Be brave and take a radical turn23 Jun 2008LABOUR appears to be in political freefall without a parachute. This is partly because of the collapse of many ?new? Labour orthodoxies ? the triangulations and trimmings based around a mythical middle England. This model now almost appears to belong to a different era, but to many it seems there is no coherent alternative to put in its place or too little time to implement it. That doesn?t have to be the case. I believe there is a way to regain the trust and support of those who are deserting Labour by meeting their aspirations for their place in a fairer society. Recent election results demonstrate that support for the Labour Party is disintegrating. In Crewe, London and across the country in the local elections, the verdict was damning. But, as many of us have been flagging up over the last few years, this did not fall out of the sky, with the biggest shifts among public services workers and more generally among working-class labour voters. In response, all we heard was: ?Let?s not go back to the 1980s?. As if anyone wanted to. The other false accusation was that we wanted to retreat to some ?old Labour? comfort zone. These are trite responses to a careful analysis of the trend in electoral decline. A year ago change was promised, but little delivered, as the general election that never was meant a rewind back to the old playbook of triangulation and tacking to the right. Increasingly we are outflanked by a modern conservatism than maintains a more literate language. It talks about values and relationships, it empathises with people who are struggling, it appears to be going with the grain of people?s vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, some on our own side are adding to this topsy-turvy atmosphere by pitching for public spending cuts and tax cuts. We are in danger of trading off the very essence of social democracy. At the heart of the debate is what the people of this country aspire to. These aspirations are not defined by individualist, Thatcherite, pro-private, anti-public greed, but by expectations of a political process that will focus on removing the barriers to realising aspirations in terms of poverty, child-care, access to housing, leisure, arts, culture and so on. It is not the aspiration of climbing the ladder and breaking the rungs after you. There is a formula at the heart of the Government based around a fundamental rupture between marginal seats and Labour?s heartlands. It cynically counter-poses aspiration and our core vote. We need politicians to break from this disparaging segmentation of the country and its associated patronising in terms of who is and isn?t aspirational. Politically, we need to reclaim the very nature of aspiration. We need to decontaminate it from the toxic interpretation of those such as Business Secretary John Hutton who see aspiration as a call for more millionaires and tax protection for fat cats. Voters are leaving Labour because of our failure to deal with their real aspirations, in terms of housing, their working poverty, their scramble over limited resources, their desperate desire for mobility and resources. These aspirations depend on collectivist social democratic actions. So we need to start again. Simply put, why don?t we say that our purpose is to build a fairer, more equal and sustainable country and planet? With that as a goal, we need to get behind some policies which are promoted in a language and story that allows people to render intelligible their concerns and aspirations. They could include: * a windfall tax on oil companies to help those struggling with escalating fuel bills, specifically those in fuel poverty;
* a new fair employment clause in all public contracts to end the race to the bottom in the world of work;
* building homes for families, allowing councils to build for renting;
* a fairer tax system with a new top rate and a cut in taxes for the low paid with all new revenues hypothecated to boost benefit levels for the poor;
* a moratorium on the private sector role in delivering front-line public services;
* protection for the universal service obligation of the Post Office;
* help children get healthy with free schools meals for all;
* access to all local authority sports facilities free for children under 16;
* make work pay by ending the national minimum wage rates and paying the rate for the job;
* abolishing health inequalities through proper funding of primary care;
* democratising the police through greater local accountability and elections;
* pioneering local area agreements to offer real and enduring devolution drawn up and delivered locally;
* a new radical covenant between the people and the military funded by the scrapping of Trident;
* workplace environmental reps to make work healthier and more fulfilling;
* greater working time flexibility for parents;
* tackling the legacy of Home Office failure with the introduction of earned regularisation of unregularised migrants. These will meet the real aspirations or real people in real need ? not least that half of the population which shares just 6 per cent of Britain?s wealth, while the top 1 per cent owns a quarter of it. The very rich have become the new untouchables through the myth that their massive wealth will somehow flow to the rest of us and that, if we dare tax them fairly, they will jump ship to another country. A new politics of hope must start with idealism and the belief that another world is possible. No one?s life should be compromised by the brute luck of birth. Utopianism has been given a bad name by those who want everything to stay the same. The National Health Service, full employment and even the minimum wage were all initially decried as hopelessly utopian, but people had the courage and the desire to struggle to make them a reality. Political leaders are reluctant to take a lead. They play it safe, caught in the trap of electoral timidity when the moment demands bravery. This is not a surprise. History teaches us that lasting changes ? from the vote and the NHS and on to greater women?s equality ? were not handed down from on high by benevolent politicians, but fought for by millions of people, convinced that the time for change had come. The bottom line is this. We can fight to change the direction of the party ? but only if we have the political will. Given the patterns of injustice that we see every day, it is no less than a categorical imperative that we accept the challenge to change this country. It cannot be beyond our collective wit to do so. We could start by organising ? and quickly ? a lurch to the centre-left. Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham. This is an edited extract of a keynote speech given to the annual Compass conference in London last weekend.
Big Oil’s Big Lie23 Jun 2008Of course, it’s not a crime, and it’s hard to see how, in a free society, it could or should become one. But the culpability of the energy firms the climate scientist James Hansen will indict in his testimony to Congress today is clear. If we fail to stop runaway climate change, it will be largely because of campaigning by oil, coal and electricity companies, and the network of lobbyists, fake experts and thinktanks they have sponsored. The operation sprang directly from Big Tobacco’s war against science. It has used the same fake experts, the same public relations companies and the same tactics: as I showed in my book Heat, the campaign against action on climate change was partly launched by the tobacco company Philip Morris. But while the tobacco companies’ professional liars were smoked out by a massive class action in the US, the sponsored climate change deniers still have massive influence over public perception. A survey published yesterday by the Observer shows that six out of ten people in Britain agreed that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change.” This is an inaccurate perception, which results from Big Energy’s lobbying. Almost without exception, the scientists who claim to doubt that manmade climate change is taking place fall into two categories: either they are not qualified in the branch of science they are discussing or they have received money from fossil fuel companies. Of all the self-professed climate “sceptics”, I have been able to find only one ? Dr John Christy of the University of Alabama ? who has relevant qualifications and who does not appear to have received fees from lobby groups or thinktanks sponsored by the energy companies. But even he has had to admit that the figures on which he based his claims were the results of “errors in the ? data”. The others are the very opposite of sceptics. Many of them are paid to start with a conclusion ? that climate change isn’t happening or isn’t important ? then to find data and arguments to support it. In most cases, they cherrypick scientific findings; in a few cases, like the fake scientific paper attached to the celebrated Oregon petition, they make them up altogether. But people who don’t understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a pamphlet are taken in. The energy companies’ propaganda campaign is amplified by scientific illiterates in the media, such as Melanie Phillips, Christopher Booker, Nigel Lawson, Alexander Cockburn and the television producer (who made Channel 4’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle) Martin Durkin. I don’t believe that the energy companies should be prosecuted for commissioning the truckload of trash their sponsored experts publish. But their campaign of disinformation must be exposed again and again. Like the tobacco lobbyists, they are not only delaying essential public action; they also create the impression that science is for sale to the highest bidder. The awful truth is that sometimes it is.
Another Treaty That Won’t Lie Down23 Jun 2008The Irish government, obliged by its own national constitution to put the question of the Lisbon Treaty to the vote, will win little sympathy from its ‘partners’ in the European Union. Those national leaders who did not dare to put the matter to the vote, and those who were bullied out of doing so by more powerful actors in the EU drama – the Commission and the big member states – will breathe a sigh of relief that they cannot be blamed for this farce. When EU leaders gather for their regular summit meeting in Brussels at the end of this week, the Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen is going to have some explaining to do. The instructions from Brussels were quite clear. A second round of ‘No’ votes must be avoided at all costs. You might compare the Taoiseach’s position to that of a minor gang leader required to explain to a mafia boss why takings are down from his protection rackets. He can whinge all he likes about constitutional obligations, but having caused this mess he will be expected to offer a feasible way out of the brown stuff into which the leaders gathered in Brussels find themselves sinking. Of course, there is only one honest, democratic way out, and that is to abandon the whole project. The constitutional position is quite clear. The Lisbon Treaty, like the virtually identical Constitutional Treaty before it, is dead. And yet what is almost certain to happen is that a set of clearly rejected constitutional arrangements will be imposed on the peoples of 27 countries. Three countries which held popular votes have actually rejected one or the other version. Only Spain and Luxembourg held referenda which resulted in approval, but what matters here is not the three-two scoreline. The rules in the case of both the Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty were simple. If one country rejected either, it fell. Modern European politics is, however, a game which can be halted at any time by one team, the ruling elite, which can then proceed to change the rules. It also gets to appoint the referee. People voted against these treaties for a variety of reasons. If Lisbon is imposed, small countries will lose power. National institutions under democratic control, or at least influence, will see their powers transferred to unelected and unanswerable bodies. National vetoes will disappear across a range of policy areas, so that ever more laws can be imposed which have the assent of neither the government nor the parliament of the member state involved. A European army will be born. And neoliberal economic policies which are good for no-one but multinational corporations and international criminals will be reinforced. The Irish in particular could see much to alarm them in a treaty which would jeopardise their military neutrality, undermine their agriculture and allow unprecedented interference in their system of taxation, until recently an unquestioned national preserve. Their reasons for voting ‘no’ are, however, their own affair. As in other contexts, no means no, whatever motives may lie behind it. Yet the Taoiseach has said only that there is no “quick fix”. He has also said that Ireland will do its best not to halt what he describes as “the ambitious project of EU reform”. European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, meanwhile, has joined the leaders of many EU member states in refusing to declare the treaty dead. The British government has said that the ratification process will continue. So, you can vote Yes, you can vote No, but the process is more akin to a multiple choice test than an election, and don’t worry, if you don’t get the answer right the first time, you’ll likely be given a second chance. Similarly, depending on where you live you can vote social democrat, Labour, Christian Democrat, Liberal, Communist or for the Man in the Moon, but don’t expect it to make any serious difference to the way in which your country is governed, the decisions your government takes, or life in general. There are now only two sets of interests which really matter: those of multinational corporations and those, sometimes still slightly different, of the governments and political parties which now exist primarily to serve their interests. This includes not just conservatives but Europe’s social democratic and labour parties, most Green parties – our own being an honourable exception – and the whole ragbag of centre-left, centrist and right wing groups which are increasingly indistinguishable at the level of policy. So, viciously anti-trade union labour rulings by the European Court of Justice go unchallenged by parties which were created by those same trade unions. And the EU’s ‘flexicurity’ proposals, which translate as flexibility for us, and security for them, are enthusiastically supported by parties built by working people to defend their interests The European Union, which likes to present its opponents as narrow nationalists and backward-looking xenophobes, is dragging us back to a time before working people could demand, if nothing else, that they be treated with respect, paid a living wage, and allowed to organise in pursuit of their legitimate demands. By imposing neoliberal economics on twenty-seven member states, the EU is making real international cooperation, of the kind needed to confront the crises facing us in a world increasingly spinning out of control, impossible. The Irish people, like those of France and the Netherlands before them, have had the courage and good sense to vote to reject the heinous Lisbon Treaty and thereby give us a further chance to confront those who would deprive us of our rights and of our livelihoods. This time we must seize it with both hands.
Brutality and Fear23 Jun 2008The human costs of dawn raids There are some statistics that the New Labour government makes sure the public know about. The constant rise in the number of police officers patrolling British streets for example; the number of arrests that these police officers carry out; or the relentless year by year increase in people incarcerated in prisons up and down the country. Another of these statistics is the number of people that are removed from the UK. The higher the figure, the better; and last year this statistic reached an all time high. Every eight minutes a person was removed, one way or another, from the country. According to the Home Office, these numbers equate, quite simply, to a form of success: evidence that ?strong controls are working?. So it is ironic that the means through which these figures are realised are shrouded in secrecy and misinformation. Dawn raids ? or to use their official term ?enforcement visits? ? are rarely discussed in the same self-congratulatory tones as the aims they supposedly achieve. And there is a reason for this. They are brutal. They rip people from their homes at the time that is least expected. And they tear families apart from each other; sometimes never to see each other again. Dawn raids have emerged as a central facet of New Labour?s asylum and immigration policies, with little semblance of public debate. Statistics are not available to the public, yet what evidence there is suggests that dawn raids are carried out at rapid pace. Records of the number of dawn raids have only been made available since April 2005, but in the House of Commons in 2007, the Minister of State for Borders and Immigration explained that 8,100 ?enforcement operations? were carried out before 8 am in 2006. On average, that is roughly twenty-two dawn raids a day. Dawn raids are carried out explicitly for the purposes of detention and removal. Yet of these 8,100 conducted, only 2,009 led to arrests. A ?success? rate that equates to roughly one out of every four suggests that they are – from one perspective – an ineffective way of meeting government targets for ?removing more failed asylum seekers than new anticipated unfounded applications?. Yet it is exactly these targets that continue to justify their use. Ensuring the former figure is higher than the latter is described as ?public performance? and according to Liz Fekete from the Institute of Race Relations, ensures that ?[i]n the process, the fact that those who seek refuge?are human beings, not mere statistics, is lost?. This reduction of people to statistics covers a horrifying level of abuse, harm, and fear. As stated above, dawn raids are particularly barbaric. They are carried out in the early morning ? when people are most likely to be at home, asleep, and disorientated ? apparently in ?the interests of health and safety and to help minimise disruption?. But the reality of dawn raids suggests that health and safety is far down the list of priorities. For example, the 1993 raid on immigraion overstayer Joy Gardner led to her death, after she was placed in a body belt, had her wrists, thighs and ankles tied to handcuffs and belts, and thirteen feet of tape wrapped around her mouth to stop her making any noise. Statistics for the number and nature of complaints made by people in relation to dawn raids are not available. But work by the Border and Immigration Agency Complaints Audit Committee gives some idea of mechanisms of redress. In their 2006/7 Annual Report the Complaints Audits Committee emphasised that 20% of records of complaints against BIA had gone ?missing? (although this was later reduced to 15%), and of complaints against arrest teams their audit sample showed that ?none was handled in time?. Of overall complaints, those of criminal behaviour (some of which were assault) rose 7% from the previous year. Where there is hope though, it rests within continuing actions of campaigners, many of whom are in the asylum process, who continue to display solidarity, raise awareness, and resist. In doing so, they emphasise not only their refusal to succumb to one of the fiercest tools available to the Home Office; but the wider polices in which these activities are concretely embedded.
Big Oil Cashes in on Iraq Slaughter22 Jun 2008Four major US, British and French oil companies are getting their hands on the petroleum reserves of Iraq for the first time in 36 years, based on no-bid contracts, the New York Times reported Thursday. These deals reached with the US-backed regime in Baghdad have placed the five-year-old US war of aggression in the clearest possible perspective. For the thousands of American families who have seen their sons and daughters killed in the Iraq war or return maimed or psychologically damaged, the knowledge that their sacrifices have opened up potentially huge new profit streams for Exxon-Mobil, Shell, British Petroleum and Total will provide cold comfort. For the over one million Iraqis killed and the millions more turned into refugees or made homeless in their own land, an overriding justification for their suffering has now been laid bare. It was to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy corporate executives and major shareholders of Big Oil. As the New York Times reported Thursday: ?The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.? The Times acknowledged that ?The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India.? No-bid deals in the oil sector are not only ?unusual,? under conditions in which oil demand is at an all-time high crude is selling for nearly $140 a barrel and energy-producing countries around the world?Russia, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Bolivia and others?are exerting a tighter national grip over their reserves. Such contracts cannot be explained outside of their being negotiated at the point of a gun. The deals have been structured as ?service agreements? in order to circumvent restrictions that would have ensued under Iraq?s draft oil law, which the Iraqi parliament has proven unable to pass because of both nationalist opposition to foreign exploitation of the country?s reserves and disputes between the federal government and Iraqi regional entities over control of the oil fields. In reality, however, the two-year deals provide for payment to foreign companies in oil, opening up the possibility of substantial profits. Moreover, as one oil expert commented, they provide the ?foothold? for the four major Western companies, paving the way to far more intensive exploitation. A total of 46 companies, including Lukoil of Russia, China National, India?s major oil company and others had memorandums of understanding with the Iraqi Oil Ministry, according to the Times. Yet none of them were allowed to bid for contracts. Instead, the deals are being handed over without any competition to Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Total and British Petroleum. The Times comments, ?While the current contracts are unrelated to the companies? previous work in Iraq, in a twist of corporate history for some of the world?s largest companies, all four oil majors that had lost their concessions in Iraq are now back.? In a similar vein, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News: ?The United States government has stayed out of the matter of awarding the Iraqi oil contracts. It?s a private sector matter.? However Rice, a former director of Chevron, which is participating in one of the contracts in a consortium with Total, acknowledged that with the new deals ?it?s starting to get interesting in Iraq.? This is all nonsense and lies. The new contracts have everything to do with the role played by these companies decades ago and their determination to wrest back the control they exercised before Iraq nationalized its oil industry and ejected the US and British oil giants in 1972, a move that ushered in a wave of nationalizations throughout the oil-producing countries. Before then, the Iraq Petroleum Company was dominated by the US and British companies, which controlled three-quarters of the country?s oil production. Moreover, the US government has worked over decades to re-impose American domination over Iraq, which has the second largest proven oil reserves?115 billion barrels?and the largest unexplored reserves of any country in the world. The disingenuous explanation given by the US-dominated Iraqi regime?and echoed by the Times?for the supposedly serendipitous return to dominance of the very companies that controlled the country?s oil production 36 years ago is that ?they had been advising the ministry without charge.? Yet, as the Times article notes, Russia?s Lukoil, which had been training Iraqi oil engineers free of charge, is being thrown out of an oilfield where it held a previously signed contract, in order to make way for Chevron and Total. The reality is that these contracts are the direct product of armed aggression. In the wake of the invasion, US troops seized control of the oilfields and secured the Oil Ministry in Baghdad, even as it left every other governmental and cultural institution to the mercy of the looters. It then selected Phillip Carroll, the former president of Shell Oil, to head up an ?advisory board? to assume control over the ministry. As the Times delicately notes: ?It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq?s Oil Ministry.? The drive by the US government and the oil monopolies to regain their control over Iraq?s oil wealth began well before the Bush administration launched its unprovoked war in March 2003 and constitutes a bipartisan policy that has been pursued by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the conditions emerged for US imperialism to pursue this strategic aim with continuously escalating violence and aggression. After Iraq?s infrastructure was shattered in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the Clinton administration campaigned for punishing United Nations sanctions that choked off essential food and medical supplies and resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of additional lives. The critical strategic aim of these sanctions was to block the resumption of oil production and prevent the realization of contracts signed between the government of Saddam Hussein and foreign rivals of the big US and British companies, particularly Russian and Chinese producers as well as France?s Total. This was combined with stepped-up military attacks, as the Clinton administration hammered Iraq with cruise missiles in a series of strikes dubbed Operation Phoenix Scorpion, Operation Desert Thunder and Operation Desert Fox, all preludes to the ultimate invasion. At the same time, Clinton signed into law the ?Iraq Liberation Act of 1998,? leveling the charges of ?weapons of mass destruction? that would be used to justify war less than three years later and declaring that US policy was ?to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.? With the installation of the Bush administration, preparations for the armed takeover of Iraq began in earnest. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act from a national energy task force chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney in early 2001 included a map of Iraq?s oilfields and a list of ?foreign suitors for Iraqi oilfield contracts.? The imposition of the contracts for the four big oil firms has confirmed what the Iraq war was about from its conception?well before the September 11, 2001 attacks. The false claims about ?weapons of mass destruction? and the invention of ties between Baghdad and Al Qaeda were pretexts for a war aimed at re-establishing semi-colonial control over Iraq and its oil wealth, thereby furthering the US drive for global hegemony. What is involved is a conspiracy by the government and powerful corporations to foist a war of aggression onto the American people. Far from provoking outrage or the calls for investigations, however, news of the oil contracts has been met with a deafening silence from the mass media and the political establishment alike. The same television news outlets that trumpeted the Bush administration?s lies about WMD and terrorism passed over the oil deals without a mention. There is ample evidence that furthering the interests of the oil conglomerates and American imperialism as a whole by continuing the war and occupation in Iraq remains a consensus policy supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. On the same day that news of the oil contracts broke, the Democratic leadership of the House moved to approve another $165 billion Iraq war funding package, bringing the total amount legislated by Congress to continue a war that is opposed by the overwhelming majority of the American people to over $600 billion. The 2008 presidential election contest has been presented by the media and the two presidential candidates?Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain?as a choice between a US withdrawal from Iraq or continuing the war until victory. Yet, the ongoing negotiations over a ?Status of Force Agreement,? or SOFA, providing for the long-term presence of US occupation troops in the country has pointed to an underlying agreement on Washington?s future course. Iraq?s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, in Washington for the talks on the SOFA, held discussions this week with both McCain and Obama on future US policy in the country. The Washington Post quoted Zebari Wednesday as saying that Obama had assured him that a Democratic administration would ?not take any irresponsible, reckless, sudden decisions or actions.? Obama explained, he said, that he ?wants redeployment,? but that he ?is not interested to pull all troops out. He wants a residual force? in Iraq to carry out anti-terrorist operations, protect US facilities and train Iraqi security forces. According to the Post the Iraqi foreign minister concluded that ?there was ?not too much difference? between Obama?s position and that of the presumptive Republican nominee…? In other words, both candidates are determined to continue shedding blood?Iraqi and US alike?to advance the cause of securing Iraq?s oil reserves for Exxon-Mobil and the other energy corporations and to create a base of operations for new and even bloodier wars of aggression in the region, including against Iran. See Also:
Iraq: New offensive targets Sadrist movement in Amarah
[18 June 2008]
US “confident” of Iraq bases agreement despite opposition
[13 June 2008]
US-backed crackdown in Basra paves way for opening up Iraq?s oil and gas
[25 April 2008]
Wall Street drools over prospect of capturing Iraq oil wealth
[6 March 2007]
Afghanistan in an Amorphous War22 Jun 2008An incident causing major loss of life in Iraq, and an enduring pattern of low-level violence in north Africa, have created concern that the cautious sense of progress in the campaign against al-Qaida in recent months may prove more apparent than real. Even these serious events, however, are overshadowed by evidence of a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. At the same time, all these theatres of the global "war on terror" share underlying affinities that United States strategy in this war is tending to reinforce. The Iraqi incident was a car-bomb attack on a crowded Baghdad market on 17 June 2008 which killed sixty-three people and wounded seventy-eight. This, the most destructive explosion in the city since 6 March, was all the more painful for coming at a time when a certain optimism about Iraq's security and wider prospects was achieving traction (see "Iraq starts to fix itself", Economist, 12 June 2008). A further aspect of this was the declining number of victims, both American (in May 2008, nineteen soldiers died, the lowest monthly total than in any month since the war began in March 2003) and Iraqi (civilian casualties were also at a relatively low level in May – although still in the hundreds). These signs of improvements had done much to support the view – expressed most vocally on the American right, but shared by others too – that the war in Iraq was, or was becoming, winnable. Those sympathetic to John McCain in the presidential campaign suggest that he should make this theme (and his broader support for the war and the US's military "surge" strategy) a centrepiece of his contest with Barack Obama (see Charles Krauthammer, "McCain must make case for Iraq", Newsday, 19 Jun 2008). The implication here is that Iraq is and will remain what it has been – the pivot of the entire "war on terror", where the now-expected destruction of what is termed "al-Qaida in Iraq" is a sign of decisive progress in the war as a whole. The Afghan landscape The progress that has been made in increasing security for many Iraqi citizens – partly through the social division of much of the population by repeated bouts of fighting and expulsion, partly through the deals made with elements of the Sunni community against al-Qaida forces, partly though the exhaustions of war – is given as justification of this optimistic view. This approach, however, tends to ignore other, more uncomfortable pointers to the al-Qaida movement's condition – including the attack on 2 June on the Danish embassy in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad; and a series of bombings on 4-8 June in Algeria that killed a number of people (the precise total is in dispute). The most important of these trends is the upsurge in violence in Afghanistan. In May 2008, the deaths among coalition troops in that country exceeded those in Iraq for the first time; June has also been marked by numerous hits against British troops, which took the total killed in the war to 106. There had earlier been a widespread anticipation that the summer months would see a renewed Taliban offensive in southern Afghanistan, although there was also some caution about the prospect of major attacks (see "Al-Qaida's afterlife", 29 May 2008). The fact that overwhelming firepower is available to Nato forces has made it all the more likely that Taliban and other militias would opt to diversify and "miniaturise" its tactics, including the use of roadside- and suicide-bombs. The war in Afghanistan has been attracting less media attention in the United States than that in Iraq, and the evolving reportage of the presidential campaign may accentuate the contrast (see Jim Malone, "Iraq: The Defining Difference Between McCain, Obama", VOA, 13 June 2008). But inside the Pentagon it was becoming clear that the security problem there was rapidly developing, in part because many districts in western Pakistan had become safe havens for Taliban, al-Qaida and other militias. The US response to this increased threat has been threefold: increase troop levels in Afghanistan and seek to take overall responsibility for the counterinsurgency war, at least in the southern and southeastern parts of the country pressurise Pakistan to limit militia operations in its own western districts make a determined effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. An announcement by Britain's ministry of defence series of incidents in which British troops were killed led the country's Britain's ministry of defence to announce a further increase of 230 in troop numbers, taking the total to around 8,030 by spring 2009 – though this was linked to a claim that the Taliban were in retreat rather than making gains. This bullish assessment contrasted with a more cautious measure of the condition of security in Afghanistan from the senior US army commander in the country, General Dan K McNeill, at the end of his sixteen-month posting on 3 June (see Ann Scott Tyson, "A Sober Assessment of Afghanistan", Washington Post, 15 June 2008). McNeill emphasised that the last three years had seen a gradual resurgence of Taliban activity. At the same time, the number of troops operating under Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) had risen over a three-year period to 53,000 from forty countries. But this was not enough, McNeill contended: a much larger troop deployment would be required if the Taliban militias were to be defeated. The Taliban vision Three major developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan that took place within days of McNeill's departure from the country both underpinned his judgment and gave an indication of the likely course of events in summer 2008. The first was the killing on 10 June of eleven members of Pakistan's official Frontier Corps as a result of a US air-strike. Some reports say that the Pakistani troops were actually aiding a Taliban group under attack by US and Afghan troops close to the border. This has not been confirmed, but it would not be entirely surprising, given local sympathies for fellow-Pushtun Pakistani paramilitaries in some parts of the Pakistani army (see Anna Mulrine, "Pakistan's Border Badlands Are a Challenge for the Next President", US News & World Report, 13 June 2008. More important, though, is the reaction within Pakistan to this event. The loss of life has intensified a deep-seated public antipathy to the United States and its conduct of its "war on terror". The killing of the Frontier Corps soldiers will make it difficult for a Pakistani government of any persuasion to work with Washington. Moreover, the incident comes at a time when the Pentagon's closest ally in Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf – still the country's president, though weakened after the elections of February 2008 – is facing severe political challenges to his authority, and may even be obliged to resign in the next few weeks (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, "US strike hits Pakistan's raw nerve", Asia Times, 12 June 2008). The second development was the extraordinary break-out from Sarpoza prison in Kandahar, in an operation planned and executed by Taliban elements. In a coordinated assault where the explosion of a bomb hidden in a road-tanker was followed by a direct paramilitary invasion of the city's main prison, several hundred Taliban prisoners were released. The incident is all the more serious because (as is perhaps not fully appreciated in the western media) Kandahar is one of the main centres of coalition military resources in Afghanistan, host (for example) to its second-largest air base. The third development compounded the Taliban attack on the jail. This was the deployment of at least 500 paramilitaries to overrun a number of villages close to Kandahar. At the same time, the combination of the jail attack and the subsequent offensive is unlikely to mark the start of a Taliban operation to take control of Kandahar, since Nato with all its firepower will not allow that to happen. What is more probable is that this operation is a show of strength, and the prelude to a Nato counter-offensive which the Taliban forces will respond to by melting away until the next opportunity is chosen. The two actions show is that the Taliban militias do not have to limit their operations to small-scale guerrilla attacks; the level of their support means that they are well beyond that and can engage in large-scale offensives too, at a time of their own choosing. More generally, the Taliban strategists will see this as one part of the early stage of a decades-long war; they do not have to win in the conventional military sense, they merely have to outlast those foreign forces seen as the occupiers, especially in the face of divisions within Nato (see Anna Mulrine, "A Struggling Coalition of the Willing and the Not-So-Willing", US News & World Report, 16 June 2008). The global horizon These recent developments in Afghanistan confirm that the focus of the US "war on terror" may really be shifting eastwards. At the very moment when neo-conservative elements in Washington speak of winning the Iraq war, that very war is becoming less relevant in the context of the larger picture. The US insistence on maintaining a very large military presence there indicates that the Iraq war is far from reaching its endgame, but in one sense it has already served its purpose (see Tom Englehardt, "The Greatest Story Never Told: Finally, the US Mega-Bases in Iraq Make the News", TomDispatch.com, 15 June 2008). More than five years of fighting in Iraq have given the wider al-Qaida / jihadist movement a new generation of paramilitaries trained against well-armed and equipped US soldiers and marines. Many of the tactics honed in Iraq are now being applied in Afghanistan, not least in the form of roadside bombs and the tactical nous employed to avoid Nato's air power (see Caroline Gammell & Tom Coghlan, "The increasing sophistication of Afghanistan's roadside bombs", Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2008). All this, combined with the persistent uncertainties in Iraq, and the significant and under-reported currents in north Africa, means that the "war on terror" has moved on. Whether they are right or wrong, those who claim that Iraq is or is becoming a success fail to realise that the country's importance in the global arena of conflict is diminishing. This has been the recurrent story of the George W Bush administration's "war on terror". It is a further reason to argue that, in the absence of fundamental changes of approach, the world is still in the early stages of a decades-long confrontation.
Shell tanker drivers? strike20 Jun 2008Last weekend?s strike by 641 Shell oil tanker drivers foreshadows a summer of discontent over low pay rises and soaring food and fuel bills. Unconfirmed reports suggest they have been offered a 14 percent pay rise, undermining the government?s 2 percent target but little more than the original offer of 7.3 percent this year and 6 percent next, which the drivers rejected before last weekend?s strike. Unite trade union leaders have called off another four-day strike due to start this Friday and an overtime ban and are recommending drivers accept the deal. They have refused to make the deal public, confining themselves to a joint statement with the two contractors employing the drivers, Hoyer UK and Suckling Transport, saying they were ?pleased to confirm that they have successfully concluded pay talks.? The government became extremely nervous at the speed with which many areas of the country ran out of fuel last weekend, the solidarity for the strikers shown by drivers from other companies and the support given by the public. The same nervousness goes for union leaders who, witnessing the chaotic effects of the strike and its spread to other workers in a way reminiscent of the secondary action banned by the Conservatives in the 1980s and upheld by Labour, moved quickly to close it down. Despite the strike only involving drivers delivering to Shell petrol stations?about 10 percent of the UK?s total?it quickly began to bite as they picketed oil refineries and distribution depots. By Monday, nearly 700 petrol stations out of the 8,700 in the UK had run out of diesel and unleaded petrol. From the first hours of the strike, tanker drivers from BP and other companies refused to cross picket lines. Striking workers picketed three oil depots in Scotland?at Grangemouth oil refinery, Aberdeen and Inverness?waving banners saying, ?Shell, gallons of greed? and ?Shell drivers over a barrel.? Only 3 tankers left the Grangemouth depot in the first seven hours of the four-day dispute, instead of the usual 40 vehicles an hour, and 6 turned away. On Monday, drivers from other companies walked out to join the strikers at Grangemouth after 11 workers from Scottish Fuels?a spin-off from BP?were reportedly suspended for refusing to cross the picket line and ?refusing to accept management instructions.? Faced with the possibility of the dispute escalating, Scottish Fuels backed down and reinstated the workers. Trade union leaders sought to bury the incident, claiming it had all been a ?misunderstanding? and was now over. Grangemouth, which is one of the most vital oil distribution centres, delivering one third of the UK?s supply, was the scene of a strike by workers at another BP spin-off company, Ineos, in April, protesting cuts to the company?s pension scheme. Around 15 BP drivers, who had arrived with a police escort for the nightshift at the Stanlow refinery in Cheshire, then refused to work, joined striking drivers. Some independent drivers also drove away after talking to pickets. In Plymouth, drivers from every fuel company at the local distribution depot joined the strike, leading to nearly all the petrol stations in the counties of Devon and Cornwall running out of fuel. The local Business Council chairman, Tim Jones, told the BBC, ?The impact of this right across the board is absolutely horrifying. ?The frustration and anger among the business community is growing by the hour. ?Fuel prices are already high, there is a credit crunch and this is the last straw. Businesses are on their knees.? The government relaxed competition law to allow fuel companies to compare stocks and target areas where fuel was short and also prepared emergency powers to ration petrol. It instructed the police to break up any picket lines that tried to prevent tankers from leaving or entering refineries or fuel depots and put the Army on standby to drive fuel tankers. Chancellor Alistair Darling claimed on Wednesday that large pay rises for public- and private-sector workers would fuel rising prices and said, ?That would be a disaster, not just for the country but for each and every one of us.? ?If you get yourself into a position where every penny extra you get through pay rises is eaten up through price rises, through inflation, then we will get into precisely the problems Britain had in the Seventies, the Eighties, and even the early Nineties, when inflation was at very high levels,? he said. ?We have got to be vigilant in relation to all pay?public and private sector pay alike?because if we get ourselves into that spiral it will take years to get out of it.? Darling spoke out after inflation hit a 10-year high of 3.3 per cent, and forecasts suggest it could hit 4 percent or higher within the next few months. For only the second time since the Bank of England was made independent, the level of inflation has risen more than 1 percentage point above the target?forcing its chairman Mervyn King to write to the Chancellor explaining how he plans to control the problem. King says that inflation will stay ?markedly? above the 2 percent target for the foreseeable future suggesting interest rate cuts are off the agenda. At the last meeting of the Bank, interest rates were kept at the same level, but some board members wanted them to rise. Workers made to pay for slump Darling?s insistence on below-inflation pay awards is part of a continued effort to place the burden of the coming economic slump on the backs of working people. For a worker on the average salary of 23,750 and receiving the current average 3.2 percent pay rise, it means take-home pay rising by 500 a year?about half the 1,000 extra that the average family has to find just to pay for their annual food and drink alone and before they pay for soaring fuel, housing and transport costs. According to figures published by the Office of National Statistics this week, the cost of food and drink has risen nearly 8 percent this year, the highest increase since 1990. Essential foods, such as bread and butter, have leapt by nearly 20 percent. The price of gas and electricity has soared and could go up another 50 percent over the coming year, and other utility suppliers such as water companies are planning to announce double-digit price rises soon. Average household heating and fuel bills will rise by more than 400. At the same time, the number of people without jobs is currently 1.64 million and rising sharply. It is widely predicted to keep going up for the next 18 months. These sorts of price rises have fuelled anger amongst the population as a whole and growing militancy amongst workers, especially as the government declared that pay rises had to be kept to 2 percent a year for years to come. There have already been strikes by postal workers, teachers and civil servants in protest of pay levels. Next week, the public sector union, Unison, will announce the result of a ballot on industrial action by 600,000 council workers who have already rejected an offer of just below 2.5 per cent. The union?s general secretary, Dave Prentis, warned that a dispute with public sector workers could bring the government down at the next election?raising the nightmare scenario haunting Labour politicians of a repeat of the 1978-1979 Winter of Discontent that led to the collapse of the last Labour government. Darling tried to downplay the drivers? pay rise, insisting that it was a one-off award due to the ?peculiar? nature of the oil industry?a line repeated by Business Secretary John Hutton. In fact, there is nothing peculiar about the conditions facing workers in the oil industry. What has happened to the oil tanker drivers?including contracting out to slash existing wage rates?is something every worker or professional person will recognise and most will have experienced. It was a major reason why attempts to whip up hostility against the drivers remained largely unsuccessful. As Gary from Lincolnshire wrote to the right-wing Daily Mail ?...it?s not a disgraceful pay rise. Open your eyes to reality. What these tanker drivers have received is what all of us should get. It?s only fair and reasonable. If you believe the CPI inflation rate of 3.1 percent then you have been totally duped by the government. Wake up Britain we ALL deserve 14 percent and don?t let them fool you.? Twenty years ago, tanker drivers were amongst the best-paid sections of the working class and enjoyed relatively good conditions and pension benefits. Under the impact of globalisation, all this has changed. Figures released by Unite showed that the drivers have suffered a drastic decline in their wages and conditions since the 1990s, when Shell outsourced their tankering operations. At the time, trade unions at the company and at countless other companies and public services across the UK sold the concept of outsourcing to their members, saying that under employment protection (TUPE) rules, they would keep the same pay and conditions. The fact that new starters could be employed at different rates was downplayed or ignored. According to Unite, in 1992, a driver typically earned approximately 32,000 (US$62,400) per year for a 37-hour week. Today, 16 years later, that same driver, employed by contractors Hoyer UK and Suckling would be earning the same 32,000-per-year basic wage for working a 48-hour working week?considerably closer to the industry average of 25,000. As the strike started, Unite General Secretary Tony Woodley blustered, ?This should have been solved six months ago. Shell outsourced my members? jobs years ago to cut costs and have been very successful at the workers? expense. ?Despite what management is saying, our members are on a basic wage of 31,800 and if they had remained working for Shell that would now be 46,000. What we are asking for is a basic wage of 36,000.? Woodley argued for a pay rise by citing yet another attack on drivers? conditions his union failed to fight?pensions. ?It would cost just 1 million to solve this dispute?money they have already saved from the workers? pension scheme alone,? he said. Unite Assistant General Secretary Len McCluskey chimed in, stating that Shell ?is one of the most profitable companies on earth and it now needs to provide the financial flexibility to avert this dispute. It is no use Shell bosses, who have themselves enjoyed 15 percent plus pay increases in the last year, sitting on their hands…. Shell tanker drivers are earning exactly the same today as they were fifteen years ago while working for a company that makes 1.3 billion every month, profits our members? hard work helps deliver. So Unite is saying to Shell bosses, stop hiding behind your sub-contractor and help us sort out a solution.? Shell is quite unmoved by the pathetic appeals from Woodley and McCluskey. On July 1, the company is outsourcing its IT infrastructure and the transfer of 3,200 jobs, mostly based at its Aberdeen HQ, to AT&T, EDS and T-Systems. The trade union Amicus is threatening legal action over staff redundancy terms, which Shell amended in June last year, slashing payments from 200,000 to 50,000 (US$98,700). Regional Amicus officer Graham Tran complained that ?loyal? employees were being ?dumped? and pleaded, ?We just want Shell to look after its loyal employees.? Shell says it will press ahead with plans to make pre-tax cost savings of about US$500 million per year through reorganising its structure, cutting costs and outsourcing jobs in the hope it will surpass the record 14 billion in profits it made last year. As many industry analysts point out, as oil prices soar, companies are ?increasingly examining their supply chain networks in order to make them more efficient and sustainable.? According to Unilever customer logistics director (Europe) Martin Whitcombe, manufacturing or logistics networks take a minimum of three to five years to restructure, ?so it is important that firms make changes now.? ?Oil prices are now $127-$130 a barrel. At $150 a barrel, we start thinking about our (supply chain) network; at $200 a barrel, we really start thinking about our network,? he said. According to economists Jeff Rubin and Benjamin Tal, this year?s explosion in transportation costs has offset all the trade liberalisation efforts of the past three decades. They say that the cost of transportation in 2000 when oil was US$20 a barrel was the equivalent of a 3 percent tax, but with oil at US$150 a barrel, it is equivalent to an 11 percent tariff.
London?s Embarrassment20 Jun 2008?This is the end of political correctness in London,? exulted a Conservative as newly elected Mayor Boris Johnson entered city hall. Nearly a month after the polls closed, it is still an extraordinary thought that London, of all places, is to be represented in the eyes of the world by a man like Johnson. The Tory MP from Henley (outside London) first won notoriety as a right wing columnist and sometime TV quiz show guest: a bumbling parody of a right-wing upper class twit. His extramarital affairs also attracted publicity, and he was removed from the Tory front bench. As a pundit, he struck a brusquely Thatcherite and neo-con pose. In 2005, he described Africans as ?pickanninies? and called for the re-colonisation of the continent. He applauded George Bush and the Iraq war. He opposed the Kyoto Agreement and dismissed the threat of climate change. He routinely evoked social stereotypes, casually insulting the entire populations of Liverpool and Portsmouth, among others. After a bombing atrocity, he declared that ?Islam is the problem? (there are more than 700,000 Muslims in London). In the post-modern climate, it was sometimes hard to know how seriously anyone was supposed to take Johnson?s views. But as a Conservative party candidate for the Mayor of London, Johnson could no longer shelter behind the columnist?s lazy excuses, and he waged a careful and mostly dignified campaign, distancing himself from many of his earlier remarks. His central thrust was ?against crime?, with the populist touch of replacing the new elongated, uncomfortable ?bendy buses? with much loved double decker Routemasters. And of course he inveighed against the ?political correctness? of the incumbent Livingstone regime, including its links with the Chavez government in Venezuela (which benefited poorer east Londoners with cheap fuel). Ken Livingstone first came to prominence in the early 80s as the left wing Labour leader of the Greater London Council. Here he spearheaded a progressive programme which became a flagship of resistance to Thatcher ? so much so that she abolished the Council in 1985, leaving Londoners without any form of representative London-wide government. Responding to long pent-up demand, Labour re-introduced a modified form of London government in 2000: an elected Mayor and Assembly were to enjoy carefully restricted powers (education, housing and much else was left in the hands of the 32 London boroughs) and a limited tax base. Barred by Tony Blair from standing as the Labour candidate for the newly created Mayoralty, Livingstone ran as an independent and won a historic victory. In office, he soon made it up with the Labour party, and he and Blair and then Brown learned to live with each other. In 2004, he was re-elected as mayor, this time as the as official Labour candidate. His major achievement was the introduction of the congestion charge for central London, an effective environmental policy and the first social democratic innovation in this country for more than a generation. He opposed the war on Iraq ? and in doing so faithfully represented the view of a majority of Londoners. He denounced Islamophobia and continued to be associated with the rights of ethnic minorities. But he also gave strident support to the heavy handed police tactics that led to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 and the near killing of two others in Forest Gate in 2006. When a London jury found the Metropolitan police guilty of health and safety violations in the course of the de Menezes incident, Livingstone condemned them for exposing London to terrorist attacks. Socialist rhetoric was reserved for left wing audiences. In practise, his economic policies were dictated by big business and the banks; his sole strategy for London was to compete with other cities to attract multi-national capital. Hence the vast sums poured into the Olympic project, which Livingstone championed. He opposed proposals for a modest tax on non-domiciled millionaires who spend months of the year in London. As time went on his regime became identified with croneyism and petty corruption. Not all the allegations were groundless. Livingstone certainly ran a closed shop, surrounded by a coterie dedicated to protecting his personal position, and he and they sometimes displayed a very casual approach to the prerogatives of power. The London election was heavily publicised as a personality contest though both candidates were muted during the campaign. Livingstone, in particular, was lacklustre, relying on his proven competence as incumbent and presenting himself as a safe pair of hands against Johnson?s gaffe-prone naivete. But the the campaign was given lurid fire by the extraordinary intervention of London?s main daily newspaper, The Evening Standard, which waged a ferocious assault on Livingstone. Across the city, the Standard?s familiar hoardings blazoned headlines linking Livingstone to corruption or terrorism or crime. In the end, Johnson picked up 42 per cent of the first preference votes, against Livingstone?s 36%. After the 2nd preference votes were distributed, Johnson was elected with 53%. While Livingstone?s vote held nearly steady from 2004, the Tory vote was up by more than 14%. Turn outs were higher in Johnson supporting areas in outer London than in Livingstone supporting areas in inner London. Still, Livingstone fared better in London than Labour did nationally, where it was reduced to third place with 24% of the vote, its worst local election result in forty years. The full story behind this must wait for another column. Suffice it to say that New Labour?s contempt for its core constituencies ? crystallised around the abolition of a special lower tax band for people on low incomes ? has come home to roost. Across the country, working class voters deserted Labour in record numbers. It was Labour?s performance in national government that was Livingstone?s greatest handicap in London. Here, the working class revolt against Labour was restricted to the white working class, but it destroyed Livingstone?s chances. These people had benefited little from either Labour nationally or Livingstone locally. They didn?t even get the benefit of the political gestures. Undoubtedly, part of Johnson?s triumph rested on a veiled appeal to racism and xenophobia. This was confirmed by the alarming success in the London elections of the far right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim British National Party. In the vote for mayor, Johnson received the second preferences of nearly all of the 70,000 who voted first for the BNP candidate. In addition, some 128,000 mainly Johnson supporters gave the BNP their second preferences. Most disturbingly, the BNP secured 130,000 votes ? 5.3% – in the city wide top-up vote for the London Assembly, and under the proportional representation system won a seat there for the first time. The Green Party, with 8.3% of the vote, won two seats, and the rest were divided between Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats. Since the Tories are two short of a majority the BNP member could play a significant role, though at the moment he is being shunned. So one of the world?s most successfully multicultural cities stands naked. In a climate of looming economic crisis, fear, scapegoating and bigotry fuelled the vote for the BNP and for Johnson. People who have been left out by London?s economic boom turn their resentments on their fellow Londoners, who in fact share their frustrations. Now that boom, sustained by cheap credit and high property prices, is ending. Gross inequalities created during the years of wealth have already turned London, for all its marvellous mixing, into a city of parallel universes. As incomes and standards of living are squeezed and jobs are lost, we?ll find out how well we really know each other. Speaking as a Londoner, I?m filled with dismay at the idea of Mayor Johnson, flanked by a BNP assembly member, presiding over this crisis. When the Conservatives revile ?political correctness? they have in mind not merely the gestures associated with Livingstone but any and all claims for equality, any and all resistance to racism. In that respect their celebration of Johnson?s victory as ?the end of political correctness in London? is certainly premature.
Labour refuses to answer Davis?s by-election challenge20 Jun 2008Labour will not contest the by-election forced by the resignation of shadow home secretary David Davis, which he says is intended to initiate a public debate on the government?s attack on democratic rights. The decision confirms that the Labour government is incapable of defending its extension of the period in which people can be detained without charge to 42 days?a measure that it managed to push through Parliament only with the support of nine members of the Democratic Unionist Party, reportedly ?persuaded? with financial incentives for Northern Ireland. More fundamentally, it underscores Labour?s hostility to any form of democratic accountability?a position which it made a point of principle with its decision to support the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq in defiance of popular opinion. Initially, Davis?s announcement was greeted with universal scorn and derision by the media, who claimed that his ?egotistical stunt? would backfire due to broad public support for the government?s stance. While Labour joined such claims, it refused to say if it would contest the election from the very start. Instead, having been defeated in the London Mayoral contest by Conservative Boris Johnson and with record lows in opinion polls, it turned to its closest backer, Rupert Murdoch, for help. Within hours of Davis?s resignation, Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of the Sun, boasted that he had the oligarch?s blessing to take on Davis and that ?the Sun has always been up for 42 days, or perhaps even 420 days, frankly.? MacKenzie, who said he had discussed his candidacy with Murdoch and Sun editor Rebekah Wade earlier that evening, said he was ?90 percent certain? to challenge Davis if Labour decided not to. He also revealed that Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Tony Blair had been present at the party, implying that he had Labour?s backing to act as its proxy. But as thousands of e-mails and texts to newspapers and media outlets showed that Davis?s stance had struck a chord with the public, little was heard from MacKenzie or the Sun for several days. The former editor?s claim that Murdoch would finance his candidacy?which would be illegal under electoral law?combined with the possibility that the Sun?s claim to represent the ?man in the street? would founder should it be seen to tie itself too closely to an unpopular government?appears to have done for MacKenzie?s candidacy. Not that Murdoch was out of the picture. The Guardian reported that the Sun had also ?considered approaching Rachel North, a survivor of the 7/7 bombings, who has campaigned for justice for the victims.? And his other media outlet, Sky News, reported that Labour was canvassing John Smeaton to stand in its place. The baggage handler won the Queen?s Gallantry Medal for helping police foil a terrorist attack at Glasgow Airport last year. The report was considered especially authoritative because it came from Sky TV?s political editor Adam Boulton, husband of Anji Hunter, Blair?s former spin-doctor and close friend. North, however, told the Guardian that she ?admired Davis?s stand? and was ?a big fan of civil liberties and freedom and democracy.? At the weekend, Smeaton also scotched claims that he had any intention of standing, stating that he did not understand where the rumours were coming from. Finally, on Thursday, MacKenzie confirmed he would not be a candidate in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, citing financial considerations. ?The clincher for me was the money. Clearly the Sun couldn?t put up the cash?so I was going to have to rustle up a maximum of 100,000 to conduct my campaign,? he said, rewriting events to suggest that the earlier declaration of his candidacy had been entirely a personal whim. Instead, he urged Sun readers to support Northampton market trader Eamonn Fitzpatrick, who has said he will run as an independent in favour of 42-days detention. Currently, the unknown fruit and vegetable salesman is one of several independent candidates who, in addition to their campaign over one or another single issue, are defending the government?s detention powers. Labour?s hostility to democratic accountability Labour has attempted to justify its abstention on the grounds that the by-election is a ?farce.? Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman accused Davis of ?wasting over 80,000 to run a by-election, paid for by the council taxpayers,? while Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said Davis should be made to personally foot the bill. Such demands establish an entirely new criterion for elections?i.e., whether the government of the day considers them politically pertinent or financially worthwhile. Labour has already overturned its manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on the European Union?s Lisbon Treaty?rejected by Irish voters last weekend?on the grounds that it no longer considers it necessary. In truth, Labour cannot publicly defend its policies because it is the political plaything of big business and the super-rich, whose interests are antithetical to those of the broad mass of the population. That is why Brown chose to make his rebuttal to Davis before an invite-only audience of just 50 people from the pro-Labour think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. The thrust of his speech on June 17 was that ?modern security? requirements, ?modern challenges? and ?new threats? could not be managed ?by the old, tried methods and approaches.? Terrorism, organised crime and drug trafficking were all organised globally, using the latest technology, he said. Whereas in the ?old world? police took ?fingerprints, now we have the technology of DNA.? ?While the old world relied on the eyes of a policeman out on patrol, today we also have the back-up of CCTV. ?While the old world used only photographs to identify people, now we have biometrics.? In other words, technological progress justifies the state?s acquisition of massive new powers?including plans for a national DNA database, identity cards and widespread surveillance (as in the case of closed-circuit cameras)?an argument that evokes Orwell?s 1984. As for Brown?s claims that technological developments could be used to ?strengthen the protection of the individual,? there was no evidence of this in his speech, which was all about strengthening the state. His pledge that liberty meant ?never subjecting the citizen to arbitrary treatment? and ?always respecting basic rights and freedoms? was made ridiculous by the government?s passage of 42-days, and its earlier plans to introduce 90-days detention. Concern at exposure of Labour and the ?left? It is a measure of the putrefaction of Labour and the so-called ?left? in general that a right-wing Tory can present himself as the champion of civil liberties. Labour?s 42-days detention is only the latest and most draconian of the more than 200 pieces of ?anti-terror? legislation enacted by Labour since 2001 that have overturned fundamental civil liberties and have established the legislative framework for a police state. Throughout this time, the Conservative Party has supported the ?war on terror.? Davis himself voted in favour of 28-days detention without charge and the Iraq war. But he can attack Labour as ?gutless? because not a single Labour ?left? was prepared to break ranks and challenge the government. The two Labour ?rebels? over 42-days who have said they will back Davis?Bob Marshall-Andrews and Ian Gibson?only did so when it became clear the government would not contest the election. Even more strikingly, all the government?s critics have thus far preferred to sign up to Davis?s campaign, rather than launch their own. Veteran Labourite Tony Benn has said he supports Davis, as has Observer columnist Henry Porter and Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights organisation Liberty. This has raised alarm at the pro-Labour New Statesman magazine, which, like all official political circles in Britain, was caught off-guard by the extent of the political disaffection that would be revealed by Davis?s resignation. On June 12, New Statesman editor Martin Bright had hailed Davis?s ?courageous? resignation. In his blog, ?I salute David Davis,? he wrote that the shadow home secretary had done ?the decent thing? and wished ?Davis well? in the election. Within a week, his position had changed. The government?s abstention and the willingness of its ?liberal? critics to rally to a Tory candidate left Bright concerned that Labour?s left periphery was fatally compromised politically. In an air of desperation, Bright wrote, asking, ?Where is the David Davis of the left, prepared to resign and challenge the government?s authoritarian agenda…. Where is the politician or public figure to challenge the government?s authoritarian agenda from a progressive perspective? In short, where is the liberal candidate to stand in Haltemprice and Howden?? Issuing the call for a ?genuinely liberal candidate to stand against David Davis,? he pledged that such a candidate ?would receive the full backing of the New Statesman.? See Also:
Britain: Conservative MP forces by-election to challenge Labour?s anti-terror legislation
[17 June 2008]
Britain: Parliament approves police state measures in Terrorism Bill
[17 February 2006]
Smoking the Celestial Dream19 Jun 2008As the western world winds its way through the 40th anniversaries of 1968 and the ?summer of love?, Steve Platt looks back at the role of cannabis in the ?counter culture? and how people on both sides of the political and cultural divide believed that a hardy psychoactive plant could change the world. He wonders how it could ever have aroused such passions ? both for and against its use ? and asks why it?s still illegal ?The dope dealer is selling you the celestial dream. He is very different from any other merchant because the commodity he is peddling is freedom and joy. In the years to come the television dramas and movies will make a big thing of the dope dealer of the sixties. He is going to be the Robin Hood, spiritual guerrilla, mysterious agent ? who will take the place of the cowboy hero or the cops and robbers hero.? (Timothy Leary, ?Dope Dealers ? New Robin Hood?, 1967) ?School for junkies scandal: Boys and girls of just 12 are smoking ?pot?. Hardly a senior school in the south east has not been troubled by ruthless drugs exploiters. Addiction, at an all time high, is likely to explode into an epidemic of juvenile junkies within five years. Tomorrow could see a massive new national health social problem with youngsters at present in schoolcap or gymslip having a 25p dare ?joint? and joining the queue for killer ?trips? to living nightmares. Shocking facts. But this, say the experts, is London, drugs capital of Europe 1972.? (London Evening News, 5 October 1972) There have always been two myths about marijuana, one of the Reefer Madness genre, which has otherwise normal people turning to crime, promiscuity, dissolution and ultimately death through addiction; the other talking of change, visions, insight and the curative qualities of this magical, mystical weed. On the one hand we have Richard Nixon holding it to blame for ?the decline in civilised standards of behaviour throughout the western world?; on the other we have Allen Ginsberg declaring that ?if Kruschev and Kennedy turned on together it would end world conflict?. Yeah right, man. Dope mythologies
There is nothing new about these dope mythologies. As long ago as the 1270s Marco Polo was relating a tale that has since passed into popular legend, about Hassan-i-Sabbah, who led an offshoot of the Ismaili sect of Shia Muslims and allegedly used hashish to encourage his followers in the assassination of his enemies. Polo?s account, based on secondhand information about events that occurred almost two centuries previously, gave the hashishin (hashish users) a murderous reputation which, even if it was deserved, had little to do with a penchant for cannabis. The hashish stories were in large part a product of the Christian and Sunni Muslim propaganda machines of the time. (Hassan?s assassins claimed various prominent Sunni, as well as Christian, victims; and they even made a number of attempts on the life of the great Muslim leader Saladin himself.) It is significant, too, that the etymology of the word ?assassin? appears first ? and almost certainly wrongly ? to have been identified with hashishin by French linguists and historians in the 19th century, when Jean-Jacques Moreau?s Hashish Club of Paris was earning itself a reputation as a centre of immorality and subversion. In the 1960s, when a different social grouping had rather different propaganda needs, William Burroughs was on hand to rehabilitate Hassan-i-Sabbah and his followers. They were, according to Burroughs, a much-misrepresented community of libertarian individualists and mystics. You can distinguish the dope smokers from the non-smokers by their differing interpretations of history. From time to time the great dope myths collide, turning the consumption of a hardy little plant with an ability to flourish under just about any conditions into a burning political issue. Never was this more so than when the US crackdown on drug use, almost as much as the Vietnam war, drew a whole generation of middle class American kids into open conflict with the state in 1964-74 (the cultural, rather than chronological, ?sixties?). The biggest civil disobedience campaign of the era was not draft evasion, nor the civil rights movement, but recreational drug use; and the slogan that best expressed the yearnings of the ?youth revolt? was not ?Victory to the Vietcong? but Timothy Leary?s ?Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out?. The ?Declaration of a State of War? by the Weathermen underground group, which carried out a series of bombings, robberies and kidnappings from 1969 onwards, even stated: ?We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons … Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.? Property is theft ? smoke dope You didn?t need to be a Weatherman to know which way the smoke blows. In England, the hippy occupation of 144 Piccadilly in the summer of 1969 was advertised by graffiti declaring ?Property is Theft ? Smoke Dope ? Drop Out?,and by leaflets urging the reader to ?Get high? because ?You?ve got to feel good to do good?. One famous poster of the time, emblazoned with the slogan ?Build the Revolution?, showed a huge pair of hands crumbling a brown herbal substance into outsized cigarette papers. Another showed Gilbert Shelton?s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers before and after smoking weed. The ?before? sketch portrayed them as three clean- shaven, respectable boys ready to ?kill a commie for Christ? in their smartly-pressed army uniforms; after a few tokes they transformed into the long-haired, tripped-out hippies that readers came to know and love in Skelton?s best-selling comics. This Hyde to Jeckyll transformation was a prominent feature in dope literature. BIT, a hippy advice centre in London, was fond of producing novel-length newsletters packed with epistles from former ?straights? who had undergone Damascene conversions due to a good smoke. One such contribution described, in ten pages of meandering prose, a personal life history in the first year AD (?After Dope?). The author had been a happily married office worker living in a suburban semi somewhere near Southampton until he ?discovered? dope. Since then he?d seen half the world and at the time of writing was languishing in a foreign jail awaiting trial on a smuggling charge. ?Dope has changed my life,? he announced proudly, without any hint of irony. To read more of Smoking the celestial dream buy the June/July issue of Red Pepper here for just 4 including postage
Nothing is More Important19 Jun 2008Jon Cruddas and Nick Lowles argue that the rise of the far right presents a challenge that the left has so far proved unable to meet There is a tangible shift occurring in British politics. Gone are the days of traditional class politics, when the working class voted en masse for Labour and the more privileged for the Conservatives. A new force is emerging, which will, if left unchecked, prove disastrous for both Labour and the left in general. Magnus Marsdal?s article talks about the changing politics of Norway and finds comparisons with the rest of western Europe. It is a phenomenon that is also taking place in Britain, albeit a few years later than in some other countries. The British National Party (BNP) was formed in 1982 out of an earlier split within the National Front and for many years it languished on the fringes of politics. In 1999 Nick Griffin became its leader and his more political and media savvy approach enabled the party to exploit rising racial tensions in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001. Since then, against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia, a growing eastern-European migrant workforce and New Labour?s fixation with Middle England, the party has risen steadily. It now has 55 councillors and last month secured a seat on the London Assembly. And all this in a period of supposed economic success. The BNP has long been dismissed as a cranky fascist party, made up of thugs, criminals and Nazis. While it is true that the leadership has its ideological roots in fascism, it is time we had a better explanation for the party?s rise and appeal. Society in Britain, like much of the industrialised world, has become dislocated over the past few decades. Globalisation and the increasing dominance of international finance and corporations have shifted power far away from local communities. This, coupled with the loss of empire, Britain?s changing place in the world and even the possible break-up of the United Kingdom have all challenged the identity of many, particularly those towards the bottom of the economic ladder, who naturally are more concerned about change. Politically, there has also been the growing divorce between the political parties and their electorates. The preoccupation with a small number of voters in a few key marginals has resulted in New Labour echoing the whims and prejudices of a mythical Middle England. Class has been removed as an economic and political category in Westminster discourse. Labour?s traditional voters feel ignored, taken for granted and even abandoned. At the same time, the Tories have for decades ceased to offer a real opposition in many traditional Labour areas, leaving a dangerous vacuum. In 1968 US sociologist Don Warren described the emergence of the ?middle American radical? to explain the rise of right-wing presidential candidate George Wallace. He saw a radicalised group of voters, drawn largely from the skilled working class, who opposed the political and economic elites while simultaneously despising those who they regarded as undeserving poor. A white identity emerged that had no political articulation. A similar phenomenon is occurring in today?s Britain. The Labour Party too often fails to articulate the concerns of large swathes of its traditional working class supporters. Over the past 20 years turnout has slumped in Labour heartlands. Suddenly, as the BNP has emerged as a political force, many are now turning out to vote for them. Towns like Stoke-on-Trent reflect this change. Only a few years ago Labour held every seat on the council. Today, it holds just 16 out of 60, with the BNP close behind with nine. The local ethnic minority population is comparatively small, suggesting that voters are flocking to the BNP for some far more fundamental reasons. Nor is there much comfort for parties to the left of Labour. It is easy to blame New Labour for the rise of the BNP but few have questioned why the far-left parties fail to attract significant support from white working-class voters. If anything, the far-left vote has actually shrunk since 1997 and the occasional successes of Respect or the Greens have been based on specific ethnic minority communities or middle-class liberals. Race is a prism through which many voters view their world but it is not the underlying issue. That is why immigration minister Liam Byrne?s attempts to quicken the introduction of the Australian points system will ultimately fail to deal with the political problem. He might hope to appease voters? concerns over immigration but unfortunately he, like many others, is misunderstanding the rise of the BNP. Britain might have been slower to see the emergence of a major far-right party than elsewhere but this could change very quickly. Next year?s European elections, contested under proportional representation, will give the BNP its greatest chance to break into the mainstream. The rise of the BNP is not a passing phenomena. We must now debate new strategies for organisation and policy, counter- organise on the ground and deal with the material issues that lie behind its popular support. Nothing is more important for this movement. Footnote Jon Cruddas is the Labour MP for Dagenham. Nick Lowles is editor of Searchlight magazine
Referenda: Democracy vs Elites19 Jun 2008In his article in openDemocracy following the vote in the Republic of Ireland on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, George Schpflin makes a confusing case against the use of referendums (see “The referendum: populism vs democracy”, 16 January 2008).
He says that those who support referenda have fallen victim to the “seduction of direct democracy”. There is no such thing as “the people”; it’s not democracy but populism, which in turn leads to the tyranny of the majority. Worse, it’s power without responsibility and the focus on a single issue leads to unholy alliances. The basic problem is the failure to hold national elites to account because the connection with European Union institutions is weak. Let’s turn this on its head. Would George Schpflin have made the same case if there had been twenty-seven referenda and in each and every single country the vote had been an overwhelming “yes”? I doubt it. I think he would have been much more likely to have penned a glowing piece praising the virtues of participatory democracy. The people of Europe had spoken; some in defiance of their purportedly Eurosceptic governments. I hazard a guess that he even would have urged national governments to take head and listen to their people – who had so clearly expressed their collective will. We are writing articles about the EU and the use of referenda because when given the chance to have a say, three out of four broadly pro-European countries (France, the Netherlands, and the Republic of Ireland) came up with a largely unexpected “no”. This came as a shock and governments which had originally promised one didn’t dare to ask to their people. In the United Kingdom all three political parties entered the 2005 general election with a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum. They all in different forms got cold feet and reneged. So let’s look at George Schpflin’s argument again. He’s right to say that not all things lend themselves to being decided by a referendum. But it is not the complexity of the question which matters, but whether it is about conferring power; power which emanates from the people. General-election manifestos are complex documents. Few have read them, even fewer have understood them – but when it comes to the general election people decide which package they prefer. The voters don’t say “yes” or “no” but tick a box labelled Labour, Conservative or LibDem. I am puzzled by Schpflin’s denouncement of “ad hoc coalitions”. Some may call this “tactical voting”. In the 1997 general election there was many a constituency where LibDem supporters voted Labour or vice-versa because it was the best way of getting the Conservatives out. I can’t see much wrong with that. More worrying is the line that referenda are bad because they introduce new political actors. I’d say “hallelujah” to that. Anything that stops political elites from becoming complacent seems a good thing to me. After the demos So let’s try again. There is a case for direct democracy when the people decide who should govern. When the government passes power onto a third party, then the people have a right to express their consent or otherwise. As the great constitutionalist AV Dicey put it: “the referendum is the people’s veto; the nation is sovereign and may well decree that the constitution shall not be changed without the direct sanction of the nation.” George Schpflin is right when he says the European demos is weak. I would go further and say it does not exist. But the national demos – “we the British”, the Germans, the French or the Hungarians – is strong. To argue that “the people” is an antediluvian concept and we have progressed to some higher plane, may sound trendy and modern. But in my constituency in Birmingham they know who “we the people” are. Maybe it’s clearer to call them “the taxpayers”. Schpflin assumes that European Union integration operates within three different sectors – the EU and its institutions, the national elites and the supposed European demos. I’d argue that the appetite for European integration is waning; there is no discernible European demos and the real problem is that the European elites in particular and the national elites to a lesser extent seem to be unable to comprehend or understand this. So stop condemning referenda just because we don’t like the answers they produce and begin a proper debate about what kind of allocation of powers and responsibilities “the people” across Europe would be willing to support.
Eamonn McCann on the Raytheon Victory18 Jun 2008On 9 August 2006, nine Northern Irish anti-war activists occupied the Derry offices of Raytheon, one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world, and destroyed its computers. Their action was sparked by anger at Raytheon?s complicity in Israel?s bombing campaign against Lebanon. The Raytheon 9 won a massive victory when they were acquitted of charges of criminal damage earlier this month. Campaigning journalist Eamonn McCann was one of the nine protesters. He spoke to Socialist Worker about the case There has been considerable controversy about Raytheon ever since the company announced that its factory was coming to Derry in 1999. Raytheon specialises in producing hi-tech bombs, missiles and battlefield control systems. It sells arms mainly to the US government. But it is also one of the largest suppliers of the Israeli army. The immediate cause of our occupation of the Raytheon factory was the bombing of Qana in southern Lebanon on 30 July 2006. This came at a time when the United Nations secretary general and even the archbishop of Canterbury were calling upon George Bush and Tony Blair to at least pose the idea of a ceasefire. But they adamantly refused. They wanted Israel to finish crushing Hizbollah and the Lebanese resistance forces. In the midst of this, a bomb was used to destroy an apartment building in Qana leading to the deaths of 28 people. We were almost certain that this was a Raytheon bomb. In campaigning against Raytheon we?d acquired a great deal of knowledge about what it was producing and where it was selling it. We held a meeting of the Derry anti-war coalition and decided to occupy the building. Our intention was not just to protest about what was happening in Lebanon ? it was much more practical than that. We believed that we could in effect decommission the factory, disrupt production and delay the ability of Israel to rain down further death on southern Lebanon. We were aware that Israel was running short of some of the weapons that Raytheon was delivering and that encouraged us in our belief that we could have some effect on Israel?s ability to wage war. We smashed Raytheon?s computers and used a fire extinguisher and other equipment to take out their communications hub. The charges levelled against us were affray and criminal damage. The charge of affray was thrown out because key to the charge is that you severely frighten people by your behaviour. We demonstrated in court that there was no evidence that we had frightened anybody. Then we fought the criminal damage charge. Of course, we didn?t deny doing any of the things we were accused of. In fact we said on the first day that we did all of the things we were accused of and that we would have done more if we could. I stood up in the witness box and said that we regretted that we couldn?t have done more. Our defence was not a moral defence ? it was a political defence. We didn?t say that this was a protest because we were angry at Israel?s actions. We said that this was a genuine, serious effort to disrupt the supply of arms to Israel. Our argument was that Israel was committing war crimes and that our action was intended to prevent this larger crime. If you hear the sound of a child being brutalised in the house next door and you rush in to smash the door down and save the child, should you be charged with breaking and entering? Obviously not. In the same way we were trying to save people in Lebanon who were being criminally attacked by Israel. We presented lots of evidence. This included documents from the Norwegian government about why it had withdrawn investment from Raytheon, journalism by Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn, and lots more to back up our argument. We explained what Raytheon?s weapons were and what they were used for. We were not required to establish as a certainty that these things were happening. We were required to show our belief that these things were happening. And we showed that we had a genuine belief based on reasonable evidence. The jury accepted that we believed that Israel was guilty of war crimes and that our action was intended to hamper this. We were vindicated. I hope the case will lead to a wider campaign over Raytheon. In light of the court?s decision, there is now a case for Raytheon to be investigated to determine whether it is a criminal enterprise.? For more information on the case go to www.raytheon9.org
Need for a new social alliance18 Jun 2008Interview with Susan George FLORENCE, Jun 3 (IPS) – A global alliance of human rights activists, environmentalists and ethically run small enterprises is needed to save the planet from self-destruction, says Susan George, chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. The institute works “to contribute to social justice.” Susan George, author of several books on development, now focuses on neo-liberal globalisation mirrored in the World Trade Organisation talks, international financial institutions and in North-South relations. “Even if committed to the social and environmental challenges, none of these groups individually will be able to save our future, which is dominated by powerful economic forces that have a short-term view and, if allowed, will continue exploiting and destroying the planet,” George says. We must recognise, she says, that change does not happen at an individual level. “Yes, I can change my light bulbs or reduce my carbon footprint, but we need a radical revolution that cannot be achieved individually.” IPS Italy correspondent Sabina Zaccaro spoke with Susan George at Terra Futura, an exhibition of ‘good practices’ in social, economic and environmental sustainability held yearly in Florence. In its fifth year, Terra Futura was dedicated to strengthening social alliances — and trying some audacious ones such as alliances among private citizens and financial institutions. IPS: Will the political-economic system really allow these alliances to happen? Susan George: The market ideology works to separate people, it is a model that separates people on a competition basis. Social contact is the only response to economy that works all the time to prevent this. People do not have to abandon their own field and commitment, but become used to working together. We are free agents, and if we understand that there’s an interest, that the vast majority of people can often no longer see where their interests lie — and that is part of the political fight that we have — then it is possible. If you show to people that they have an interest in alliances, and this is true for farmers, trade unionists, small medium enterprises…then yes, I think it possible to make those alliances. IPS: And who sets the rules? SG: It is hard to get binding rules, it could be easier at the level of the regions. In many places this is not possible because of corruption, or because the will of the government is to prevent this kind of thing and allow transnational corporations to do whatever they like. I would say that that’s what the European Commission is there for — to allow finance capitals and transnational capitals to operate as freely as possible. IPS: Can the ethical argument alone convince business? SG: No, not at all. They say how green they are, how caring they are, but it’s rubbish to believe it…Corporations and transnational organisations preach self-green regulation; ‘we will bring the proper solution’, they say, but it is totally illusive. IPS: So, what can be a convincing argument? SG: The right arguments are the arguments of force you cannot argue with, you don’t discuss; you don’t say ‘please’. When you are in a position where you are able to dictate. IPS: How? SG: Well, through alliances! At a much larger scale, at a big scale…the problem is scale. Alliances must be as broad as possible. Economic power is way ahead of us, so to me the problem is, can we go fast enough, become important enough in order to put a stop to that, to escape the current impasse. IPS: Does politics have a role in that? SG: If it would be just politics, I would not be that worried, since things due over centuries sort themselves out; but with the environment we don’t have that kind of time. I don’t say it often in public, because I don’t want people be in despair, but I am often in despair. IPS: Are you totally pessimistic? SG: I am hopeful; the only thing you can work on is hope. Generally, politicians are the last to move, but we need to make alliance with them. When politicians have an interest in something, they show that they are able to listen. Look at what happens with prices…and scarcity. Politicians and business do listen to that, they listen to the price of oil — they bring the wrong solutions, but they listen to price signals. IPS: Can oil be replaced with agro-fuels? SG: It’s criminal. There’s a lot of talk about using plants that are bio — but any plant is bio. I’ve just read that some of the species they’re intending to use are invasive species, they take over, and then will spread all over and take all the water out of the ground, and so on. So, it’s always the same thing — you cannot have just a techno solution because there’s the entire environment that you have to consider. I am not an agronomist, but I would refuse any introduction, any crop until the impact of that crop on the rest of the environment has been studied. You cannot just say ‘Ok, this is good, we will harvest it, and we will do ethanol out of it’, because you don’t know. That’s also what’s wrong with GMO (genetically modified organisms) seeds. They only look at the plant and what that plant is supposed to do, to repulse insects or whatever, but they don’t look at the whole of the environment, it’s not their task. Scientists are perfectly able to make a plant that can repulse insects, but they have no knowledge at all of how the birds, the butterflies, the worms, the bacteria, will react. (END/2008) Susan George is a Fellow and Chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute. Her latest books are La Pense enchane: Comment les droites laque et religieuse se sont empares de l’Amrique [Fayard, 2007], to be published in English as: Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think [Forthcoming, Polity Press 2008], and We the peoples of Europe [Pluto Press, 2008].
Ex-UK Army Chief Confirms Peak Oil Motive for War18 Jun 2008Brigadier-General James Ellery CBE, the Foreign Office?s Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad since 2003, confirmed the critical role of Iraqi oil reserves in potentially alleviating a ?world shortage? of conventional oil. The Iraq War has helped to head off what Brigadier Ellery described as ?the tide of Easternisation? ? a shift in global political and economic power toward China and India, to whom goes ?two thirds of the Middle East?s oil.? After the 2004 transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi civilian administration, Brigadier Ellery set up and ran the 700-strong security framework operation in support of the US-funded Reconstruction of Iraq. His remarks were made as part of a presentation at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), University of London, sponsored by the Iraqi Youth Foundation, on 22nd April. World Oil Shortage ?The reason that oil reached $117 a barrel last week?, he said, ?was less to do with security of supply? than World shortage.? He went on to emphasise the strategic significance of Iraqi petroleum fields in relation to the danger of production peaks being breached in major oil reserves around the world. ?Russia?s production has peaked at 10 million barrels per day; Africa has proved slow to yield affordable extra supplies ? from Sudan and Angola for example. Thus the only near-term potential increase will be from Iraq,? he said. Whether Iraq began ?favouring East or West? could therefore be ?de-stabilizing? not only ?within the region but to nations far beyond which have an interest.? Last month geological surveys and seismic data compiled by several international oil companies exploring Iraqi oil reserves showed that Iraq has the world?s largest proven oil reserves, with as much as 350 billion barrels, significantly exceeding Saudi Arabia?s 264 billion barrels, according to a report in the London Times. Former Bush administration energy adviser Matthew Simmons, author of the book Twilight in the Desert, says that Saudi oil production has probably already peaked, with production rates declining consecutively each year. This month the UK Treasury Department warned of the danger of an oil supply crunch by 2015, due to rocketing demand from China and India. The Threat of Easternisation Brigadier Ellery?s career in the British Army has involved stints in the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, Germany and Northern Ireland. ?Iraq holds the key to stability in the region,? he said, ?unless that is you believe the tide of ?Easternisation? is such that the USA and the West are in such decline, relative to the emerging China and India, that it is the East ? not the West ? which is more likely to guarantee stability. Incidentally, I do not.? Iraq?s pivotal importance in the Middle East, he explained, is because of its ?relatively large, consuming population? at 24 million, its being home to ?the second largest reserve of oil ? under exploited?, and finally its geostrategic location ?on the routes between Asia, Europe, Arabia and North Africa – hence the Silk Road.? Oil production peaks when a given petroleum reserve is depleted by half, after which oil is geophysically increasingly difficult to extract, causing production to plateau, and then steadily decline. US oil production peaked by 1970, while British production in the North Sea peaked by 2000, converting both countries from exporters into net importers of oil and gas. Oil industry experts and petroleum geologists increasingly believe that world oil production is precariously close to peaking. According to an October 2007 report by the German-based Energy Watch Group, run by an international network of European politicians and scientists, world oil production peaked in 2006. According to BP?s annual statistical review of world energy supply and demand for 2008, released on 11th June, world oil production fell last year for the first time since 2002, by 130,000 barrels per day last year to 81.53 million. Yet world consumption continued to rise by 1.1 per cent to 85.22 million barrels per day, outweighing production by nearly 5 per cent. Iraqi Reconstruction Corruption Whitewash Brigadier-General James Ellery is currently Director of Operations at AEGIS Defence Services Ltd., a private British security firm and US defence contractor since June 2004. In April this year, the same month as Ellery?s SOAS lecture, AEGIS won the renewal of its US defence department (DoD) contract for two more years, which at $475 million is the single largest security contract brokered by the DoD. The contract is to provide security services for reconstruction projects in Iraq conducted by mostly American companies. A US government audit by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, released exactly two years before Brigadier Ellery?s SOAS presentation, concluded that AEGIS could not prove it had properly trained or vetted several armed Iraqi employees. For a random sample of 20 armed guards, no training documentation was found for 14 of them. For 125 other employees, AEGIS reportedly failed to document background checks. The auditors concluded that ?there is no assurance that Aegis is providing the best possible safety and security for government and reconstruction contractor personnel and facilities.? During his April presentation at SOAS, AEGIS director Ellery declared, ?Iraq promises a degree of prosperity in the region as it embarks on massive Iraqi-funded reconstruction, a part of which will raise Iraqi?s oil production from 2.5 million bpd today to 3 million by next year and maybe ultimately 6 million barrels per day.? He added, ?With a budget of $187 billion over 4 years, Iraq is poised to have a considerable impact on the economies of countries whose technologies can fill the skills gap left by the latter years of Saddam Hussein?s regime.? During the UN sanctions regime imposed primarily by the US and Britain, Iraq was banned from importing thousands of household goods, including food, medicines, clothes and books, from 1991 to 2003, purportedly to prevent Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction. It is now widely recognized that the sanctions led to massive socio-economic deprivation, the break-down of civilian infrastructure, large-scale unemployment, and de-industrialisation, resulting in the deaths of up to 1.8 million Iraqis, half of whom were children. The humanitarian crisis led United Nations officials such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General, and Hans von Sponeck, former Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, to resign in protest. Today, those profiting most from reconstruction projects in Iraq are not Iraqis, but private contractors based primarily in the United States and Britain, according to a new report out last month by Stuart Bowen Jr, incumbent Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The Bowen Report found that at least 855 contracts valued at billions of dollars were cancelled before completion. Another 112 agreements were cancelled because of poor performance, while still more projects recorded as completed never happened. In one case, a $50 million children?s hospital in Basra is listed as completed although the contract was stopped when only 35 percent of the work was finished. During Brigadier Ellery?s tenure at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, under Paul Bremer?s leadership $8.8 billion of reconstruction funds were unaccounted for, and a further $3.4 billion was re-directed for ?security? purposes. A UN body to audit the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), by which the CPA Programme Review Board managed Iraqi oil revenues until June 2004, found ?gross irregularities by CPA officials in their management of the DFI,? and condemned the United States for ?lack of transparency? and providing the opportunity for ?fraudulent acts.? Under American- and British-administered Iraqi reconstruction programmes, Iraqi agriculture has been devastated. In 2004, the Coalition Provision Authority imposed a hundred economic orders designed to open Iraq?s economy to foreign investment, including Order 12 for tax- and tariff-free imports of foreign products. The Order allowed the giant American agribusiness conglomerate Cargill to flood Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cheap wheat, undercutting local food prices, and wiping out the livelihoods of Iraqi farmers. As an executive director of AEGIS, one of the most prominent US defence contractors in Iraq, Brigadier Ellery is a personal beneficiary of the privatisation of the Iraqi economy. In the conclusions of his April address, he said, ?Iraq has resources aplenty: not just oil, of which there is a prodigious quantity?, but especially ?the capacity to rebuild a balanced economy including agriculture – for which Iraq was a legend.?
Labels: corruption, energy crisis, iraq war, peak oil, reconstruction, supply crunch
Private Lives in Public Spaces18 Jun 2008Women are whispering. A friend recently expressed concern that her boyfriend had visited a lapdancing club as part of a work social. She didn’t want to be perceived as prudish or uptight and she didn’t want her boyfriend to be the odd one out at work for abstaining when his colleagues headed into the club. Her hushed ambivalence is a common response to the lapdancing clubs springing up all across the country recently as a result of a legal loophole. Lapdancing clubs have proliferated since they were allowed to be licensed in the same way as cafes and restaurants. Previously, they had to be licensed as sex encounter establishments along with sex cinemas, sex shops and peep shows. The 2003 Licensing Act states that a successful premises licence applicant does not require any other licence. Lapdancing clubs have capitalised on this clause and obtained premises licences only. These cannot be revoked unless a complainant proves that one of the four licensing objectives of “public order”, “public safety”, “protecting children from harm” or “creating a public nuisance” has been breached. The legal redress is clear. The Licensing Act need not exempt sex encounter establishments from requiring their own licence type. This utilises existing legislation, allows that legislation to perform the function it was intended to, and does not require any new legislation. Furthermore, it allows local authorities to consider their gender equality duty when making such decisions. Today, Roberta Blackman-Woods MP is proposing a ten-minute rule bill on this subject in parliament. She makes it clear that local authorities in London already have these separate licensing powers and that they could be extended countrywide. Yet the question of lapdancing clubs goes beyond the legislative argument and into the far murkier debate that surrounds this new social phenomenon. There is the personal and the political, inextricably linked. Barrister Philip Kolvin is advising both The Fawcett Society and Object on their campaigns to license lapdancing clubs as sex encounter establishments. Kolvin’s own reason for representing the Fawcett Society was personal. He is alarmed by the presence of lapdancing clubs around Gray’s Inn, where he works. His colleagues shamelessly go to the clubs after work, and he reports that there are limousines containing naked women having sex on the floor being provided as part of the transport service. Kolvin warns us that any cultural arguments are hazardous. We don’t want to go back to censorship. We don’t want to be accused of prudery. If we say there is a line, then the next question could be, what forms of sexual imagery do women approve of? At a Compass conference, the feminist scholar Angela McRobbie said she wants to see women having this discussion and dealing with the difficult questions. If women decide that they are fine about lapdancing clubs and see them as modern and empowering, she will accept that. But she doesn’t believe women are really involved in this debate. Instead she observes a strange silence on the issue. She also advocates the need to consider the responses of black and Asian women to lapdancing clubs. Are lapdancing clubs harmless? If the no-contact rules are adhered to, then presumably the lapdancing clubs leave lots of sexually frustrated men wandering the streets at night. Otherwise, we can assume that rules have been contravened and that lapdancing clubs are just another route into the sex industry at large. If neither of these harmful effects prevail, then perhaps these clubs are not needed, and men attend them with some newfound sense of social obligation in an increasingly commodified society where every pleasure must be paid for. I am of the view that the sexual empowerment argument for women is a myth. Women are reduced to sex objects for male gratification. They are emancipated only in the context of wage-earning capacity and participation in consumer culture. Increasingly, we find our power as citizens misleadingly equated with our power to consume or not to consume, to earn or not to earn. So I say let local communities be allowed to decide whether or not lapdancing clubs are approved in their area. Do you want one on your doorstep? At the Compass meeting, a lady in the audience voiced the liberal argument that lapdancers are choosing to work and benefiting from it. A former lapdancer countered her by saying, “This argument really annoys me. It’s all very well you saying that, but would you choose this job for your daughter, or your sister, or your wife, or even yourself?” Lets bring this back into the public domain and have a conversation about it in the public space. Let communities have a say in licensing these establishments, and let women have a say in their own representation. And let’s quit the double standards.
A New Encounter with an Old Standpoint17 Jun 2008The website of Standpoint, the new magazine published by the Social Affairs Unit, is now live. In his inaugural column, editor Daniel Johnson highlights the magazine's neoconservative credentials: “When you have a good idea, start a magazine.” This, according to our board member Gertrude Himmelfarb, is the motto of her husband Irving Kristol. In a long and fruitful life, he has started three. (Their son Bill has started one, too.) The first was Encounter, which Kristol co-founded with the late Stephen Spender in 1953. It was a transatlantic monthly in which the intellectuals of the free world could debate with one another and their communist counterparts. To write for Encounter was a privilege. Johnson doesn't mention it explicitly, but it is, of course, well-known that Encounter was founded and financed by the CIA as part of its psychological warfare strategy during the early cold war. According to historian Hugh Wilford, the magazine's "greatest achievement was in creating 'a certain kind of intellectual-cultural milieu' in which American and European interests came to appear as if they were identical." It's noteworthy that Johnson is happy to embrace the martial aspects of the parallel: Ever since it folded at the end of the Cold War, many people in Europe and America have lamented the old Encounter. But it was only when a new kind of assault came from a very different quarter on 11 September 2001 that a new Encounter again became an urgent necessity. The aftermath revealed such moral cowardice and intellectual confusion on both sides of the Atlantic that the battle of ideas has sometimes seemed in danger of being lost by default. To defend and celebrate Western civilisation is not merely desirable; it is imperative. The content is pretty much what you would expect. We get this from Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali: Happily Marxism, in its various forms, has been shown to be the philosophical, historical and economic nonsense that it always was. But we are now confronted by another equally serious ideology, that of radical Islamism, which also claims to be comprehensive in scope. What resources do we have to face yet another ideological battle? Nazir-Ali is an advisor to the Social Affairs Unit's Centre for Social Cohesion, whose director Douglas Murray also has a piece in the magazine. In the past, Murray has argued that Europe "has unsustainable demographic issues which – if un-addressed – will eradicate the continent as we know it within three or four generations" and that "Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board." (For a good antidote to this kind of fear-mongering see this article from Alex Harrowell at A Fistful of Euros). The Independent reports that the Social Affairs Unit is heavily funded by Alan Bekhor, an associate of the Reuben brothers, who had a big stake in Russian aluminium in the 1990s, before selling out to Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky. I don't claim to understand the details, but it would be interesting to know where these events fit in to the wider story of the dynamic between Berezovsky and Vladimir Putin. It's pretty clear, though, where Standpoint stands on "Putin's New Evil Empire."
Between False Refuge and the Peril of Return16 Jun 2008Peace, or something like it, breaks out in Iraq. US-led foreign forces declare violence has tapered off to the lowest levels in years, thanks to additional troops, security cooperation with Sunni tribal leaders and erstwhile insurgents, and a tentative halt to the activities of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. An Iraqi government derided as sectarian and dysfunctional steps up to promote political accommodation and begins taking more responsibility for security and providing services. Stability takes hold, paving the way for about two million Iraqis who have fled the country to make their way home.
An uncertain future
The scenario outlined above can be, and is, disputed. Whether or how long a period of relative calm will last remains to be seen; Iraq's political future – including a long-term US military presence being negotiated in Baghdad and Washington – is itself an open question. But on the subject of refugees, a dangerous certainty now unites Iraq's government, the United States, and some Western countries, notably Britain, where Iraqis have sought a haven from the bloodshed that the US invasion ushered in. They are encouraging – and in the case of Britain, forcing – the return of Iraqi refugees on the grounds that the country is now stable enough to receive them. Politically attractive though this may be, it also contradicts international law prohibiting the forced return of anyone to territory where his or her life or freedom is threatened. With prodding from Washington, the Iraqi government has renewed calls for refugees to return. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced at a recent summit on Iraqi reconstruction that his government would work to create conditions that facilitate return and provide financial incentives to Iraqis who return from abroad; the Ministry of Migration and Displacement subsequently announced that $195 million would be allocated to cover returnees' expenses. Since 2005, Britain has returned failed asylum seekers to areas controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which administers the three northern governorates that are the most stable part of Iraq, on the grounds that the region is safe. On 11 June 2008, the Guardian reported that the UK Border Agency planned to expand its deportation scheme to include other parts of Iraq, recently detaining dozens of failed Iraqi asylum seekers for possible deportation, including some from areas not controlled by the KRG. If confirmed, this would harden a policy toward Iraqi asylum seekers that was unforgiving from the start. A contradictory policy Home Office correspondence leaked in March stated that failed asylum seekers will lose financial support unless they agree to a voluntary repatriation program under the auspices of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The repatriation procedure as described in this correspondence included a waiver absolving the deporting authority of any responsibility for what may happen following repatriation. The basis for deportation to the whole of Iraq has drawn strength from a ruling in the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) earlier this year, narrowing the scope for protection against deportation under European Council directive 15©. The AIT's ruling found "neither civilians in Iraq generally nor civilians even in provinces and cities worst-affected by the armed conflict can show they face a ?serious and individual threat' to their ?life or person'...merely by virtue of being civilians." Contradictions abound in the justifications for repatriating Iraqis to the north and elsewhere. The Home Office December 2007 immigration policy statement on Iraq explicitly rejects the opinion of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that relocation to central and southern Iraq is unsafe; yet failed asylum seekers who agree to voluntary repatriation are asked to absolve those who send them back from any responsibility for what may happen after they arrive. UK authorities express a strong preference that returns be voluntary; yet surveys of Iraqi refugees, including Human Rights Watch interviews with those who have returned, indicate that economic and administrative pressure nearly always figure prominently in even voluntary returns to Iraq. To justify sending asylum seekers back, the asylum tribunal invokes and works to argue around a European Council directive aimed at preventing deportations back into armed conflict. That reading runs up against the UK's broad commitment, as a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, to the principle of non-refoulement: the agreement not to return refugees to countries where their lives or freedom are at risk.
Political expediency There is, however, one depressing note of consistency that emerges from Britain's treatment of Iraqi asylum seekers. Like the United States, its senior partner in the invasion of Iraq, Britain appears willing to use the lives of refugees to bolster political arguments for success in Iraq – the US by admitting only symbolic numbers of refugees, the UK by returning asylum seekers to danger. Perhaps the desire to claim victory or at least validation in Iraq by citing diminished violence – though by any standard other than the carnage of recent years, Iraq remains an incredibly dangerous place – as evidence of stability that could support the return of refugees, has trumped other considerations. These considerations should include the dire conditions facing approximately 2.7 million people who are internally displaced within Iraq; UNHCR estimates that more than a million of the internally displaced lack adequate shelter and food. The head of Iraq's parliamentary committee on displacement last month suggested that the committee should simply resign over what he called the government's inability to address the needs of the displaced and refugees. The narrative of emerging security and stability in Iraq, should it develop into durable fact, would be welcome. Meanwhile, Britain, like the United States, bears particular responsibility toward the refugees whose flight originated in the chaos and violence that the invasion of Iraq has wrought. It can begin meeting that responsibility by acknowledging that those Iraqis who seek safety in Britain have legitimate fears about what awaits them at home.
More troops for Afghanistan, no Iraq withdrawal16 Jun 2008At a joint press conference with US President George Bush yesterday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that more troops would be sent to Afghanistan, taking the UK?s contingent in the country to its ?highest level.? After speculation in the media of a rift between London and Washington over troop deployments in Iraq, he added that there was no ?timetable? for a withdrawal from the country. Britain has 4,200 troops remaining in Iraq on the outskirts of Basra and took part in the US-Iraqi offensive in late March against Shiite militiamen in the city. He also supported Bush in pledging that tougher sanctions will be imposed on Iran for failing to stop its nuclear energy programme. Defence Secretary Des Browne later told parliament that a further 230 soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan, taking the total to around 8,030 by early 2009. Sunday?s Observer newspaper had claimed that Bush had delivered a ?stern message? to Brown last week, warning about further reductions of British forces in Iraq. The White House moved to defuse the issue by saying, ?What the president said is what the president has been saying and Prime Minister Brown has been saying from the very beginning.? Downing Street declared that it was not British policy to set ?arbitrary timetables? on troop withdrawal. At their press conference Bush said, ?I have no problem with how Gordon Brown is dealing with Iraq. He?s been a good partner.? He continued, ?I just want to remind you that [Brown] has left more troops in Iraq than he initially anticipated. Like me, he will be making his decisions based on the conditions on the ground without an artificial timetable based on politics.? He warmly welcomed Brown?s pledge to send more troops to Afghanistan and to step up sanctions against Iran, praising him for being ?tough on terror.? In relation to Iraq and Afghanistan, Brown said, ?There is still work to be done and Britain plays, and will continue to play, its part.? He praised Bush as a ?true friend of Britain? and for the ?steadfast resolution that he has shown in rooting out terrorism in all parts of the world.? On Iran, Brown stated, ?I will repeat that we will take any necessary action so that Iran is aware of the choice it has to make?to start to play its part as a full and respected member of the international community, or face further isolation.? Britain would urge Europe to impose ?further sanctions? on Iran, he said, by freezing the assets of the country?s biggest bank and imposing new sanctions on oil and gas. Bush thanked Brown for his ?strong statement,? and added, ?The Iranians must understand that when we come together and speak with one voice we are serious.? Pressure was necessary to ?solve this problem diplomatically,? but ?Iranians must understand, however, that all options are on the table,? he threatened. Brown?s pronouncements gave Bush everything he wanted. They were a kick in the teeth to those in the ruling elite and sections of the press who hoped that Brown?s elevation to prime minister would signal an end to Tony Blair?s ?mistake? of aligning Britain too closely with the US. Brown?s craven support for Bush reveals that far more was involved than a policy error on Blair?s part. Both men represent the dominant financial elite, whose central aim is utilise relations with Washington to project a global military and economic presence for British imperialism, while strengthening its hand against its major European rivals, Germany and France. And even though things have gone badly, there is little sign that anyone has an alternative perspective to offer within ruling circles, least of all Brown himself. Brown?s pronouncements only highlighted the impotence of the perspective promulgated by the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), which helped organise an anti-Bush demonstration on Sunday in tandem with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the British Muslim Initiative. Originally banned from assembling in Parliament at midday, the police finally allowed it to take place in the early evening but continued to refuse it permission to march the few hundred yards to Downing Street where Brown was entertaining Bush. The StWC was the main beneficiary of the mass movement against the Iraq war and the widespread sentiment it provoked amongst working people for a political alternative to Labour. A key role was played by the Socialist Workers Party, which insisted that there was no possibility of the struggle against war being conducted on the basis of socialism. It had to formulate demands that could be supported by everyone, including a handful of Labour rebels and trade union functionaries, Liberal Democrats, nationalist parties, dissident Conservatives and the coalition?s other major affiliates, CND and the Muslim Association of Britain?a small group of Arab Islamists that portrayed the Iraq war in religious terms. As Blair?s hold on power became increasingly untenable the StWC sold the idea that Brown, then his chancellor, would break from policies that he had fully supported. A letter was drafted by Communist Party of Britain leader Andrew Murray and StWC convenor and SWP leader Lindsey German that whilst acknowledging that ?Brown has been at the Prime Minister?s right hand throughout the decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan? claimed, ?Nevertheless, it is our conviction that mass pressure, combined with electoral self-interest, can force the British government to break from George Bush?s wars.? The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were described as ?Bush?s wars? in order to provide a retroactive amnesty for all those Labourites who had voted in favour of war alongside Blair and Brown. The Sunday demonstration also saw the antiwar MP George Galloway using his opportunity to sow dangerous illusions in Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama. He repeated statements he made earlier in the month on Arab TV when he said, ?I pray for the safety of Barack Obama, and I pray that he can shift the United States? attitude. So as we come towards the November elections, and the real prospect of a significant victory for Obama, everyone will have to re-find their footing, and these puppet presidents and corrupt kings [in the Middle East] may discover that the ground has moved under their feet, Allah willing.? Earlier this year Galloway declared, ?My guess is America is looking for real change, and only Barack Obama represents that.? Obama seeks to portray himself as an opponent of the Iraq war, but has repeatedly rejected what he describes as a ?precipitous withdrawal? of troops?Bush?s ?artificial timetable??stating that he ?has always believed that our troops need to be withdrawn responsibly? and that troops involved in ?counterterrorism? operations would stay. In practice this means maintaining the occupation indefinitely. In his June 4 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, while repeating his support for diplomatic engagement with Iran, he said, ?I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.? Obama represents a section of the American ruling elite that has concluded that a significant change in stance and personnel is required to salvage the interests of US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally. These layers do not oppose military action as such, but regard the Bush administration?s single-minded focus on winning a military victory in Iraq as unwise and ultimately disastrous. An Obama presidency would not represent a fundamental break with the politics of American imperialism, but rather its continuation in a new form. The attempt to prevent and curtail a peaceful antiwar protest is made necessary by the absence of any democratic mandate for the policies pursued by Brown and Blair before him. It led to open conflict between a massive number of police and some protesters, resulting in 25 arrests and some serious injuries. Two rows of barriers were erected to prevent access to Whitehall, together with rows of police officers and riot vans.
42 days? Try 18 months16 Jun 2008Until the end of the second world war Europe was a continent of emigrants. Millions left for the Americas: some to colonise, others to escape hunger, financial crises, persecution, ethnic cleansing, war or totalitarian governments. European citizens arrived in Latin and North America en masse, without visas or conditions imposed on them by the authorities. They were simply welcomed, and continue to be in Latin America. They came to exploit the natural wealth and to transfer it to Europe, with a high cost for the native population. Yet the people, property and rights of the migrants were always respected. Contrast the European “return directive”, to be voted on in the European parliament this week. It imposes harsh terms for detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants, regardless of the time they have spent in European countries, their work situation, their family ties or their achievements in integrating themselves into local society. The EU is now the main destination for migrants around the world, because of its positive image of space, prosperity and public freedom. The great majority of migrants contribute to, rather than exploit, this prosperity. They are employed in public works, construction, cleaning, hospitals and domestic work. They take the jobs the Europeans cannot or will not do. Maintaining the relationship between the employed and the retired by providing generous income to the social security system, the migrant offers a solution to demographic and financial problems in the EU. For us, our emigrants represent help in development that Europeans do not give us (few countries reach the minimum objective of 0.7% of GDP in development assistance). Latin America received, in 2006, a total of $68bn sent back from abroad, more than the total foreign investment in our countries. My country, Bolivia, received more than 10% of its GDP in such remittances. Unfortunately, the return directive is a huge infringement of the human rights of our Latin American friends. It proposes jailing undocumented immigrants for up to 18 months before their expulsion. Mothers with children could be arrested, without regard to family and school, and put in detention centres, where we know depression, hunger strikes and suicides happen. How can we accept it? At the same time, the EU is trying to convince the Andean Community of Nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru) to sign an “association agreement” that includes a free trade agreement of a similar nature to that imposed by the US. We are under intense pressure to accept demands for liberalisation of our trade, financial services, intellectual property rights and public works. Under so-called “judicial protection” we are being pressured to denationalise water, gas and telecommunications. Where is the “judicial protection” for our people seeking new horizons in Europe? If the return directive becomes law, we will not be morally able to deepen negotiations with the EU, and we reserve the right to legislate so European citizens have the same obligations for visas that Europe imposes on the Bolivians, according to the diplomatic principle of reciprocity. The social cohesion problems that Europe is suffering now are not the fault of migrants, but the result of the model of development imposed by the north, which destroys the planet and dismembers human societies. I appeal to European leaders to drop this directive and instead form a migration policy that respects human rights, and allows us to maintain the movement of people that helps both continents. Evo Morales Ayma is the president of the Republic of Bolivia presidencia.gov.bo For more information on the Returns Directive, see No Fortress Europe‘s site – and sign the petition!
How many innocent people are going out of their minds today?16 Jun 2008We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group of historians on Sunday night. The president has spent much of his second term pleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, he will surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had. Even if historians were somehow to forget the illegal war, the mangling of international law, the trashing of the environment and social welfare, the banking crisis, and the transfer of wealth from rich to poor, one image is stamped indelibly on this presidency: the trussed automatons in orange jumpsuits. It portrays a superpower prepared to dehumanise its prisoners, to wrap, blind and deafen them, to reduce them to mannequins, in a place as stark and industrial as a chicken-packing plant. Worse, the government was proud of what it had done. It was parading its impunity. It wanted us to know that nothing would stand in its way: its power was both sovereign and unaccountable. Three days before Bush arrived in Britain, the US supreme court ruled that the inmates at Guantánamo Bay were entitled to contest their detention in the civilian courts. This is the third time the supreme court has ruled against the prison camp, but on this occasion Bush cannot change the law: the court has ruled that the prisoners’ rights are constitutional. Symbolically the decision could scarcely be more important. Practically it could scarcely be less. The department of defence can transfer its prisoners to an oubliette in another country, where the constitution’s writ does not run. The public atrocity of Guantánamo Bay has provided a useful distraction from something even worse: the sprawling system of secret detention camps the US runs around the world. We don’t, of course, know much about this programme. Bush first acknowledged it in September 2006. “Of the thousands of terrorists captured across the world, only about 770 have ever been sent to Guantánamo.” Other suspects, he said, were being “held secretly” by the CIA. “Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged.” He went on to claim that all the secret prisoners had now been transferred to Guantánamo Bay. Several lines of evidence suggest that this claim was false. The CIA appears to have overseen or controlled, and in some cases appears still to be running, black sites in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Macedonia, Kosovo, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand and, possibly, Diego Garcia. The US appears to be using ships as secret prisons. In just two years the CIA ran 283 flights – which the Council of Europe believes were used for transporting secret prisoners – out of Germany alone. It admits that it possesses 7,000 documents about its ghost detention programme. Are we to believe all this was done for the 14 men transferred to Guantánamo Bay? In Iraq, the US now admits to holding 22,000 prisoners without charge in its own facilities, some of whom are known to be kept away from the Red Cross and other visitors. Apart from those moved to Cuba, hardly anyone, so far, has come out of this system. At the end of last year salon.com interviewed Muhammad Bashmilah, who was arrested and tortured by Jordanian police, handed to the Americans, flown to an unknown country in autumn 2003, and held secretly by the CIA until he was transferred to Yemeni custody in May 2005. He reports that he was kept in a cell about the size of a transit van throughout the 19 months of his confinement, without any human contact except during interrogation. The lights and a source of white noise were left on permanently. Driven mad by isolation and sensory deprivation, he tried to kill himself several times. Eventually, when it became obvious even to the CIA that he had nothing to do with terrorism, he was handed over to the Yemeni government, who held him for another year until he was released without charge. Lawyers for some of the men transferred to Guantánamo Bay claim that, while in secret detention, their clients were left hanging from the ceiling by their wrists, beaten with electric cables, yanked around on a dog’s leash, chained naked in a freezing cell, and doused with cold water. “The CIA worked people day and night for months,” one prisoner reports. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.” Could it be worse than this? Yes. In 2003, a US official admitted to the Sunday Telegraph that the CIA was detaining and interrogating children. Discussing two boys aged seven and nine held in secret detention by the CIA, the official explained: “We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children, but we need to know as much about their father’s recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care.” According to another prisoner, the boys had already been tortured by Pakistani guards. A former CIA official told the New Yorker that “every single plan [in the secret detention programme] is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level – meaning the director of the CIA. Any change in the plan – even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added – was signed off by the CIA director.” Never mind detention without trial; this is detention without acknowledgement. When men and women disappear into this system, neither they nor their families know where they are. The Red Cross cannot reach them; they are beyond the scope of the law. They have been disappeared in the Latin American sense of that word. Do I need to explain that this treatment breaks just about every article in the Geneva conventions? Do I need to tell you that – without charges, trials, lawyers, scrutiny or even recognition – it is just as likely to net the innocent as the guilty? In 2006 George Bush maintained that “these aren’t common criminals, or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield – we have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantánamo Bay belong at Guantánamo”. But a new and detailed investigation by the McClatchy newspaper group has found that many of them were indeed either common criminals or bystanders, or men sold to the authorities in order to settle a feud. Who knows how many innocent people are going out of their minds in the CIA’s secret prisons today? Along with its innocent victims, the US government has locked itself into this system. As the justice department has argued, these prisoners cannot be released in case they describe the “alternative interrogation methods” (the euphemism it uses for torture) the CIA used on them, which could “reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage”. Like almost everything Bush has done, this programme promises to backfire. George Bush will be remembered not only for the lives he has broken, but also for smashing everything he claimed to defend.
After the oil crunch?15 Jun 2008There are two competing explanations for today?s high oil prices. One sees the price rise as the result of a temporary imbalance between supply and demand, exacerbated by a weak dollar and a bubble of speculative commodities trading. Fix these problems, adherents suggest, and the price can return to previous low levels, allowing business to continue as usual. The other sees the current price spike as symptomatic of a much deeper crisis, one that could end life as we know it in the rich, consuming west as global supplies of cheap oil begin to run short, not temporarily, but for ever. As Chris Skrebowski, editor of the UK Petroleum Review, puts it: ?This is what I would describe as the foothills of peak oil.? An imminent oil peak is no longer just a fringe theory: increasing numbers of experts view the topping out point as very close, if not actually upon us. ?Easy, cheap oil is over, peak oil is looming,? warns Shokri Ghanem, head of Libya?s National Oil Corporation. If they are right, we are about to move into a very different world. But while the reality of global warming is now nearly universally accepted, the potential problem of peak oil is still widely doubted or ignored. There is no official policy for a smooth transition to a post-oil future; the British government blithely reassures us (in response to a peak oil petition on the No 10 website) that ?the world?s oil and gas resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the forseeable future?. Both the International Energy Agency and the US government issue projections based on oil reserve estimates which many geologists and oil industry insiders suggest are grossly inflated. This complacency smacks of a fatal combination of ignorance and denial. Recent oil production figures suggest that the peak oil crowd is winning the debate. For the past three years world crude production has flatlined at about 86 million barrels per day, despite a rapid upward trend in prices. This lack of increase in supply, combined with rapidly rising demand in countries such as India, China and Brazil, lies at the root of today?s soaring prices. Unlike the oil price shocks of the 1970s, caused by political factors, the present crisis is caused by something far more intractable even than the Middle East conflict ? geology. David Strahan calls this ?the last oil shock? in his book of the same title; the one after which supply and demand can never be rebalanced and the world totters towards economic catastrophe. As Strahan points out: ?For three years the oil supply has been a zero-sum game in which if one country consumes more, another has to consume less.? In this case, unusually, it is the rich world which is losing out: countries which are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have seen crude oil use falling for two years, as price rises choke off demand. Indeed, what we do here no longer seems to matter much: car sales in Russia leapt by a staggering 60 per cent last year, while new vehicles flooded the roads in India and China. With oil massively subsidised in many Opec countries, some of the strongest growth in demand is now coming from oil producers themselves. Whether the actual moment of peak oil is now, next year or in five years? time is not what matters most; what defines this new era is the conclusive end of cheap oil. Never again will oil be bought at $20 a barrel, as it was through much of the 1990s. Instead, we will see crude prices rising steadily ? if not uniformly ? towards $200, $300 and $400 a barrel in years to come. The oil crunch has created a crisis for western leaders. George Bush made two humiliating trips to Riyadh to beg the Saudis to pump more. He was rebuffed: whether the Saudis can?t or won?t remains unclear. In France, President Sarkozy has had to contend with striking fishermen, and in Britain the hauliers are blocking roads and refineries once again. Gordon Brown?s absurd response was to ask North Sea producers to increase output ? despite the fact that offshore production peaked in 1999 and has since fallen by 40 per cent. The hauliers? protests have now spread to France and Spain. All seem to believe that the rising cost of energy should be borne by someone else, not them. They huff and puff to no avail ? the rules of geology cannot be broken. But peak oil may not be quite the crisis the catastrophists predict. So far, the price hike has been an environmental boon: the rise in fossil fuel prices has made emitting carbon more expensive, helping to make up for the more or less total failure of world climate change policymaking. Higher oil prices have made renewables more competitive, spurring rapid developments in wind and solar power: installed capacities of each are now doubling every two years. In the US, SUV sales have slumped ? General Motors may now drop t he Hummer and focus production instead on its new plug-in electric hybrid model, the Chevrolet Volt. The aviation industry has seen its profits evaporate, with many analysts declaring that the era of cheap flights is over. All of these should be causes for celebration. In global warming terms, oil at $139 a barrel has been the best thing to happen for a decade. Betting on failure But high oil prices cannot substitute for proper carbon regulation indefinitely. Even as the ?green tech? sector soars to new heights ? $100bn flooded in last year ? equally big investments are being ploughed into the dirtiest fuels of all: unconventional oil and coal. An upcoming report from the WWF and the Co-operative Insurance Society suggests that oil sands in Canada are three times as carbon-intensive as conventional oil, while oil shale in the US Rockies may be up to eight times more so. And these reserves are vast, estimated at 1.7 trillion barrels for Canadian oil sands and up to 1.5 billion barrels for US oil shale. Proven reserves of 174 billion barrels in Canada place the country second only to Saudi Arabia, which claims 260 billion barrels. But extracting this oil is environmentally devastating. Some open-cast mines in Canada?s oil sands are so huge they can be seen from space, and they have already laid waste to vast areas of fragile boreal forest. This is not oil that can be drilled easily out of the ground: each barrel requires the extraction of two tonnes of tar-soaked sand, which is then washed with hot water to remove the hydrocarbons, using both gas and water in massive quantities. Current operations use enough natural gas to heat a quarter of Canada?s homes, according to the WWF/CIS report, while 300 million cubic metres of water are diverted from the nearby Athabasca river. Ponds to hold the resulting toxic sludge measure up to 50 sq km each. Coal-to-liquids technology is also being ramped up worldwide, using the Fischer- Tropsch chemical process to produce synthetic petrol, diesel and kerosene from solid coal ? but again this is vastly more carbon-intensive than pumping conventional oil, doubling CO2 emissions. The Economist suggests both oil shale and coal to liquids become competitive with world crude prices at $70 a barrel or above. With high prices likely to continue, all the majors are moving rapidly to invest in this area. Even after making record profits on the back of high prices ? $27bn for Shell and $40bn for Exxon-Mobil in 2007 ? the evidence suggests that oil companies are moving away from renewables and instead ?recarbonising? by ploughing billions into unconventional oil as they run down their conventional reserves. In May this year, Shell pulled out of the London Array, expected to be the world?s biggest wind farm. Instead, the company plans to double its output from the Canadian oil sands, and is being closely followed in investing in unconventional oil by BP, Exxon-Mobil and ConocoPhillips. However, as the WWF report asserts, these companies are exposing their shareholders to a significant investor risk: essentially they are betting that world policy failure on greenhouse-gas regulation will continue indefinitely. If policy improves, high carbon prices will likely make dirty fuels uncompetitive when compared with renewables, and investors in solar, wind and other clean energy sources will win out at the expense of the oil majors. This has to be the best-case environmental scenario: that high oil prices continue, and that the pricing of carbon in world markets chokes off investment in dirty replacements. Then a true transition to a post-oil, low-carbon future becomes a real possibility. But this scenario depends on policymakers having the vision to squeeze fossil fuels further even as restive populations protest at losing their foreign holidays and big cars. As David Strahan concludes: ?All it needs is some brave political leadership. What a terrifying thought.?
42 Days: Creeping Internment15 Jun 2008The British state’s attempt to push through detention without charge for 42 days is a precursor to a plan to impose indefinite internment, targeted disproportionately against Muslims and ethnic minorities. The current controversy over 42 days is only a sign of things to come. The British state views the House of Commons victory as a stepping-stone on the way to obtaining the power to impose internment, that is, the power to label innocent people people as “terrorist suspects”, and subsequently detain them indefinitely without charge. Yet just as the House of Lords is expected to reject the Bill for now, it is equally expected that unelected Prime Minister Gordon Brown will attempt to galvanise the Parliament Act to force the Bill through. One of the most vocal voices in the state campaign for internment is that of Ken Jones, who as head of the Association of Police Chief Officers (APCO), and former chair of its counter-terrorism committee, insisted last year that there was a need to hold people without charge for “as long as it takes.” This “judicially-supervised detention” is, we were told, essential to counter the increasingly complex, global nature of terror cells. This was, however, only an official public admission of police planning that has clearly gone on far longer. The first hint that Scotland Yard was privately pushing for internment came on 8th October 2006. The conservative political commentator Iain Dale revealed that Sir Ian Blair as Metropolitan Police Commissioner told a Reform Club Media Group meeting under Chatham House rules that the British people should “brace themselves for a truly appalling act of terror”, following which “people would be talking quite openly about internment“. Then on the 19th October 2006, Professor Anthony Glees, director of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence & Security Studies at Brunel University, wrote a piece in the Independent, ‘Internment should be a policy option’, arguing for the overturning of the European Convention on Human Rights, which he insisted is “inappropriate for a country at war.” Advocating that “We need to think about how we should behave to people who consider us enemies”, namely Muslim communities, he went on to argue: “Internment in the second world war is called MI5’s darkest hour, but internment was a very effective way of keeping the country safe from Nazi subversion. People say that the vast majority of those interned were Jews, and they would be the last people to act in a subversive way. In fact research shows that there were some Jews in Britain as agents of the Third Reich. Their families were in the hands of the Gestapo and they were blackmailed. And some say that internment in Northern Ireland made the situation better. Internment needs to be talked about. There shouldn’t be things that shouldn’t be considered – if they can help.” The increasing attempt to legitimise the concept and practice of internment against predominantly Muslim communities adds to the raft of anti-terror legislation which is already systematically discriminatory. It also feeds into the the rampant politicization of intelligence, in which – as investigative journalist and Spectator editor Peter Oborne has documented in a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies – the spectre of terrorism both before and after 7/7 has been deliberately exaggerrated, and even fabricated, by the British government and police to legitimize authoritarian measures of social control at home and abroad. According to Harmit Atwal of the Institute of Race Relations in London: “There are two criminal justice systems in Britain today. In the first, under the ordinary rule of law, there is a balance between the rights of the citizen and the rights of the state. But in the second, under the special provisions of anti-terror laws, you can be arrested, questioned and publicly accused of being a threat to civilisation on the thinnest of pretexts, detained without fair trial and go slowly mad in the cells of Belmarsh, Woodhill or the immigration detention centres. The first system applies to white Britons. The second system applies to foreign nationals and, increasingly, British Muslims too.” Hence, the impact of creeping internment will most likely be the further systematic erosion of British national security. According to Des Thomas, a former Senior Detective Superintendent, Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) and Deputy Head of Hampshire Constabulary CID, the 7/7 attacks served “to facilitate the introduction of repressive legislation and oppressive policing resulting in the frightening and alienation of the Muslim community.” Thomas warned that the tightening of anti-terror powers is thus “conducive to allowing insurgents to establish an area from which they would be free to move, recruit and mount further attacks. Laws of this kind are often impossible to implement and the trying may itself act as a recruiting sergeant for extremist organisations.” Increasingly harsh anti-terror laws make “it easier for Muslim extremists to convince potential recruits” exposing the “short-sighted and repressive nature of the state response.” [p. 9] Thomas’ concerns are backed by the evidence – evidence that the British state, MPs and mainstream media continue to ignore. A study by the Democratic Audit at the University of Essex that: “The key to successfully combating terrorism lies in winning the trust and cooperation of the Muslim communities in the UK. However, the government’s counter terrorism legislation and rhetorical stance are between them creating serious losses in human rights and criminal justice protections; loosening the fabric of justice and civil liberties in the UK… harming community relations… having a disproportionate effect on the Muslim communities… prejudicing the ability of the government and security forces to gain the very trust and cooperation from individuals in those communities that they require to combat terrorism. The impact of the legislation and its implementation has been self-defeating as well as harmful.” Similarly, even Demos, a think-tank of which Brown’s predecessor Blair has been particularly fond, backs up these findings in a study setting out a six-point strategy for countering extremism by working within and alongside Muslim communities. The report finds that the potential radicalisation of younger generations of British Muslims is precisely the danger that increasing indiscriminate arrests under new anti-terror powers will exacerbate. Inevitably, casting the net so wide that innocent people are inevitably drawn into new police 42 day internment-regimes will culminate in increasing discontent, frustration, and anger at the injustice of the legal system. It will also generate a massive burden in manpower, cost and bureaucracy on a national security system which is already riddled with holes, to process thousands of cases the vast majority of which will be dead leads. Given that the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Kevin Macdonald, had already confirmed that an extension of detention time without charge is simply unnecessary (”Our experience has been that 28 days has suited us quite nicely“), the underlying state rationale behind creeping internment has neither been explained, nor justified.
Globalisation’s New Deal14 Jun 2008I know, far too much has been said and written already about ‘globalization’, mondialisation, Globalisierung, and also about their opposite numbers, anti-globalization, ‘glocalism’ and so on. No-one should propose adding to this untidy heap, without doubts and reservations. Yet I would like to try my hand again and ask your forgiveness in advance. The only excuse possible is that of approaching the Zeitgeist from a different angle. Rather than adding one more interpretation, I will try to decipher something that is in course of being said, and said not (or not only) by intellectuals, academics and ‘intéllos’, the shamans of our age. The emerging message I’m after is the one that may be coming from below, from the electorate of Scotland. Part of that message was delivered last May. It was a message favorable to fuller self-government, or possibly formal Independence, and it seems certain to carry us forward to one or more referenda on the matter fairly soon. But I suspect that a great deal more than this was already being said, or half-said, in such a striking shift. At least part of that may have come from deeper sources, which surely relate to the current way of the world as well as to party struggles, the plight of the Labour Party, and the weird dilemmas of Westminster’s archaic constitution. Political leaders naturally hope people are voting for policies on this and that, after canny calculations of gains and losses; but of course voters are also concerned with ‘directions’: general inclinations of society, affected by passions or longings that may well be in the background of debate. There is perhaps a feature of the Scottish electorate that may help us towards such a diagnosis. It’s the one indicated by Professor Tom Devine in his recent history The Scottish Nation 1700-2000 (1999), where he argues that the Scots have been the leaders in modern emigration. Comparatively viewed, they appear to have outdone the Greeks, the Irish, Jews, Italians and Norwegians from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and deposited a very extensive global diaspora whose size remains difficult to estimate. Most guesses put it at eight or nine times the size of our present-day population. But my point is less the migrants than as what they left behind, a population unusually affected by so much departure, over such a prolonged period of time. In Scotland Romany or Gypsy nomads are usually called simply ‘travelling people’: an appropriate label from residents who, if not travelling themselves, invariably have well-travelled relatives in Calgary, Cape Town, Nova Scotia, Auckland, Chicago or Perth (Western Australia) and who either go there, or receive fairly irregular visits from them and their descendants. Michael Russell has some amusing phrases about this in his book The Next Big Thing (2007). Wherever you go, he points out, you find that ‘Insecurity is part of the Scottish condition. We come from somewhere else, and settle where we feel least uncomfortable. We belong to places that we only visit, yet we are visitors in the place where we live…’. In his book Devine diagnoses what he calls ‘Highlandism’ as one byproduct of this sustained communal haemorrhage: a projection of imagined origins, the famously synthetic folklore of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, an identity deploying the most colorful items from successive wardrobes and cabin-trunks, with appropriate music and displays. This outstanding hemorrhage from such a small population may have fostered an unusually exposed and outward-looking mentality, a mind-set forcibly attuned to a wider view, and to contrasts of culture and custom. More than most other nations, Scots have been so to speak ‘pre-globalized’ by such mundane circumstances. This matter-of-fact Weltanschauung has little to do with the new intéllo fad of ‘cosmopolitanism’, the aloofness deemed ethically appropriate for the globalizing times. When Scots explorer Charles Macdouall Stuart reached the centre of the Australian continent in 1860, during his famed South-North expedition, the flag he proudly planted there had to be the Union Jack. Such was the old 1707 deal, the enchantment of that age. And what one might call the ‘self-colonization’ implicit in such triumphs has proved much harder to recover from than other, cruder forms of imperial hegemony. Returning to the enchantment of today: in spite of my earlier reservations about ‘globaloney’, some theory of what global circumstances means is of course needed. And here, one way forward in the morass may be to look back more carefully at certain neglected views of nationhood. What I have in mind is the curious question of the scale of modern countries and states. This tends to be taken for granted in most commentary and policy-formation; but should not be. It relates quite directly to what the last century’s main theorist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, always posed as the crucial problem in his field. The underlying puzzle has always been not why there are so many nation states and distinct ethnic cultures but why are there so few? In his classic Nations and Nationalism (1983) the social anthropologist Gellner observes that there can’t be less than somewhere between six and eight thousand identifiable ethno-linguistic populations scattered round the globe. Why, then, are there less than 200 or so national states? Gellner’s characteristic explanation of this disparity was in terms of overall social and cultural development. The culprit had been first-round industrialization and urbanization. These were not processes planned by some celestial council from a suitably all-powerful centre. No, industrialization evolved chaotically out of the unlikely fringe location of the North Atlantic seaboard, and was marked throughout by chronic unevenness and widespread antagonism. It was impossible for industries, larger-scale commerce, greater market-places and banks to develop at a small-town or region scale. Nor were they ever likely to be set up by the sprawling dynastic and military empires of antiquity, whose essential concern remained expansion, hierarchy and secure military dominance of an inherited rural world. By contrast, Capitalism was able to evolve only at an intermediate level, within societies smaller than the antique dynasties but much bigger than most ethno-linguistic groups. It demanded the formation of relatively large socio-economic spaces, to be viable. Viability in that sense may never have been a fixed or unalterable condition. However, in retrospect we perceive that for over two centuries it did come to mean something like France’ or like England: not something like Brittany, Provence, Monaco, Wales or Ireland. The Scots had already situated themselves within the bigger-is-better expansion, via the 1707 Treaty of Union. Their fate was to be the unusual one of successful ‘self-colonization’ in that world. That is, they avoided conquest or assimilation, and conserved a distinct civil society but only by accepting the broader rules of the new age, as laid down by France, England and other more viable polities. As Gellner points out, such rules required a sufficiently common culture and language, and the cultivation of popular assent. This should not be confused with present-day ‘nationalism’. Nationhood and nationality culture and politics may have been primordial; but the ‘-ism’ is a different and far more peculiar story. Nationalism didn’t enter common parlance until the last third of the 19th century, after Abraham Lincoln’s victory over the American secessionists, and the Franco-Prussian War. Gellner always emphasized the general point, and newer historical analyses have confirmed it. In all languages, nationalism became commonsense in conjunction with ‘imperialism’, as part of the climate leading into the world wars, and finally the Cold War of 1947-1989. ‘Nationalism is not the awakening and assertion of mythical, supposedly natural and given units…’ is how he sums it up, ‘It is, on the contrary, the crystallization of new units, suitable for the conditions now prevailing’. The conditions then prevailing were the emergent ones of primarily capitalist socio-economic development, at first in the North Atlantic area and then more globally. It was those conditions that favoured the norm, the typical scale and standards for the political entities of (approximately) 1789 to 1989. British nationalism was of course just one chapter in that story, a value-parade both enforced and widely exported — and defended down to the present with mounting desperation by New Labour governments. But what I want to suggest is that it is precisely ‘those conditions’ that are changing. Gellner was thinking in the 1980s, when the old identikit ‘nation-state’ rules remained in place, albeit shakily. But one aspect of globalization has been the collapse of at least some of them. When commentators declare so confidently that it ‘undermines’ borders and flags, as well as customs posts, they usually fail to make a vital distinction. Yes, possibly blood is draining out of an ‘-ism’; but there’s very little sign of it deserting nationalities, identities, cultural contrasts, and the wish to have, or to win, different forms of collective ‘say’ in the brave new globe. Speculation in this zone has been limited by a curious monotheism of out-look: the child, doubtless, of Christianity, Islam, and their kind, as well as of the odd theatre of the Cold War’s Iron Curtain. Globality is decreed in advance to possess one overall or commanding meaning: either Neo-liberal progress or some new universal oppression, choose your side. It’s treated as if it had come out of a grand blueprint, when most people accept there was no such design — or any conceivable way of finding out, should Deities be invoked. But in fact, may not globality simply be true to its more discernible origins? That is, a range of conflicts, ‘thrown up’ rather than devised for any numinous cosmic purpose? it may be too much to say ‘battlefields’ — but certainly terrains of decision, alternative directions and possibilities. Umberto Eco has identified one of these alternatives clearly, and amusingly, in his Putting the Clock Back. Look at the world since the First Gulf War, he asks: just who is so plainly clinging to past patterns and habits? We see the explosion and spread of what he labels ‘neo-war’, the curse of US-led globalization. That is, of threatened and actual incursions against largely phantasmagoric enemies like ‘Terrorism’ and Islam or ‘the West’ and crusade-style Christianity or Evangelism. The aim of these is to maintain and mobilize the mass public opinion upon which capital-letter Great power élites still depend, against the individualism, privatization and indifference that accompany so many transnational blessings and successes. Societies have mutated far more than states. And this is why the latter find themselves tempted into another version of the 19th century Restoration that tried to impose stability, values (etc.) between Napoleon 1st and the ‘Springtime of Nations’ in 1848. Brown and Bush can’t literally put the clock back; but at least they can try to slow it down a bit, with plausible aggression and of course the new forms of persuasion provided by the revolution in communications. The guilty parties here are unmistakable: they are the old lags of Gellner’s bigger-and-better epoch, plus new members and applicants to join the Body-builders Club — countries endowed with that favourite attribute of British Leaders, ‘clout’. America First, naturally, but with Great Spain, Great Russia, Great Serbia alongside cheer-leader Great Britain, plus rising muscle-flexers like India, Indonesia, Iran and China. The latter is currently bidding to take over the clout market, as Americans and Brits move towards retreat from Mesopotamia, and (soon) from Afghanistan. In Tibet the clock is being put back with a Great-nationalist vengeance: a menu of colonial repression once believed anachronistic, where no feeble alibis about ‘democracy’ required. I suppose pidgin Chinese will very soon dominate Club soirées, or at least share them with pidgin English and Russian. But right now the loudest voice defending values is now that of John Bolton, President Bush’s Ambassador to the UN. He has published his political memoirs as Surrender is Not an Option (2006). However, the great-at-all-costs Club is busy acquiring its own academic credentials as well. That is, Professors who seriously believe that the globe is safer with well-padded, first-round veterans in control. An astonishing volume entitled No More States? appeared last year from the stables of University College, Los Angeles, arguing not only that there should be no more of these small nuisances, but that possibly a reversal of thrust may be possible, in the sense of ‘agglomerationism’ — returns to one or other metropolitan fold by populations tempted astray by romantic delusion or bad verse. In case anyone fears I’m making this up, let me quote from Professor Richard Rosecrance’s summing up: ‘Potentially dissident Scotland, the Basques, Quebec and other provincial populations have gradually come to see the federation-metropole as a less hostile environment, and their independence movements have declined in proportion…(hence) few new states are likely to be created…It is possible, even, that the number of fully independent states may decline as political units begin to merge with each other…’ This conclusion had the good luck to be published not long before the 2007 elections in the U.K., and in that sense comment may be superfluous. But the general sense is unmistakable: global history must be frozen in its tracks, for the convenience of existing agglomerations, including the US and loyal fan-club Great Britain. Only the consolidation of a retrospective blueprint will allow stability and reasonable global order prevail. ‘Bigger is Better’ was therefore not just a phase social evolution had to go through, to improve the general lot. No, it has to be made per-manent, virtually eternalized, in the imagined interest of a species whose values have become indistinguishable from the established interest of the Big Lads Club. And on the other side, what about all the no-hopers? Here the list could hardly be more different, but in newly surprising ways. The best approach to it remains Foreign Policy magazine’s ‘Globalization Index’, a now long-running attempt to estimate and compare national successes and failures of the global times. I only have the 2006 ‘Top 20’ list with me, and have only just received 2007. But so far its overall aspect has changed little from year to year: ‘Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland, Denmark, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Israel, the Czech Republic and so on, and on, down to Slovenia, currently at No. 20. True, there have also been some exceptional entries. The USA appears in the Top 20 because in spite of manufacturing decline and job exports, it can’t avoid showing up because most of the new globe’s spare cash has been washing irresistibly through it, at least down to the regrettable ‘sub-prime’ property hitches of 2007. However, the broader picture remains unmistakable: a springtime of victorious dwarves, one might say. ‘Small is beautiful’? Sooner or later, one or more formal referenda will be of course be required for such entrants, but a kind of referendum movement, or direction, is already under way in Scotland, a gathering mixture of questioning and hardening conviction. Among Scots this takes the form of a firming ‘self-confidence’, a kind of matter-of-factness I mentioned earlier. As we have seen, the old question used to be: ‘Are you big enough to survive and develop in an industrializing world?’ The advent of globalization is replacing this with another, something close to: ‘Are you small and smart enough to survive?’ ‘Smart’ in the new circumstances refers of course to education, or to ‘consciousness-raising’ as feminists used to put it. And not too surprisingly, the most common answer coming up from the bowels and steerage accommodation of the common ship is: ‘You bet we are…nor do we mean to be deprived of the chance.’ I think some sense of this may have been part of the election groundswell last May, in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland — and maybe most notably in Scotland. On the emerging global vessel, it’s presence or nothing: speak up and act up, or the already existing officer and first-class passengers will not only stay there, but reinforce their grip over the lower-deck rabble of dependents, servants and migrating stowaways. In a remarkable recent essay called simply ‘Presence’, the Dutch social historian Eelco Runia has made the point with a humorous metaphor. Globalization can’t help meaning that we’re all ‘in the same boat’; but on this noble vessel, most of the occupants can’t help being virtual ‘stowaways’, travelling either on fake documents and overdrawn credit-cards, or just secretly, smuggled or bribed aboard at night or in disguise. However, as the global process continue its erratic course, this rabble has begun appearing on deck, in broad daylight. No, they want their tickets. It’s time they were released from the dank lower levels of ballast, coiled ropes and awful stairwells. ‘Equality’ is the demand: demands for use of the cafeteria and TV lounges, new cabins and beds, ideally with fresh bedding, as well as some formal presence by representation on the bridge. There used to be bigger-is-better techniques for avoiding this kind of nuisance. Allow them enough folk-dancing and local government down in the bilges, that’ll keep them out of trouble. But of course presence in Runia’s sense represents something more than these palliatives. The spirit of Gertrude Stein is turning out to be quite strong up on deck: something to do with the democratic air. On this bigger, final boat everyone now cannot help finding themselves aboard, ‘self-government’ is self-government is self-government. What Charles Stewart Parnell meant in the famous remark about nobody having ‘a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation’, in the sense of its will and sovereignty. The motto prefixes the recent Scottish Government’s ‘National Conversation’ on Scotland’s future. In the new context, does that mean ‘six or eight thousand’ states corresponding to Gellner’s original sources of human diversity? Nobody can know this, but what it already does imply is that no court of fixers and blueprint-fiddlers should decide who is in or out, or what their relationships with one another should be. To an increasing degree these are likely to relate to one another via formulae of confederation, quite different from federalism, subsidiarity, devolved regionalism and other dodges of the bygone era. And it’s worth emphasizing something else too, at this point — something fundamental that globalization is bringing home, everywhere and to everybody. While the threats of globalizing uniformity are often exaggerated, they do remain real enough to have brought something else, something really new, into recognizable perspective. One might call this, the threat to Babel. Globalization can’t help a degree of sameness; but, more strongly than empires of the past, the new mode may be forcing something more profound into existence. The counter to ‘all-the-same-ism’ can only be cross-fertilization, the societal equivalent of Darwin’s new species and forms. That’s what ‘the universal’ has always been, the capacity to transcend, to fuse, to breed hybrid novelty rather than merely ‘agglomerate’ in Professor Rosecrance’s sense. However, the power to do this rests at bottom upon more than the maintenance of diversity — it demands that differentiation be favoured, that it be positively fostered by globalization. The basic problem that Globalization confronts is having to perpetuate ‘Babel’, as well as confronting all its difficulties and contradictions. The reason is that human universals arise only via contrasts, by the transcendence of borders rather than their suppression — via cross-fertilization, through hybrids and surprises, from the unheard-of, in communities not just ‘imagined’ in Ben Anderson’s celebrated phrase, but previously unimaginable, from presences whose spell makes the past into a bearable future. And how on earth can anything like that be achieved without ‘independence’? In this context independence surely isn’t backward-looking or inward-looking me-first, chip on the shoulder time, and so on. It’s more like seizing the chance as the clock-hands move so decisively forward, the chance to contribute and to endure with an emerging purpose not yet wholly known, because societies must retain, or rediscover the power and confidence to surprise themselves. With all its daft twists and turns, and hopeless exaggerations, globalization may be undermining the older, late 19th century nationalism and simultaneously providing new stimuli for 21st century nationalism, or at least nationality-politics. In the most widely read popularization of globalization theory, the Oxford Very Short Introduction to the subject, my Austrian colleague, Manfred Steger, puts it at the end of his account, ‘there’s nothing wrong with greater manifestations of social interdependence as a result of globalization’; but what matters above all are ‘the transformative social processes that arise to challenge ‘the current oppressive structure of global apartheid’, new societal vehicles capable of ‘ushering in a truly democratic and egalitarian global order’. The emergence of new communities of will and purpose may be right in the main-stream of globalization, rather than futile attempts to stave the latter off. Imagine an email to the cosmos from Edinburgh, notifying whoever is listening of events recent and soon to come. It could read something like: “Back in state-political presence after three centuries, on different footing following lessons at once painful and positive; no deaths, comparatively little resentment, modest ambitions to make a difference.” No heaven-shattering utterance, I concede. Yet there would have to be an attachment going with this message too, about which I have so far deliberately said nothing: I sometimes think of it as ‘Adam Smith’, a connotation that renders boasting unnecessary, and which is also quite peculiar, in the sense that the family of myself and my brother happens to come from Kirkcaldy, the same small East coast port as the author of An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations (1776), the foundation of modern economics. In Scotland, this kind of allusion can be fatal. It’s guaranteed to arouse a deep-source genetic sarcasm that long preceded Social Darwinist nonsense: ‘So…they think their faithers must have kent some o’their faithers…Hm-m-m-m!’ It may be recalled that Smith’s actual father was the Kirkcaldy ‘Comptroller of Customs’, preoccupied with doubling his official wages by extorting harbour fees and tariffs from the coal and salt trades, as well as from Baltic, Russian and Dutch sea-captains. The birth-pangs of Neo-liberal Economism were every bit as dishonorable as those of other faiths. While they might have been suffered in Bremen, Tallin, or any number of other places, it so happened that Kirkcaldy was the decisive venue, and something of that took up permanent lodgings in modernity. And it can’t be denied, this does add a certain weight to endeavours at demolishing ‘the authority of the old system’, and a distinct edge to the ‘more daring, but often dangerous spirit of innovation’ now in charge across the River Forth from the old seaport. A few years back, Arthur Herman published How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2002). Mistaken theorists of an earlier moment — myself among them — used to complain about Scotland having missed or neglected its national opportunities, by failing to participate in earlier waves of anti-colonial liberation. But of course, the Scots never belonged there. Not having been colonized they ‘did it themselves’ via self-colonization, the subordinate affirmation of a kind of flightless or contained nationality, which implied exemption from many rules of the former imperial world. Today that time is ended. I have suggested that resuming the power of flight simply means participation in the new forms and rules, alongside many others. It’s a matter-of-fact need, neither too late nor too soon, and I suspect that something of this has already sunk into popular sensibility — the nascent ‘common sense’ of a different, dawning moment in history, the moment when Eelco Runia’s ‘presence’ is possible for us, as well as for ‘them’. I have drawn a general contrast between Old Lags laboring away on restoring the grandfather clock, and new, smaller arriving vehicles impatient with tradition, and anxious to move faster. In the British-Irish archipelago, this contrast has become in effect a ‘front line’ between Anglo-Westminster and former peripheral accomplices. Most clearly, the clash will be manifested in the battle over nuclear weapons, and the decision to replace the Trident weapons system with something better. This is of course partly Great-Power pantomine; but it happens to be located in western Scotland at the Faslane naval base. More than pacifism and general nuclear disarmament is involved: and it’s hard to imagine any ‘compromise’ over such an issue. So there will be endless problems and pitfalls, sure; but they are taking place at a great border crossing, as the world gets used to a different landscape. I suspect that one of the few useful tourist guides here may be Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s Free Trade Reimagined (Princeton, 2007). Unger’s argument is that the victory of ‘managed capitalism’ was unavoidable, but not necessarily linked to a tide of socio-political reaction derived from the 1960s. The rising waters of resurrected conservatism naturally appropriated a re-emergent capitalism — but did not succeed in making the free-trade world into its own. The lunacy of Neo-liberalism has been disproved by globalized reality, as well as that of centralized or State-Socialism. Hence managed capitalism is in desperate need of new management — the ‘reimagination’ of his title. There’s no chance of turning clock-hands back; yet the the new chronology signalled by their advance is quite different from what prevailed before 1989 — on both Right and Left. What happened in the 2007 elections was part of ‘everything else’. It did not betray but expressed the grander shift, the avalanche under way. Only a small bit of Globalization’s drawing-board, but definitely on it, contributing to the designs of a new and still mostly hidden hand. This article has been adapted from a lecture delivered on March 4th 2008 and is part of a project, ‘Edgelands’, sponsored by the Australian Research Council for 2008-09. Tom Nairn is one of Scotland’s leading writers and political theorists
Ireland Shows the Way14 Jun 2008Dublin In the midst of a growing economic crisis, Ireland?s urban working class and struggling rural people have united to deliver a blow to Europe?s ruling elite. The defeat of the Lisbon Treaty in yesterday?s Irish referendum has tossed out years of efforts by the European Union to come up with new, ?streamlined? procedures, and to get the increasingly unitary EU an (unelected) president and foreign minister. The Treaty was itself a modest rewrite of the European Constitution, rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. As the counts came in from around the country today, the Irish people?s decision was, in the end, not even close. The momentum for a No vote displayed in last week?s opinion polls continued right through polling day. With a turnout bigger than in any previous Irish Euro-referendum, the electorate smashed expectations that a big vote would boost the Yes side and defied the advice of 95% of the country?s elected politicians, who supported the Treaty. The politically disparate No campaign had rained blows from left and right, defending workers? rights and defending low corporation tax, against privatization and against abortion; the Yes side could scarcely defend itself, let alone fight back. Former Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte today compared the plight of the Yes campaigner to playing a video game: ?You pop the bad guy, two more pop up.? The various No elements avoided arguing among themselves during the campaign, but the battle to claim the victory has now begun. All analysts agree, however, that as in the 2001 Nice Treaty referendum, Irish people?s concern about military neutrality and the growing militarization of the EU was crucial. Many of the issues and energies in the Lisbon campaign have been addressed already in CounterPunch. The X factor in this result was the effect of the prevailing economic catastrophism: would voters take the conservative option of voting Yes to avoid the danger of deepening the crisis with political uncertainty? In the end it was the most at-risk sections of the population who delivered the most decisive No. The problem for the Treaty was that it was all too easy for voters to connect Ireland?s present economic woes to its role in Europe. As unemployment leaps, it calls attention to all the east-European immigrants working here; as previously astronomic house prices collapse, the president of the European Central Bank announces a coming rise in interest rates; as farmers worry about their futures, the EU negotiates at the WTO to allow more South American beef into European markets; as fishermen despairing of high fuel prices stage protest blockades at key ports, they complain about EU-imposed fishing quotas that force them to dump tons of their catches. A No vote does nothing to address any of these issues; indeed few of them even figured prominently in the campaign. But voting No was the means at hand to complain about them. Much of the media credit for the No win is being given to conservative businessman Declan Ganley and his new Libertas organization, with its respectably neoliberal campaign focusing on taxation and voting weights in EU institutions. But the results so far indicate that better-off Irish voters, from the fat farming regions of the south midlands and the prosperous suburbs of south Dublin, stuck with their traditional Europhilia. The Yes side won solid victories in well-off areas and a near-draw in prosperous rural regions. The No victory came with unprecedented turnouts in poorer areas of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and other cities, and with large No margins in more marginal rural areas in the west of the island and around the Border with Northern Ireland. Fishing communities delivered an overwhelming No. Former prime minister Garret FitzGerald has described the result as the most class-divided in Irish history. There is, without doubt, some space for the Left in Ireland and across Europe to exploit this huge victory in a tiny country against the European Union?s neoliberal elite, especially if EU leaders try to drive through yet another version of Lisbon. But the reasons that an uneasy Ireland voted No are not simple, and the complex and contradictory story here gives that elite the chance to shrug off the result and just live with the institutional status quo ante. Is Europe a regulatory threat to business? A military threat to peace? A liberal threat to traditional morality? A driver of climate-change enlightenment? A hungry vulture in third-world markets? A counterweight to US power? Take your pick: unlike the US, the definition of institutional Europe is up for grabs, internally and globally. I was speaking last night to a prominent left-wing politician and No campaigner. He spoke of hearing a No voter give her reasons: ?If the Lisbon Treaty goes through, Europe will bring in abortion, gay marriage, legal prostitution, euthanasia?? The campaigner was glad to have another No vote, but conceded: ?If I believed that myself, I would have voted Yes.? Harry Browne lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology. His book, ?Hammered by the Irish: How the Pitstop Ploughshares disabled a US war-plane ? with Ireland?s blessing?, is forthcoming from Counterpunch Books. He can be reached at: harry.browne@gmail.com
UKWatch.net