After New Labour29 Oct 2008The credit crunch is a salutory reminder of two things: the weakness of governments and the power of governments. Governments failed to predict, prevent or prepare for this crisis; but they have also shown that they can, after all, make massive interventions in the globalised economy when they want to. Will this lead to great democratic and social reforms as the depression of the 1930s did? At the moment, it seems unlikely. The key difference between today’s situation and the aftermath of the 1929 crash is the absence of countervailing forces to finance capital. Contrast this with the middle decades of the last century, when the threat of communism, the power of organised labour, and the strength and autonomy of municipal governments all posed serious challenges to the power of banks and corporations, making it possible for governments to implement the very high levels of regulation and socialisation typical of welfare capitalism. Today, globalisation and the difficulty of effective labour organisation leave governments of the left in a much-weakened position. Despite this, the great Fabian fantasy ? the dream of benign and omniscient government re-ordering social relationships from the centre of administrative power ? maintains a grip on the imagination of both left and centre-left which is crippling in its consequences. On the one hand, New Labour tries and fails to solve social problems from the centre. On the other hand, its radical critics have consistently and correctly pointed to New Labour’s enthusiastic embrace of most of the neoliberal programme, but they also rarely address the broader question of the global political context and the constraints that it imposes. For example: can anyone really doubt that if New Labour had attempted to resist the international imperative towards privatisation of public services, as many wish they had, then the press and the City would have turned on them savagely, turfing them out of office after a single term? The point is this: if we want a democratic future, then “what policies should government enact?” is almost always the wrong question to ask. The question for anyone interested in a progressive route out of the crisis is: “what alternative sources of power should government be trying to build up, to fill the vacuum left by the financial institutions which have ruled the world for the past 30 years?” The right has often understood better how to think this way. The most brilliant strategic move by any government in living memory was Thatcher’s sell-off of council houses. The effect was to turn a generation of former Labour voters into small-time property speculators, creating a massive source of pressure on future governments to continue acting in a Thatcherite way. So even while real wages were shrinking, debt was spiralling and working-hours climbed ever-upwards, governments have been forced to pursue policy objectives (easy credit, high asset prices) which in the long-term only benefit the real capitalists. New Labour has never had an equivalent strategy. It could have helped the unions to reinvent and renew themselves for the 21st century, instead of pushing hard to remove protections from workers across Europe: by now a revived labour movement would be a powerful ally in the face of recession and Tory revival. It could have thought strategically about how to encourage the development of a democratic media sector in the world of web 2.0: instead it has never ceased to cower before Murdoch. Instead of allowing the PFI industry to erode the democratic accountability of public-service provision, it could have helped to rebuild local government as an ally in the effort to regulate capitalism. After New Labour, this is the path which any potential progressive government worth the name will have to follow. “After New Labour”, the second debate in the “Who owns the progressive future?” series, organised by Comment is free & Soundings journal, will take place in London at Kings Place on November 3 at 7pm. Guardian readers can obtain tickets at a special rate of 5.75 by phoning Kings Place box office on 0844 264 0321 and quoting “Guardian reader offer”. For full details click here.
Criminalising free speech29 Oct 2008In November 2007 the European Commission submitted a proposal to add three new criminal offences to the 2002 EU Framework Decision on terrorism.(1) If agreed by governments, EU countries will be obliged to criminalise “provocation”, “recruitment” and “training” for terrorism. Charges of “recruitment” and “training” will need to show a direct link with terrorist groups or activity (as defined in 2002), but the “provocation” offence is extremely broad, as it does not require a direct encouragement to commit terrorist acts but applies to any statements which create a “danger” of such acts being committed. According to the proposal: “public provocation to commit a terrorist offence” means the distribution, or otherwise making available, of a message to the public, with the intent to incite the commission of [a terrorist offence as defined in the Framework Decision], where such conduct, whether or not directly advocating terrorist offences, causes a danger that one or more such offences may be committed. As Statewatch pointed out in its analysis of the proposal, the wording of this definition is clearly likely to result in the criminalisation of the expression of political views (for example on the situation in Middle East or on certain conflicts within Member States), even if that expression does not in any way include the advocacy of terrorism to support those opinions.(2) It will be enough that the authorities deem that there is a “danger” that this will happen, an actual terrorist offence as a consequence is expressly not necessary for the Framework Decision to apply. The origins of the proposal All three offences in the proposed Framework Decision are taken from the text of the 2005 Council of Europe convention on the prevention of terrorism.(3) This Convention started life in 2003 in a working group established by Council of Europe Justice ministers to consider the harmonization of laws on incitement to terrorism and the act of “justifying terrorism”, which was already illegal in Spain (where prosecutions for the crime of “apologa” have been extensive) and France (where prosecutions for “apologie” are extremely rare). After the Madrid bombings in March 2004 the Council of Europe mandated a far-reaching Convention addressing “public expressions of support for terrorist offences and/or groups”; “the instigation of ethnic and religious tensions which can provide a basis for terrorism”; “the dissemination of “hate speech” and the promotion of ideologies favourable to terrorism”. The Council of Europe already had some experience in this area, having adopted in 2003 a Protocol to the “Cybercrime Convention” (of 2001) concerning the “criminalisation of acts of a racist and xenophobic nature committed through computer systems”, which addresses the dissemination of “racist propaganda” over the internet.(4) However, while this Protocol contains an opt-out based expressly on established national principles concerning freedom of expression, there is no opt-out in the terrorism Convention agreed in 2005. There is at least a “safeguards” clause (in article 12) which obliges states to respect “freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of religion”, the principle of “proportionality” and the prohibition of “arbitrariness or discriminatory or racist treatment”. But in the EU proposals, even these limited safeguards have been dropped. The EU negotiations The EU proposals are a recipe for an overbroad offence encompassing political opinion and giving prosecutors enormous discretion in deciding when and if to bring cases for “public provocation” to terrorism. So bereft of human rights safeguards is the Commission’s proposal that the member states are considering introducing some of their own – a first for EU decision-making. The EU Council presidency describes the Commission’s proposal as “very delicate? situated on the borderline of fundamental rights and freedoms such as freedom of expression, assembly or of association and the right to respect for family life”.(5) It is therefore “essential”, suggests the presidency, “that the right balance is struck”, as in the Council of Europe Convention. Of course, if the CoE Convention strikes such a delicate balance, why bother tinkering with it at all? The solution proposed by the presidency is the insertion of a recital in the preamble to the draft Framework Decision based on article 12 of the Council of Europe Convention. However, as a recital, it will be of limited effect because member states are only obliged to align their national legal systems with the substantive obligations in the actual articles of the text. In opposition to the Commission proposal, Sweden – supported by other unnamed EU member states – has proposed a new article based on the draft EU Framework Decision on racism and xenophobia, which (like the CoE Cybercrime Protocol) contains an express opt-out allowing member states to abstain from enacting “measures in contradiction to fundamental principles relating to freedom of association and freedom of expression and assembly, in particular freedom of the press and the freedom of expression in other media”. The limits to free speech Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that commissioned the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as, among other things, a terrorist, argued – provocatively and erroneously the eyes of many – that its actions addressed an important issue of self-censorship in the media: “The modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where you must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule.”(6) While newspapers in many countries reprinted the cartoons, it is notable that the overwhelming majority of media organisations in the UK, USA, Canada and elsewhere chose not to. In doing so, they tacitly acknowledged the limits to free speech. As A. Sivanandan has put it: “Europe holds that freedom of speech is the very basis of western democracy and cannot therefore be compromised or watered down. It is an absolute. But that is a fallacy. No freedom is an absolute. Every freedom carries with it its own responsibility. The right to freedom of speech does not, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great American judge said, give you the right to falsely cry ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre.”(7) Indeed, laws criminalising holocaust denial and incitement to racial hatred show very well the limits to free speech in western democracies. The status quo is an uneasy compromise based on the principles of respect for minority communities and social cohesion. Here the media occupies a crucial position, particularly when it comes to moderating the so-called “clash of civilisations”. Aidan White, Secretary-General of the International Federation of Journalists, has warned that “journalists need to be more conscious than ever about the dangers of media manipulation by unscrupulous politicians and racists”.(8) Index on censorship What began in Denmark as an exercise in counter-self censorship – albeit one of extremely dubious judgment, to say the least – quickly exploded into a politically charged issue seized upon by both sides of the ‘debate’. Exactly the same thing happened last year when Oxford University’s Student Union chose to hold a debate on free speech involving David Irving and Nick Griffin. Last month the Archbishop of Canterbury provoked a similar storm when his views about Sharia Law in Britain were seized upon by other supposed champions of free speech in the media. Yet for all the limits on free speech, all three examples show that freedom of expression is alive and well for cartoonists, racists, Archbishops and, for the time being at least, those that they offend. The new EU proposals threaten to radically alter the status quo by criminalising speech that may provoke terrorism, even if where it does not directly advocate acts of terrorism. Because the EU’s definition of terrorism is so broad, the scope for criminalisation is enormous. “Terrorism” was defined in EU law in 2002 as: “seriously intimidating a population, or unduly compelling a Government or international organisation to perform or abstain from performing any act, or seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organisation.” To suggest that the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis or Afghans have the right to resist occupation and aggression through armed struggle could easily be construed as public provocation to terrorism. Advocates of direct action against corporations, government policies and intergovernmental organisations like the EU may also fall foul of the new laws. Those who say that the new laws are needed argue that they are required to deal with “preachers of hate” and “Jihadi” websites. On the other hand, since incitement to murder and incitement to terrorism (included in the 2002 EU Framework Decision) are criminal offences, why not let the courts decide if that is what people are guilty of? It does seem reasonable for states to attempt action against websites that directly encourage atrocities such as ’9/11’ and the Madrid and London bombings – however futile the uncontrollable nature of the web may render this exercise – but it is patently absurd to use them as a justification for the introduction of new offences criminalising people for their political beliefs or opinions. The limits to permissible thought In November 2007, Samina Malik, the 23-year-old self-professed “lyrical terrorist”, was convicted under section 28 of the UK Terrorism Act 2000 for the possession of material that is “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. The articles in question included the “terrorist manuals” she had downloaded from the internet and poems she had written about “Jihad”. After five months in prison on remand, Ms Malik was acquitted of the more serious charge of “possessing an article for terrorist purposes” under section 58 of the Act. So despite the jury finding no evidence to suggest that she ever actually intended to carry out an act of terrorism, she was given a suspended sentence for having even entertained the idea. On 13 February 2008, the Court of Appeal quashed the earlier section 58 convictions of five young Muslim students for downloading extremist literature. The Court decided that while there was no doubt the men had possessed extremist literature, there was no proof that they ever intended to do anything with it. This demand for legal certainty exposes the inherent flaws in the EU proposals – they seek to criminalise the possession of a “dangerous” opinion. Christopher Hitchens recently defended the author Martin Amis of racist attacks on Muslims, saying “the harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation, but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought”. As John Pilger and others asked in a letter to the Guardian newspaper following the conviction of the “lyrical terrorist”, is the right to “experiment with the limits of permissible thought” now only accorded to people who have the correct skin colour, religion and academic background?(9) Ben Hayes is a researcher with Statewatch. 1. COM (2007) 650, 6.11.07. See SEMDOC website
2. See Statewatch News online, November 2007
3. Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism of 2005 (CETS No.: 196)
4. Additional Protocol to the Convention on cybercrime, concerning the criminalisation of acts of a racist and xenophobic nature committed through computer systems (CETS No.: 189)
5. Council doc. 6761/08, 20.2.02.
6.. “Muhammeds ansigt”, Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten, 30.9.05
7.. “Freedom of speech is not an absolute”, interview with A. Sivanandan, Race & Class, July 2006.
8. Journalism and Combating Intolerance: Those Cartoons and a Challenge to Free Expression and Quality Media, Aidan White
9. “Race, class and freedom of speech”, Iain Banks, Caryl Churchill, Lindsey German, Michael Kustow, Adrian Mitchell, Andrew Murray, John Pilger, Michael Rosen, Guardian, 7.12.07. See also http://www.spectrezine.org/weblog/?p=133
It’s all poor people’s fault, isn’t it?27 Oct 2008I’m not sure what makes it official that the recession’s started, but one way of measuring the start is when the government first insists there ARE lots of vacancies, but the unemployed need to be more flexible, and better at applying for jobs, as Gordon Brown stated this week. This must have been the problem in the 1930s. Millions of people became too fussy, until they perked up around 1940 when some cushy jobs came up, such as marching through the North African desert with a machine gun. Brown assured us there are 600,000 vacancies, just as Major in 1991 and Tebbit in 1982 told us there were plenty of jobs, if only people would look for them. But even if these vacancies were magically all filled, a minister would tell us, “The unemployed must be prepared to develop new skills, such as murdering people who have a job, then applying to take their place. My granddad taught me those values, often recalling how, rather than sit around whining, he poisoned his way into the Post Office for nine and six a week. It’s time we revived the old saying, ‘Assassinate, don’t beg off the state’.” Another sign that we’re in recession is the government blames immigrants. So Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, has said the numbers allowed to come here must be cut, given the economic problems. This is even cleverer than blaming the unemployed, as in effect it’s saying, “I’ll tell you who’s brought this on ? people who’ve never been here.” As any economist knows, banking crashes are caused by Somalian fishermen. This is all in the recession handbook ? to ensure governments and banks don’t get the blame by blaming the victims. If the criminal system worked the same way, judges would spend all day telling people who’d been burgled, “You have been found guilty of being burgled. You appear to have no sense of how much a burden to the rest of us you’ve become. Maybe you need lessons in how to make an effort in life, such as the fine example shown by the man who burgled you. You don’t catch him sitting around grumbling about his missing CDs, do you?” Or the government could set up its own counselling service, at which a counsellor leans gently forward and says reassuringly, “You’ve told me how you were beaten up by your stepfather, and locked in a cupboard, and made to eat mouthfuls of insects, so the important point for you is to tell yourself at all times, especially in your most fragile moments, that this was your fault. There might be occasions when you feel someone else was to blame, but no, it was all down to you. Next.” With similar sensitivity Peter Mandelson has announced that, to help business survive the recession, there will be a postponement of new regulations allowing flexible working for parents. And Mandelson’s only been back a week. Give him another fortnight and he’ll announce, “Working parents have a variety of options available to them, such as selling their children to China to work in a clothing factory or train as a gymnast. I, for example, had to make myself available at all hours to lounge on a Russian billionaire’s yacht. I don’t go around saying, ‘I’m sorry Mr Oligarch, I can only lounge until four in the afternoon’. I’m prepared to make sacrifices.” So perhaps anyone who finds themselves unemployed, or homeless or otherwise broke as a result of this recession, should march to the House of Commons and announce “I demand to be nationalised. Bail me out for a million and I can carry on, because if I go under, who knows WHAT I might bring down with me.”
Our debt-fuelled economy badly exposes us to the economic storm27 Oct 2008It was not so long ago that Gordon Brown claimed to have abolished ?boom and bust?. As we enter what everyone now thinks will be a deep and prolonged recession this claim is looking ? being as generous as possible ? a little over optimistic. The government is keen to stress that the current crisis was not ?made in the UK?, and it is certainly true that this is now a global crisis that no country can insulate itself from completely. Having said that, we have long heard claims that the UK is in a better position to weather economic and financial storms because of our stable economy and sound system of financial regulation and macroeconomic policy? If this is true it is a bit odd that only a few weeks ago the OECD argued that the UK was, in actual fact, the worst placed among the major developed economies. Rather than being in a better position than everyone else, it seems that we are in actual fact in the worst. Why might this be?
If everyone on earth consumed as we do in the UK, we would need the resources of more than three planets like earth to sustain us If everyone on earth consumed as we do in the UK, we would need the resources of more than three planets like earth to sustain us The most obvious reason is that the crashing financial sector is much more important to the UK economy than to most others ? even the US. At least until very recently, the financial sector accounted for 10 per cent of UK GDP, and a quarter of all income tax, and had been growing in importance since the 1980s at the same time as the importance of manufacturing has steadily fallen. This has not just happened of course ? successive governments have championed the growth of the financial sector, much to the irritation of manufacturers who have long complained that economic policy has been skewed towards the needs of the financial rather than the real economy. This seemed fine during the ?long boom?, but looks very unwise now. The second factor is consumption. As with the financial sector, the UK has the highest level of consumption (around 90 per cent of GDP) of any other G7 economy. Again, this has been growing steadily since the 1980s at the same time as investment has become less important. The final piece of the jigsaw is debt. UK household debt is the highest of the G7 economies at 109 per cent of GDP and has also been growing fast in recent decades. This does not sound like a stable, well-balanced economy equipped to withstand turbulent times, but one that has become increasingly dominated by the financial sector, and which is fuelled by unsustainable consumption based on ever higher levels of debt. When commentators talk gravely about the dire impacts of falling consumer spending they do so with good reason. The UK economy has become less stable, less diverse and more dependent on consumption and debt ? which has obviously been of great benefit to the financial services sector ? than any other major economy. As we look to rebuild from the ashes of the current crisis it is vital that we do so in a way that invests for the long-term to build a diversified, sustainable economy, where finance is the servant and not the master.
Propping up Propaganda27 Oct 2008Since starting Media Lens in 2001, we have learned that corporate journalists are very often ill-equipped, or disinclined, to debate vital issues with members of the public. In 2004, the esteemed Lancet medical journal published a study showing that 98,000 Iraqis had most likely died following the US-led invasion (http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/ images/journals/lancet/ s0140673606694919.pdf). John Rentoul, chief political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday, responded with sarcasm when we challenged him about his dismissal of the peer-reviewed science: “Oh no. You have found me out. I am in fact a neocon agent in the pay of the third morpork of the teleogens of Tharg.” (Email, September 15, 2005) In 2006, a follow-up Lancet study estimated that the death toll had risen to 655,000. Today, the probable death toll exceeds one million. (Just Foreign Policy, http://www.justforeignpolicy.org /iraq/iraqdeaths.html; ‘Update on Iraqi casualty data’, Opinion Research Business, January 2008; http://www.opinion.co.uk/ Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88) In 2003, Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, also did not take kindly to a reader accusing him of peddling Downing Street propaganda on the eve of the invasion: “What a lot of balls … do you read the paper old friend? ... ‘Pre-digested pablum from Downing Street…’ my arse. Do you read the paper or are you just recycling garbage from Medialens?” (Email, February 14, 2003) Last week, Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, was asked why he dismissed readers of Media Lens as a mere “lobby”, but not readers who post comments on his website. Seaton replied: “because, unlike MediaLens readers, users of Comment is free are not given directives to spam journalists and others – and would not mindlessly follow such directives if they were” (Email, October 15, 2008) The constant journalistic refrain is that the public is made up of ill-informed idiots, mindless “blog-o-bots” (Robert Fisk, interviewed by Justin Podur, ‘Fisk: War is the total failure of the human spirit’, December 5, 2005; www.rabble.ca), launching “an attack of the clones” (BBC journalist Adam Curtis, email to Media Lens, June 18, 2002). A moment’s thought would tell these journalists that the people responding to our alerts are interested in our efforts precisely to expose methods of public deception, manipulation and control. The whole point of what we are doing is to challenge all forms of psychological goose-stepping. Little of this professional contempt for public challenge ever makes it into the open. The media sections of the press, where journalism ought to be scrutinised, are reserved for professional navel-gazing, ego-burnishing and insider gossip. At best, media commentary is inoffensive, rarely straying from the anodyne; and even then, only to mock easy targets like the Sun or the Daily Mail. At its worst, corporate media ‘analysis’ props up a brutal propaganda system in which “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business”, as the US social philosopher John Dewey observed. Swooning Over The British Press Consider Stephen Glover, media commentator in the Independent, who earlier this month gloried at the supposedly vibrant state of the British press. Glover, one of the founders of the Independent in 1986, described his pleasure in “fingering the redesigned Daily Telegraph” which “looks quite handsome”. Glover also liked the “much-improved Times”, while the “revamped Independent” positively “crackles with energy.” (Stephen Glover, ‘It has its faults, but we should be proud of the British press’, the Independent, October 6, 2008) As though in the pay of “the teleogens of Tharg”, Glover asked innocently, “Am I starry-eyed?” Undoubtedly. He was also suffering from blinkered, power-friendly vision. It is only two months since Glover belatedly, and superficially, pointed to the failings of the UK press in challenging government propaganda on Iraq: “I am still awaiting an apology from those newspapers that assured their readers, before the invasion of Iraq, that there was absolutely no doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.” (Stephen Glover, ‘Press were wrong on Iraq’, August 11, 2008) But media performance was far worse than Glover would have us believe, as we reminded him at the time (email to Stephen Glover, ‘No mea culpa from the British press’, August 19, 2008; http://www.medialens.org/forum/ viewtopic.php?p=9849#9849). The British media were willing accomplices in the perverse political portrayal of Iraq as a threat to the West. And, because the media simply buried the facts, not many people know that Iraq had already been devastated by thirteen years of brutal United Nations sanctions leading to the deaths of over a million people. Around half of them were children under five. The two Westerners who knew Iraq best – Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, senior UN diplomats in Baghdad who resigned over the “genocidal” sanctions – were virtually shut out of British press and broadcasting. (For more on their expert and excluded analyses, see Hans C. Von Sponeck, ‘A Different Kind of War’, Berghahn Books, New York, 2006; and Denis Halliday, interviewed by David Edwards, Media Lens, May 2000; http://www.medialens.org/ articles/the_articles/articles_2001/iraqdh.htm) The ideological role played by the corporate media, as faithful stenographers to power, continued up to and beyond the illegal 2003 invasion. This was a war of aggression, in contravention of the UN Charter, and recognised in law as the “supreme international crime”. If the British media had performed its fairy-tale role, and actually held power to account, perhaps there would have been no Iraq invasion, no cataclysm, no outpouring of grief and misery. It is all too easy for media insiders to be seduced by the superficial glamour and “vibrancy” of newspapers, and to divert their eyes from the blood-soaked reality underneath. At the Guardian’s website, an ostensibly rival media commentator, Roy Greenslade, noted that the Independent had ditched its media section. Greenslade, a Guardian veteran and now professor of journalism at City University in London, wrote: “... ‘the media’ is a part of modern life that deserves to be monitored consistently. Its influence appears to grow rather than diminish. There needs to be public scrutiny of the people who own and control the various media platforms and of those who manage and operate it on behalf of those owners and controllers.” (Greenslade blog, Guardian website, October 6, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/greenslade/2008/oct/06/theindependent) As this paragraph suggests, Greenslade has mastered the art of saying very little. He could have observed that news operations, the BBC and Guardian very much included, operate as platforms for established interests in society: corporations, business investors and warmongering Western leaders. But such obvious, real-world facts are not allowed to intrude. He added: “Despite its scant resources, The Independent has played, and is playing, a part in keeping the media honest.” It is a bold judgement, one that can be made only by ignoring the actual content of the Independent’s media coverage. More crucially, it also overlooks what the paper reports, and does not report, in its news and business sections. In the age of the internet – when honest, non-corporate news sources are readily accessible – it is becoming ever harder to ignore the evidence before our own eyes. Green Alliance – A Spin Profile This Alice-in-Wonderland quality extends to the publicly funded BBC whose output regularly contravenes its own guidelines on “impartiality”, “balance” and a stated commitment “to reflect a wide range of opinion.” Consider a recent BBC online piece which proclaimed: “Green groups have welcomed the creation of a new energy and climate department in Gordon Brown’s government reshuffle.” (Mark Kinver, ‘Greens welcome new climate department’, October 3, 2008;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/sci/tech/7650669.stm) Which “Green groups” were these? Well, the only group cited was the Green Alliance, which describes itself as “an independent organisation” but which, in fact, has close links with both government and big business. (Source Watch; http://www.sourcewatch.org/ index.php?title=Green_Alliance) The BBC report quoted Green Alliance director Stephen Hale: “Hallelujah. A department of energy and climate change, and not before time… The new department puts climate change where it belongs, with its own seat at the cabinet table.” The BBC was here taking us deep into Orwell territory. Hale was a special adviser to Margaret Beckett when she was Secretary of State for the Environment. The most recently available accounts indicate that Green Alliance has received funding from a range of sources which include government departments: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the Department for International Development. (Green Alliance Trust accounts for year ending 31 March, 2007; http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/ uploadedFiles/About_Us/FinalAccounts0607(1).pdf) Funding and support for Green Alliance have also come from centres of green activism like BP, Glaxo, Lever Brothers, Shell, the BBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Tarmac and the privatised utilities. (SpinProfiles, http://www.spinprofiles.org/ index.php/Green_Alliance; website to be launched in November 2008) As the excellent new online resource SpinProfiles says: “Green Alliance looks like an enormously powerful corporate lobby heavily connected to the political forces that have reshaped the globe since the late 1970s.” (Ibid.) In his BBC report, Kinver did also cite the Sustainable Development Commission. But this is hardly a “green group” as readers would normally understand the term. After all, as Kinver noted, it was set up by the government to which it reports. All of this makes a nonsense of the headline, leading paragraph and thrust of the BBC piece about environmentalists supposedly applauding the creation of the new department. The BBC’s analysis, as ever, failed to mention the small matter of the government’s lamentable record in tackling the climate crisis, and that this latest initiative has as much substance as previous government assertions of “joined-up thinking.” Lack of space cannot account for failures of this kind: they occur too consistently right across the BBC’s copious broadcasts and webpages. When asked, “Why can’t the BBC do better than this?”, Mark Kinver responded: “I did contact the main green groups in the UK (Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and WWF) for their reaction to the news of the formation of the new department. All welcomed the move by Gordon Brown to use his reshuffle to bring the energy and environment portfolios under one departmental roof. “However, I did not include direct quotes from these organisations because I balanced the left-leaning Green Alliance’s views with the comments from the free-market think-tank, Policy Exchange (their positions were illustrated by the direct quotes I used in the story). “Because the reshuffle was a change within the Whitehall village, rather than a change of government policy, I felt that the most appropriate comments were from organisations that operated within that sphere – hence quotes from the Green Alliance, Policy Exchange, CBI [Confederation of British Industry] and SDC [the Sustainable Development Commission].” Longstanding readers of our alerts may recall that we have sometimes highlighted the moribund state, and lack of radical vision, of the main green groups, notably Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace (e.g. ‘Silence is Green’, February 3, 2005). And we have truly gone down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole when a BBC journalist can describe the Green Alliance as “left-leaning.” The editorial commitment to “a wide range of opinion” is equally surreal when quotes are restricted to elite groups within the “sphere” of “the Whitehall village.” Finally, the BBC’s notion of “impartiality” is exemplified in the “balance” in the piece between the corporate-leaning Green Alliance and the even more rabidly corporate “free-market think tank”, Policy Exchange. Readers can cast their minds back to New Labour’s ascension to power in 1997 when there was similar optimistic talk of “joined-up” government. Back then, John Prescott’s “super-ministry” was sold to the British public as a great innovation taking responsibility for transport, environment and the regions of the UK. The Independent told its readers that Prescott, a “blunt Northerner”, “regards himself as a moderniser and a man with ideas. He is restless for power, and is likely to turn his office into one of the engine-rooms of the Blair government.” (‘Blair’s magnificent seven: the new cabinet takes shape’, The Independent, May 3, 1997; no byline) The Observer’s Patrick Wintour assured us that Prescott was a “policy wonk” who was “willing to address policy challenges without prejudice. His record in campaigning on green issues stretches back to long before they became fashionable.” (Patrick Wintour, ‘Five challenges to forge a better Britain: action on the environment’, The Observer, May 11, 1997) The Guardian’s Larry Elliott announced breathlessly in the early days of the New Labour regime: “The first fortnight of the Blair administration has proved one thing: Labour may not be as red as it once was, but it is one hell of a lot greener. One of the beneficial spin-offs of modernisation is that the obsession with growth at all costs has been ditched.” (Larry Elliott, ‘Labour’s moral mission: going from red to green with a pollution solution. Environment has moved centre stage in a new government that sees protecting the world as good business and good politics’, The Guardian, May 19, 1997) More than a decade later and we are supposed to perceive the latest recarving of Whitehall departments as a bold move that will really get to grips with the terrifying threat of climate chaos. We are supposed to believe the prime minister will perform a massive U-turn away from corporate priorities, as the Guardian insists he must: “Mr Brown must now prove that he is prepared to treat an ailing climate with an injection of political capital to match the vast dose of financial capital he was so willing to invest in the banks.” (Leader article, ‘The greening of Brown’, the Guardian, October 20, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/oct/20/ leader-climate-carbon-gordon-brown) The required suspension of disbelief is truly farcical. Meanwhile, the world’s life-support systems are continuing to collapse under rapidly escalating global financial and industrial exploitation. SUGGESTED ACTION The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone. Stephen Glover, media commentator, the Independent
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Delusions of war27 Oct 2008During the 1990s, many one-time leftists in the west and elsewhere were drawn towards the idea that human rights could somehow fill the gap left by the decline in socialist politics. In the wake of the Bosnian bloodbath and the Rwandan genocide, that crystallised for some into support for unilateral humanitarian intervention and war. A decade on, the hopes that were invested in such delusions lie buried in the graveyards of Falluja and Kandahar, the ethnically cleansed Serb and Roma districts of Kosovo and the torture, kidnapping and internment jails run by the self-proclaimed liberators and human rights champions of the war on terror. As regular readers of comment is free will know, Conor Foley is a veteran aid worker who has seen from the inside how the human rights agenda has been conscripted to legitimise and underpin the US and British wars of occupation and domination of the past 10 years. Part working travelogue from almost every recent major conflict zone, part political journey and analysis, Foley’s new book, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, is an important and thoughtful contribution to understanding why western “humanitarian interventions” ? from Somalia and Yugoslavia to Sierra Leone ? have largely failed in their own terms and left such a dismal and unstable legacy. Foley is effective at deconstructing some of the mythology and deceit around these debacles ? including the illegal Kosovo war of 1999, which paved the way for the aggression against Iraq, but is still seen as a successful humanitarian intervention by many who balk at the more nakedly imperial Iraqi and Afghan disasters. As Foley reminds us, the Nato bombing campaign was supposedly launched to stop war crimes and ethnic cleansing, grotesquely exaggerated in Anglo-American propaganda. But both increased dramatically as a result: it turned a “simmering crisis into a full-scale humanitarian disaster”. And in the months after Nato troops took over in Kosovo, a thousand people were killed or disappeared as up to 250,000 Serbs and Roma were driven from their homes in the new western protectorate. But he is at his most insightful about the role played by the battalions of NGOs he has worked among, which follow the conquering armies like missionaries, often urging them on and providing the social infrastructure for the bloated occupation regimes that are then imposed on hostile lands. As Foley highlights, most non-governmental organisations in the humanitarian line of work are no longer really NGOs at all ? they’re increasingly sub-contracted GOs, which get the bulk of their funding from western governments with political strings attached. Foley describes returning to Afghanistan in 2004 to find that “the humanitarian effort had become part of a wider counter-insurgency operation”. The then US secretary of state Colin Powell hailed the humanitarian NGOs as “a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team”. Against such a background, it’s hardly surprising that aid workers come to be seen as targets by some of those fighting occupation. Steeped as he is in NGO-speak and thinking, Foley can often lapse into loaded terminology and assumptions: he repeatedly uses the term “international community”, for example, when he clearly means the US and its allies. In the same vein, he largely accepts the reasons given by the western powers for their interventions at face value, along with, say, the legitimacy of occupied Afghanistan’s fraudulent elections, in which political parties weren’t even allowed on the ballot paper. And so keen is Foley to dissociate himself from “anti-imperialists” that he reserves some of his sharpest ? and least sure-footed ? attacks for a writer such as Naomi Klein, over her analysis in The Shock Doctrine of disaster capitalism in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. But in a sense that only strengthens the force of his critique, coming as it does from someone immersed in the ideology and practice of the “humanitarian community” ? who has learned from personal experience how calamitous invading other people’s countries in the name of democracy and human rights has proved on the ground. When he describes the role played by western governments and NGOs in Sierra Leone and Liberia as a deeply resented “recolonisation”, you know it’s not meant as a rhetorical flourish. Far from making another Rwanda less likely, the liberal interventionist wars of the past decade have postponed the development of a genuine rules-based system of international protection by discrediting humanitarian intervention as a mechanism of imperial power enforcement applied only to weak and recalcitrant anti-western states. In the circumstances, Foley’s conclusion that humanitarian NGOs should return to a policy of the strictest neutrality and broaden their focus from individual human rights to the wider inequalities of wealth and power that underlie conflict and humanitarian crises is surely only common sense.
Mervyn King?s moment of clarity26 Oct 2008There is some truth in the old saying, “Don’t shoot the messenger”. Though his admission was certainly damaging, Bank of England governor Mervyn King’s statement Tuesday before businessmen in Leeds that, “It now seems likely the UK economy is entering a recession”, was not responsible for the precipitous fall of the pound that followed.
If anything, King’s was a deliberate understatement of the real position facing the UK economy. What was in reality most significant in his statement was his frank admission that on October 6 and 7 Britain’s banking system had been closer to collapse than at any time since the start of World War I.
King told his well-heeled audience that it is “difficult to exaggerate the severity and importance of those events. Not since the beginning of the First World War has our banking system been so close to collapse”.
Bank funds had started to dry up and it required the radical action of the 500 billion bank bailout to ensure the survival of the financial system. Even so, King insisted that the provision of liquidity by central banks was only “a sticking plaster” and not a substitute for proper treatment of the problems afflicting the banking sector.
King went on to speak of how “the plan to recapitalise our banking system, both here and abroad” meant we had “turned the corner” and begun “a long, slow haul to restore lending to the real economy, and hence growth of our economy, to more normal conditions.”
But this proved to be less convincing than his admission, as summarized by the BBC, that “this was one of the worst banking crises ever. He does not say in so many words, but the Bank of England, along with counterparts at the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority, seem to have found themselves looking over into an abyss with unthinkable consequences if they fell.”
The next day, the pound plunged almost five cents against the dollar and fell against the euro. The 3.4 percent fall to its lowest level since September 2003 was the biggest decline since September 1992, when investor George Soros drove sterling out of Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism.
However, King’s remarks could only have an impact if what he was admitting was what the markets already believed?that sterling is overvalued because of the dire state of the UK economy. In reality the UK is already in recession, something that Prime Minister Gordon Brown was also forced to accept in a speech to parliament the next day when he warned of a “sharp and prolonged slowdown”.
Moreover, the pound’s fall took place against a background of sharp falls on European and Asian stock-markets due to fears of a deep global recession with the United States at its epicentre.
The International Monetary Fund’s six-monthly study has warned that euro zone economic growth will almost grind to a halt next year, with zero growth in Germany, Europe’s most powerful economy. With Sweden only the latest European government to announce a $205 billion bank rescue, the IMF also warned Wednesday that more European banks might still fail. Private funding is “virtually unavailable” the IMF said, and banks will have to rely on public intervention, asset sales and consolidation. Europe’s banks have already been forced to borrow $72 billion in short-term loans from the European Central Bank, as other credit sources have dried up.
Even so, it is becoming clear is that the UK economy is perhaps the most exposed to the global downturn. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research has said the UK is on the brink of its first full year of recession since 1991 and that the economy will shrink by 0.9 percent in 2009, with consumer spending falling by 3.4 percent, business investment down by 3.8 percent and private housing investment by 17.1 percent.
The NIESR has warned that “The British economy will suffer next year as it experiences the worst setback among the G7 countries.” And if the government’s 50 billion banking bail-out did not succeed, the recession could be even deeper and longer. The NIESR said its forecasts assumed that the Bank of England would cut interest rates to 4 percent early in 2009.
The Ernst and Young Item Club predict that the UK economy will decline more dramatically still next year—by one percent—and that it has “deteriorated dramatically” in the past three months. The credit crunch would hit the economy “very hard”, it warned. Consumption will fall by 1.2 percent next year, with credit continuing to be hard to obtain and unemployment expected to rise.
It also predicts house prices will fall 14 percent by the end of this year, and drop a further 10 percent next year. Mortgage lending fell to its lowest level for more than three and a half years during September, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, ten percent less than during August and fully 42 percent below the level for September last year. Housing sales have fallen by more than half, down 53 percent in September compared with the same month in 2007. Andrew Clare, head of asset management at Cass Business School, told the Sunday Herald that housing prices could slide by a further 40 percent, “taking UK house prices to 2023 before they matched the level reached in 2007.”
The Confederation of British Industry has reported falling demand for UK made goods and a drop in output leading to the sharpest single-quarter fall in manufacturing confidence in 28 years, with 46 percent of firms reporting falling orders?the fastest decline since 1999. Many firms are planning to reduce spending on machinery and buildings, the largest cut back since the early 1980s. UK retail sales fell 1.5 percent below their September 2007 level, with Homebase, Currys and Argos reporting falling sales. “Christmas will be painful for much of the sector as consumers continue to batten down the hatches,” reported Ernst and Young.
This will lead to a massive rise in unemployment.
The CBI predicts that 23,000 manufacturing jobs will be shed in the third quarter and that this number will increase to 42,000 in the fourth quarter?a total of 65,000 redundancies. Such job losses in manufacturing will add to the hundreds of thousands in the financial, retail and service sectors.
The number of people out of work in the UK has soared by 164,000 compared to the previous quarter, the biggest rise for 17 years. Now at 1.79 million, or 5.7 percent, unemployment is widely predicted to stand at two million by December possibly rising to three million by December 2010?or nine percent.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development said that recruitment is slowing and redundancies rising. “We’ll see hundreds of thousands of jobs being lost, and unemployment is likely to rise, certainly above two million. The question is how much further than that,” said the organisation’s chief economist, John Philpott.
The Sunday Herald, in a survey entitled “Capitalism isn’t working” noted that unemployment would rise across all sectors of the economy, all age groups and all regions.
It reported, “In the last turn-down in the 1980s some areas of Britain escaped, especially London and south east England. This time round, unemployment in London is already estimated to be 300,000 and rising daily as the City’s financial institutions re-evaluate their needs in a shrinking market. The latest unemployment figures appear to show increases across Britain and there is no evidence to suggest that the rise towards three million won’t be uniformly felt.”
This is politically significant in that both the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher and John Major and Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown depended on relatively better-off social layers predominantly located in the south east to provide a degree of social support for their pro-business agenda. Now even that is breaking up, threatening ever-sharper political and social convulsions.
The efforts by government to bail out the super-rich also herald massive attacks on working people. UK government borrowing soared to a 60 year record high of 8.1 billion in September and is projected to reach 64 billion this year or over 40 percent of GDP. With 500 billion already committed to supporting the banks it is inconceivable that increased levels of borrowing can be sustained without tax hikes and deep cuts in public spending and welfare programmes.
Heroes with feet of clay26 Oct 2008ALISTAIR Darling would have us believe that government policies have had no effect on the current recession – it’s a global phenomenon over which we have no control. At the same time, he tries to cheer us all up by meaningless statements such as “I’m confident we’ll get through it.” Of course we’ll get through it. Economies always get through recessions, but the questions are, in what state we will be and who will pay for it. The Chancellor and the Prime Minister pride themselves on having bailed out the banking system by heaving billions of pounds at it and running parts of it with a view to returning it to the class of adventurists who broke it in the first place. The role of the banks ought to be to provide investment to businesses and to loan money to people for large purchases that they can’t afford to buy outright. Instead, they have become money-printing operations, dedicated to maximising profits by loaning people more than they can afford at premium interest rates and by gambling on futures markets. And even now that the government has advanced huge sums to the banks at low rates of interest, they are still restricting credit to small businesses and are crucifying homeowners. Public ownership of the banks could provide the stability for a new economic and political approach that would see working people not only survive the recession but do so by building a society with different priorities than those cherished by the neoliberal fanatics at the head of all three major parties. Today’s recession and the financial meltdown that signalled its onset were caused by reliance on market forces rather than government involvement to champion the public interest. Banks seeking to return to profitability will want to sack large numbers of staff and repossess homes. Building corporations will mothball house-building plans until the housing market revives. And the energy transnationals will be happy to continue screwing us all with their manipulated markets. If “we” get through this recession without mass unemployment, increased homelessness and winter carnage through hypothermia, we need a different approach. The government has shown with the banks that it can afford to invest when it has the will to do so. That will has to be expressed by putting building workers back in jobs to thaw out the frozen housing schemes and by initiating a state-funded council housing drive. Public works, especially on Crossrail and new high-speed inter-city links, must be prioritised and there has to be immediate action to sequester energy company profits to assist people faced with unpayable fuel bills. There must be no return to new Labour’s adoration of the stinking rich, exemplified by recent media publicity given to Peter Mandelson’s holiday haunts. The costs of this crisis should be paid by those who helped create it and who enriched themselves in the good times. It’s time for an effective wealth tax and higher taxation on big business and the rich. Now that the Establishment’s economic heroes have been shown to have feet of clay, it’s time for an alternative approach based on justice and co-operation rather than avarice.
Nuclear-free footsteps…24 Oct 2008This summer, I was one of nine walkers to complete a gruelling 84-day, 1000+ mile International Walk towards a Nuclear-Free Future from London to Geneva, through France. The other eight walkers were: co-organisers Kerrie-Ann Garlick and Marcus Atkinson, and June, from Australia; Jill Saunderson from Fife; Steve Gwynne from Birmingham; Lena Bladh from Sweden; and Albert Monti and Aristide from France. The walk was jointly organized by the Australian-American group ?Footprints for Peace? and the French anti-nuclear network ?Sortir du Nuclaire?. We were joined along the way by many more French walkers, other Brits, another Australian and representatives from Austria, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Switzerland and the USA, all keen to build a strong global movement against the worldwide expansion of the nuclear industry. This was my second outing with Footprints for Peace, following last year?s amble from Dublin to London which also took 12 weeks, covering a paltry 900 miles. Some of us, myself included, got arrested then ? more than once in some cases ? engaging in civil disobedience against Trident nuclear weapons at Faslane and the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. Battersea and beyond This year?s walk departed on 26 April, the 22nd anniversary of the world?s worst ever civil nuclear disaster, Chernobyl. At a well-attended opening ceremony at Battersea Park Peace Pagoda, we heard from Bruce Kent, CND vice-president; Sin Berry, then the Green London mayoral candidate; and Shuji Imamoto, chair of the Japanese Greens. We arrived in Portsmouth after five days, took a ferry across to Cherbourg and began our arduous trek across France. If the last walk was tough, I found this one even more challenging. We often covered 15-18 miles a day in oppressive heat. Inevitable tensions arose through tiredness and spending so much time in a group of strong-minded individuals. Sometimes we were put up in relative comfort and fed very well, but often we made do with basic conditions, camping in farms and playing fields and cooking out-doors. Walkers of all ages joined us, from young children and teenagers to pensioners. Travelling through France, the cultural and language barriers presented extra challenges, although my GCSE French helped. The walk?s strict no-alcohol rule created problems in a country where (moderate) consumption of alcohol is deeply ingrained in the culture. However, the group accepted this rule, standing in solidarity with indigenous people in Australia and North America whose communities have been devastated by alcohol donated by uranium mining corporations. Nuclear France The British government, committed to a nuclear power renaissance, is looking to the French to provide the technology, avoiding any debate about the health and environmental implications, safety concerns or the true financial costs of nuclear power and the management of waste that remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no discussion of the links between nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear weapons; of the risk of rising sea levels flooding nuclear sites in low-lying coastal areas; of the legacy of Chernobyl, Windscale and Three Mile Island; and of the constant leaks, discharges and dumping of radioactive materials into the air, land and water. There is little talk about the displacement of indigenous populations due to uranium mining in Australia, North America, Niger and elsewhere, or the radioactive contamination of their sacred lands and World Heritage sites. What is more, our government conveniently ignores the astronomical rise in the incidence of birth defects, leukaemias and lymphomas seen in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Lebanon as the West bombards them with its nuclear waste in the form of so-called ?depleted? uranium (DU) munitions. We called at various civil nuclear sites on the Normandy coast and along the banks of the rivers Loire and Seine, some nuclear waste dumps and a couple of military bases. The 80%state owned company Electricit de France (EDF) operates every nuclear power station in France and wants to extend its nuclear empire to the UK. Prime minister Gordon Brown?s brother, Andrew is currently EDF?s head spin doctor in the UK. Actions en route At each site, we staged a ?die-in? or other peaceful action, displayed banners, distributed flyers and, on occasion, engaged workers, bosses, the gendarmes and the public in discussion about the wide-spread death, disease, human rights abuses and environmental devastation caused by the nuclear industry. We visited Flamanville in Normandy, where the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) is under construction. It has been plagued by safety problems and spiralling costs, like the only other EPR in the world, being built at Olkiluo-to in Finland. This is the technology French company AREVA and German firm Siemens want to bring to the UK. At various public meetings along the way, we exchanged information and ideas with local activists, politicians and journalists. We spoke about local resistance to the nuclear industry and sustainable alternatives to nuclear power. Arriving in Geneva in mid-July, we met with our national ambassadors to the UN on disarmament, as well as a high-level representative from the UN Conference on Disarmament who we presented with a thousand origami peace cranes we?d folded along the way. We shared with these diplomats our concerns about nuclear and uranium weapons and nuclear expansion. Next year, Footprints for Peace plan to walk from Geneva to the European Parliament in Brussels, via Germany, starting again on Chernobyl Day, 26 April. In 2010, they will walk from the Y-12 plant in Tennessee to the United Nations in New York for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference. ————————————————————————————————————————
Footprints for Peace: http://footprintsforpeace.net
Walk diary: http://tinyurl.com/peacenews016
Europe’s neglected railways need more inventiveness and less market23 Oct 2008Long before the EU was founded, Europe had a wonderful international railway system, linking nearly all countries and their capitals by direct long distance trains and overnight connections, where necessary completed by ferry links. In addition to this system small cross border connections guaranteed direct links between regions in neighbouring countries in continental Europe. The entire system was possible on the basis of voluntary co-operation between national railway companies and an international company for sleeping cars. It was an example of successful bottom up European co-operation. However, to-day at the European level there is less integration of railways. On the main lines national frequencies have been improved, but cross border links, night trains and long distance trains have been seriously reduced. Now the railways focus on frequent services in densely populated urban regions and the link between the biggest agglomerations, mainly inside one country. The main cross border exception is the high speed network from Brussels to London and Paris, which will soon be extended to Amsterdam, Cologne and Barcelona and later to Milan. The remaining parts of the traditional network, especially in scarcely populated rural regions, are in danger of being disused or neglected. For many years politicians and governments persuaded the railway companies from different European countries no longer to consider themselves colleagues, but to feel themselves condemned to be in competition with their neighbours in an attempt to conquer their home markets. Since the introduction of computers some countries no longer take responsibility for the integration of trains coming from abroad into their home network. So the selling of international tickets has become more complicated. In the past you could buy hand written tickets to use far from home, but to-day you can buy only the limited selection that your home railway company has available in its computers. There is also a lack of information on international long distance services. The European Parliament (EP) failed to correct those shortcomings in its recent decisions on passengers’ rights. Only expert linguists and geographers can rapidly and easily cross modern Europe by rail. Most others, aside from inventive people on their holidays, who are not in a hurry, are condemned to take an aeroplane, a bad choice from an environmental viewpoint. The three railway packages which passed the EP between 2000 and 2007 ignore most of those problems. They are based primarily on the idea that railway companies can reduce their expenses by adopting the experiences of the free market in air and road transport, where demand is growing. Liberalisation and an obligation to select operators by tendering are the presumed means to promote growth and quality. First, European freight transport should be taken over by cross border operating companies, and later cross border passengers transport as well. To that aim some operating companies have been separated from the rail network, and they have to pay for using it, although the Swiss experience taught us that it is cheaper to integrate both. For the future we need less market and more use of practical experience and inventiveness.
A colourful revolution23 Oct 2008In Stokes Croft, once dubbed ?Bristol?s forgotten half mile?, a quiet but colourful revolution is taking place. A loose coalition, the People?s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC), is using public art to transform an area that used to be emblematic of urban decline. For Chris Chalkley, the one-man dynamo behind the scheme, art has the power to give the district a greater sense of community, and turn it into Bristol?s ?cultural quarter?. ?It?s possible that groups of people could come together to form an alternative vision for the area,? Chris enthuses, as he takes us on a whistle-stop tour of a few of the ?street galleries? that have sprung up across Stokes Croft. Shop fronts, walls and even an electricity sub-station have been adorned with striking images by local artists. Almost anything can be turned into a feature of the area, Chris says. Even mundane objects like drainpipes and litter bins can impart a feeling of identity, safety and vibrancy when they have been decorated with eye-catching, unique designs. The PSRC is funded and organised almost entirely by Chris himself. Having run a china shop for 25 years, he does not think of himself as either an activist or artist, and relies on local artists to donate their time. In April, around 20-30 volunteers painted the inside of a railway tunnel just outside Stokes Croft. In a single weekend, it became a canvas for myriad different designs. There is no doubting the potential of Bristol?s artists, which is only beginning to be harnessed. Dissatisfaction and blight The PRSC has grown out of a need to change the face of the area, and dissatisfaction with the council?s response to its problems. Connecting the shopping centre of the city with more affluent areas to the north, Stokes Croft is a mixture of residential buildings and shops that line the main road. While a number of its buildings are listed, about 30 are derelict, such as a three-storey carriage works from the area?s Victorian heyday, which has stood empty since 1979. A further blight on the district?s image in many people?s eyes is the large number of homeless people, many of them suffering from drug problems, who congregate in what is known locally as the ?bear pit?: a largely tarmac-covered, sunken roundabout at the end of Stokes Croft, connected to the surrounding streets by forbidding, grimy underpasses. The main road also boasts two less-than-subtle brothels. Chris is adamant that image problems cannot be fixed simply by moving homeless people on or shutting down the massage parlours. You have to ?work with what you?ve got?, he says. In their effort to discourage rough sleeping and graffiti by providing only single person seats and covering surfaces in anti-graffiti paint, the council has inadvertently made the area unwelcoming for everyone, says Chris. ?If the policy is to make public space inhospitable to the homeless, then it will become scary to the public.? While the PRSC has no formal links with any political organisations, it explicitly challenges what it believes has been the council?s approach to urban development. The focus, the group claims, has been exclusively on attracting private investment and big brands, exemplified by the ongoing 500-million Cabot Circus project to rejuvenate Bristol?s retail heart just a few hundred metres away from Stokes Croft. Instead, the PRSC argues, the aim of regeneration should be to create welcoming public spaces and to promote creativity in the face of creeping corporate homogenisation, with public art a cheap way of doing so that can involve the local community. ?This is the front line of the battle against the encroachment of Cabot Circus,? Chris warns, ?so it needs to have a strong identity.? However, others think that the new shopping hub, currently festooned with cranes, might be beneficial. ?Cabot Circus has had a good impact,? says Lisa Blackwood, who works at the nearby Kuumba Arts and Community Centre. ?Stokes Croft is too close to Cabot Circus not to be developed.? Yet commercial enterprise is welcomed by the PRSC, so long as it fits with the area?s independent and eclectic feel. ?If we change the perception of the area, then businesses will come,? Chris says. Indeed, cafes, grocers, bookshops and t-shirt printers have sprung up, attracted by relatively low rents. Character appraisal Bristol council says that it is working with residents and groups such as the PRSC to improve Stokes Croft. In October 2007 it published a detailed ?character appraisal? of the area, assessing its aesthetic and social problems, and also acknowledging that the murals that now dot the area are part of its distinctive character. They have recently undertaken a 1-million renovation of a hostel for homeless people, and a street-drinking ban in 2003 was largely successful in moving on drinkers from a central grassy patch known as ?Turbo Island? on the main road (though critics claim that this has done little more than displace them a few hundred metres down the street). But private investment is still central to renewing urban areas, the council argues: ?The improvements to the image of the area effected by the work of PRSC are one part of the process, but not sustainable on their own ? there needs to be commercial investment to back it up.? One of the council?s biggest problems is getting private owners to preserve the historic character of their buildings and shop fronts. Some property holders simply hang on to derelict buildings, hoping that a lucrative development offer will come along. The council is currently battling to reclaim the towering Westmoreland House building from the developers Comer Homes, who have left it derelict for more than two decades. Seven people have died since the building was damaged by fire and abandoned in 1969. As our tour of the Republic comes to an end, Chris is keen to stress that he doesn?t think he has all the answers to Stokes Croft?s problems. Most of the works done so far are temporary. ?The project is constantly evolving. A year ago I was thinking differently, and next year it will have changed again.? There may be a risk that street art, while visually exciting, will turn the area into an artistic ghetto, and be exclusive of those who are not a part of the graffiti community. Or, if businesses and affluent residents are drawn in, the resulting rent hikes may push out the very artists who are attempting to accelerate urban renewal. The next step planned for the PRSC is to set up as a social business, where donations are exchanged for a say in the future of the project. Whatever direction the PRSC takes next, there can be no doubt that public art created and funded by local artists can be a cost effective way of putting colour and life back into the inner city.
Not the death of capitalism, but the birth of a new order23 Oct 2008As the dust of the credit crash clears and the real world recession kicks in, the ideologues of capitalism are scaring themselves with spectres. “He’s back,” the Times warned its readers on Tuesday over a portrait of Karl Marx. Not only are sales of his masterwork Das Kapital booming, but the virus of the newly fashionable revolutionary has, it seems, spread to the heart of the capitalist camp: the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has had himself photographed leafing through its pages while Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hailed by everyone from the German finance minister to the Pope. In the US, John McCain has been lashing out at Barack Obama for his supposed “socialism”, the High Tory writer Simon Heffer excitedly dubbed the state bail-out of the banks “neo-sovietisation”, and the BBC broadcast a prime-time debate last week on whether the crisis signalled the “death of capitalism”. Meanwhile the Economist, the Pravda of the neoliberal ascendancy, has been trying to mobilise true believers for a fightback: “Economic liberty is under attack”, its current issue thunders. “Capitalism is at bay, but those who believe in it must fight for it.” Of course, they are running ahead of themselves in a panic. If Marx’s central ideas about class and exploitation were really taking hold across the western world, you can be sure the mainstream media wouldn’t be running quirky, cartoonish pieces and debates about them, but something much more ferocious and alarming. It’s certainly true that the events of the past few weeks have exposed deregulated capitalism as bankrupt and its ruling elites as greedy and inept. But it is the free-market model, not capitalism, that is dying. That is reflected in public opinion: a Financial Times-Harris poll conducted across the advanced capitalist world this month found large majorities believe the financial crisis has been caused by “abuses of capitalism”, rather than the “failure of capitalism itself” – only in Germany did the proportion blaming capitalism as a system rise to 30%. As Sarkozy has pronounced: “Laissez-faire is finished.” It is not Marx who has really been rehabilitated in short order, but John Maynard Keynes, out of dire necessity. In the wake of the largest-scale acts of state economic intervention in capitalist history, politicians are now having to make a virtue of it. “Much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense,” the chancellor Alistair Darling declared at the weekend, as he announced plans to bring forward large capital projects and the prime minister defended higher borrowing to counter falling demand. The symbolic significance of this official return to Keynesianism shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s 32 years since the then Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan bowed the knee to monetarism, nearly three years before Margaret Thatcher came to power, and announced to his party conference: “We used to believe that we could spend our way out of a crisis, but I tell you … it is no longer possible.” Faced with financial collapse and the threat of a full-scale economic depression, such fancies have now had to be consigned to the dustbin of history. But claims that the current crisis signals the end of capitalism or the birth of a new socialism simply set up a straw man and divert attention from what is in fact at stake. If we’re talking about socialism as a systemic alternative, that is clearly not currently on the agenda in the heartlands of capitalism – or elsewhere, with the arguable exception of Latin America. And both its post-communist collapse of confidence and the weakening of the working class as a social and political force make it difficult for the left to take full advantage of capitalism’s stark failures. That has led some, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm, to conclude that the main beneficiaries of the crisis will be the right, as in the 1930s. There’s certainly a danger of growing support for rightwing populism on the back of mass unemployment; but if the new enthusiasm for Keynesian intervention and public ownership can be channelled to protect those most vulnerable to the crash – rather than make them pay the price for it, as now seems more likely – that need not be the case. What the crisis is bound to do is increase the demand for alternatives both within capitalism and beyond it. It has already discredited the economic model that has dominated the world for a generation at a cost of endemic instability, rampant inequality and environmental devastation. In its defence of free-market capitalism this week, the Economist argued that, in the past 25 years of market liberalisation, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of absolute poverty and speculated that this decade may see the fastest growth of income per head in history. But most of that growth and poverty reduction has been in China’s state-directed and still heavily publicly-owned economy, while India’s lesser capitalist success story is so grotesquely unequally distributed that the proportion of its children who are malnourished – at 47% a global leader – has remained almost unchanged for a decade. For the rest of the world, growth was faster and far more equally shared in the postwar decades of Keynesianism and socialism. An opportunity has now opened up for those political leaders prepared to use this meltdown to reshape the economic system, from Obama to Hugo Chvez. It’s often said that the left has no alternative model after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy. But in reality no economic and social model, left or right, has ever come pre-cooked: all of them – from Soviet power to the Keynesian welfare state and Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism – have grown out of ideologically driven improvisation in particular historical circumstances. Marx himself famously offered no blueprint. Instead, the pressure to respond to economic need – as in the New Deal or postwar Europe – will shape the way the new economic order develops. Already, the forms of intervention have been sharply different from past crises, with bank nationalisations offering a potentially powerful new economic lever. We are no doubt heading into a new kind of capitalism as well as a period of growing support for more far-reaching social alternatives. But what form it takes will be decided by pressure, from above and below.
Growing bitterness in Gordon Brown?s backyard23 Oct 2008The billion-pound bailout of the banks has fuelled widespread bitterness over the way the system is letting ordinary people down. This growing anger is easily noticable in the town of Glenrothes in Fife, where a by-election of national significance will take place on 6 November. Prompted by the death of Labour MP John MacDougall, the election will be seen as a test of Gordon Brown?s ability to bounce back in the polls. The constituency in the former Fife coal field borders Brown?s own seat, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and is solidly working class. Both the prime minister and his wife Sarah have already said that they will personally campaign in the election. The Scottish National Party (SNP), meanwhile, hopes to win the seat ? building on its success in the Glasgow East by-election where it overturned a 13,500 Labour majority in July. However, with the collapse of the two main Scottish based banks and the economies of Iceland and Ireland that were held up as a model by the nationalists, it is not clear how the anger and fear at the oncoming recession will play out in the election. Social club At the social club in Glenrothes Arthur McMain summed up the feeling of many local people. ?People are struggling with rising heating costs but the government gives billions to those banks,? he said. Arthur, who is in his fifties, used to work at the Brand Rex cable-making plant in the town but was made redundant about a year and a half ago. ?Some people I know worked all their lives so they could get a decent pension and ended up with nothing,? he said. ?The bankers have got it all sewn up. The man in the factory is paying the pensions of the fat cats.? Yet despite having voted SNP all his life, Arthur said that this time he?s voting for Labour. ?Why? Because the SNP council has just raised the charges for home care.? This is an added local dimension in the election. The SNP?s candidate is Peter Grant, head of Fife council. The SNP-Lib Dem coalition-run authority implemented unpopular and controversial hikes in care charges earlier this year that caused anger and fear among many local elderly and disabled people and their families and friends. Council worker Andy Carr shares Arthur?s anger at the bailout. ?The bonuses of those bankers should be taken off them. They don?t deserve it,? he said. ?There aren?t enough jobs in Fife,? he added. He is angry that the council have just appointed a lot of new management posts but he says he?s voting SNP. ?The SNP have done things straight away, like getting rid of the toll on the Forth road bridge. The SNP will win no bother. Everyone?s pissed off with Labour.? Arthur added, ?I hear we?re getting a visit from Gordon Brown. I?ll spit on him if I see him.? Asked if he knows of anyone else visiting the area, he said, ?Tommy Sheridan is speaking here around the start of November. I?ll be waiting to see what he has to say.?
A place for the left22 Oct 2008Turn on the news in the past few weeks and it?s like reading Trotsky: capitalism in profound crisis; Labour leaders and their ?epigones? (a favourite Trotsky word) locked in internal battle. But where are we, the left? In its party forms the English left is divided both inside parliament (with some, disastrously, voting through 42-day detention) and outside (the Respect debacle). In its movement form, it is fragmented and, apart from the occasional creative initiative such as the climate camp, barely visible. We have, no doubt, contributed to the loss of legitimacy neoliberalism has suffered over the past decade or so. But as Walden Bello, a radical intellectual from the Philippines, has put it: ?Neoliberalism is like the train conductor who gets shot in an old western and dies with his hand on the accelerator. He?s dead but speeding the passengers inexorably towards total disaster.? It?s as if we know the alternative direction in which the train should go, but are powerless to take action. Powerless because the millions of people who feel estranged from ?mainstream? politics do not consider the left to be any different. Where the left is having an impact is where it is part of ? and has helped to create ? initiatives that reach beyond itself, to challenge the political class with a vision of a radical and egalitarian democracy. This is invariably a vision that is not explicitly socialist. Look at the Convention for Scottish Independence, Plaid Cymru?s coalition-building work in Wales or the broad-based coalition to save democracy in the NUS. Look too at the movements in support of Barack Obama in the US. In the UK, Europe?s most centralised and executive-dominated of political systems, the loyalties and sense of rights associated with place are an important base of this democratic challenge. This is obvious in the nations of the UK but it applies also to English cities. Here are two modest examples. The first is an eight-year-long experience in Newcastle of a successful trade union-led struggle against privatisation leading to a collaboration between unions and public managers completely to transform the management of the council?s IT-related services ? back office and frontline. It might sound mundane and a speck in the ocean of privatisation, but what these public service workers, unions and managers have done is to give a practical and convincing answer to the pervasive notion that only the competitive pressures of the market can produce innovation and change. Here in Newcastle is a demonstration of the innovative dynamics of the public sector itself. Crucial to its success has been the activation of a powerful ethic of public service rooted in a strong city identity, an ethic that had been dormant, stifled by the old hierarchies of local government and the constant attacks from Whitehall. Another example of a completely different kind, too new to be sure of its success, is an experiment in the left pooling its resources to create the Convention of the Left, a locally-rooted challenge to New Labour?s annual rally in Manchester. At the time of writing it has certainly achieved a creative cross-party, cross-movements collaboration impossible at a national level. The pull of these national and local identities away from Westminster is a vital clue to understanding and preparing for the unravelling of New Labour. Although the Labour Party can trace an important component of its origins back to a convergence of local labour alliances, the party?s structural alliance between the trade unions and the parliamentary leadership tied it to the British state before anything else. New Labour has taken this to extremes and ended up as a caricature of a party: no roots, no means of feedback, no loyalty, no trust. When this implodes there will be few local parties left with any life, but what there are will be an important part of any attempt to recreate a left that is based on a recognition of national and regional autonomy and creativity. As national political structures crack and lose their authority, initiatives from Scotland, Wales and the English cities and regions will have the chance to break through, setting a new kind of example, stimulating a new direction for debate and developing their own international links. The importance of place is not as a romantic retreat for the left. On the contrary, it offers a base for creating a left that is sufficiently rooted to be effective and a source of autonomy from the Westminster/Whitehall rootless elite. More immediately it provides the basis for the cross-party kind of left politics that must surely be the way to avoid the Tory dystopia that hovers ominously on the horizon (see Patrick Dunleavy and Alex Nunns in the October/November issue of Red Pepper).
A sentence of bitter irony22 Oct 2008The last words in the 83-page judgment delivered on Wednesday by the law lords in the case of the Chagossian islanders are those of Richard II: “It boots thee not to be compassionate; after our sentence plaining comes too late.” Certainly, there is something of a Shakespearean tragedy in what has happened to the Chagossian islanders since they were evicted from their homes to make way for the US military base on Diego Garcia nearly 40 years ago. And certainly, there has been nothing compassionate about the behaviour of the British government in the treatment of them over the years. The law lords have now ruled, by the narrowest of margins, that the Chagossians have no right to return. While there remains the possibility of taking the case to the European court of human rights, there is no disguising the fact that the lords’ ruling is a bitter blow to the islanders. They had arrived at the lords with the wind of two favourable judgments, from the divisional and appeal courts, in their sails ? and some had even pledged that they would set off by sea before Christmas had the ruling gone their way. It was in 2000 that the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook, made it clear that he supported the islanders’ case. It seemed only a matter of time before a small number of them returned to see if it was possible to recreate what was described by their lawyer, Richard Gifford, as “paradise lost”. Then came 9/11 and the insistence of the US that Diego Garcia, the island at the heart of the archipelago, was an essential “linchpin” in their security network, vital for the bombing missions on Afghanistan and, more recently, Iraq. What the Americans had not said was that that Diego Garcia would also be used for “rendering” prisoners en route to Guantánamo Bay. Almost everyone agrees that the Chagossians were shabbily treated, to say the least, but there does not seem to be anyone in government prepared to right the wrong. Robin Cook and that “ethical” foreign policy now seem as remote as the islands themselves.
Global Europe: an Open Door Policy22 Oct 2008The full annotated version of this article can be found here In 2006, former Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson launched Global Europe, a new framework for trade policy which clearly prioritises the interests of big business. This analysis by Corporate Europe Observatory shows how the European Commission has from the earliest stages of its design facilitated the unparalleled participation of industry in this strategy, particularly BusinessEurope, which represents the interests of large corporations. BusinessEurope continues to be given privileged access to DG Trade as Global Europe is implemented, including in the on-going negotiations on EU bilateral free trade agreements. And this month in Brussels, BusinessEurope will hold its ?Going Global: the Way Forward? conference in the Charlemagne building, the headquarters of DG Trade. It is a telling example of the European business organisation?s close connections with the Commission. Several Commissioners and highranking Commission officials will be there to hear first-hand BusinessEurope?s assessment of how well Global Europe is being implemented. What is the Global Europe strategy? ?What do we mean by external aspects of competitiveness? We mean ensuring that competitive European companies, supported by the right internal policies must be enabled to gain access to, and operate securely in world markets. That is our agenda.?
Speech by then Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson,
Churchill Lecture, Berlin, 18 September 2006. Global Europe is a new framework for EU trade policy which covers several initiatives. Peter Mandelson has presented it as trade policy?s contribution to the EU?s so-called Lisbon agenda for growth and jobs. The external agenda of Global Europe is a very aggressive push to dismantle ?barriers?, such as the social and environmental regulations that large EU corporations currently have to comply with when conquering new markets and accessing natural resources abroad. It plays on the fear that emerging countries like India, Brazil and China will prove more competitive than EU industry by imposing a trade policy which is entirely focused on helping business become ?more competitive? and ?more profitable?. It does not consider the impacts on the development of other countries ? whose governments will find their choices are restricted when it comes to determining their own development model, protecting their environment and even providing assistance to their people (many of whom live in extreme poverty). It wants third countries to increase access to their markets, deregulating sectors such as services, investment, public procurement and competition policy, and enforcing tougher intellectual property rights (IPR) which will benefit EU-based trans-national companies: re-opening the ambitious business agenda which had proved too difficult to get through the WTO. At the centre of the Global Europe strategy is a new generation of regional and bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs), abandoning the moratorium on FTAs introduced by the former Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy in 1999. Other elements of Global Europe include Market Access Partnerships (MAP), designed to tackle barriers to EU exports; a policy to gain unlimited access to raw materials all over the world; as well as moves to redefine the EU?s trade relations with China and the US. The other side of the coin is the EU-internal agenda, not generally considered to be the territory of trade policy. Here again the fear of so-called emerging economies and the threat they are said to pose to jobs and growth is used to push through measures within the EU, which could have wide-ranging effects. More deregulation and liberalisation. Mandelson?s agenda includes a review of the Single Market; further liberalisation to remove any restrictions preventing the expansion of corporations and measures to match other countries? requests for the opening of EU markets. This could potentially expose every sector to more competition. Global Europe reinforces what in Commission-speak is referred as ?better regulation?, which is the need to subject every new EU regulation ? including environmental and social rules ? to an impact assessment that looks at their effect on the international competitiveness of European business. This makes it more difficult to adopt environmental or social regulations, as large corporations will argue that they will hamper their international competitiveness. Global Europe also proposes that the EU should first look at what other ?main competitors?, mostly the US, are doing, before introducing new regulations so as to create ?regulatory convergence?, ?The greater the consistency in rules and practices with our main partners, the better for EU business?. The Impact Assessment Report of Global Europe admits those policies will hurt the more vulnerable in the EU: ?the process of market opening… brings about transformations which are disruptive for some.? Joint drafting by big business and the Commission It is not often that corporate lobby groups admit being so pleased with a piece of legislation. But in the case of Global Europe the input of big business (and not that of NGOs, smaller business or trade unions) was requested and incorporated from the very early stages. The origins of Global Europe date back to the release in September 2005 by DG Trade of the ?Issue Paper on Trade and Competitiveness?, an analytical paper setting the scene, where the Commission set out over some 50 pages its ideas for a revised EU trade policy. While the Commission only consulted NGOs and trade unions at a Civil Society Dialogue meeting on 8 March 2006, where business was also present, DG Trade held a special consultation meeting for business federations and several confidential meetings. As this analysis shows, DG Trade incorporated the reactions and demands of big business in the next draft of the paper, which was by that stage titled Global Europe. This draft, dated 26 June 2006, was sent by DG Trade to BusinessEurope, the European employers? confederation (which changed its name from UNICE in January 2007). BusinessEurope was positive about the draft: ?Overall business is pleased with the substantial improvements in DG Trade?s reflection on this issue?. DG Trade has confirmed to CEO that they did not send that draft (or any other) to NGOs or trade unions. However, that same draft was leaked later in the summer and civil society groups campaigning on trade issues were able to compare it to the final version released in October 2006. Parallel to this formal consultation process (which was already very biased in favour of big business), several of the big business lobby groups had separate correspondence and meetings with Peter Mandelson and other top officials at DG Trade to discuss Global Europe. Among these groups, Business Europe had by far the most access to DG Trade officials. The evidence gathered so far by CEO through the EU regulation to access information shows that BusinessEurope had at least seven meetings on the Global Europe strategy with top officials at DG Trade between February 2005 and October 2006, including meetings with Commissioner Mandelson. Other meetings covered other issues ? for instance hardly a month has passed in which BusinessEurope did not organise a meeting with Commission officials and WTO negotiators on the World Trade Organisation talks. At many of the meetings on Global Europe, UNICE/BusinessEurope acted as a hub for other corporate lobby groups. Regular attendees included the European Services Forum (ESF), a group comprising large service corporations set up by former Trade Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan, who is now a lobbyist for the London financial services industry; CEFIC, the European chemical association; German industry and ACEA, the car lobby. In one of those meetings, DG Trade Director-General David O?Sullivan stressed that there was an ?open door policy for UNICE in DG Trade.? Although BusinessEurope claims to be the voice of all business in Europe, big and small, they use their substantial political weight for lobbying for positions which favour big corporate players. The current President is Ernest-Antoine Seillire, former president of French MEDEF and heir to the Wendel empire, now an investment company. BusinessEurope has received ?749,675 in funding from the Commission in 2007. BusinessEurope Conference at DG Trade premises The doors of DG Trade are indeed open to BusinessEurope. The corporate group is holding a conference on October 28th in the Charlemagne building in Brussels, the headquarters of DG Trade, to evaluate the first two years of Global Europe. Asked about their involvement, DG Trade denies any financial responsibility and says the event is BusinessEurope?s: ?The role of the European Commission is limited to suggesting to BusinessEurope names of Commission officials that could possibly intervene during the conference.? According to the programme for ?Going Global: the way forward? speakers at the one-day event include Enterprise and Industry Commissioner Gunter Verheugen; Development Commissioner Louis Michel; Education Commissioner Jan Figel; Director General External Trade David O?Sullivan; Deputy Director General External Trade Karl-Friedrich Falkenberg; Director General Environment Jos Delbeke; Deputy Director General Enterprise and Industry Franoise Le Bail; and Deputy Director General Economic and Financial Affairs Marco Buti. Ex-Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson will be substituted by new Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton. The previous version of the programme included also Commission President Jos Manuel Barroso and Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas. With such a panel it is more than an understatement to say that the role of the Commission is limited to suggesting names of Commission officials. And despite denying any financing of the conference, the Commission is subsidising it through the use of the Charlemagne building. Renting such a space would cost thousands of euros, without even counting the political value of such a endorsement. In short, this event clearly reflects the links between BusinessEurope and the Commission on Global Europe, links that go beyond influence into joint policy-making. Corporate fingerprints in Global Europe: Pure Free Trade Agreements ?This is not a plan for competitiveness but a plan for exporting inequality and
poverty?
Celine Charveriat, head of Oxfam?s Make Trade Fair campaign, 4 October 200616 The very privileged access enjoyed by BusinessEurope and other corporate interests throughout the drafting of Global Europe has resulted in a framework for EU trade policy which puts aside all other concerns in favour of big EU business. The 2005 Issues paper on Trade and Competitiveness, the analytical basis of Global Europe, aired the possibility of lifting the moratorium on new bilateral and regional free trade negotiations. That was the ?Lamy doctrine?, in place since 1999 and designed to convey strong political support for the WTO negotiations. The drive towards a bilateral trade agreement strategy was motivated by the lack of results achieved at the WTO. DG Trade Director General David O?Sullivan shared DG Trade?s views in a meeting with many representatives of BusinessEurope possible, given the organisational set-up and the number of Members pushing for their quite heterogeneous interests?. He graphically concluded that ?the EU-US round days were over?, in reference to the stronger positioning of developing countries which no longer swallow the deals offered by the powerful North. Adding pressure was the fact that the US and other ?EU competitors? had launched a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) frenzy. Large EU corporations were worried that their major competitors would benefit and this could have an impact on their market share. Big business had become very frustrated with the lack of results at the WTO. European businesses were enthusiastic about the proposed move towards bilateral free trade agreements, but felt that the Issues paper was not strong enough about the sharp economic focus that those should have. ?New negotiations should be clearly labelled as trade agreements and not be linked to parallel political cooperation accords? demanded BusinessEurope, ?That will ensure that the EU approaches commercial negotiations with as strong a hand as possible.? Most of the big business lobby groups conveyed their wish list for a new generation of free trade agreements (FTAs) in meetings with DG Trade officials and through position statements and letters. One common demand was to target the countries which would bring them more benefits, particularly the so-called emerging economies such as Brazil, India, South East Asia and China. As the European Services Forum (ESF) put it: ?It therefore calls on the EU to allocate adequately its resources in its bilateral trade strategy with a particular focus on the countries/regions with the highest growth potential and commercial opportunities for European business ahead of more general political cooperation agreements.? Small businesses not heard Smaller businesses though had different interests. ?Less than 10% of SMEs in Europe are active internationally, mostly in the internal market only.? said UEAPME, the voice of small and medium sized companies, crafts and trades. They called for EU trade policy to focus instead on commercial relations with bordering countries, as ?their geographical proximity makes them more attractive and easier to reach as a partner for EU small businesses.? According to them, Global Europe ?Fails to mention, let alone address, the impact on European small and medium sized businesses, especially as far as non-internationally active SMEs are concerned.? The Commission clearly listened carefully to the demands of large EU corporations and the final Global Europe Communication has a clear focus on FTAs. It establishes criteria to choose new FTA partners including market potential (economic size and growth), the level of protection against EU export interests (the less protection, the greater the benefits) and whether they are negotiating with EU main competitors. The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), warned that the Global Europe strategy said ?nothing about the price the EU would have to pay to achieve further market opening in third countries through these new FTAs, in particular in the sensitive sectors of services?, and called for a broader European-wide debate, expressing its ?disagreement with the proposed general reorientation of European trade policy in favour of an extremely aggressive liberalisation agenda in developing countries?. As ETUC points out, to obtain its negotiating goals with third countries, Europe will be forced to open up its markets in exchange and might arrange deals which are politically difficult to sell at home. For this reason the Commission enlisted the support of business. In a meeting between DG Trade and BusinessEurope David O?Sullivan ?called on business to make itself heard in relation to the content of future FTAs, in particular with respect to ensuring that commercial interests were fully served and the cost to pay in terms of market access of any other objective.? Trade Unions and NGOs? concerns have gone unheard, apart from some rhetorical references to sustainable development in the final communication. Although only consulted superficially within the Civil Society Dialogue, several NGOs (FOEE, WWF and ActionAid) raised ?questions on the sustainable development and the lack of development dimension of the paper.? The Commission replied that ?this paper did not aim to address specifically these issues. They were mentioned when there was a direct link with competitiveness.? Corporate grip reaches the implementation of Global Europe Research by CEO has found that the privileged access and undue influence of BusinessEurope and other large corporate interests is still continuing through the implementation phase of Global Europe. There is evidence for instance of how DG Trade shares its insights on the ongoing free trade agreement negotiations with BusinessEurope, while refusing to give similar insights to other groups or citizens. Some examples are given here ? but other documents requested by CEO on the bi-lateral free trade agreements have not yet been released by the Commission, making it possible that more examples will be revealed. For example, BusinessEurope met with the Director General of DG Trade David O?Sullivan and DG Industry Commissioner Verheugen to discuss bilateral relations with China and Russia in July 2007. In their short report of the meeting BusinessEurope noted that DG Trade Director General David O?Sullivan had highlighted ?the importance of strengthening dialogue with BusinessEurope to exchange views on negotiations with India, Korea and ASEAN as well as negotiations with China on the new partnership agreements.? Further meetings on FTAs and EPAs took place in October 2007 and January 2008. Information not disclosed DG Trade refused to disclose full details of a meeting between Peter Mandelson and BusinessEurope in January 2008 because ?it could be prejudicial to our ongoing negotiations on the DDA [Doha Development Agenda at the WTO], Korea, India and ASEAN and therefore undermine the protection of the public interest as regards international relations.? From the limited information disclosed, it is clear that BusinessEurope were consulted on the on-going negotiations. The Commission?s Secretary General Catherine Day backed DG Trade?s refusal to grant CEO access to the full minutes, without justifying the discriminatory treatment between corporate groups and other citizens. The case is now under investigation by the Ombudsman. In fact a number of DG Trade access to document requests have been refused or responded to with documents where the text has been blacked out. BusinessEurope however is clearly given privileged access, allowing them to closely monitor and influence the development of ongoing negotiations. Civil society groups meanwhile are excluded and have less opportunity to prevent the inclusion in the agreements of negative provisions for people and the environment. A strategy for Market Access BusinessEurope has also been given access and opportunities to influence the implementation of the new Market Access strategy, which establishes a partnership between the Commission, Member States and business to dismantle ?barriers? encountered by corporations exporting to third markets. It facilitates the continuous input of business into decisions over priorities. ?Barriers? include restrictions on trade in raw materials, environmental and social regulations, inadequate protection for intellectual property rights and restrictive government procurement rules. BusinessEurope acknowledged the Commission and Peter Mandelson?s helpful approach. ?The European Commission has been very efficient in putting into place the right channels…individual barriers to trade and investment were raised at the highest level during official visits of third countries?. BusinessEurope?s Philippe de Buck added that ?When the revised strategy was launched, I asked Commissioner Mandelson to act more often as the EU Ambassador for Market Access around the world. I think he was pleased with his new title. At least he took his ?new duty? very seriously.? Impacts within the EU: other voices unheard As previously mentioned, Global Europe also deals with domestic EU policy on the basis that EU internal policies affect the external competitiveness of EU business and should therefore be adjusted accordingly. The big business goal here was clear ? throughout the drafting process they called for a deregulation agenda within the EU. In fact, the Seattle to Brussels network, a coalition of groups campaigning for trade justice has warned that ?the home front? is where the ?true threat he [Peter Mandelson] poses becomes clear… anyone concerned with agricultural sustainability, workers? rights, climate change or the European social model itself stands in the way of the Mandelson vision.? The domestic agenda breaks down into three blocks ? further liberalisation of the EU?s Internal Market; ?better regulation? (checking existing and new regulations to test their effect on competitiveness); and regulatory convergence (mostly with the US) to bring new regulations in line with those of competitors. The European Trade Union, ETUC, spoke out against regulatory convergence: ?A fortiori, standards must not be established in consultation with businesses outside the Union. The aim of achieving regulatory convergence with the United States at all costs would not take forward European prosperity?. Trade unions? concerns clashed with corporate wishes. In early 2006, BusinessEurope?s President Seillire sent a letter to Peter Mandelson demanding: ?...forward planning for regulatory frameworks in new areas (e.g. nanotechnology, biotechnology) to be formulated concurrently with those of our major trading partners?. ?There is certainly a case for rethinking our internal policies to relate them more effectively to what happens ?outside? and to better serve our offensive economic interests?, agreed Mandelson. BusinessEurope insisted that it ?would like DG trade to play a more active role in future internal regulation making to ensure that it will encourage regulatory convergence and assess the impact of new regulations on the global competitiveness of European services and industries.? BusinessEurope highlighted the ?overly burdensome REACH legislation? and the unilateral climate policy of the EU as two areas that could benefit from regulatory convergence with the US. Needless to say, the REACH legislation and Europe?s climate policy would never have happened, had the EU applied US standards. The inclusion of domestic policies was a victory for the large corporations. BusinessEurope expressed its satisfaction to David O?Sullivan, writing: ?The stronger focus on the coherence of internal and external policies and the much clearer policy on bilateral trade negotiation with an economic focus are fundamental improvements which, if implemented, could contribute tremendously to the competitiveness of the EU economy.? However, it meant that the critical voices of civil society groups, of trade unions, of smaller business, went unheeded. Small and medium size businesses fear the impacts of a further opening of markets. UEAPME (representing SMEs in Europe) protested: ?The effects of external trade are more often a challenge than an opportunity for small businesses, for instance when multinational retail chains enter a national market or when European crafts face unfair competition from third countries? SMEs will not be the only ones hurt by Global Europe in the EU. The Seattle to Brussels Network denounced the measures: ?What is to be expected is more competition, more flexibilisation, more deregulation. Good bye European model, here is naked globalisation for all?. The Global Europe strategy foresees that there will be ?victims?, but proposed yet more deregulation and liberalisation and the establishment of a European Globalisation Adjustment Fund as the solution. It also calls for more flexible labour markets and active labour policies (a euphemism for minimal job security and limited unemployment benefits) combined with lifelong learning to substitute the social security nets which exist in most EU countries. No wonder trade unions are increasingly critical of Global Europe. As ETUC puts it, ?The Communication sees rules and standards as nothing more than obstacles to trade or ?red tape?... European regulations and standards must not be governed solely by the imperative of competitiveness if this concept is limited to maximising the share of the global market held by multinationals operating in Europe .? This is the very problem of Global Europe. It seeks to benefit large corporations operating in world markets, ignoring the implications. To a large extent this is due to Peter Mandelson, who has become known during his tenure for taking corporate influence over trade policy to yet deeper levels than his predecessors. Mandelson, who recently resigned as Trade Commissioner to become Business Secretary in the UK, has been the driving force behind Global Europe. As he told the UK press: ?I produced and got adopted a global Europe trading strategy to reduce protectionist measures that had been mounting over the past four or five years?. Global Europe
worsens an already unsustainable trade policy which encourages the use of a huge share of world resources to feed large European corporations while fuelling poverty, inequality and environmental destruction. Now that a new Commissioner takes over, she should break with Mandelson?s disastrous heritage and make a u-turn on EU trade policy. The Commission has a political responsibility to break free from the undue influence of big business interests and develop an alternative trade policy which prioritises global justice and sustainability over corporate interests. As a first step, she should refuse to host the upcoming BusinessEurope conference in the Charlemagne building and cancel the mass participation of Commissioners.
Labour scapegoats immigrants for the financial crash21 Oct 2008Phil Woolas has made clear how the Brown Labour government intends to try and divert attention from its multibillion pay-out for Britain?s banks and the super-rich by scapegoating migrants. The comments by the newly-appointed immigration minister were made just days before Britain is officially to be confirmed as being in recession, prompting the Guardian to forecast that ?Rising unemployment is expected to trigger a wave of mortgage defaults as people who lose their jobs find themselves unable to keep up payments on their homes.? In the Times, Woolas claimed that the economic crisis meant that the number of migrants entering the UK needed to be curbed. He had been brought in as immigration minister ?to be tougher and to change perceptions,? he said. ?Clearly if people are being made unemployed, then the question of immigration becomes extremely thorny,? he continued. ?It?s been too easy to get into this country in the past and it?s going to get harder,? he went on, adding that a cap on immigration would be needed should numbers rise above a certain point. The assertions by Woolas are a barefaced attempt to inculcate anti-immigrant prejudice. For more than a decade the Labour government, building on the policies of the Conservative governments before it, has done everything to encourage the speculative binge on the international financial markets. Public sector spending was gutted and basic welfare provision run down in order to force working people into taking out their own unemployment, health and pension provision?investment then harvested on the stock markets where it reaped massive dividends for the super-rich. The Bank of England was made independent so as to free it from any form of ?political pressure? and make it wholly responsive to the ?free market?, while the government actively opposed demands for tighter regulation. While the wealthiest layers of the population have enjoyed a financial bonanza as a result, social inequality has grown as millions of workers and their families have plunged into greater levels of debt to make up for declining wages in real terms. Woolas is well aware that the collapse of this speculative house of cards has caused widespread anger amongst millions of working people. Not only are their jobs, savings, pensions and living standards now severely jeopardised, but the government has insisted on handing over hundreds of billions of taxpayers? money to bail-out the banks, with barely any preconditions. This is truly parasitism on a gargantuan scale. Under conditions of worsening economic uncertainty, an unprecedented transfer of social wealth away from the mass of the population is being engineered in order to benefit a tiny minority. What the government and the official parties fear above all, is the inevitable rise in social and political tensions that will fuel a left-wing, socialist challenge to their free-market dogma. That is why Woolas sought to divert responsibility for the crisis onto migrants claiming that, ?In times of economic difficulties, racial stereotyping becomes stronger but also if you?ve got skills shortages you should, as a government, attempt to fill those skills shortages with your indigenous population.? Such efforts are hardly new. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has, in the last months, become ever more strident in his promotion of ?Britishness? under conditions of a widening social chasm. But in his latest remarks, Woolas was only following in the footsteps of New Labour?s political masters?the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the financial oligarchy which forms the government?s real social constituency. Consider the response of Murdoch?s Sun newspaper to the unfolding crisis. The weeks leading up to October 10 had seen major falls on the international stock markets, threatening a complete breakdown of the banking system?particularly in the United States. On September 29, Wall Street suffered its biggest one-day point fall in history, after the House of Representatives voted down the proposal to give US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson unprecedented power to use at least $700 billion clawed from working people buying up largely worthless paper assets. The defeat was, at least in part, the outcome of enormous popular opposition to the plan. But, in the next days, every effort was made?particularly by the Democratic Party?to insist that public opinion must not impede the Paulson bail-out, which was approved on a second vote only a matter of days later. Also on September 29, the British government announced it would take over the Bradford and Bingley building society at the cost of some 55 billion. This was in addition to its earlier take-over of the Northern Rock bank at the cost of approximately 100 billion. The measures failed to halt the financial meltdown and, on October 6, the European stock markets crashed, and trading in Iceland was halted completely. In the subsequent days, not even the pledges of even more billions in public monies?including a 500 billion pledge from the British government to leading high street banks?gave stability to the markets. In amidst this epochal financial turmoil, the Sun chose to focus its attention on an Afghan asylum seeker, a mother of seven, whose extortionate rent on her West London home was being paid by the local authority. ?While millions worry about the prospect of losing their jobs, their homes, their savings and their pensions?, the Sun ranted, Toorpakai Saiedi was ?luxuriating? in her home at the expense of the ?British taxpayer?. There followed days of coverage on the Afghan family, the size of their television set and the largesse of Britain?s public services. Commenting on the same ?news? story in the Daily Mail, Richard Littlejohn opined, without any trace of embarrassment, ?I sometimes think there are two Britains?one where most of us live and another which the government runs.? Once again the target was not the bankers and super-rich, but a supposedly too generous welfare state. According to Littlejohn, the problem is that there is too much spending on the public sector, which is ?awash with cash? and where ?the party never ends?. Just days later, the Sun followed up with an attack on pensions paid to workers in the public sector. Hard pressed taxpayers were ?bankrolling? ?very generous, guaranteed schemes?, it complained, at an anticipated cost of 20 billion. The newspaper cited Conservative Treasury Chief Secretary Philip Hammond complaining that the revelations would ?cause serious concern to hard-pressed taxpayers.? It is no surprise that the likes of the Sun newspaper would join with Labour and the Tories in seeking to divert attention from the massive bankrolling of the City of London by working people. The policies of deregulation and privatisation were geared to satisfying the demands for self-enrichment by the likes of Murdoch. And it is this imperative that has determined the actions of the Brown government over the last weeks. As the Sun newspaper put it regarding the massive amounts of ?hard-pressed taxpayers? money being handed over to the banks, there was no alternative. There is no ?Plan B? it stated. When it comes to cutting back the public provision on which millions of workers depend, however, all options are on the table.
Gordon’s Problem with Mandy21 Oct 2008Britain?s beleaguered Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who is still struggling in the domestic opinion polls and battling with the international financial meltdown, would have been cheered greatly by reading the New York Times earlier this month. Writing in its opinion pages, Paul Krugman one of the paper?s columnists and professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, asked simply ?Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?? Although Krugman said it was slightly premature for the question to be answered fully, he glowingly praised Brown for ?defining? the ?character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.? Krugman argued that, despite its relatively small economy, you would not expect Britain to be playing ?a leadership role? in such turbulent times. However, the ?Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn?t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own.? This was a ringing endorsement for Brown from an influential commentator like Krugman, who coincidentally won the Nobel Prize for Economics this week. Others agree. One financial advisor I spoke to last week, whilst quick to point out that he was at the different end of the political spectrum from Brown, readily praised his action to try and stem the collapse of the British banking system. But whilst Brown is keen to be seen as the key international politician solving the financial crisis, one action he has undertaken recently is likely to do just the opposite. Earlier this month he appointed the veteran Labour politician Peter Mandelson as the government?s new Business Secretary. As Mandelson is no longer a Member of Parliament, he has to be made a Lord in order to take up the appointment. Mandelson is an almost mythical political figure: hated and admired by his critics and followers. Along with ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mandelson and Gordon Brown are credited with creating ?New Labour,? that went on to win three general elections. He is seen as being one of the original ?spin doctors? who twist and massage their message. Known for political subterfuge, he was once dubbed the ?Prince of darkness? by his critics. Mandelson is also unique in that he has already resigned from the Government twice. In the late nineties, he had to resign when it was revealed he had borrowed 373,000 for the mortgage from a millionaire Labour MP who was then subject to an investigation by Mandelson’s own government department. After he was brought back into the Labour government again by Tony Blair, Mandelson had to resign a second time, after it was alleged he had tried to intervene to get a passport on behalf of a prominent Indian businessman. Although a subsequent inquiry found that Mandelson had done nothing wrong, it was too late to save his job. Brown explained his decision to bring Mandelson back into the cabinet as business secretary, by saying: ?Serious people are needed for serious times.? But Mandelson?s appointment by Brown stunned everyone. For the two men, although once close, have been feuding for the last fifteen years. The Conservative William Hague, who is the shadow foreign secretary, said it was a ?stunning failure of judgment? by Brown. On the other end of the political spectrum, the veteran Labour left-winger, John McDonnell, called it an ?extraordinary step backwards? to ?reinstate possibly the most divisive figure in Labour’s recent history.? And divisive the Mandelson ? Brown split has certainly been. Their feud goes back to 1994 when Mandelson made the pivotal decision to support Tony Blair rather than Brown for the Labour leadership. The feud is graphically explored in the diaries written by Tony Blair?s former Communications Director: Alistair Campbell, which is seen as being one of the definitive books on New Labour. Campbell describes the political and personal relationship between the two men as a ?wall to wall disaster area?. Campbell?s diaries explicitly details how: the ?real bane of Tony Blair?s life was Gordon Brown?s and Peter Mandelson?s inability to get on? and that the rift between them was ?so deep that it was impossible to do anything much about it?. In fact Mandelson and Brown ?hated each other?. Over the last few years, the relationship between the two men is said to have thawed considerably. Although this did not stop the right-wing Telegraph pointing out that, at a recent meeting between Peter Mandelson and the Conservative Treasury spokesperson, George Osborne, that Mandelson had ?dripped pure poison? about Brown to Osborne. The interesting thing about Brown?s reappointment of Mandelson is that it is a move in the wrong direction, if his government is going to reign in the financial sector. Everyone knows argues that the current crisis means that we should move from an unregulated banking system to one that is regulated and works in the public interest, not just for the greed of city bankers. However Mandelson is far too close to business interests generally and also to the financial industry, including accountancy firms. The role of accountancy firms in the current crisis is crucial, just as they were in the collapse of global giants Enron and World Com earlier this decade. When Enron collapsed it caused the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, at the time one of the world?s top accountancy firms, that had failed to notice the fraud at the heart of Enron. In the current crisis many people are now asking how could the accountancy firms audit the books of banks and mortgage companies and not notice that something was so terribly wrong again? Could it be that accountancy firms are part of the problem? Prem Sikka, the Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex, has been tracking accountancy firms for decades, and also Mandelson?s relationship with them. ?When he was at the Department for Trade and Industry [DTI], he started making very favourable noises to accounting firms?, argues Sikka. According to Sikka, when Mandelson was at the DTI he gave auditors greater protection from lawsuits than had existed before. He did this by introducing ?proportional liability? for accountancy firms, who before had had unlimited liability. This made it harder for injured parties to get compensation from accountancy firms and gave greater protection to the accountancy firms. Then within months of being sacked as the Minister, Mandelson had been offered a 40,000 deal with the accountancy giant Ernst and Young to carry out ?executive networking.? So he had went from regulating accountancy firms to working for them. After Mandelson lost his job a second time, he resigned from being an MP and reignited his political career as EU Trade Commissioner, in Brussels. When he arrived in 2004 to take up his job, he was heckled by protestors brandishing a giant puppet. They accused Mandelson of having ?strings that are pulled by European lobby groups and multinationals?. Mandelson was quick to annoy his critics at the European Parliament too. When the Green MEP from Italy, Vittorio Agnoletto asked a question on the close relationship between the Trade Department and business lobby groups, Mandelson dismissed the criticism. He said: ?I am not conscious of any incestuous or damaging relationship.? He ignored the long list of evidence compiled by his critics. The following year, in 2005, the corporate watchdog, Corporate Europe Observatory, submitted a complaint against the European Commission after Mandelson?s Department had started blanking out the names of industry lobbyists in documents released under EU rules to make official documents public. After a two year investigation, in a significant rebuke to Mandelson, the European ombudsman ruled that his office had been ?wrongly blanking out the names of industry lobbyists? in the documents. It said that ?disclosure of names of individual lobbyists is essential?. The failure to reveal this information ?would constitute an instance of maladministration by the commission?. Since then, Mandelson has been at the forefront of removing barriers to trade and investment. He has pandered to the corporate lobbyists who want a de-regulated open financial system. As the Sunday Times once noted, Mandelson is regarded as ?being close to the financial services lobbyists who are pushing for the liberalisation of rules around the world.? For example, Mandelson was there in May 2008, when the body set up between the EU and US to foster greater economic ties and deregulation, called the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC) met for the second time in Brussels. According to the official news release: the TEC continued its work to ?eliminate barriers to transatlantic trade? and ?advance capital market liberalization, and strengthen support for open investment regimes.? By bringing back the ?Prince of Darkness? to his government, Gordon Brown has signaled that whatever the short-term quick fix for the banking sector, the longer term will see more of the same. Mandelson will make sure his banking friends get a good deal. And that is bad news for everyone.
Big flaws in Labour?s new spending plans21 Oct 2008How quickly New Labour?s old orthodoxies of the free market have come crashing down. Not long ago Tony Blair and his ?Iron Chancellor? Gordon Brown told us that sticking to agreed spending plans meant there could be no utopian dreams of council housing, good transport infrastructure, or even school roofs that didn?t leak. They said that in the era of globalisation it was no longer possible for the state to intervene in the economy. Those who disagreed were at best old fashioned and at worst, enemies of ?reform?, they said. Now, with the financial crisis and the onset of recession, it appears that times have changed. Chancellor Alistair Darling says that he is prepared to spend billions on capital projects in order to stave off another Great Depression. Housing minister Margaret Beckett will be given millions to buy up empty homes for council houses. More money will be splurged on a strange collection of ?public works? such as aircraft carriers, replacing Trident nuclear submarines, the Olympics and London?s Crossrail project. The ranks of disillusioned Labour voters ? who have endured years of cuts in pay and public services alongside tax breaks for the rich ? will doubtless be wondering why it has taken an economic calamity for the government to abandon its free market dogma. Many will have watched the signs of economic collapse and feared a return to the Tories and the mass unemployment of the 1980s. Now they will hope that Labour?s spending plans can avert disaster. Closer look But a closer look at Labour?s new spending plans reveals the enormous gap between what the government is prepared to dole out to the banks, and what it is says it will do for ordinary people. On housing, the first phase of Beckett?s plan will release 13 million in London ? enough to buy up just 335 unsold homes. There are 9,000 people on the council house waiting list in the London borough of Barking & Dagenham alone. Subsequent phases will release a further 200 million around the country. But according to town hall leaders, by then the numbers waiting for a home will have reached around 2 million. That means the plan, if it were divided equally between all on the waiting list, will be worth just 100 each. The money for this plan ? and those for other big money ?capital projects? such as new school buildings ? is not new. It is merely being brought forward a year. And the stark reality is that the government?s spending plans do not go nearly far enough. First, there is the question of scale. Economists are predicting that up to 2.2 million will be on the dole by the end of next year. The current measures could not save more than a few tens of thousands of jobs. To build and maintain a new generation of council houses that could really make a dent in the number on the waiting list would require spending that approached the amount used to bail out the banks. Second, there is the question of what is being prioritised. The government has decided it is prepared to spend nearly 4 billion on two new aircraft carriers. But most people, given the choice, would rather see the skills of 10,000 workers that depend on those contracts used to improve lives, rather than threaten them. Lastly, there is the question of who will benefit most from the spending. If much of the government?s investment money is handed to the same developers who profit from schemes such as Private Finance Initiatives (PFI), then how much of the public?s money will actually benefit the public? Recession In the NHS there are fears that government plans to ?spend their way out of recession? will result in ?retargeted spending? to create short-term jobs, and that the much slower growth in spending after 2010 will lead to cuts in services. The demise of the world economy has killed the rationale for New Labour?s obsession with the market. But we are some considerable way from policies that could really benefit working people during a recession. Thanks to the scale of the bank bailout, Gordon Brown now runs four banks and most of Britain?s mortgages. Surely they should now be made to operate in the interests of workers, rather than the rich. We need a fight for real public investment ? under the control of those who build, use and protect public services. And we should keep pointing out that the the market has failed ? it is time to kick it out of public services for good. These are the fights that hold the key to the future.
If an hour is a long time in politics, we must start thinking in centuries21 Oct 2008The problem is simply stated. As Gordon Brown – discussing what he perceives to be an improvement in his political fortunes – says, ?an hour is a long time in politics.?1 It used to be a week, but everything is speeding up. To remain in office or to remain in business, decision-makers must privilege the present over the future. Discount rates ensure that investments made today are worth nothing in ten years? time; the political cycle demands that no one looks beyond the next election. The financial crisis is just one consequence of a system which demands that governments sacrifice long-term survival for short-term gains. In this case political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic – from Reagan to Brown – decided to appease business lobbyists and boost short-term growth by allowing the banks to use new financial instruments, many of which were as dodgy as a three-pound coin. It made perfect political sense, as long as the inevitable crash took place after they left office. For similar reasons we are likely to be ambushed by other nasty surprises: runaway climate change, resource depletion, foreign policy blowback, new surveillance and genetic technologies, skills shortages, demographic change, a declining tax base, private and public debt. Politics is the art of shifting trouble from the living to the unborn. At first sight, the government?s strengthening last week of the UK?s climate change target looks like an exception to this political short-termism. In fact something rather interesting is taking place in this country. While prime ministers in Italy and eastern Europe demand a bonfire of environmental measures in order to save the economy2 in the UK politicians from all the major parties have made the connection between environmental destruction and economic meltdown. One of the fastest-spreading memes is the proposal for a green new deal: a Keynesian package of environmental works designed to boost employment and channel public investment.3 If this idea is adopted it won?t be the first time that it has helped to rescue a major economy. The biggest and most successful component of Roosevelt?s New Deal was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed three million people to plant trees and stop soil erosion.4 But all such proposals soon collide with the realities of the political cycle. As Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, admitted, ?signing up to an 80 per cent cut in 2050, when most of us will not be around, is the easy part; the hard part is meeting it, and meeting the milestones that will show we are on track.?5 A recent paper in the journal Energy Policy shows that the government is pursuing the wrong policies to meet the wrong targets, produced by using the wrong methods to assess the wrong data. (Otherwise it?s more or less on track). The paper shows that to help deliver even a small chance of preventing two degrees of global warming, the UK can generate a maximum of 17 to 23 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2000 and 2050.6 In the first five years of this decade we produced 3.6 billion tonnes: at this rate our carbon budget would run out by 2028. To hit the government?s temperature targets, the UK?s carbon emissions need to fall by between six and nine percent a year from 2012 onwards. At the moment they?re still rising. Current policy, in other words, bears no relationship to the long-term target. On this trajectory, the only way in which the government could meet its obligations under the climate change bill would be to buy the cut from other countries, which means that it will make no contribution to a global reduction. But at least in this case there?s a recognition that current policies have long-term implications. Elsewhere, the government simply refuses to look beyond the present, for fear of seeing something it doesn?t like. For example, it has failed to conduct any assessment of global oil supply. When I asked the business department what contingency plans it possesses to meet the eventuality that oil production might peak, it told me ?the Government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans?.7 The survival of our transport networks – and therefore of the economy – is secured by touching wood and crossing fingers. In other cases, the question isn?t even raised. Food policy everywhere is governed by the expectation that crop yields can keep growing to meet rising demand. A possible limiting factor is the supply of the phosphorus rock required to make fertiliser. I asked the researcher Tom Bailey to produce an assessment of global phosphate deposits which can be exploited at reasonable prices.8 He found that there is a wide range of estimates and a good deal of confusion between reserves (known deposits which can be readily exploited) and resources (the total geological stock). The most extensive survey published so far suggests that the global demand for phosphate is likely roughly to double by 2050.9 Can this demand be met without pricing food out of the mouths of the poor? Perhaps. Some reports suggest that phosphate constraints will provoke a global food crisis by the middle of the century. This, in other words, is a critical, even existential, question. Yesterday I searched the past five years of parliamentary records in the UK. It hasn?t been discussed once. But the possibility that aircraft passengers and crew might be exposed to trace amounts of another phosphorus compound – tricresyl phosphate – has been mentioned 1670 times over the same period. This is a miniscule issue by comparison to the question of whether or not the world might be fed. But it has the great political virtue of affecting people today. In 1791 Thomas Paine complained that ?the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies?.10 He was answering Edmund Burke?s contention that a declaration made by parliament in 1688 bound the people of England ?for ever?. A parliament which considers only the immediate consequences of its decisions imposes the same insolent tyranny on succeeding generations. They have no means of contesting the legacy of economic crises, depleted resources and limited choices we bequeath to them. What can be done about political short-termism? With the environmental thinker Matthew Prescott, I?ve hatched what might be a partial solution. We propose a new parliamentary body – the 100 Year Committee – whose purpose is to assess the likely impacts of current policy in 10, 20, 50 and 100 years? time. Like any other select committee, it gathers evidence, publishes reports and makes recommendations to the government. It differs only in that it has no interest in the current political cycle. Its maximum timeframe is roughly the residence time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The members of this committee would not be equipped with crystal balls; they would simply be released from the need to balance the interests of the present against a heavily-discounted future. Their purpose would be to provide a voice for those who have not yet been enfranchised. A 100 Year Committee can?t insure us against political stupidity, but it deprives governments of one of their excuses: that they couldn?t see trouble coming. 1. Andrew Rawnsley, 12th October 2008. Why the crisis puts a spring in the Prime Minister?s step. The Observer. 2. David Gow, 16th October 2008. EU pledges to lead climate change fight despite financial crisis. The Guardian., 3. Andrew Simms et al, July 2008. A Green New Deal. New Economics Foundation.
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_publicationdetail.aspx?pid=258 4. Neil M. Maher, 2008. Nature?s New Deal. Oxford University Press. 5. Edward Miliband, 16th October 2008. Statement to the House of Commons. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm081016/debtext/81016-0006.htm#08101662000006 6. Kevin Anderson, Alice Bows and Sarah Mander, 8th August 2008. From long-term targets to cumulative emission pathways: Reframing UK climate policy. Energy Policy 36, 3714?3722. 7. DBERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request Ref 08/0091. 8. Please contact me if you would like a copy of his assessment. 9. Ingrid Steen, September-October 1998. Phosphate Recovery. Phosphorus and Potassium, no. 217. http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/projects/phosphate-recovery/p&k217/steen.htm 10. Thomas Paine, 1791. The Rights of Man, pp. 41-42. Penguin edition, 1984.
Rallying for power19 Oct 2008The British National Party conducted its largest single leafleting session when 300 people campaigned in Stoke-on-Trent last month. Publicly they were there to draw attention to what they considered was the lenient sentence handed down to a man found guilty of the manslaughter of a local BNP member, but in truth they were launching their campaign for control of the city. The BNP activists, drawn by a ratio of more than four to one from outside the city, spent a few hours leafleting and then met up again for a shambolic rally in car park. As usual Griffin was surrounded by thuggish henchmen and the so-called truth truck ? known more accurately as the lie lorry. Habib Khan had received an eight-year sentence in August after being convicted in May of the manslaughter of his neighbour Keith Brown, a BNP member. The pair had been involved in a long-running dispute over land and Khan had been the subject of a sustained racial campaign by Brown, his family and friends. The two men had previously worked together at H & R Johnson Tiles quite amicably but things turned nasty after Khan bought the house next to Brown and applied for planning permission to demolish his two houses to build one new one. ?I took him [Mr Brown] inside the house and I said ?it?s so dangerous?,? Khan told the court. I have a family, in my position what would you do ?He said ?my house is old, your house is new, I don?t like it?. From that day he never cooperated.? Brown blocked access to the builders and is alleged even to have tried to smash down some of the new building. The Khans were regularly called ?Paki?, had their windows put in frequently and even had a panic button installed by the police because of their fear of attack. Last year Brown?s son, Ashley Barker, was convicted of assaulting Khan, an incident that left Khan unconsciousness. The court heard how Khan acted to defend his son who was being attacked by Barker outside his home. Khan, described in court as a ?mild and calm-mannered family man?, had intended to use the knife to threaten Mr Brown, who had hold of one of his sons. Judge Simon Tonking said Khan had acted ?in the honest belief that he needed to protect his son? but in doing so had killed Mr Brown. The jury, consisting of 11 white people, found Khan not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. In passing sentence, the Judge took into account the abuse and attacks on Khan. ?What became obvious as the evidence unfolded, however,? said Judge Tonking, ?is that from time to time, despite denials to the contrary, both Mr Brown and his son Ashley Barker were involved in acts of racial aggression towards members of Mr Khan?s family. ?It should be said that the jury?s verdict was entirely respectable and understandable on the evidence.? The real issue The BNP and Brown?s family were furious and claimed that this was another example of anti-white prejudice and so a rally was organised. However, raising opposition to Khan?s sentence was simply the pretext. It was left to the party?s deputy leader to spell out the real purpose of the day. Simon Darby told the rally that the party?s next target would be to take control of the city of Stoke-on-Trent through the election of a BNP mayor. ?If there is a mayoral election then we are confident that we will win that election,? he added. The BNP currently has nine councillors in the city and averaged 24% in the wards it contested in May?s local elections. While this is less than one sixth of the total councillors, their influence extends far beyond what the figure suggests. Labour has the largest group on the council, but at 17 it is not that much bigger than the BNP group. In May the Labour Party polled 25% of the vote across the city, only fractionally more than the BNP. Indeed, in the ten wards where the BNP and Labour went head to head the BNP was in front in all but two. More worryingly, the BNP councillors sit and regularly vote with a larger group of independents, making a group of 29 in total. Opposing them is a coalition of 31 Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. This is all a far cry from the mid-1990s when Labour held all 60 seats on the council, most with huge majorities. Since then Labour has collapsed. Internal wrangling, incompetence and a general swing against the national government has seen Labour?s grip on the city weaken. A directly elected mayor was introduced in the city in 2002 but unlike in other local authority areas with mayors, Stoke-on-Trent was unique in that it gave total power to the mayor and the council?s Chief Executive. This created resentment and hostility in the city and particularly from the councillors who became increasingly redundant in the decision making process. Their disquiet often became open opposition, which added to the political instability in the city. The first mayoral contest was won by an independent (who was a former Labour Party member), with the BNP only just failing to go through to the second round by 1,500 votes. Each voter has two votes and the result is determined after the two leading candidates in the first round are allocated the second preferences of the others. In 2005 Labour won it back, largely because the contest was held on the same day as the general election, which had brought the Labour vote out. The BNP was further behind, though its candidate still took 18% of the vote. In the face of mounting hostility to mayoral government the current mayor introduced a cabinet system in a bid to involve the councillors. However, this has done little to improve the standing of the council in the eyes of the population. The BNP scents victory next year and certainly has the momentum behind it. Its confidence was evident by a recent letter from the party?s councillors to other councillors in which they boasted of running the council before long. These councillors were invited to join them. However, it is not certain that there will even be a mayoral election next year, as the legislation that introduced the elected mayor only provided for two terms. Later this month the people of Stoke-on-Trent will decide whether to keep the mayoral system or replace it with a traditional leader/cabinet authority. It is not clear which they will choose. Most parties appear split, though the councillors of the three main parties seem keen to revert to the more traditional method of selecting the council leader from within the council chamber. The BNP however, precisely because it believes it can win a contest, is campaigning to retain the mayor. The party is joined by a group of individuals who have launched a campaign called People?s Choice. Its leader Paul Breeze told the local paper: ?The reason we voted for a directly elected mayor system in the first place was because our existing governance arrangements of a leader and cabinet had resulted in our city becoming stagnant, bereft of ideas, and lacking in vision and true leadership. ?We are still paying the price today for the years of drift we had under the old system. Our city needs stability, someone given a clear mandate from the people, to push forward with changes.? However, in a sign that chaos will reign, the anti-mayoral campaign is also called People?s Choice! If a mayoral contest does take place it would seem that the BNP, Labour and the former independent mayor Mick Wolff will be fighting it out for the top two places. Any one of these could win. Given the danger of a BNP victory, it might seem logical for anti-fascists to hope the mayor is abolished. However, not only is this merely delaying a problem, it could in fact create a bigger one in a year or two. If the people go against the mayoral system, the city will be in a state of flux, which will only intensify the stagnation and demand for real change. By law, the current mayor leaves office next May, so who would run the council? A Governance Report into Stoke-on-Trent recommended a reduction in the number of councillors in the city so we are likely to face all-out elections in either 2010 or 2011. With chaos and confusion likely to overshadow the intervening period the BNP could continue to grow locally and so dominate those elections. It might be easier for the BNP to win enough wards to take control of the city council, albeit with the support of some independents, than win a mayoral election outright. Either way Stoke-on-Trent is where we currently face the most serious threat. With a real danger of the BNP winning control of a city of 250,000 people, the energies of the anti-fascist movement must be focused here. Likewise, the main political parties and the trade unions must also redouble their efforts. A multi-track approach is needed. Anti-fascists and trade unions need to develop a coherent and sensible campaign that highlights the threat of the BNP and its true nature, but recognises that the BNP has planted deep roots in local communities and that undermining the BNP?s councillors locally is vital. At the same time a turnout campaign needs to be built, especially if there is a mayoral election, which can identify and mobilise anti-BNP voters. Wider mood events are important but in a winner-takes-all election our priority has to be winning the election. The mainstream political parties need to get their act together and find a way to engage with voters locally. Nationally, the government still needs to do more to address the deep-rooted economic problems that beset the area. Searchlight is currently making representations to the main parties, unions and government to make sure that everyone is doing their utmost to help in Stoke-on-Trent. Anything less and the BNP will next time be organising a victory rally.
Pepperazzi19 Oct 2008Cops attack as Smash EDO demo paints the town red again… Over 400 people gathered in Brighton on a very wet Wednesday in the latest protest called by Smash EDO against local bomb factory EDO MBM/ITT. The last demo, in June (See SchNEWS 634), saw protesters invading the factory grounds and smashing windows. This time the cops were determined to have an overwhelming presence. At noon Sussex University campus was occupied by large gangs of cops as people arrived at the demo?s start point at the uni entrance. Police tactics soon became obvious. As the crowd gathered they issued a Section 60 notice, giving them the power to remove masks. Trying to stamp their authority, they quickly set about the gathering crowd demanding people remove any kind of face covering, photographing everyone and generally using any tactics to intimidate, attempting to seize banners and alienate as many onlookers as possible. Initially shocked ? the mob soon found the resources to fight back and just after midday the march burst into life. The red and black-clad crowd sprang into action to the rallying call ?Get behind the banner?. Behind the sturdy, massive SHUT ITT! banner – reinforced with a wooden frame – and waving flags, the noisy bloc moved at pace through Stanmer Park and out onto the Lewes Road, filling both lanes. At least ten pairs of police evidence gatherers with long lenses, video cameras and spotter cards, including the Met?s Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) were in evidence from the start but spent most of the march foiled by FIT Watchers (See SchNEWS 639). Hundreds of copies of FIT Watch?s spotter cards were distributed complete with photos, names, numbers and descriptions of FIT police likely to be in attendance. Whenever FIT teams appear, shouts of ?Block That Shot? is becoming a call to arms for activists sick of only being able to protest whilst constantly under surveillance. CAGE FIGHTING Multiple sound systems and makeshift instruments kept spirits up in the procession towards the factory. Police seemed to have taken a leaf from the anarchist book and handily blockaded the whole of Lewes Road for several hours, with 8 vans bumper to bumper, urging people towards their sanctioned ?protest pen? at the bottom of Home Farm road. Unsurprisingly the idea of being herded into a massive steel cage surrounded by a sea of fluorescent baton wielding cops didn?t appeal to anyone. Determined to march on, people surged towards the police lines, pushing the cops back behind their line of vans. Heavy use of pepper spray and batons on those at the front took the sting out of the crowd, who, nursing bruised bodies and the ill effects of an impromptu chemical eye-bath at the hand of Sussex?s finest, split into two groups. Half the crowd stood their ground, eyeballing the cops, whilst others in small groups gradually headed off-piste, up the slope and into the woods towards the back of the factory. PUT THE KETTLE ON Marauding bands of masked militants swarmed through the forest, whilst clueless coppers couldn?t see the hoods for the trees. In a hail of irony, laser-guided paint-missiles bombarded the factory?s roof – staining the factory walls blood-red in a spot of unrequested decoration. After scuffles in the woods and open fields where someone narrowly avoided castration via a police dog bollock-biting attack, a group of about 50 managed to reclaim Lewes Road nearer town before being joined soon after by other cross-country cells and marched towards town. By half two, the crowd on Lewes Road had begun to disperse and the police line had moved across the road, freeing up one lane of traffic. The remaining crowd were able to launch themselves down Lewes Road towards the Level. Fearing that 100 or so anarchists might not cause enough trouble, the cops kindly contributed towards the mayhem by sending some 25 vehicles to create a police traffic jam stretching halfway down the road. When the converged marchers arrived at the Level (traditional end point of Brighton demos), police backed off, thinking that the crowd had had enough. As it turns out, the up-fer-it protesters saw the police begin to disperse and made a break for it to storm the city centre, with the local Army recruitment centre as a goal. Still singing and chanting, they carried on, pursued by police until they were finally kettled near Queens Road. Seeing their plight, locals started harassing the cops, kettling in the kettle and throwing food and water to the stalwart marchers. Police eventually followed the protesters to the beach for their final push, where they nicked a pebble-thrower. With a total of around ten arrests, one sore scrotum, plenty of bruised knees, inflamed sinuses, and stinging eyes, the last 100 intrepid protesters completed the 5 mile anti-arms trade mini marathon to bathe aching feet in the sea. Andrew Beckett, spokesperson said ?We didn?t let the police control events. We went where we wanted, when we wanted. All the police from four counties weren?t able to stop us making our stand against EDO/ITT?. See www.smashedo.org.uk
Brown government caves in to banks? demands19 Oct 2008Within days of announcing an unprecedented 37 billion bailout of three high street lenders?the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Lloyds TSB and HBOS?that will involve the British government taking shares in the banks, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has caved in to the City?s demands for the banks to make dividend payouts. He did a U-turn and relaxed the terms of the agreement, part of a 500 billion rescue plan made at the expense of working people. Although the banks will receive billions of pounds from the Treasury to stave off a banking and credit collapse that is the result of their own reckless practices, the super-rich have refused to accept the slightest constraints on their right to be paid dividends. Headlines in the Financial Times were screaming, ?Brown?s 37 billion rescue: did it go too far?? The Treasury denied that there was ever a ?blanket ban on dividends for five years.? The Chancellor indicated he would be flexible on paying dividends after one year, saying, ?If someone comes up with a better way of running the scheme, of course we will listen.? A Guardian source confirmed that a compromise was possible. Darling?s aides denied any U-turn and sought to justify this humiliating climb-down in the face of the City?s demands with the pathetic claim that the bankers had not understood the terms of the deal or explained it properly to their shareholders. In reality, Darling himself had previously told the BBC?s current affairs Newsnight programme, ?All the banks knew what was on offer. They knew the terms and conditions and they had signed up to them.? The chancellor was a pushover because the government had never wanted to impose any conditions on the banks in the first place. It only banned the banks from paying dividends for five years in order not to fall foul of European Union rules on state aid and competition. The EU believed this would ensure that the banks were returned to private ownership, since it would force the banks to repay the government as soon as possible. It was one of 10 conditions imposed by the EU on the government?s 500 billion capital injection, debt guarantees and liquidity-funding scheme announced last week. The City of London and financial commentators are up in arms over the terms of the agreement, which they denounce as punitive. Under the agreement, negotiated with teams of top legal advisors, the government will buy 9 billion of preference shares in the banks. This will entail a 12 percent annual payout to the government, with no dividend payouts to other shareholders, including ordinary shares to be bought by the government, until the government?s preference stake is repaid in five years? time. The banks are demanding the right to pay dividends to other shareholders and repay the government for its preference stake earlier by selling off assets or raising additional capital from other investors. The financial institutions are also outraged that the British government is demanding a 12 percent dividend, when the US government, in a similar deal, is requiring only a 5 percent dividend. They want the British government?s dividend also cut to 5 percent. The insurance and pension funds that hold many of the banks? shares backed up the banks? demands for a government retreat. The banks are holding the government to ransom. They are threatening that without dividend payouts to shareholders, they will be unable to raise new money from shareholders to shore up their capital reserves as the government has demanded. This in turn will mean that the government will have to dig even deeper to bail out the banks. It is, of course, far from clear that with or without dividends they will be able to either sell their assets or raise additional capital in the prevailing economic conditions. Labour MPs fell in behind the government. John McFall, the Labour chairman of the treasury select committee, said dividends should be paid because otherwise the banks would not attract private investors. ?The government wants the first cut for the taxpayers, but if we are to have confidence in financial companies we have to ensure that dividends are paid to make it attractive for investors to come in.? The banks also protested at the government?s requirement that they lend at 2007 levels, particularly to small businesses and homebuyers. On this, they were immediately reassured. Baroness Shriti Vadera, the minister for business, was at pains to stress that the reference to 2007 meant simply ?the availability of lending? and did not mean that the banks had to match last year?s total lending. The bailout means that the government will hold 60 percent of RBS?s shares and 43.5 percent of Lloyds TSB and HBOS, which are to merge early next year under a rescue deal, personally brokered by Gordon Brown, the prime minister. Banks? share prices have fallen sharply since the weekend bailout was announced. While the government has agreed to buy shares in Lloyds TSB at 173.7 pence, its price has fallen to 150 pence. HBOS?s shares have fallen from the agreed price of 113.6 pence to 84.1 pence and RBS?s shares fell from 65.5 pence to 65 pence. The banks have also protested against any attempts to limit top management?s pay and bonuses. The Financial Times?s Lombard column threatened the government with the headline, ?It will be bloody if regulators take an axe to bonuses.? The government and the regulatory authorities have all but admitted that such limits would be unworkable. While the financial journalists called the bailout a humiliating defeat for the banks, the financial elite have simply seen it as a down payment. The super-rich will brook no curb on their prerogatives. Far from dividends being the reward for taking risks, with the possibility of no payouts in lean years, as every first year finance student is taught, the financial elite now see it as their right however the banks perform. As far as the financial institutions are concerned, now that they have access to taxpayers? funds, there can be no reason for dividend payouts not to continue. Furthermore, such payouts come first?before the requirement to provide credit to business and homebuyers, supposedly the essential business of banks. In turn, Labour will do ?whatever it takes? to defend the wealth and privileges of the ruling class. It will plunder the assets of the state built up by generations of taxpayers, pledge the future earnings of taxpayers and launch a ruthless assault on working people, resorting to illegal and dictatorial measures as it sees fit. And it has the support of all the main political parties in doing so.
This way happiness lies19 Oct 2008Instead of worshipping the invisible, and usually remote, hand of the market economy (which too often can be caught picking the pockets of the poor), you design an economic system in which resources flow and circulate effectively to serve the invisible heart of the core economy ? made up of family, neighbourhood, community and civil society. One unintended consequence of the current global financial crisis is that it will reveal what some have known for a long time, namely that a new economics is already emerging. The tragedy is that the crisis-ridden financial system has long since failed to do the basic job required ? underpin the productive economy and the fundamental operating systems upon which we all depend. These have been variously neglected, taken for granted or cannibalised by finance. They include the core economy of family, neighbourhood, community and society, and the natural economy of the biosphere, our oceans forests and fields. That is why, as we aim for recovery, we should not be trying to get back to how things were before. Before was built on an illusion of limitless credit and unlimited natural resources. It was unsustainable for many reasons. Injecting liquidity into the system and looking for signs of recovery in the return of consumer binge-spending on the high street will simply lay the foundations for an even bigger crash in the future. Consumerism is highly addictive, giving a brief high that quickly wears off and is damaging to both the individual and the world around them. For a society like Britain, there is a large and growing literature that shows, fairly conclusively, we have been looking in the wrong place to find greater life satisfaction and measure the economy’s success. With most people having most of their basic material needs met, organising society to achieve progress through indiscriminately rising consumption not only doesn’t work ? the fall-out from the long hours, throwaway, materialistic, individualistic, status-obsessed culture that accompanies it, is counter-productive, undermining and ultimately destructive. For a vision of what an alternative might look like, the current edition of New Scientist magazine contains enough economic heresy (but scientific common sense) to choke every finance minister in the northern hemisphere and the whole staff of the International Monetary Fund. Best is the vision for what the country and economy could like in 2020. In it, we have moved from an economy of over-consumption, through-put and waste, and the anachronism of overwork and unemployment, to one which the ecological economist Herman Daly describes as, “a subtle and complex economics of maintenance, qualitative improvements, sharing, frugality, and adaptation to natural limits. It is an economics of better, not bigger.” The good thing about such an economy is that it is rich in employment and the thick weave of local, micro-economic relationships that help to create resilient economies and bind communities together. Instead of worshipping the invisible, and usually remote, hand of the market economy (which too often can be caught picking the pockets of the poor), you design an economic system in which resources flow and circulate effectively to serve the invisible heart of the core economy ? made up of family, neighbourhood, community and civil society. It is already happening in place but could quickly move to a much bigger scale. Google tell their staff to spend 10% of their time not doing their job. They’re free to get involved with the local community. The company has found that as a result it has made staff more innovative. A lot of research shows that such community involvement also has a very positive payback in terms of life satisfaction. A 10% rule could be introduced across the economy with time credited to the local community. But we could go further. In Britain, the idea of a shorter working week was sullied by the chaos of the 1970s. But again, if people who over-work, worked less, employment could be more equally distributed. Coupled with other innovations to ensure a basic income guaranteeing basic needs, shorter working weeks help turn us from being time-poor, to time-affluent. With more time for family, community and creative learning it makes for happier people and better neighbourhoods. A duty of reciprocity in public services could also help nurture the core economy. People who offer time, as simple as making visits to the elderly and infirm, could earn time credits to use public services like leisure centres at off peak times. Local authorities could use Section 106 (the planning gain law) in negotiations with businesses, to introduce a “time commitment” ensuring that they bring some useful service to the local community ? even if only making rooms available for use. Time banking is already working successfully in some health centres. In Wales a time banking system was introduced in which older women provided skills to local schools and were given time credits in return. They cashed them in for bingo sessions during the day and theatre performances in the evening. Their fear of going out at night was solved because the local rugby club was part of the scheme too, and took time credits to accompany them. Then, the women started to lose their fear of going out, and felt secure enough to go alone. There was an upward spiral of personal and communal well-being. Note that these are all low-carbon, relationship building activities. Life satisfaction scores tend to be much higher among people with a more communally oriented set of values than those who are materialistic and individualistic. They are also less driven to consume for its own sake. Kick the addiction. Get time-rich. Be happy.
Melancholic Nation18 Oct 2008A distinctive feature of much of the left in Britain, going right back to the early Fabians, is the way in which its view of good and bad has focused upon material goods and conditions rather than on social relations. For the socialist left this found expression in demands for greater equality, and in particular greater access to material goods such as housing, health care and income. For the Labour right, especially in recent years, it has strongly coloured the managerialism of the volume-indicator-obsessed Blair/Brown regime. Here progress has become synonymous with the achievement of a range of measurable targets, largely but not exclusively geared to economic competitiveness. Both left and right have privileged quantity over quality, material progress over the quality of social relations. This was something that Richard Titmuss, one of the key thinkers behind the post-war welfare state, was careful not to do. For Titmuss, social policy was about what he called ?social growth?, something that lay precisely in the quality of social relations, whose ?indicators cannot be measured, cannot be quantified, but relate to the texture of relationships between human beings?.[1] Unfortunately, this relational view of social well-being became eclipsed by generations of public sector economists whose view of the human being was essentially one of the rational, autonomous, interest-maximising individual. In the public sphere nowadays, as the saying goes, what counts is what can be counted. My argument in this essay is that we need to return to positions that place human relationships at the centre of politics. There has always been a strand in British socialism, from at least the time of Edward Carpenter, that connected social transformation with change in the nature of social relations; this theme was taken up again in the 1960s and 1970s, by feminists, anarchists and libertarian socialists. From this perspective, socialism needs to hold up a picture of a different future, of a society in which human relations are qualitatively transformed for the better: one in which relations between employers and workers, men and women, intimates and strangers, old and young, are based upon a set of values and principles that are radically different to those that pertain today. This strand needs to be reasserted in the face of the current impoverishment of the political and cultural spheres. Social suffering, CBT and managerialism In recent years the shortcomings of the conventional economistic approach have become increasingly apparent. First, a growing body of evidence, drawn largely from international survey research, has demonstrated that the massive growth in GDP in western democracies since the Second World War has not been accompanied by any appreciable increase in happiness.[2] The evidence seems to suggest that it is simply not true that the more you have the happier you are. Second, psychiatric morbidity rates indicate that the incidence of mental illnesses such as clinical depression and schizophrenia, and of self-harming behaviours such as alcohol and drug abuse, has increased signifi cantly in recent decades.[3] Moreover there is some evidence to suggest that this may be more pronounced in societies which have embraced neoliberalism.[4] Richard Layard, an influential contributor to the happiness debate, has recently pointed to the economic costs incurred by the 1 in 5 adults who suffer from mental illness at some time in their lives (perhaps recognising that this is the best way to gain the attention of government ministers).[5] Given the traditionally shameful levels of NHS spending on mental illness, anything which seeks to highlight this suffering, and the absence of even a half-decent set of services and treatment programmes to deal with it, is to be welcomed. However, Layard?s report suffers from some significant weaknesses. First, he ignores decades of accumulated evidence that link the incidence of virtually all forms of mental illness to social causes – social exclusion and marginalisation. Second, he prescribes as a remedy a massive programme of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, to be delivered from a network of Psychological Treatment Centres: this is likely to serve simply to sustain and reproduce the very social relations that contributed to the lack of well-being in the first place. The relationship between social inequality, stress and lack of well-being has been documented for over three decades now in journals such as the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour. Not only do poverty and social marginalisation increase the scale and intensity of stress-inducing life events and incidents; they also decrease the social resources – such as the presence of others in whom one can confide ? that enable people to cope with such stressful environments. In the last couple of years I have started to use the term ?social suffering? – coined by the French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu – as a way of examining how poverty and inequality get inside the soul and eat away at the human spirit. Social suffering draws our attention to the shame, humiliation, despair and frustration that make up the day-to-day experiences of those who are not only poor, but are also made to feel responsible for their own misfortune; to the suffering of those who are made to feel stupid because of their skin colour or accent; of those who feel they are ?losers?, where being a loser means that you are ?sad?, inadequate, something to be pitied. Social suffering is not just about lack of respect and lack of recognition; it is about disrespect and misrecognition; it?s about the ways in which one class or cultural group preserves its own (fragile) sense of superior identity by denigrating another group. Social suffering also draws our attention to what happens when those who suffer lack a political explanation for their experience, and thus embody it in stress-related illnesses; project it onto others (for instance through racism and homophobia); or enact it by ?being hard?, or by demanding recognition through what we now call ?anti social behaviour?. By adding the ?social? prefix to ?suffering? our attention is drawn to the way in which the absence of well-being is linked to structural inequalities (this is not the same thing as identifying happiness with material possessions; rather, it is to recognise the psychical consequences of such inequality). As Richard Titmuss once put it, poverty is the price some people pay for others? social progress. By ignoring the social patterning of suffering, the Layard Report individualises mental illness: he construes it as the outcome of a generalised social malaise, which then falls haphazardly upon all of society. It follows that Layard?s prescription is necessarily an individualised one. The widening structural inequalities which have accompanied Britain?s neoliberal trajectory over the last three decades are left unquestioned; indeed Layard?s prescription is specifi cally designed to be incorporated within the disciplinary framework of Labour?s ?welfare to work? agenda. He makes a direct link between improved access to behavioural therapies and getting people off incapacity benefits and back to work, and argues that, even in the very short term, the costs involved in providing the new services will be more than offset by the savings to be gained by getting people off benefits and back to work. Well-being is now seen as a goal which can be measured, quantified and managed. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a ?triumph? of one of the fastest growing and most powerful professions in the world today. Represented, regulated and policed in the UK by the British Psychological Society, modern psychology is dominated by positivist and evidence-based models of human functioning, which are almost tailor-made to fit the managerialist culture of New Labour. This is not a reflexive profession in any way sceptical of its own claims to expertise, or curious about how its practices are situated in the wider power relations of society. Moreover, its positivism has frequently led to a lack of interest in human experience (which is often viewed as an intangible and unmeasurable epiphenomenon); and indeed, when the profession has become interested, it has always resorted to proxies for human experience that can be measured – specifically self-reports. The ?new science? of happiness studies that is presently pouring out of psychology departments in North American universities assumes this form. For instance, the Character Strengths and Virtues project of Martin Seligman and his colleagues is creating a battery of selfreport questionnaires designed to assess respondent?s psychological well-being.[6] I?m not saying that such projects have no value – they can and do yield some important insights, and offer an antidote to the preoccupation with pathology, dysfunction and illness that has dominated psychiatry. But the use of these proxy measures inevitably reduces and simplifies human experience. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy exemplifies this process. When as a therapist I work with someone who is acutely depressed, or who is suffering from panic attacks, I am soon immersed in the incredible complexity of human experience. For example, there may be intricate and subtle connections between the depressed part of the person and a rather triumphant and morally superior part; similarly, many people I see are constantly caught between a desperate desire for closeness and an absolute terror of the same thing. In the wrong hands CBT reduces this complexity of experience to its purely cognitive dimensions, as if depression was simply a matter of being stuck in repeated patterns of maladaptive thoughts which then have self-fulfilling consequences (?I think I?m a loser, losers don?t pass their exams, therefore it follows that I will fail my exam?). The whole person is reduced to a set of operationalisable ?problems?, which are sustained by maladaptive personal beliefs; thus, reframing these beliefs and setting measurable positive goals can set in motion more virtuous belief/action/emotion cycles. This kind of ?quick fix? can and does make a real difference to the lives of some individuals, but it must not be seen as the only available alternative to psychotropic drugs (the incontrovertible evidence-base for which seems to have evaporated recently). CBT fits snugly into Labour?s managerialist vision of welfare, which is informed by a phobia about all forms of dependency, and sees human experience as something to be acted upon through prescriptive interventions, rather than something to be listened to, respected and understood. The managerialisation of welfare has led to a situation in which the amount of one-to-one contact between clients/service users and professionals has been systematically reduced – on the ward, in the classroom, between offender and probation officer, client and social worker, troubled adolescent and youth worker. Professionals are consumed by writing up care plans or lesson plans, dreaming up ?deliverables? in ever more bids for new contracts or new initiatives, and completing monitoring returns and ticking off ?outcome measures?. And any time they have left over from this for face-to-face work is itself often governed by targets, tests and treatment programmes that are interposed between them and their ?welfare subjects? – who are now recast as the objects of welfare interventions. This is a million miles away from an ethic of care. Care takes time, and time means money; care does not lead to predictable outcomes ? because humans are not predictable beings; care is exacting and exhausting. But this is why it is also enriching, both to the giver and receiver. (In our own recent research we came to realise that for many public service workers care is inseparable from social justice: workers care about what they do because they want to make a difference. In particular, those who work with the poorest and most marginalised in society often embody what we called an ?angry compassion?, in which the ethics of care and justice were fused.[7]) The symptoms of melancholia Care, respect and solidarity are not just about the principles which should underline public welfare, as Fiona Williams argued in her article in Soundings 30. They are also about how each of us leads our lives, about the kind of society we want. The evidence that economic growth does not produce more human happiness should be seen as providing excellent ammunition for those who argue that global warming can only be tackled effectively by some kind of limit on economic growth. But for many, a green future seems austere and unattractive – something people would only turn to if pushed by fear of catastrophe. It follows that the task for the green left is to put forward a convincing vision of a future that combines lower economic growth and increased human happiness – that is, one which decouples human flourishing from material abundance. A starting point is to understand that, beyond a certain level of economic scarcity, there is a direct relationship between deterioration in the quality of a society?s social relations and an increase in its preoccupation with materialistic sources of happiness. The less we invest in each other, the more we invest in material goods and services. Studies of autistic children indicate that they often cling to material objects, often hard and shiny ones. It?s as if the object becomes a substitute for the sense of human relatedness that would otherwise hold them together. Perhaps consumer objects increasingly function in this way, not so much as sublimations of desire but as items essential to our going-on-being, any threat to which produces a sense of panic. I have come to believe that anxiety saturates the pores of wealthy post-scarcity societies such as ours, constituting a particular ?structure of feeling?, to use a term from Raymond Williams. This is an anxiety with many sources. In post-scarcity societies citizens are no longer consumed by the struggle for physical survival, and questions of identity and recognition become more central. The individualisation of these struggles becomes manifest in the ?problems of being? – of the borderline personality, of self-harmers, of the millions now stuck in various addictions (including addictive consumerism), or persecuted by fears about their masculinity, body-image, and so on. These problems of ?psychical survival? (as Christopher Lasch once put it) are ripe for exploitation by advertising, marketing and the lifestyle media, and consumption becomes more about the alleviation of anxiety than the pursuit of pleasure. Then there are the disrupting effects of the constantly accelerating pace of economic and social change, made worse under neoliberal governments such as those in Britain and the USA, which dismantle secure labour markets and welfare safety nets and seek to strip away the regulation which might otherwise offer citizens some protection. There are also anxieties generated by the proliferation of new forms of risk, including those, like genetic engineering, consequential to technological and scientific innovations, and those that emanate from the panarchy of global security and financial systems, with their constant threat of chaos and catastrophe. Some anxieties are global, some are more specific to particular forms of governance such as neoliberalism, and yet others may be unique to the particular historical circumstances of a nation. What might be the particular set of historical circumstances that have contributed to our own uniquely intense social malaise? My belief is that it may have something to do with the slow but seemingly inexorable economic decline of Britain, a decline concealed during the last decade by the credit bubble and turbo-capitalism. We are a country haunted by loss and decline ? the loss of empire that Paul Gilroy has commented on, and the loss of our status as a world power both militarily and economically. Britain is also haunted by the loss of community and class solidarity, the loss of ?proper jobs? and manufacture, and the loss of respect and decency. Of course many of these things exist in other countries too, but Britain was once a hegemonic world power, the first of the modern era. I wonder if we need a new development term that could be applied to a country whose development has now been arrested. Under Labour, there seemed to be one last throw to pretend things were otherwise, as Blair strode the world stage and Brown presided over an apparent economic miracle. But in cities and towns throughout the country, particularly beyond the mania of the capital, people have been sensing this loss for some time, without being able to give words to it. Long ago Freud gave us a word for this – a loss which cannot be thought about. He called it melancholia. A melancholic is stuck in an endless cycle of grievance and self-reproach, irritability and despair. Perhaps this is what it means to be British today. According to Madeleine Bunting, ?there is an increasing perception that we have become a nasty country – aggressive, quick to judge or humiliate, and profoundly competitive? (Guardian commentisfree, 19.2.07). The UNICEF Report found that little more than 40 per cent of our 11 to 15 year olds found their peers ?kind and helpful?, the lowest score of all the richer countries. So, if Britain were on the couch today what would follow from this diagnosis? Well, perhaps the first task would be to get the patient to face the loss, and abandon manic attempts to assert the opposite (further military adventures, the idea that we can go it alone by balancing precariously somewhere in between the USA and Europe, perhaps even the idea that we can host the Olympic Games). Second, we 115 would try and help the patient understand that what it imagines to be progress is in fact largely an illusion. This means coming to terms with the idea that, except in a very few areas, such as the cultural industries, we have ceased to be economically creative; that areas of intelligent production and manufacture in Britain are few; that we invest significantly less in R&D than nearly all of our competitors; and that the one area – banking and financial services – where there seemed to be growth and innovation was, appropriately enough, a form of parasitic rather than productive capital. Thirdly, applying a bit of CBT, we would show the patient how some of its habits of mind contribute to its own self destruction. Only recently, for example, Robin Alexander, who leads the inquiry into Britain?s primary education, bemoaned the way in which adult society rams the cult of celebrity down our children?s throats. There are also the impossible norms we impose on ourselves of masculine hardness and feminine thinness – and the whole cultural denigration of losers, chavs, feral kids, etc. Fourth, and more positively, we would indicate to the patient that their belief that they lack the internal resources to overcome the loss is one of the characteristics of depressive anxiety, and that they in fact have plenty of resources even though in phantasy they believe that they are running on empty. Britain has potentially more renewable resources (particularly wave, wind and tide) than almost any country of comparable size in the world. It is also a mongrel nation, the result of successive invasions and migrations stretching back nearly two thousand years, and, as we all know, mongrels happen to be far more resilient than pedigrees. Britain has been reasonably good at adapting to change: reactionary forms of populism and fascism have been minority responses, and whilst we complain and moan we also embrace strangers and imitate them – the vitality of British creative industries today is in no small part a result of this. Fifth, but by no means last, we would encourage the patient to rage at the source of their loss, even if the source, as in bereavement, was nature itself. For us, at this particular point in time, I think this means we must get back in touch with our anger, particularly anger at our parasitic and spineless ruling elites – which now, tragically, include much of the party that once stood for labour. The problem is that melancholics turn their anger upon themselves ? hence Madeleine Bunting?s comment about the ?nasty country?. To speak of some kind of national psyche in this way is of course to engage in a gross over-simplification. What I am offering here is no more than a way of thinking, a thought experiment if you like. To pursue the experiment a little further, we can see how melancholics have a particular ?problem of being?, the problem being an inability to live in the present. Unable to think realistically about and accept their loss, distorted fragments of the past continuously return to haunt them. Like a melancholic, Britain is stuck in a process of arrested development. What we need now is a new vision. A vision, like that of Richard Titmuss, of social development, concerned with the texture of relationships between human beings, and between human beings and the natural world. Notes 1. R. Titmuss, Social Policy: An Introduction, George Allen & Unwin 1974. 2. R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Penguin 2005. 3. M. Rutter & D. Smith (eds), Psychosocial Disorders in Young People: Time Trends and their Causes, Russell Sage Foundation 1995. 4. See for example Unicef?s 2007 Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries, in which Britain and the US scored worst. 5. The Centre for Economic Performance, The Depression Report: A New Deal for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, London School of Economics and Political Science 2006.
6. M. Seligman & T. Steen, ?Positive Psychology Progress?, American Psychologist, July-August 2005. 7. P. Hoggett, M. Mayo & C. Miller, The Dilemmas of Development Work, Policy Press, 2008 forthcoming.
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