public interest aspects of the investigation. This was despite being told by the Attorney General that Article 5 of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention forbids such considerations from being taken into account. The ministerial advice was therefore ?tainted?. iv) Damaging national security by discontinuing the investigation The SFO Director is under a legal obligation to take a balanced view of the public interest issues arising from an investigation. But neither the Director nor government ministers assessed or took into account the harm to the UK’s national security of discontinuing the investigation. v) Government ministers expressed a view on what decision an independent prosecutor (the Director of the Serious Fraud Office) should take. The SFO Director and Attorney General requested views from government Ministers on the public interest aspects of pursuing the investigation. The rules for these consultations between the judiciary and the executive forbid Ministers from giving a view on whether a prosecution should proceed or not. But the Prime Minister expressed a clear view that the public interest would best be served by intervening to halt the investigation. This is unlawful. vi) Blackmail, threats and the rule of law It is unlawful for an independent prosecutor to permit threats or blackmail to influence his/her decision to discontinue a criminal investigation or prosecution. To do so is to surrender the rule of law. 7. The Serious Fraud Office is a UK government department that investigates and prosecutes complex fraud. It aims to contribute to “the delivery of justice and the rule of law.? The Attorney General superintends the Director of the Serious Fraud Office; both are supposed to act independently of government. The Attorney General is the chief legal adviser to the Government and is responsible for all crown litigation. The Attorney General is appointed by the Prime Minister and is a member of parliament. Under the OECD Anti-bribery Convention, political appointees should not make decisions on corruption cases. 8. The OECD Anti-bribery Convention, which the UK signed in 1997, is a multilateral treaty aiming to ensure that all OECD countries present a combined and united front against bribery and corruption of foreign public officials. Article 1 of the Convention requires parties to make it a criminal offence to bribe a foreign public official. The UK did so in the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act. Article 5 makes provisions to enforce Article 1. It rules out the termination of corruption investigations on grounds other than the merits of the case. Signatory governments specifically undertake not to be influenced “by the potential effect [of an investigation] upon relations with another State . . . .” But the SFO Director’s decision to suspend the investigation was based on considerations of potential damage to relations with Saudi Arabia if the BAE-Saudi arms deals investigation continued. Article 5 also prevents signatories from being “influenced by considerations of national economic interest” in deciding whether to terminate an investigation.” Yet T
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