Political will is a renewable resource28 May 2008You may have seen the ads ? enough to make any football fan?s blood boil: ?Germany 200, England 1?. No, this was not a report from the World Cup qualifiers, it was a straightforward calculation of how much further forward Germany is in implementing the clean-energy revolution. Germany has 200 times more solar power installed than the UK ? and this is not because Germany gets any more sun. The difference is down to a simple piece of legislation called a ?feed-in tariff?, which a coalition of environment groups and other campaigners is pressing the British government to adopt. As this article went to press, a new Energy Bill was being debated in the Commons. Yet it seemed unlikely that the energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, would allow a cross-party amendment to introduce a feed-in tariff, even though 276 MPs have now signed up to an early-day motion supporting such a move. As Friends of the Earth?s Dave Timms says: ?The UK?s feeble performance on renewable energy is a national disgrace. If we want families and businesses to tackle climate change by investing in clean technologies such as solar panels for their homes and offices they must get a guaranteed premium payment for all the renewable energy they generate.? The feed-in tariff owes its success to this very simplicity: all it does is mandate that electricity companies must buy renewably generated power at a substantial premium, and must continue to do so for at least 20 years. This makes investing in renewables much cheaper, because investors are guaranteed a premium-rate payback over a long time period. Countries which have introduced feed-in tariff laws, such as Spain, Italy and Germany, have seen their renewable power sectors boom. Meanwhile Britain languishes at the very bottom of the European clean-energy league. Every year that passes without a feed-in tariff law represents a huge missed opportunity for this country. Germany?s renewables sector employs 250,000 people, and had a turnover of 24.6bn Euros (19.4bn) last year. The country is the world?s number-one producer of solar panels, putting it in prime position to be the manufacturing powerhouse ? with China at number two ? of the clean energy revolution that transforms our energy systems as the world moves towards a low-carbon economy. Under the Germans? approach, 13 per cent of their electricity comes from renewable sources, as opposed to a mere 5 per cent in the UK. And it is not just solar: Germany has ten times our installed wind-generating capacity, too. Portugal and Spain, despite having much less wind resource than the UK, have already shot past us in the clean energy race thanks to feed-in tariff laws. The government does have a policy to increase renewables generation ? it just doesn?t work very well. Instead of guaranteeing a good price for clean energy over a long time period, Britain has a system of tradable ?renewables obligation? certificates, which energy generators can buy and sell between themselves to ensure that they reach a government-mandated target. The system is cumbersome and allows only the large-scale players to make a profit ? which is why the feed-in tariff is so important if household solar panels and other microgeneration technologies are ever really to take off. (This is particularly true now that the government has cut installation grants for domestic microgeneration.) Hermann Scheer, the German MP who pioneered feed-in tariff law, complains the British system is ?too bureaucratic?. Instead of helping shift ?power to the people? so that everyone with a roof can generate their own electricity at home, the government?s policy seems designed to protect only the big energy suppliers, he says. One of the objections is cost: higher prices are eventually passed on to consumers in the form of higher bills. But as Scheer says: ?Each household pays 24 Euros [19] a year more due to the feed-in tariff law.? With 250,000 new renewable energy jobs, he jokes, ?it is the cheapest job-creation programme ever?. The price also seems a bargain compared to the costs of climate change, not to mention the problems of depending on rapidly depleting imported oil and gas supplies. So what is lacking to make this happen in Britain? Just political will ? and as Al Gore is fond of remarking: ?Political will is a renewable resource.?
Low pay leads to poverty in British Army28 May 2008A report on the state of the British Army released this month revealed considerable resentment amongst ordinary soldiers over low pay, leading many into financial difficulties, under-nourishment and the quitting of the armed forces altogether. The findings are contained in a briefing team report prepared for the head of the British Army, Chief of the General Staff Richard Dannatt, and are based on months of interviews with thousands of soldiers and their families between July 2007 and January 2008. Much of the report is concerned with manning levels in the armed forces in light of the increased military engagement, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. But new light is also thrown on the levels of poverty suffered by many frontline soldiers. In a section entitled Pace of Life, the report says: ?It is viewed that the ?pace of life? has been compounded by undermanning, the amount of change being implemented and the lack of support and expertise to deliver that change. COs [Commanding Officers] are concerned at the impact this is having on the moral component.? The report goes on to say that undermanning is ?having a serious impact on the retention in infantry battalions.? Almost half of all troops are unable to take their entitled annual leave as they are forced to cover gaps. The brief section on pay then reveals: ?More and more single income soldiers in the UK are now close to the UK Gov?t definition of poverty. Thus many married junior soldiers feel that they are being forced to leave because they cannot afford to raise a family on current pay.? The study also states: ?A number of soldiers were not eating properly because they had run out of money by the end of the month.? Army COs now enforce ?hungry soldier schemes,? whereby destitute soldiers are loaned money in order to enable them to eat sufficiently. A scheme known as Pay as You Dine (PAYD) requires soldiers not on active duty to pay for their meals. COs have reported being inundated with angry complaints from soldiers due to the quality of the food and the large amount of paperwork involved. Such schemes are a break from the past when the army provided, as a bare minimum, a staple of three square meals a day, free of charge to all serving soldiers. According to the Independent newspaper, ?Now hard-up soldiers have to fill out a form which entitles them to a voucher. The cost is deducted from their future wages, adding to the problems of soldiers on low pay.? The report contains warnings from senior officers that ?there is a duty of care issue? involved. Also the ?core meal? on offer ?is often not the healthy option.? Despite the obvious alarm among senior ranks, General Dannatt has made clear that he intends to persist with the current food schemes. He said recently, ?I am determined that PAYD must be made to work to both the financial and physical well-being of those who are fed.? Along with millions of workers, rising costs have made buying a home impossible for many serving soldiers. ?The ability to purchase a property was a major area of concern across all ranks. Discussion included an increase in… Buy to Let legislation and the cost of moving from one private home to another private home near their new appointment.? Also cited as growing concerns amongst soldiers and their families were children?s school fees and the lack of medical support for families, especially dentists. Previous studies show that, due to their hours of service, UK soldiers are actually paid well below the national minimum wage. Most serving soldiers earn only 16,000 a year, with a ?new entrant rate of pay? of just 13,012. According to the Armed Forces Pay Review Board, a 2007-08 pay increase of 2.6 percent has to be measured against an estimated net increase in charges of 3.9 percent. The report also touched on the increasing resentment felt amongst the ranks towards the governments? cap on the amount of compensation received by the families of wounded soldiers, as well as the growing incidents of ?accidental deaths.? Dannatt said, ?I am concerned at the comments from the chain of command, some elements of which clearly believe that they will lose influence over their soldiers and that this will impact on unit cohesion.? Douglas Young of the British Armed Forces Federation was one of a number of military figures who utilised the report to demand an increase in funding for the Army, in line with the demands of fighting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. He told the Independent, ?People are leaving the armed forces for financial reasons. There?s no question about it.? Patrick Mercer, a Conservative MP and former army colonel said, ?I?ve been talking to some very senior officers recently, all of whom privately have said to me that the Army is running on empty; the money has run out. The manpower situation is in crisis, and the so-called Military Covenant is abused at every turn. The thing that really worries them is that the MoD [Military of Defence] seems to be in denial about it.? Colonel Bob Stewart, a former commander of British forces in Bosnia, said that the British Army was ?woefully imbalanced, badly equipped, particularly for training, and quite honestly I?m afraid to say it is losing its edge as a top-rate army in the world because it cannot maintain it.? Major Gen Patrick Cordingley, who led the ?Desert Rats? into Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991, said, ?I would be very concerned about the strain on the armed forces remaining at this level of deployment in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It cannot be sustained for longer than perhaps another two years.? Colonel Clive Fairweather, former deputy commander of the elite SAS, commented, ?I really do think the Army is heading for the rocks and I don?t say this lightly.? There has been a concerted campaign, sanctioned by the government, orchestrated by the military, and aided by the press and the monarchy to ?rehabilitate? the British Army which is now associated with the brutal video and photographic images of detainee abuse in Iraq. The government is, for example, proposing a new law making it a criminal offence to ?discriminate? against anyone wearing a military uniform in public. The hostility toward soldiers from members of the public, which the law is supposedly directed against, was largely concocted by the media and the government by amplifying a few isolated cases. It is one of 40 proposals contained in a report, ?National Recognition of Our Armed Forces,? ordered by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and drawn up by Quentin Davies, the former Tory MP who switched to Labour last year. Davies has called for a ?new era of greater openness and public involvement of the [armed] services.? A new Armed Forces and veteran day is under consideration as a public holiday, as well as more media-friendly parades for regiments returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, secondary schools are being strongly urged to set up cadet forces. At present only 260 grammar and independently maintained schools have them. The current report into the actual conditions faced by soldiers in the British Army goes some way to unmasking this grotesque propaganda campaign, whereby princes and aristocrats born into privilege and plenty parade at the head of an ill-fed, poverty-waged army prosecuting wars of imperialist aggression.
Monbiot to Arrest John Bolton for War Crimes27 May 2008As this article is uploaded, George Monbiot may have tried, or be trying, to carry out a citizens’ arrest of John Bolton for war crimes relating to the Iraq war. What follows is a press release concerning the attempted arrest, followed by the charge sheet against Bolton. Press Release At 7.20pm on Wednesday 28th May, at the Hay Festival, the writer and campaigner George Monbiot will attempt to arrest John Bolton for the crime of planning a war of aggression. From 2001-2005 John Bolton was Under-Secretary of State at the US State Department. He was one of the key initiators of the war against Iraq. He is coming to the Hay Festival, at Hay-on-Wye, Powys, to promote his book Surrender is Not an Option. This appears to be the first time that a citizen’s arrest of one of the architects of the Iraq war has been attempted. As the attached charge sheet shows, John Bolton was instrumental in preparing and initiating the Iraq war, by disseminating false claims through the State Department and by orchestrating the sacking of an official who tried to provide a negotiated settlement. The Nuremberg Principles, which form the basis of customary international law concerning armed action, state that the following action is a crime punishable under international law: “participation in a common plan” for the “preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances”. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg ruled that “to initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime”. The 2003 war with Iraq launched by the United States and the United Kingdom qualifies under international law both as a war of aggression (it was pre-emptive and unnecessary) and as a war in violation of international treaties (primarily the UN Charter). In the Guardian today (Tuesday) Mr Bolton denies that he is a war criminal. Many people accept that the launching of the Iraq war was an international crime, but no one has yet been prepared to act on it by arresting one of the perpetrators. Monbiot intends to arrest John Bolton as he comes off the stage after speaking at the festival and to hand him over to the police. Bolton is speaking on the Guardian Stage from 6pm until 7.20. Monbiot comments, “This could be hazardous, as Mr Bolton knows of the attempt, and is likely to be surrounded by security guards. But someone has to take the initiative, if the perpetrators of the supreme international crime are to be held to account.” Contact: George Monbiot’s office ? 01654 702758
g.monbiot@zetnet.co.uk Charge Sheet John Robert Bolton, Former Under-Secretary of State, US State Department, 2001-2005 We are conducting a citizen?s arrest for the crime of aggression, as established by customary international law and described by Nuremberg Principles VI and VII. These state the following: “Principle VI
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i)
?
“Principle VII
Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.” The evidence against you is as follows: 1. You orchestrated the sacking of the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Jose Bustani. Bustani had offered to resolve the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, and therefore to avert armed conflict. He had offered to seek to persuade Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, which would mean that Iraq was then subject to weapons inspections by the OPCW. As the OPCW was not tainted by the CIA’s infiltration of UNSCOM, Bustani’s initiative had the potential to defuse the crisis over Saddam Hussein’s obstruction of UNMOVIC inspections. Apparently in order to prevent the negotiated settlement that Bustani proposed, and as part of a common plan with other administration officials to prepare and initiate a war of aggression, in violation of international treaties, you acted as follows: In March 2002 your office produced a ?White Paper? claiming that the OPCW was seeking an ?inappropriate role? in Iraq. On 20th March 2002 you met Bustani at the Hague to seek his resignation. Bustani refused to resign. 1 On 21st March 2002 you orchestrated a No-Confidence Motion calling for Bustani to resign as Director General which was introduced by the United States delegation. The motion failed. On 22nd April 2002 the US called a special session of the conference of the States Parties and the Conference adopted the decision to terminate the appointment of the Director General effective immediately. You had suggested that the US would withhold its dues from OPCW. The motion to sack Bustani was carried. Bustani asserts that this ?special session? was illegal, in breach of his contract and gave illegitimate grounds for his dismissal, stating a ?lack of confidence? in his leadership, without specific examples, and ignoring the failed No-Confidence vote. In your book, Surrender is Not an Option, you describe your role in Bustani’s sacking (pages 95-98) and state the following: “I directed that we begin explaining to others that the US contribution to the OPCW might well be cut if Bustani remained”. “I met with Bustani to tell him he should resign … If he left now, we would do our best to give him ‘a gracious and dignified exit’. Otherwise we intended to have him fired”. “I stepped in to tank the protocol, and then to tank Bustani”. You appear, in other words, to accept primary responsibility for his dismissal. Bustani appealed against the decision through the International Labour Organisation Tribunal. He was vindicated in his appeal and awarded his full salary and moral damages.2 2. You helped to promote the false claim, through a State Department Fact Sheet, that Saddam Hussein had been seeking to procure uranium from Niger, as part of a common plan to prepare and initiate a war of aggression, in violation of international treaties. The State Department Fact Sheet was released on the 19th December 2002 and was entitled ?Illustrative Examples of Omissions From the Iraqi Declaration to the United States Security Council?3. Under the heading ?Nuclear Weapons? the fact sheet stated ? “The Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger.
Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?” In a US Department of State press briefing on July 14th 2003 the spokesman Richard Boucher said ?The accusation that turned out to be based on fraudulent evidence is that Niger sold uranium to Iraq?4. Your involvement in the use of fraudulent evidence is documented in Henry Waxman?s letter5 to Christopher Shays on the 1st March 2005. Waxman says ?In April 2004, the State Department used the designation ?sensitive but unclassified? to conceal unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, in the creation of a fact sheet distributed to the United Nations that falsely claimed that Iraq sought uranium from Niger?. ?Both State Department intelligence officials and CIA officials reported that they had rejected the claims as unreliable. As a result, it was unclear who within the State Department was involved in preparing the fact sheet?. Waxman requested a chronology of how the Fact Sheet was developed. His letter states ? ?This chronology described a meeting on December 18,2002, between Secretary Powell, Mr. Bolton, and Richard Boucher, the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Public Affairs. According to this chronology, Mr. Boucher specifically asked Mr. Bolton ?for help developing a response to Iraq’s Dec 7 Declaration to the United Nations Security Council that could be used with the press.? According to the chronology, which is phrased in the present tense, Mr. Bolton ?agrees and tasks the Bureau of Nonproliferation,? a subordinate office that reports directly to Mr. Bolton, to conduct the work. “This unclassified chronology also stated that on the next day, December 19, 2003, the Bureau of Nonproliferation “sends email with the fact sheet, ‘Fact Sheet Iraq Declaration.doc,’” to Mr. Bolton’s office (emphasis in original). A second e-mail was sent a few minutes later, and a third e-mail was sent about an hour after that. According to t=987e chronology, each version ?still includes Niger reference.? Although Mr. Bolton may not have personally drafted the document, the chronology appears to indicate that he ordered its creation and received updates on its development.? Both these actions were designed to assist in the planning of a war of aggression. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg ruled that “to initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime”. 28th May 2008
Burma and the Making of Iraq’s Ghost Towns27 May 2008The Rules Of The Game The psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan once commented on ?how suavely we simply ignore great bodies of experience, any clearly analysed instance of which might present us with a very real necessity for change.? (Quoted, Daniel Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths – The Psychology of Self-Deception, Bloomsbury 1997, p.124) The problem for professional journalists is that they are not free to change. Or at least, they are not free to change and flourish in their chosen careers. Ex-CBS producer Richard Cohen explained the relationship between media and politics: “Everyone plays by the rules of the game if they want to stay in the game.” (Quoted, Daniel Schechter, The More You Watch, The Less You Know, Seven Stories Press, 1997, p.39) The rules include focusing intently on the crimes of others while suavely ignoring comparable, or worse, crimes at home. Consider the intense criticism heaped on the Burmese government for failing to accept foreign add in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. Gordon Brown said: “There are people suffering in Burma, there are children going without food, there are people without shelter. “It is utterly unacceptable that, when international aid is offered, the regime will try to prevent that getting in. “And I’m determined to work with the rest of the international community to make sure that people in need of help, people who face a long and terrible time ahead…” (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page15495.asp) And so on… Foreign secretary, David Miliband, talked of “malign neglect?. French president Nicolas Sarkozy found Burmese government inaction “utterly reprehensible?. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/14/burma.china) As ever, the British media rallied to the cause. In the Guardian (May 19), Kim Fletcher lambasted the Burmese generals for having done “a most effective job in preventing the world from witnessing the wholly ineffective way in which they appear to have dealt with the devastation.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/19/pressandpublishing.chinathem…) An outraged May 18 Sunday Telegraph leader actually raised the possibility of military action: ?The inevitable violation of Burmese airspace would certainly require that the cargo planes be protected by fighters. It would not amount to an invasion of the country. But it would mean the use of force to get aid through to the people who so desperately need it.? (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/05/18/dl…) The first aid war! The Observer?s Nick Cohen also cited with approval the ?call for foreign troops to escort aid workers into the stricken areas?: ?As always, there are 1,001 good reasons for doing nothing. But I don’t think passivity is an option for the UN.? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/11/cyclonenargis.burma) Cohen?s compassion for the Burmese people, we were to understand, made inaction unthinkable. And yet these are the same politicians and journalists who have shown almost complete indifference to the suffering of the Iraqi people under US-UK occupation. Cohen, for example, had plenty to say about the merits of war in 2002 and early 2003; he has had almost nothing to say about the catastrophic consequences since. This is a recurring theme of right-wing commentary. Typically, great compassion is expressed for the population of a nation targeted for US-UK attack. As Western violence then wrecks havoc on that country, the pundit simply moves on to express similar compassion for the next target. Trails of right-wing tears track across the globe closely followed by JDAMs, cluster bombs, and blood. In the last year, Cohen has had essentially nothing to say about the suffering of civilians in Iraq, beyond tiny mentions in passing. In April, he wrote that ?the United Nations estimated that in 2006, 35,000 died in the civil war in Iraq.? But this was in the context of a discussion of avoidable deaths in NHS hospitals. He described the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq as merely a ?civil war?. (Cohen, ?Satirists once had real bite. Not any more,? The Observer, April 6, 2008) In a further mention, Cohen mocked the idea that America and Britain were responsible for the violence, describing how ?squaddies on the ground [are] fighting totalitarian enemies in close combat?. (Cohen, ?Our weasel words betray these decent Iraqis,? The Observer, October 7, 2007) By contrast, General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the British army, said in September, 2007: “By motivation… our opponents are Iraqi nationalists, and are most concerned with their own needs – the majority are not bad people.” (Richard Norton-Taylor, ?Embrace returning troops, pleads army chief,? The Guardian, September 22, 2007) Leaving The Children to Die On January 19, 2007, 100 eminent British doctors wrote to the British government pleading for emergency medical aid to be sent to an Iraqi children?s hospital – exactly the kind of assistance the government is now insisting Burma should accept. The doctors? letter, titled, ?Iraq?s children must not be left to die,? began: ?We are concerned that children are dying in Iraq for want of medical treatment. Iraq, instead of being a country at the top of the league for medicine, as it once was, now has conditions and mortality of a Third World country. Sick or injured children, who could otherwise be treated by simple means are left to die in hundreds because they do not have access to basic medicines or other resources. Children who have lost hands, feet and limbs are left without prostheses. Children with grave psychological distress are left untreated.? (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-letter-sick-or-i…) The letter added: ?Contrary to Article 50, 55, and 56 of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV where the Occupying Power has a duty of ensuring the food and the medical supplies of the population… three years into the conflict, Iraqi children are dying in large numbers due to lack of medical supplies. (Babies are being ventilated with a plastic tube in their noses and dying for want of a 95 pence oxygen mask, or lack of a phial of vitamin K, or sterile needles, or even rubber surgical gloves. Premature babies are forced three to an incubator 36 years old held together with wire and elastoplast).? In rejecting the request, Hilary Benn, then Britain’s Secretary of State for International Development, replied on January 29, 2007: ?Iraq has a democratically elected government that is responsible for providing healthcare to its citizens. I agree that the quality of this healthcare, the security of hospitals and the availability of medical supplies is entirely inadequate. But I take issue with your assertion that the deaths of children are a ?direct result of the actions or inactions of the UK government?. It is the escalating sectarian violence and political divisions that are the main obstacles to the Government of Iraq delivering the services that the Iraqi people deserve.? Benn added: ?I regret that I am unable to meet you and your colleagues at this time, but I can assure you that the issues you raise are of deep concern to me, and that the UK is making every effort, along with international partners, to support the Iraqis to improve the situation for their citizens.? The journalists currently going blue in the face over Burmese indifference did not give a damn. The doctors? plea was reported in two brief articles in the Independent – no other media outlet covered the story. Turning Cities Into Battlefields Or consider the media response to the fate of Iraqis currently enduring major US-led assaults. In the last month, UK national broadsheets have published a total of six articles offering substantial reporting on the fighting in Sadr City. Sadr City and other major Shiite areas in Baghdad have been under siege since late April; millions of people are struggling to survive. On May 1, Patrick Cockburn – an honourable exception to the journalistic norm – reported in the Independent: ?Shia losses have been heavy. An Iraqi government spokesman for the civilian side of Baghdad security operations said 925 people had been killed and 2,605 wounded in Sadr City since the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, began his offensive against the Sadrist movement on 25 April.? (http://www.independent.ie/world-news/middle-east/us-military-death-toll-...) On May 3, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported the aftermath of a US attack involving a hospital in Sadr City that was ?badly damaged? with a fleet of ambulances destroyed: ?The hospital corridors were littered with glass shards, twisted metal and hanging electrical wiring. Partitions in the wards had collapsed. Huge concrete blocks placed to form a blast wall against explosions had toppled onto parked vehicles.? (http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5it1rhG8GfKYP4YMgIiTDEUl26QwA) Hospital officials reported that at least 28 people had been injured. The Iraqi Red Crescent Organisation told Time magazine this month that hundreds of people had fled the fighting and oppressive curfews, which have cut access to food, water and electricity. Mohammed Kamel Hassan, a volunteer organiser for Red Crescent reported that up to one million Sadr City residents needed emergency aid. Abu Haider al-Bahadili, a Mahdi Army leader, told the Washington Post: ?Sadr City right now is like a city of ghosts. It has turned from a city into a field of battle.? (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/29/AR200804…) On May 13, Cockburn reported that more than 1,000 people, ?mostly civilians?, had been killed during the offensives. In one clash in Sadr City, the US claimed it killed 28 Shia ?militants? but hospital officials said they had received 25 bodies, most of which were civilians. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/alsadr-ceasefire-all…) Bush – ?Stay The Course! Kill them!? Earlier this month, the Independent reported revelations made by Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq in 2003-4. In his recently published memoirs, Wiser in Battle, Sanchez describes how Bush personally ordered Shia leader Moqtadr al Sadr to be captured or killed. During a video conference on April 7, 2004, Bush said: “The Mehdi Army is a hostile force. We can’t allow one man [Sadr] to change the course of the country. At the end of this campaign Sadr must be gone. At a minimum he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out.” (Cockburn, ibid) Bush emphasised the point: “Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!” This is the ethic of extermination through maximum force that has brought utter catastrophe to Iraq. The political novelist Gore Vidal recently summed up the Bush regime: ?They ? Cheney, Bush ? they wanted the war. They?re oilmen. They want a war to get more oil. They?re also extraordinarily stupid. These people don?t know anything about anything.? (http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/14/legendary_author_gore_vidal_on_the) General Sanchez?s grim account was apparently of no interest – the Independent was the sole newspaper to cover the story. Indifference also defines media reporting of the assault on Mosul, one of Iraq?s great cities, also described by eyewitnesses as ?a ghost town?. According to one rare press report (Cockburn, again), Mosul ?looks ruinous and under siege. Every alley way is blocked by barricades and the only new building is in the form of concrete blast walls.? (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ghost-city-mosul-bra…) We found two articles offering meaningful analysis of the disaster in Mosul over the last month in the entire UK quality press. It ought to be a thing of wonder that the British corporate press can simultaneously rage against the crimes of the Burmese government while having almost nothing to say about the ongoing US-UK devastation of Iraq. And yet it feels entirely normal. American media analyst Edward Herman explained: ?The human capacity for compartmentalisation of thought and suppression of inconvenient facts always continues to break new ground in service to evolving political demands.? (http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/17050) 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. Write to Nick Cohen
Email: nick.cohen@observer.co.uk Write to Alan Rusbridger
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email: editor@medialens.org The Media Lens book ?Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media? by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. John Pilger described it as: ?The most important book about journalism I can remember.? For further details, including reviews, interviews and extracts, please click here:
http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php
What Boris Johnson Signals for the Left (Part 2)26 May 2008Part 2 of an essay on the significance of the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, both for contemporary politics in general and left in particular. Part 1 is here Boris and celebrity capitalism Anti-political sentiments tend to be bound up with a belief in the power of individuals and a concomitant scepticism about the power of collectives – be they nations, villages, or organisations – to achieve anything much. At the level of popular culture, its obvious manifestation is an obsession with the doings of celebrities: those pure ?personalities’ whose notable achievements in any meaningful field are negligible. Famous for ?being themselves’, contemporary celebrities appear to make few compromises with the everyday demands of collective or civic life; let alone the commitments that working in groups demands of scientists, nurses, builders or even serious actors. At the same time, the producers of reality TV shows go to great lengths to convince audiences that living together is impossible, and that competitive, selfish values naturally dominate all human relations. They fall over themselves to prevent or subvert attempts at co-operation when these emerge in contexts like the Big Brother House or the Young Mums’ Mansion, and they demonstrate a relentless invention in the introduction of arbitrary mechanisms and carefully-selected sociopaths to situations where any ordinary group of people would just figure out a way to discuss things and get on with the job of living together. The implicit message is clear: don’t believe in democracy, collectivity, or society; realise instead that the natural state for human beings is the mind-set of a neurotic, cocaine-addicted TV producer, whose colleagues of today will be tomorrow’s competitors for the next 6-month contract with Endemol. Like it or not, these have been the defining cultural phenomena of our time. In this context, the belief that commerce and competition are the only legitimate sources of authority, and that fame and personal charm are the only real measures of value, is bound to thrive. Without any countervailing cultural force, the chief criterion for winning Big Brother – possession of a distinctive and likeable TV persona – starts to inform voters’ attitudes in selecting candidates, while “being political” comes to seem both incompetent and inherently untrustworthy. Within this universe of values, Boris Johnson appears as the one honest man: unashamed of his lack of principle, contemptuous of the whole political process, indifferent to the public distaste for racist language (although Boris the mayor, as distinct from Boris the candidate, is sensitive enough to this issue to have appointed a black deputy already). Unembarrassed by the personal privileges which he has exploited so effectively since leaving Eton, Johnson presented himself explicitly as a celebrity who had achieved little of substance and promised more of the same: his editorship of The Spectator, his most significant real achievement to date, was hardly one of the points on which he sold his candidacy to the voters of Bexley, and nor was his policy-light manifesto. Boris’ persona resonates with the sense that politics itself is a futile circus, that collective action is impotent, that media notoriety and personal wealth are the only really effective forms of power in contemporary culture. However, this is not a situation which can simply be laid at the door of the evil ?Media’, because the government itself has been sending out much the same message throughout the tenure of New Labour. Even in recent months, Brown’s self-defeating promotion of figures such as Digby Jones, Alan Sugar and David Pitt-Watson has manifested precisely this set of assumptions. More fundamentally, New Labour’s attacks on the core values of the public sector and its efforts to commercialise and privatise public services all work to reinforce the idea that the world of commerce, with its emphasis on competition and profit, is a fit model for every possible sphere of human endeavour and interaction. The PFI programme, foundation hospitals, city academies, retreats from collective pay bargaining and the massive outsourcing of various strands of service delivery all point in this one direction. Indeed, such policies do not only imply that the values of the market are the only values that matter; they actively make this true by forcing public servants to play by commercial rules even when they do not want to and when their clients derive no obvious benefit from them doing so. In the process, relationships between service ?users’ and ?providers’ are re-engineered on the assumption that such relations must be inherently antagonistic, that only market disciplines can protect the interests of ?consumers’ from the lazy, self-serving ?producer interests’ (i.e. public sector professionals). How can government and politicians expect to be trusted when they organise their entire policy agenda according to the assumption that all other public servants are untrustworthy? Johnson’s victory surely emerges from this matrix of assumptions. His persona resonates with these beliefs because of his unashamed privilege and contempt for the post-Macpherson anti-racist orthodoxy. Surely the reason the Tory leadership allowed Johnson – widely regarded as a political liability – to run at all, was that they recognised this, if only on an unconscious level (so much of politics, like the other expressive arts, is about intuition, inspiration and unconscious genius). In voting for Johnson, some must experience the pleasure of letting go of their lingering resentments against the privileged caste to which he belongs and they never will. In doing so, they assent – blissfully – to the anti-political world view, according to which we shouldn’t worry at all about such issues as social justice, elite power, the divide between the publicly and the privately educated, the persistent realities of racism. To ignore the social politics of a figure like Johnson is a self-permission to accept that nothing can be done to alter a society which produces such anomalies,to stop worrying and get on with the business of running up credit-card debts. The message that we don’t have to bother with politics, that it’s frustrations and compromises merely mask an empty reality in which individuals struggle for personal gain – just as they do in the workplace and on the high street – is comforting for people who can no longer relate to the idea of a positive public realm. The seductive message of Boris, the insouciant adventurer who finally made Ken seem earnest, however effective: don’t worry, it’s all nonsense, just have a laugh, have a drink and go shopping. At the same time, for some a vote for Boris clearly meant a vote ?for change’, however unspecified. Again, it’s an easy mistake simply to dismiss this as a generic effect of disillusion with Labour, or the consequence of the Evening Standard’s relentless anti-Ken headlines. Clearly these factors played a role, as did opposition to Ken’s radical cosmopolitanism, and the anti-immigration rhetoric of the BNP. But it is more important to understand this apparently empty vote ?for change’ as a protest against the apparent impotence of the kind of democratic politics which Ken has come to represent, expressed in the anti-political values embodied by Boris. Ken himself then compounded his vulnerability by failing to renew or articulate what had been his hallmark. Instead he traded on his “experience”, presenting himself to voters as a safe pair of managerial hands rather than as a campaigner for their collective empowerment. As a result, voter turn-out in those areas which backed him was significantly lower than in those which backed Boris. The enthusiasm with which suburban voters rejected the idea of themselves as cosmopolitan Londoners with a stake in the democratisation of society was not matched by any equivalent defence of this ideal by those with the greatest stake in it. Livingstone had made no obvious effort to mobilise such a constituency; but if he had tried, there is no reason to assume that he would have failed. The Realities of Power Overall then, a deplorable situation. Government and media elites collude to produce a culture which generates disdain for real politics and a veneration for irreverent celebrities. Mayor Boris is the result. But is that the end of the story? Here is where I want to depart from the chorus of voices on the ?centre-left’ who have bemoaned the devaluation of politics in recent years. For while bodies like Demos, the Fabian Society, the IPPR and the Power Commission have produced reports diagnosing and deploring this state of affairs, they have almost entirely missed the central point. What most of these documents have in common is a narrative which blames government for failing to engage the citizenry, or sections of the public for failing to engage with politics. Incompetence on the part of government and bad faith on the part of journalists seem to be the usual imagined culprits. But major cultural shifts do not happen merely because of bad faith and incompetence. They happen also because someone, somewhere benefits. The legitimacy of politics itself has been undermined from within and without, to the point where the most effective progressive politician of his generation can be defeated at the ballot box by a figure better known for his punch-lines than his policies. Who gains? The right-wing press, perhaps the most biased and under-regulated in the ?free’ world, which New Labour has not made the slightest move to check after 11 years in power, is one clear winner. The other, most importantly, is the super-rich elite of ?non-doms’, city bonus-earners, PFI-profiteers and public-school alumni, tied together by their involvement with key financial institutions, corporate media and the speculative property market. What would be required to work against this array of interests would be something much more than a few well-meaning voter-participation initiatives, but the rebuilding of social forces strong enough to challenge corporate power. A society which lacks a strong labour movement – another situation which a Labour government has done nothing to remedy – also lacks a strong sense of collective empowerment and political possibility. It will need a revival of democracy, a genuine attempt to reconfigure and reinvent local government, trade-unionism and political participation for the 21st century, to reverse the trend which has so demeaned the very idea of democracy in contemporary culture. But such an effort could only be meaningful if it was led by politicians who recognised the obstacles such a project faces, and the fierce conflict with powerful vested interests which it would require. With the defeat of Livingstone, we have lost the last prominent British politician who understood this political reality. Despite narrowly losing his election, Livingstone did much better at the polls than the Labour Party nationally, which suffered massive defeats in local elections across the country on the same day. He remains the most popular and successful radical politician of his generation, and Johnson beat him in part because he was even more populist, irreverent, outspoken and seemingly-authentic than Ken became in his last, more diplomatic years. The implication is clear: at least among the crucial swing constituencies of Southern England, the kind of ponderous self-righteousness embodied by Gordon Brown, his presbyterian purposefulness barely concealing his deference to hedge-fund managers and media moguls – is unlikely to convince anybody of anything. On the other hand, an uncowed populist Labour leader, willing to tell people the truth – that corporate profits do not equal social benefits – might yet be able to capture the imagination of voters as Johnson did last week. The way to engage with the anti-political ?common-sense’ which has brought Johnson to power is not to preach about the virtues of civic participation: it is to acknowledge that in fact the public is right to disengage from a process which does not offer it any scope for meaningful participation. Politics today is thoroughly corrupted, and democracy is often a meaningless sham, because those charged with administering it will not defend it from the encroaching power of corporations, commercial media and US militarism. We need politicians with the nerve to admit this, and to take on the vested interests which maintain this state of affairs. Only then will the voting public start taking them seriously again. Jeremy Gilbert is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His publications include Discographies: Dance music, culture and the politics of sound (with Ewan Pearson, Routledge, 1999); and Cultural Capitalism: Politics after New Labour (ed. with Timothy Bewes, Lawrence Wishart, 2000) Also by Jeremy Gilbert in OurKingdom: Who is the Democratic Candidate for Mayor? (30 April 2008)
Labour’s time is up26 May 2008Power can shape “truth”, but not for ever. That is one lesson that could be learned from the series of electoral defeats that mark the end of New Labour’s weightless hegemony. There is something grotesque about the daily denunciations of Brown by hardcore Blairites in parliament and their media acolytes, who barely uttered a word of criticism as the country was dragged into two wars and New Labour prettified the Thatcherite social and economic agenda, now calling for the removal of Brown. As if his removal and replacement by a robotic Blairite (Miliband senior, Purnell and, amusingly enough, even Milburn is mentioned in this regard) would do the trick. The litany of own goals scored by Gordon Brown is endless and has been well-documented. That one of these could lead, sooner rather than later, to the independence of Scotland, is ironic, but all this is beside the point. Brown was fully implicated in the New Labour project and funded its hyper-militarism. He is too weak to even mimic Zapatero in Spain and Rudd in Australia by withdrawing British troops from Iraq. Instead, one of his zombies devised the pathetic idea of Armed Forces Day to celebrate militarism and encourage school-leavers to take up killing foreigners as their main subject and graduate or die in the university of the world. The fact is that New Labour’s time is up. When it came to power waving the Union Jack in 1997, the social landscape had already been wrecked by Thatcherism. The phallic architecture of the deregulated financial companies dominated the city, the old gents and their cozy networks were consigned to clubland. Silicon and pharmaceutical firms, funded by Japanese and American capital and immunised against a trade-union movement, neutered by the state, sprouted along the M4 corridor southwest from London and Reading. The old textile towns were reduced to the status of cemetries; iron and steelworks had been ploughed to rubble. The old working class was dead. In the transference of class wealth and power, Thatcherism and its neocon New Labour worshippers were eminently successful. Wealth disparities had increased during the Blair/Brown years. The “modernisation” had fallen manifestly short as a solution to long-term problems of productivity and investment, leaving aside the archaic political structures of the British state. Many of the cash-starved utilities had foundered in private hands. Schools and hospitals continued to deteriorate. As railway privatisation proved a disaster, New Labour “radicals” were thinking of how the “revolution of choice” could privatise health and education. From the start New Labour was pledged to consolidate the Thatcherite paradigm rather than offer anything different. Blair’s model was to depoliticise Labour (and the electorate) by preaching against the sin of “ideology” (ie social democracy) in the name of a new, beyond left-and-right, trendy Starbucks-style capitalism. And so it was decreed that Labour should become little more than a British version of the US Democratic Party with cheerleaders and all, though it is more remiscent of the Republicans. Domestically, Brown would aim for fiscal-surplus levels usually only demanded of the Third World, to be ameliorated by a few low-cost anti-poverty measures. Globally, New Labour would, in its own words, station itself “up the arse of the White House and stay there”. This was 10 Downing Street’s instruction in 1997 to Her Majesty’s new representative in the United States. While all this was going on there was little opposition within the Labour Party or the major trades unions. As long as they were in power with over-sized, if unrepresentative majorities, the brothers and sisters might grumble a bit in private, but power was what really mattered. Look at them now as they squeal in anguish at the thought that they might lose their jobs. Members of the cabinet who have helped deregulate the country will find something or the other if the economy doesn’t collapse, but for New Labour cannon-fodder the world outside the bubble offers little hope. It’s too late now. They should accept that the party’s over. Desperate squabbling to retain power at all costs without any political principle involves will not endear them to the electorate and is unrealistic in any case. As for Gordon Brown, he may be a lame-duck prime minister, but he could still do something decent. After all, he has nothing to lose now except his job. He could withdraw British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and, like the Irish Republic, permit a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Worth remembering that Blair’s massive majorities were the product not of voter enthusiasm but of a winner-takes-all electoral system, which helped to mask the collapse of the Conservatives, the country’s historic party of government. The Tory recovery is a sign of how low New Labour has fallen and marks its end. Brown could push through two constitutional measures badly needed at home: a fully elected second chamber and proportional representation. It might help reverse a growing alienation of the young from the political process. Were he to realise that he owes the country something, he might still make the history books and as more than an accessory to war crimes.
Review: Flat Earth News26 May 2008Nick Davies (2008) Flat Earth News, London, Chatto & Windus. 408 pages. ISBN-13. 9780701181451. 17.99 paperback The Bigger Picture Journalists, especially those working for newspapers, are notoriously sensitive to criticism, even from their fellow workers. Indeed, when Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army uttered the immortal lines ‘they don’t like it up ‘em’, it was clearly journalists and not Germans that he had in mind. As Nick Davies puts it in Flat Earth News: ‘dog doesn’t eat dog. That’s always been the rule in Fleet Street. We dig into the world of politics and finance and sport and policing and entertainment. We dig wherever we like – but not in our own back garden’. It was thus not altogether surprising that journalistic responses to Nick Davies’ best-selling book were not entirely positive – particularly amongst the upper echelons of Fleet Street, at which the bulk of his barbs were aimed. A common line of attack was to accuse Davies of harping back to a golden age of the press. Thus in the Guardian’s Comment is Free on February 8th, 2008, Simon Jenkins argued that journalists ‘should not chastise themselves with fantasies of past virtue’ (see link below) whilst Peter Preston in the Guardian the following day developed this theme further. According to Preston, Davies, whom at one point he gratuitously refers to as Saint Nick, ‘believes that, once upon a time, the press enjoyed a golden age. He can’t quite put a date to it … But in any case, things ain’t what they used to be. Then (whenever then was) journalists had time to check agency copy, make their own calls, go out and order coffee; time to think. Now all that’s gone to hell on a turbo-charged handcart’. However, for Preston the supposed ‘golden age’ was also the era of ‘Beaverbrook, union disputes stopping the presses, and regional mini-barons intervening to keep their Rotary Club chums out of the headlines. It is a dream and a confection. It is also chock-full of self-deception’. And in the Press Gazette February 15th, David Leppard, former editor of the Sunday Times Insight team and the subject of considerable criticism in the book, claimed that: ‘according to Davies, nearly all of us – except him – have abandoned the standards of some bygone golden era’. The only problem, however, is that Flat Earth News, which is very well informed about the history of journalism, quite explicitly rejects the notion of any golden age. Thus, as Davies clearly states: ‘there never was some kind of golden age when all journalists were free to tell the truth. They have always had to work against the clock and they have always been the targets of attempts to interfere in their stories. They have always been – as they still are – restrained by media law which, in Britain, remains particularly restrictive in its approach to official secrecy and libel. There always were accidental screw-ups and deliberate lies’. Davies furnishes various examples of just how bad journalism could be in the past, most notably coverage of black people by the US press in the nineteenth century which was distinguished by ‘casual news reports about meetings of the Ku Klux Klan as a good Christian organisation; plenty of comfortable jokes about the stupidity of poor niggers’ and reports such as ‘the lynching picnic was postponed until Saturday … A thrilling time is expected here’. But what is really at stake in such criticisms are not different views of the history of journalism but different conceptions of journalism itself – in particular the old dispute about whether journalism is a trade or a profession. On this point, Preston is clearly a tradesman, arguing that ‘low blows and dodgy statistics are also a part of the business all journalists really belong to – which … is a trade, and a rough one, at that’. Preston concludes that ‘one inescapable point about journalism is that, base or lofty, ruthless or idealistic, it is a mess, and always has been. That shouldn’t stop us from trying to clean it up point by point, problem by problem. We can’t afford not to be serious about our serious trade. But nor – like rather too many tremulous tradesmen – should we wallow in a froth of self-loathing that blots out the good and the necessary and the essential, too’. A similar, if more cynical, line was followed by Tom Fort in the Sunday Telegraph, February 24th, who stated that: ‘Nick Davies is a distinguished reporter who specialises in very long and depressing stories for The Guardian on subjects most other journalists prefer to leave untouched, such as poverty and the failings of the criminal justice system. He has now turned his virtuous investigative eye on his own profession. His reaction is almost spinsterish in its horror. Davies’ notion of what journalists and journalism are for is idiosyncratic, to put it mildly. Whoever told him that this is an industry “supposedly dedicated” – as he puts it in his prologue – “to telling the truth”? Where did he get the idea that journalists should be, or ever have been, reluctant to lie, cheat, deceive and resort to low tricks of every kind?’ However, the clearest evidence that Davies’ conception of journalism is very different from that of some of his colleagues is provided by a particularly revealing response to one of the most symptomatic examples of ‘churnalism’ in the book, which concerns a story put out in 2006 by the Press Association about a football fan who insured himself against emotional trauma in the event of England failing in the World Cup. As Davies himself puts it: this story contains all the ‘essential ingredients for the concoction of all Flat Earth News – an unreliable statement created by outsiders, usually for their own commercial or political benefit, injected via a wire agency into the arteries of the media, through which it then circulates around the whole body of global communication. And, most important, at every stage, as it passes through the hands of all those journalists, nobody checks it’. Many people might react to this tale with horror, or simply weary resignation, but not Jon Harris, the managing director of Cavendish Press, who responded in the Press Gazette, February 15th that it was ‘clearly a fabricated stunt and has been done to death before, but if it still entertains the reader, then who cares?’ Harris is clearly a total stranger to irony, as nothing could illustrate more starkly Davies’ contention that one of the rules of modern journalism is ‘if we can sell it, we’ll tell it’, and that editorial judgement has collapsed under the enormous pressure to ‘give people what they want’. Particularly crass though it may be, Harris’ response actually shares a tendency with some of the more positive responses to the book, namely to miss the bigger picture and to fail to see the wood for the trees. Drawn as they are to easily communicable and digestible statistics (not to mention press releases), most journalists homed in on the fact that, out of 2000 news stories in The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent and Mail, only 12per cent were wholly composed of material researched by reporters, and 80 per cent were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. (The make-up of the remaining 8 per cent was unclear). Furthermore, the ‘facts’ had been thoroughly checked in only 12 per cent of the stories. As Davies himself put it in the Guardian, February 4th: ‘the implication of those two findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have geneally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda’. Furthermore, Davies’ researchers discovered that ‘the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985. In other words, as a crude average, they have only one-third of the time that they used to have to do their jobs. Generally, they don’t find their own stories, or check their content, because they simply don’t have the time. Add that to all of the traditional limits on journalists’ trying to find the truth, and you can see why the mass media generally are no longer a reliable source of information’. However, this is only part of the story, albeit an important one. Particularly in Chapter 4, ‘The Rules of Production’, Davies broadens his analysis very considerably to take in all the various factors which combine to ensure that certain kinds of stories are routinely accepted as being newsworthy and that others are equally routinely rejected. And although Davies doesn’t actually say so, what we have here is nothing less than a version of Herman and Chomsky propaganda model, with the five filters replaced by ten rules. These include: run cheap stories, select safe facts, avoid the electric fence, select safe ideas, give them want they want, and go with the moral panic. Davies sums up his model thus: ‘the rules of production of the news factory themselves impose their own demands as media outlets pick easy stories with safe facts and safe ideas, clustering around official sources for protection, reducing everything they touch to simplicity without understanding, recycling consensus facts and ideas regardless of their validity because that is what the punters expect, joining any passing moral panic, obsessively covering the same stories as their competitors. Arbitrary, unreliable and conservative. Most worrying, however, this flow of falsehood and distortion through the news factory is clearly being manipulated, by the overt world of PR and the covert world of intelligence and strategic communications’. And in a particularly telling comment he remarks that ‘there is no need for a totalitarian regime when the censorship of commerce runs its blue pencil through every story’, although what is especially chilling about the book is the way in which it shows commercial and political forces working together to produce forms of censorship the more dangerous for being largely covert and invisible. Davies concludes that ‘what we are looking at here is a global collapse of information-gathering and truth-telling. And that leaves us in a kind of knowledge chaos, where the very subject matter of global debate is shifted from the essential to the arbitrary; where government policy, cultural values, widespread assumptions, declarations of war and attempts at peace all turn out to be poisoned by distortion; where ignorance is accepted as knowledge and falsehood is accepted as truth’. Perhaps, then, it’s no wonder that Fleet Street journalists ignored the wider picture. Link: Comment by Simon Jenkins
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/08/politics.media
NHS Whistleblower speaks out26 May 2008Senior mental health nurse Karen Reissmann was sacked last year after being found guilty of gross misconduct by Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust for speaking out against NHS cuts. Tom Haines-Doran catches up with her to ask about the latest in the campaign to have her reinstated. Where are you at with the campaign to get you reinstated? The campaign started when I was first suspended [June 2007] for bringing the Trust into disrepute. We had 700 people on strike for 14 days of action, followed by further action in November. My appeal was turned down and is now going to an employment tribunal. MPs will be asked to sign Early Day Motion 443 which calls for my reinstatement and there may be further days of strike action. We?re trying to persuade Alan Johnson to sign the motion. It?s ironic that I am being supported by Stephen O?Brien the Shadow Minister for Health, and not his opposite in the Labour government. Is the return to work something that can keep the campaign alive? The campaign is not going to fizzle out. I have received an incredible amount support from my colleagues and many others. People are worried about the Health Service; there is a fear of speaking out and a number of health workers are saying they?re glad that I did. One of the questions I was asked by the management was ?what loyalty do you have to our organisation?? I said I have plenty of loyalty to the patients, but what they wanted to know was what corporate loyalty I had to the individual trust. The aim of my suspension was to break our union, but now we have seven more Unison stewards than at the start. The fight to stop staff cuts in our service, the campaign that led to my suspension in the first place, has been won ? the managers have conceded they will keep the original staffing levels. During the campaign you brought in many activists from the Trade Union movement and the left. How was this achieved? One of the first things we recognised was that we needed to mobilise political pressure from the outside. There was a deliberate strategy of including trade unionists and service user groups and networks. We have fought to get users heard. They overcame the stigma of mental illness and have been articulate in their defence of the service. We made an effort to write to every Unison branch to pass information on and particularly helpful were the CWU and RMT unions who made donations to the campaign and invited us to speak at their meetings. Regarding the NHS in general what would you say are the key issues? One of the key problems is the tendering process. It identifies areas of work, for example, hip replacement operations and parcels them off. The idea is to create a competitive market within the Health Service. South Manchester Psychiatric Unit is run by a Private Finance Initiative that uses a private contractor to clean the ward and it costs the NHS four times what it did when the work was in-house. Also more of the work is target-driven. As an NHS employee how would you say working conditions have changed during your career? When I started 25 years ago we provided a service to patients. Now targets are the be all and end all and we can no longer prioritise in terms of need. On the other hand 25 years ago nurses? wages were worse because they were less unionised. But with this slight improvement in wages has come a greater workload. The pace is unrelenting. For example occupancy rates are much higher. Now there are 20 beds for 24 or 25 patients with occupancy rates at 120 per cent to 130 per cent. This leads to stress amongst the staff and patients. Would you recommend a job in the Health Service to people? I love the work and the people I work with are fantastic. If you do a job that is helpful to others it is generally more satisfying. But more time is spent filling out forms and battling bureaucracy. I would say ?do it? but you?ll have to fight your corner. Michael Moore?s documentary Sicko gave an overview of what a privatised health system looks like in the US, is that something that could happen here? Nothing is automatic about the NHS. People who fought in the Second World War weren?t prepared to go back to the provisions available in the 1930s. Unlike the Tories, this government dresses up privatisation in complicated proposals. They don?t say they will privatise it but they are in effect creating a market ? they?re saying that 15 per cent of the Health Service should be outside the NHS. Not only has the NHS management chosen private operators to run aspects of the service but now private companies are set up to do this on their behalf.
We have gone mad, Your Majesty, and only you can cure our affliction26 May 2008Your Majesty, In common with the leaders of most western nations, our prime minister is urging you to increase your production of oil. I am writing to ask you to ignore him. Like the other leaders he is delusional, and is no longer competent to make his own decisions. You and I know that there are several reasons for the high price of oil. Low prices at the beginning of this decade discouraged oil companies from investing in future capacity. There is a global shortage of skilled labour, steel and equipment(1). The weak dollar means that the price of oil is higher than it would have been if denominated in another currency. While your government says that financial speculation is an important factor, the Bank of England says it is not(2), so I don?t know what to believe. The major oil producers have also become major consumers; in some cases their exports are falling even as their production has risen, because they are consuming more of their own output(3). But what you know and I do not is the extent to which the price of oil might reflect an absolute shortage of global reserves. You and your advisers are perhaps the only people who know the answer to this question. Your published reserves are, of course, a political artefact unconnected to geological reality. The production quotas assigned to its members by Opec, the oil exporters? cartel, reflect the size of their stated reserves, which means that you have an incentive to exaggerate them. How else could we explain the fact that, despite two decades of furious pumping, your kingdom posts the same reserves as it did in 1988?(4) You say that you are saving your oil for the benefit of future generations(5). If this is true, it is a rational economic decision: oil in the ground looks like a better investment than money in the bank. But, reluctant as I am to question your majesty?s word, I must remind you that some oil analysts are now wondering whether this prudence is a convenient fiction(6). Are you restricting supply because you want to conserve stocks and keep the price high, or are you unable to raise production because your fabled spare capacity does not in fact exist? I do not expect an answer to this question. I know that the true state of your reserves is a secret so closely guarded that oil analysts now resort to using spy satellites to try to estimate the speed of subsidence of the ground above your oil fields(7), as they have no other means of guessing how fast your reserves are running down. What I know and you may not is that the high price of oil is currently the only factor implementing British government policy. The government claims that it is seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, by encouraging people to use less fossil fuel. Now, for the first time in years, its wish has come true: people are driving and flying less. The AA reports that about a fifth of drivers are now buying less fuel(8). A new study by the Worldwide Fund for Nature shows that businesses are encouraging their executives to use video conferences instead of flying(9). One of the most fuel-intensive industries of all, business-only air travel, has collapsed altogether(10). In other words, your restrictions on supply ? voluntary or otherwise ? are helping the government to meet its carbon targets. So how does it respond? By angrily demanding that you remove them so that we can keep driving and flying as much as we did before. Last week Gordon Brown averred that it?s ?a scandal that 40% of the oil is controlled by Opec, that their decisions can restrict the supply of oil to the rest of the world, and that at a time when oil is desperately needed, and supply needs to expand, that Opec can withhold supply from the market.?(11) In the United States, legislators have gone further: the House of Representatives has voted to a bring a lawsuit against Opec?s member states(12), and Democratic senators are trying to block arms sales to your kingdom unless you raise production(13). This illustrates one of our leaders? delusions. They claim to wish to restrict the demand for fossil fuels, in order to address both climate change and energy security. At the same time, to quote Britain?s department for business, they seek to ?maximise economic recovery? from their remaining oil, gas and coal reserves(14). They persist in believing that both policies can be pursued at once, apparently unaware that if fossil fuels are extracted they will be burnt, however much they claim to wish to reduce consumption. The only states which appear to be imposing restrictions on the supply of fuel are the members of OPEC, about which Gordon Brown so bitterly complains. Your majesty, we have gone mad, and you alone can cure our affliction, by keeping your taps shut. Our leaders, though they do not possess the faintest idea of whether or not the oil supplies required to support it will be sustained, are also overseeing a rapid expansion of our transport infrastructure. In the United Kingdom we are building or upgrading thousands of miles of new roads and doubling the capacity of our airports, in the expectation that there will be no restriction in the supply of fuel. The government?s central forecast for the long-term price of oil is just $70 a barrel(15). Over the past few months I have been trying to discover how the government derives this optimistic view. In response to a parliamentary question, it reveals that its projection is based on ?the assessment made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its 2007 World Energy Outlook.?(16) Well last week the Wall Street Journal revealed that the IEA ?is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast?. Its final report won?t be released until November, but it has already concluded that ?future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought.?(17) Its previous estimates of global production were wrong for one simple and shocking reason: it had based them on anticipated demand, rather than anticipated supply(18). It resolved the question of supply by assuming that it would automatically rise to meet demand, as if it were subject to no inherent restraints. Our government must have known this, but it has refused to conduct its own analysis of global oil reserves. Uniquely among possible threats to the economy and national security, it has commissioned no research of any kind into this question(19). So earlier this year I asked the department for business what contingency plans it possesses to meet the eventuality that the IEA?s estimates could be wrong, and that global supplies of petroleum might peak in the near future. ?The Government,? it replied, ?does not feel the need to hold contingency plans?(20). I am sure I do not need to explain the implications, if its forecasts turn out to be wildly wrong. Your majesty, I recognise that this is not among your usual duties as the ruler of Saudi Arabia. But I respectfully beg you to save us from ourselves. Yours Sincerely, George Monbiot References: 1. Carola Hoyos, 19th May 2008. Running on empty? Fears over oil supply move into the mainstream. Financial Times. 2. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 22nd May 2008. Why oil could soon come barrelling down. The Daily Telegraph. 3. Jeff Rubin and Peter Buchanan, 10th September 2007. OPEC?s Growing Call on Itself. Occasional Report # 62. CIBC World Markets. http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/occrept62.pdf 4. Eg Danny Fortson, 4th January 2008. Oil: the power to shock. The Independent. 5. Carola Hoyos, ibid. 6. Eg Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 16th May 2008. Day of truth for US- Saudi axis. The Daily Telegraph. 7. Carola Hoyos, ibid. 8. BBC Online, 19th May 2008. Fuel prices ?keep cars off road?. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7409166.stm 9. WWF, 2008. Travelling Light: why the UK?s biggest companies are seeking alternatives to flying. http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/travelling_light.pdf 10. Eg Kevin Done, 23rd May 2008. Silverjet suspends shares amid funding crisis. Financial Times. 11. Gordon Brown, 19th May 2008. Speech to Google Zeitgeist Conference.
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page15587.asp 12. Suzy Jagger, 21st May 2008. Congress takes step towards Opec legal challenge. The Times. 13. Ian Black, 17th May 2008. Frustration for Bush as pledge to Saudis fails to win oil concession. The Guardian. 14. Eg, Department of Trade and Industry, May 2007. Meeting the Energy Challenge: a white paper on energy. Para 4.07, page 107. 15. Dan Milmo, 20th May 2008. Road policy oil assumptions attacked. The Guardian. 16. Malcolm Wicks, 2nd April 2008. Parliamentary Answer to question 197009. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080402/text… 17. Neil King Jr and Peter Fritsch, 22nd May 2008. Energy Watchdog Warns of Oil-Production Crunch. Wall Street Journal. 18. ibid. 19. I have asked the four departments with direct interests in future oil supply: DBERR, transport, environment, communities and local government. 20. DBERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request Ref 08/0091.
House repossessions rising sharply25 May 2008Figures released by the UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) on May 9 showed a marked increase in homeowners facing court action for repossession of their homes. The figure of 37,740 for the last three months was an increase of 17 percent on the last quarter and a 20 percent increase on the figures one year ago. Repossessions have risen in most of the English regions. The figures indicate that lenders are quicker to resort to the threat of court action. A press release issued by the housing charity Shelter explained that at the time of the last housing crisis in 1991, there were 2.5 court actions initiated for each repossession that went ahead. Last year the figure was five. Adam Sampson, Shelter?s chief executive, stated: ?The worst fears of thousands of homeowners are now becoming a tragic reality. Mortgage lenders should be helping homeowners stay in their homes, but with some, it?s a case of miss a couple of payments and you?ll find yourself in court.? Shelter estimates the likely total number of repossessions this year will be around the 53,000. During 1993 at the height of the economic turndown, figures for repossession peaked at just under 60,000. The Citizens Advice Bureau (a charity offering advice to people, especially on debt) issued a statement in response to the MoJ. It said: ?We have seen a very sharp rise in the number of people coming to us with mortgage arrears, and evidence that in too many cases lenders are using court action as a first rather than last resort.? A BBC2 ?Newsnight? report by Paul Mason featured a regional breakdown of the figures finding a correlation between the numbers of repossessions and falling house prices. They showed an increase in repossessions of 23 percent in the West Midlands, 32 percent in Lincolnshire, 37 percent in South Wales and 44 percent in North Wales. In each case house prices in the regions were markedly down. The only region to buck the trend was London, where repossessions were slightly down and house prices were still rising. Repossessions in Shrewsbury were up 111 percent, Haverford West up 91 percent and Skegness up by 76 percent. All were low income towns. Families who had struggled to get on the property ladder were now coming under pressure. Adam Sampson interviewed for the programme said that vulnerable families now being hit by job losses, sickness or marital break-up were under threat. The programme made the point that the last time repossessions were as high was in the economic downturn of the early 1990s, but the big difference was that we are not seeing unemployment significantly rise yet. But it is clear that job losses are increasing. The Chartered Management Institute has just reported an increase in the number of managers who are being made redundant. The figure is up by three percent on last year. Savings levels, which have historically been low in Britain, have fallen dramatically. According to a report from Call Credit, the reference agency, millions of families are using what savings they have to survive in the face of rising mortgage payments food and fuel costs. Those who have no savings are sinking further into debt. Debt agencies report an increase in the number of professional workers in well-paid jobs who are turning to them for advice. Community Money Advice, a charity which provides advice throughout the UK, has experienced an 85 percent increase in clients. ?The rise is huge because of the big increase in middle class debt,? said Jane Elliot, coordinator of Transact the umbrella organisation for debt advice services. For the moment those in well paid jobs are managing to hang on to their homes. But they are disappearing beneath a mountain of debt. A further increase in the number of repossessions is likely as the impact of the credit crunch deepens. Sections of the population who would once have thought of themselves as financially secure are increasingly being drawn into the morass. A Shelter report issued in January of this year showed how the crisis in the finance industry is impacting on house repossessions. They note ?dramatically rising house prices have made home ownership less affordable to the majority of first-time buyers,? which means people borrowing many multiples of income to finance the purchase. The sub-prime mortgage sector is not as big in England as in the United States, but the report notes that ?levels of repossessions in the sub-prime sector are 10 times higher than in the mainstream sector.? The report also pointed out the growing trend of people with multiple debt problems re-mortgaging in an attempt to simplify and resolve their debts. The report says that ?Households who are experiencing financial difficulty can face a barrage of aggressive marketing encouraging them to address their debt in some way. These arrangements are often debt consolidation loans … converting an unsecured, low priority debt into one that can result in the loss of their home…. Shelter advice workers report that the party seeking possession of the client?s home is increasingly a second charge lender whose charge on the property can amount to as little as a few thousand pounds.? Figures issued by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) show house prices falling across the country, resulting from a fall in demand. Around 40 percent less mortgages were issued over the last year than over the previous year. The Halifax bank (a leading mortgage provider) is expecting prices to fall a further 10 percent over the next couple of years. Ian Perry, a Rics spokesman, told the Independent, ?The real issue is the collapse in the number of housing transactions, which has very real implications, not just for the property industry but also the high street and the wider economy.? In spite of recent Bank of England interest rate reductions, mortgage lenders are becoming increasingly reluctant to sell mortgages to people, reflecting fear of the still ongoing impact of the sub-prime crisis in America which has led to the credit crunch and the severe tightening of money supply. A recent BBC TV programme, ?The Truth about Property,? explained that a year ago there were around 15,000 mortgage products on offer. Today the figure is 4,000. Also lenders are demanding big deposits and in most cases will not lend more than 90 percent of the value of the house. The programme featured Simon Elkin, married with two children and earning a good salary of 50,000-plus as a wedding photographer. He had savings and a good credit record, yet was unable to obtain a mortgage. A growing phenomenon is the rise in so called Mortgage Rescue companies. They offer to buy houses from people in difficulty or under threat of repossession. The Shelter report says of these schemes that ?advertising is often misleading, implying that borrowers can stay in their homes on a long term basis … the company will buy the property at a price far below full market value and rent it back to the former owners on an assured short hold tenancy that gives minimal security of tenure.? Currently these types of schemes are unregulated. The tightening of the mortgage market is also affecting people who took out mortgages to produce rental income, which mushroomed over the last few years. Many people bought property as a secure income for the future. They are also subject to the tightening of the mortgage market and when mortgages are due for renewal end up with more expensive ones, often costing more than the incomes they get from rents. These properties can become subject to repossession, leaving the tenants with no home. Attacks on the welfare state that began under Thatcher and were enthusiastically endorsed by Labour have hit housing provision. Currently mortgage holders, who through loss of job, illness, etc., are forced to turn to the state for financial support may be entitled to help from the Income Support for Mortgage Interest (ISMI) scheme. The Shelter report of January 2008 shows how this has been eroded. ?This safety net was cut back in stages as a reaction to the rapid rise in claims,? the report explains, ?during the housing market crash of the early 1990s. The ability of the current safety net to deal with the effects of economic recession, or a collapse of the housing market, is untested. Many fear that the current arrangements would lead to significant hardship and rapid rises in repossessions.? When the government cut back on ISMI, the expectation was that people would be able to rely on Mortgage Payment Protection Insurance policies. But only a quarter of mortgages are covered by these insurance policies. Those without protection tend to be the less well-off. Also the report notes, ?Payment protection insurance policies in general … have been criticised for being inadequate, because they do not cover many common reasons for falling behind with payments …? Also under attack over the last three decades has been the provision of social housing. Currently around four million people are on the waiting lists of councils or housing associations. A Local Government Association (LGA) report published May 16 expects this to rise to five million by the year 2010 and that around 50 percent of councils cannot meet current demand. ?With the banks overstretching their credit facilities,? Paul Bettison, LGA chairman explained, ?it could well mean that in the coming months councils will have to pick up the pieces as people end up on social housing waiting lists.? A catastrophic housing crisis is unfolding, of which the government is fully aware. Labour?s housing minister, Caroline Flint, inadvertently let the cat out of the bag when a photographer caught details of a cabinet paper she was carrying. One line read, ?Given present trends they will clearly show sizeable falls in prices later this year?at best down 5-10 percent year on year.?
Let’s book Bolton at Hay25 May 2008We have all but forgotten the war with Iraq. We tend to see it now as little more than a “political mistake”, like the 10p tax fiasco or Labour’s mishandling of the byelection campaign in Crewe. The press and public attention have moved on and focused on more pressing matters, like the price of property. But this mistake has killed or injured hundreds of thousands of people in a country that was doing us no harm. Mistakes of this kind – an unprovoked war of aggression – were characterised by the Nuremberg tribunals as “the supreme international crime”. Mistakes of this kind would, in any regime governed by international law, see their perpetrators put behind bars for the rest of their natural lives. But the great crime of the Iraq war has been normalised and domesticated. So successful has this process of normalisation been that in three days’ time one of its perpetrators will be coming here – to Hay-on-Wye, the epicentre of polite society – to promote his book and sell some copies. I do not regret the fact that he is coming here – far from it – but I see it as a sign of the extent to which the great crime he helped to commit is viewed as an ordinary part of the political process. John Bolton first made the demand for a war against Iraq as a signatory of an open letter sent to President Clinton by the Project for a New American Century in 1998. In 2001 he joined the Bush administration as the hilariously-titled Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control in the State Department. He appears to have been imposed on the department by Dick Cheney, to play the role of Colin Powell’s minder. He immediately started destroying international law, successfully waging war against the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the biological weapons protocol, a treaty on small arms and light weapons and, perhaps presciently, America’s participation in the International Criminal Court. In April 2002, Bolton orchestrated the sacking of the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Jose Bustani. Bustani’s offence was to have offered to resolve the dispute over Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, by sending weapons inspectors to Iraq. Bolton helped to promote the false claim, through a State Department fact sheet, that Saddam Hussein had been seeking to procure uranium from Niger. He was instrumental in assembling and promoting the bogus case for war. Only when those who help to launch illegal wars fear punishment will future governments desist from launching them. As citizens I believe we have a duty to try to deter future war crimes. So I propose that we allow John Bolton to speak here, and then carry out a citizen’s arrest. Section 24A of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 permits any citizen to “arrest without a warrant … anyone whom he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be guilty” of an offence. I do not want to advocate something I am not prepared to do myself. I was planning to stay at home on Wednesday, but I now intend to come back, listen to Mr Bolton speak, and then carry out this arrest. I hope that others at Hay might join me.
Anger Over “Terror Arrests” at Nottingham University24 May 2008Two people (one of them a student) who were arrested on the Nottingham University campus last Wednesday using “anti-terror” powers have today been released without charge. After seven days of incarceration, the two men (aged 22 and 30) were released from custody. The manner of the arrests, the intimidating police presence on campus, and the gullible media coverage have raised serious concerns and anger amongst the student body, the academic faculty, and the general public in Nottingham. The arrests were carried out due to the alleged possession of “radical material,” specifically an Al Qaeda manual relevant to the younger detainee’s dissertation, which had been emailed to the other for printing. Despite their own admission that there was no threat to local communities, the police decided to launch a full-blown “terror” operation and put the students, their families and many friends through a colossal amount of stress. Meanwhile, police on campus searched bags and dominated a central area, creating great fear amongst the student community that was totally disproportionate to the apparent ?threat? of radical material. The harassment of friends and relatives by the police also raised serious concern. One of the two was rearrested on his release under “immigration legislation.” The arrests were precipitated when the younger of the two detainees downloaded an Al Qaeda training manual, widely available on the internet and downloaded in this instance from a US Government website, in the course of his research into political Islam. He emailed this to the older detainee, a member of staff to get it printed. There was never any suggestion that either of the were part of a terrorist cell nor that they posed any threat to anybody else. Police communicated that there was “no cause for alarm within local communities” (see their press statement here), and a spokesperson for the university, who have fully co-operated with the “low-key” operation, said “there is no risk to the university community or to the wider public.” However, the whole operation seems to have serious and frightening racial overtones. One officer who investigated the case is reported to have said: “This would never have happened if he had been a white student.” The re-arrest of the second student on dubious immigration grounds displays a clear desire on the part of the police to smear the two men in the hope of gaining sympathy from the tabloid press. Furthermore, the university and police rhetoric during this time period was surprising to many students and academics. Amidst the great amount of rhetoric that the university put out during this period, supporting the police and assuming guilt of its own students, it also spoke of groups or individuals who “unsettle the harmony of the campus.” This seemed to be a direct reference to the peaceful political activism and vocal, peaceful protest that the university now seems to think it can clamp down on under the Terrorism Act. Finally, and most importantly, this has constituted a huge and serious attack on academic freedom in the university. The arrests raise concerns about the opening of a door to the criminalisation of research into radical movements which necessarily involves the study of contentious primary documents. Bettina Rentz, a lecturer in international security and the student’s personal tutor, said: ?This case is very worrying. The student downloaded publicly accessible information and provoked this very harsh reaction. Nobody tried to speak to him or to his tutors before police were sent in. The whole push from the Government is on policy relevance of research, and in this case the student?s research could not be more policy relevant.? Furthermore, the indefinite incarceration of two innocent people under “anti-terror” legislation has created a prevalent climate of fear on campus. Everyone realises that the police can – and WILL – hold anyone they want to without any evidence or charge for up to 28 days. With an increased police presence on peaceful demonstrations, there is great fear that the police are criminalising peaceful activists using the “anti-terror” legislation. Concerned students and academics are coming together to decide on the appropriate action to take. A petition has been circulated amongst staff and students, expressing concern about the detentions and demanding that the university acknowledge the “disproportionate response” to the possession of legitimate research materials and a demo on campus is being planned.
Beyond belief24 May 2008Any sensible Labour strategist would do well to heed left MP John McDonnell’s call for the party to focus on policies rathern than personalities, given the Brown government’s drubbing over the past month. The batterings which Labour received in the local elections and the disastrous Crewe and Nantwich by-election are inextricably linked to its abandonment of working people and its clammy embrace of big business. Witness the furore over the scrapping of the 10p tax rate, the looming summer of public-sector strikes over pay and the mounting fury – even unto the middle classes – at the decadent money-go-round that characterises Britain’s boardrooms. As the GMB union has pointed out, City bonuses have risen to a record 12.6 billion at a time when the financial sector is allegedly tightening its belt due to the so-called credit crunch, sparking suspicions that bosses are simply snaffling the 50 billion kindly provided by the generous British public to revitalise the sector. The alleged City regulator, the Financial Services Authority, is already known as the Fundamentally Supine Authority for its weak-kneed reluctance to do its job and prevent the finance sector from imploding out of sheer greed. And now we face the prospect of former CBI chief Adair Turner – a man whose career has revolved around lobbying for ever-weaker regulation of business – becoming the new FSA chairman, appointed by, of course, this Whitehall farce of a new Labour government. If this is what Gordon Brown means when he declares himself the right person to “steer the British economy through what have been very difficult times,” then his MPs had better start looking in the jobs section of their local paper. If anyone thinks that Lord Turner would lift a finger to prevent another Northern Rock debacle, or act to rein in City bosses’ excessive bonuses, or seriously investigate where all these billions are actually coming from, as GMB has called for, then they are either in need of serious medical attention or are members of the Cabinet. Or both. John McDonnell has repeatedly pointed out that the Labour Party needs to rediscover its socialist soul and begin implementing the progressive policies that will help drag it out of the neoliberal hole that it has dug for itself. Instead, we see a flurry of Blairite and Brownite lackeys squabbling over which brand of warmed-over Thatcherism should reign supreme and issuing denials and counter-denials as to whether any of the fourth-rate “personalities” among their number will plunge a stiletto between Mr Brown’s shoulderblades. And, while they bicker over how best to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, the ship steams happily towards electoral oblivion. Putting a fox like Lord Turner in charge of the City chicken coop makes about as much sense as putting the fevered egos of Cabinet ministers ahead of the good of the working people of this country, but it appears that good sense and original thinking are in scant supply in Downing Street.
Conservative victory in Crewe and Nantwich as Labour disintegrates24 May 2008The Brown Labour government suffered its third major defeat in a month on Thursday in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, which saw the party?s 7,078 majority transformed into a 7,860 lead for the Conservatives. Considered an extremely safe Labour seat, it had been held for 34 years by Gwyneth Dunwoody, the longest-serving female MP, until her death earlier this year. The 17.6 percent swing to the Conservatives came despite Labour doing everything possible to maximise its advantage, including selecting Dunwoody?s daughter, Tamsin, as its candidate. Only two weeks before, the Brown government had announced a 2.7 billion tax cut package, designed to placate voters? anger over its decision to abolish the 10 pence tax band, which hit more than 5 million low earners. Despite this, with turnout a relatively high 58.2 percent, the Conservative Party candidate Edward Timpson took 20,539 votes, up from 14,162 in the 2005 general election. Labour?s vote collapsed by almost half, from 21,240 to 12,679. Its sole consolation was that it was not beaten into third place by the Liberal Democrats, whose vote also fell, from 8,083 to 6,040. ?This was a classic ?send a message? by-election, and a sad one for us,? said Labour?s Steve McCabe. The result is far more than that. The Financial Times opined: ?Although Crewe is depicted as a traditional Labour stronghold, its make-up is more complex, part ?true blue Cheshire,? part working class. Labour?s unbroken hold over it was both a tribute to Gwyneth Dunwoody, its popular local MP, and New Labour?s ability to straddle the political centre ground. The loss by Dunwoody?s daughter Tamsin is a sign that the alliance that swept Labour to power is fragmenting.? But Labour has not only lost the support of those ?swing? voters?many previously Conservative supporters?that gave it its landslide victory in 1997 and has since maintained it in power. What marks out the result in Crewe is the extent to which former Labour voters switched directly to the Tories. Reports in the days and weeks before the by-election were filled with personal accounts of long-time Labour supporters stating that for the first time in their lives they would vote Conservative. This dramatic sea-change confirms that Labour is considered so opposed to the concerns and interests of working people that even the Conservatives appear attractive by comparison. Many of those interviewed remembered bitterly the period of the Thatcher Conservative government, but they were even more hostile to Labour?s 11 years in office. Writing in the Guardian on Labour?s expected defeat, the pro-New Labour columnist Polly Toynbee cited recent research by Professor Tony Travers of the London School of Economics on the May 1 elections in London. His analysis found that ?the white working class has abandoned Labour. All Labour?s signals have been wrong for them,? she cited, adding, ?Travers finds many millions of middle- and low-paid people who are young or middle-aged are right to feel Labour has done nothing for them?because those without children at home have had nothing, and they know it. They pay too much tax, they start paying tax on very low incomes, the minimum wage is very low, public sector pay is screwed down for five years?and then they see Labour ?celebrating? the mega-rewards of the rich. It may be daft to vote Tory in their anger, but they are not the deserters: Labour has deserted them.? Such an appraisal should not come as a revelation. A central premise of the ?New Labour? project initiated by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was that it did not matter how far the party removed itself from its traditional working class constituency, or how right-wing it became, working people would remain loyal because they had nowhere else to go. For years, the likes of Toynbee bought into this claim. Now, so completely has Labour effaced the old distinctions between itself and the Conservatives?becoming for an entire period the preferred party of the City of London and the super-rich?that the former taboo on ?switching sides? no longer applies. According to reports, the Conservative campaign plan changed as this became apparent. The Financial Times reported that the Tories had ?sensed a fundamental shift in Crewe. At first, their campaign plan was aimed at voters in Nantwich and more well-heeled villages surrounding Crewe. But after the first week they refocused, realising they were making inroads into solid Labour areas.? Labour is completely incapable of stemming the rot. A publicity stunt mounted to point up Timpson?s privileged background (he is the multimillionaire son of the Timpson family?s shoe repair and key-cutting business) backfired badly. Conscious that far too many of its own supporters had similar backgrounds (it subsequently transpired that one of those dressed in top-hat and tails had attended a private school), and anxious not to alienate the well-to-do, the ploy was disowned by the government and central office, leaving Labour?s electoral campaign floundering. Even the party?s attempts to brand the Conservative candidate ?Thatcher boy Timpson??a reference to a speech by Tory leader David Cameron on taxation?fell flat. After all, the Labour Party has claimed Thatcher as one of its own, with both Blair and Brown going out of their way to sing the former Conservative premier?s praise and to proclaim themselves as her true inheritors. In the end, Labour?s campaign tried to outflank the Conservatives from the right by centring on law and order and anti-immigrant measures. The pro-New Labour network, Compass, complained that Crewe represented ?a new low? in Labour ?ill-advisedly demonising its opponents, speaking the crass language of authoritarianism and clumsily trying to close down the issue of immigration.? The party was resorting to the ?hysterical maligning of young people? and ?advocating police harassment,? it complained, citing the electoral pitch of Dunwoody: ?I want the Police to harass yobs, get in their faces.? ?Perhaps most poisonous of all was the Crewe campaign?s attempt to make political capital out of issues involving Crewe?s large Polish population, via a claim that the Conservatives are opposed to ?making foreign nationals carry ID cards.? This smacks of the poison spread by the far right. In addition, it misrepresents the debate. The Tories are opposed to making anyone carry or be issued with an ID card. So, in the face of massive public unease about the project, should be the Labour Party.? Labour now faces another by-election in Henley, the former seat of newly elected Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson. In the lead-up to the Crewe ballot, Trade Union Congress leader Brendan Barber called on the government to ?reconfigure its DNA? and take a stand against ?casino capitalism.? The government must challenge ?corporate and personal greed at the top,? he said, in order to ?reconnect? with ?ordinary working people? who are ?angry that they are struggling to pay the bills as a super-rich minority is allowed to float free from the rest of society.? Entirely beholden to the banks and stock markets, Labour is incapable of making any such change in tack, even to salvage its own political fortunes. With little prospect of any substantial shift in policy, there will be renewed demands for Brown to stand down, in the hope that a shift in personnel will be enough to restore the party?s standing. There were already demands being made for Brown to go, even before the Crewe result was known. Writing in the Guardian, for example, on the eve of the election, Jenni Russell stated that the lack of an apparent alternate leader should not prevent Brown?s removal. ?The party?s unpopularity has hit an all-time low,? she wrote. ?It cannot recover under Gordon Brown. He has to go, and go quickly…. The party must find the courage to depose him.? Such calls, if heeded, would result in nothing more than an orgy of internecine feuding between contending right-wing forces. The desperation they express is amplified by the fact that it is not even a year since Brown was elected overwhelmingly and unopposed by the Labour Party, as the man who could salvage its fortunes in the wake of their collapse under Blair over the Iraq war. So brief was Labour?s respite, however, that Brown even put off an early general election out of fear the government would lose it. It was the run on the Northern Rock bank that revealed how exposed Britain is to the global economic crisis sparked by the credit crunch. A Bank of England forecast released just before the Crewe by-election projected that the UK faces its most protracted slowdown since the early 1990s, with its outlook on economic growth falling from 3.3 percent this year to 1.5 percent in 2009. At the same time, the Home Builders Federation (HBF) warned that sales of newly built houses have ?fallen off a cliff,? putting tens of thousands of jobs at risk. Chairman Stewart Baseley said, ?The implications for the economy are dire. Tens of thousands of jobs are at risk, possibly even more, as the potentially massive layoffs amongst homebuilders start to filter through.? The UK?s biggest homebuilder, Taylor Wimpey, is to close 13 offices and cut its workforce by more than 10 percent, having recorded a pre-tax loss of 19.5 million last year, compared with 406 million credit in 2006. Persimmon?s sales of new homes are already down 24 percent this year, causing it to put all new developments on hold while Redrow has laid off 15 percent of its staff. The Crewe and Nantwich by-election marks a further shift in the ongoing disintegration of Labour. Whatever the various manoeuvres of the next months, the party is in meltdown. Haemorrhaging support and entirely dependent on a layer of self-interested, corrupt careerists?themselves riven with petty factional differences?the party is also in debt to the tune of 18 million.
Lesbian Mums and the End of Patriarchy24 May 2008Medical technology is an awesome thing. It can save lives, cure terrible diseases, rebuild bodies. It can prolong and improve the lives of the chronically ill and disabled beyond the wildest dreams of sufferers even fifty years ago. It can reattach limbs, restore sight, cure depression, return the manic to health and sanity. But can it be used to give women control over whether and when they have children? Only if male doctors and MPs say so. Whoever your parents are, they’re going to fuck you up to some extent. I make no apologies for assuming that gay women and single women are just as likely to make good parents as anyone else, if not more so, as children conceived via the arduous process of IVF are slightly more likely to be wanted and treasured infants. For the purposes of this post we shall assume that one’s sexual orientation has no bearing on one’s likelihood of raising an unfucked-up child, nor on one’s right to attempt to do so. With that one out the way, let’s tuck in to a tasty breakfast of radical feminism with a gin chaser. Throughout the wholesale technological reworking of the cultural landscape in the 20th and 21st centuries, laws remained in place to prevent new medical technologies and increased understanding liberating women’s reproductive choices. Even now, a woman must gain the permission of two doctors and undergo stringent ‘checks’ before she can access safe medical abortion. Until recently, women seeking IVF needed to declare a father and use a named man’s sperm despite the existence of plausible alternatives. But this week, in an impressive feat of anti-Luddism, MPs voted to allow single female parents and lesbian couples the right to reproductive self-determination: the right to have children, if they choose, without mandatory male interference. ‘Fathers are no longer needed!’ screamed the headlines as the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill passed through the commons on Tuesday. Well, we could have told you that. Millions of us grew up without fathers at home, without fathers at all. Millions more of us have loving and productive relationships with our fathers, but it is categorically not the case that any father at all is better than no father. The work of pregnancy, labour and the majority of childrearing still falls upon women, and it is inhumane to insist that that work be anything other than a sphere of self-determination. Men do not go through the physical trauma of conception, pregnancy and labour; men can have no right, as such, to insist upon any control over the process. It might be hard for individual men to swallow, but until medical technology enables them to conceive, incubate and bear children themselves, fatherhood will remain a privilege to be earned, rather than a right to be insisted on. Reproductive rights campaigning goes far deeper than individual instances of choice. It’s a powerful cultural fascination, an issue that is woven into the very fabric of the stories that make us modern. From the rape of the Sabine women to Europa, ancient myth and precedent is obsessed by violent male control of feminine reproductive potential. From Brave New World to 1984 to the Culture, fables and fictions of the future are replete with paranoid speculation over the reorganisation of reproductive control. The power to continue – or not to continue – the human race is quite simply the biggest social loaded gun on the planet. Since the dawn of patriarchy, male control over reproductive rights has been essential to the furtherance of patriarchal power, just as the ancient matriarchies ended when men’s involvement in human reproduction was realised. This is why the rights of women to have children without ‘declaring the father’, to terminate pregnancy and to raise children alone, are such emotive and important legal sticking points. Women’s right to decide whether and when and how they have children is the ultimate threat to the rule of men, the ultimate insult to the divine supremacy of the father, and this week’s Commons vote is a milestone in the erosion of political patriarchy whose significance we will be debating for years to come. Conservative MPs such as Ian Duncan Smith have made “impassioned pleas that the Government plan would “drive another nail into the coffin of the traditional family”“ (DailyHate, 21.05.08). The assumption of the Tories is that the vacuous notion of the ‘traditional family’ ever had any relevance. The organisation of human love has little to do with how children are raised and everything to do with the maintenance of the bourgeois state - and excuse me for coughing communism onto this keyboard, I’ve got this little marxist tickle that just won’t quit. The Embryology Bill marks a turning point in the history of patriarchy, and all of us -men and women and transpeople, feminists and libertarians and trade unionists – can congratulate ourselves on beating back the tide of fundamentalist reactionism at extremely short notice. But, since this is a fight we’re going to be called to again and again, we will have to spend the meantime coming to terms with the radical systemic social change that must be the end-point of our ideology. The rights of women to biological self-determination, the rights of mothers to bear or not to bear children without mandatory male interference, must remain fixed points on the agenda of the British left. Men have a right to stand alongside women, a right to care for their children, a right to take up the responsibilities of fatherhood once that privilege has been granted them. Fathers have their place. But that place is no longer at the head of the table.
The Soul of Man under Neo-Liberalism23 May 2008In 2007, 27 teenagers were murdered in London, a record. 2008 is well on course to beat that: just over a third of the way through the year, 13 teenagers have been killed already, with the summer still to come.What is responsible for this upsurge? Why are children killing each other?and others ? in these kind of numbers? Looking at the press coverage of the most recent tragedies, these questions and considerations are conspicuous by their absence: there hasn?t been an avalanche of outrage in the right-wing press pointing the finger at the corrosive influence of 50 Cent or Grand Theft Auto; the most the liberal press has come up with is some remarks by Enver Soloman of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in the Guardian, who noted that 2% of London wards have been responsible for 10% of all violent crimes involving teenagers, and pointed out that: ?You have to look at the social drivers. Why do young boys slip into the illegal drugs economy? It?s not a positive choice, but for some of them it seems to be the only choice. You have to use a range of policy levers to tackle this problem.? While it is certainly true that options and life chances for working class kids are low and falling?social mobility in the UK fell markedly during the Thatcher era to levels similar to the US and significantly below the Scandinavian countries and Canada (Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America, April 2005 and Social mobility in Britain: low and falling, 2005)?there is one key factor that hasn?t been addressed, which is curious as it is increasingly well-documented in academia. The epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson specialises in looking at how economic inequality is related to population health. He has found that among the developed countries it is the level of equality, rather than the level of wealth, that has the greatest influence on life expectancy: more egalitarian societies have better population health than comparably wealthy societies that are less egalitarian. Conflict or co-operation However, it is not just health outcomes that Wilkinson has found to be related to inequality: ?In societies where income differences between rich and poor are smaller, the statistics show not only that community life is stronger and people are much more likely to trust each other, but also that there is less violence?including substantially lower homicide rates, that health is better, life expectancy is several years longer, prison populations are smaller, birth rates among teenagers are lower, levels of educational attainment among school children tend to be higher, and lastly, there is more social mobility [emphasis added]. In all these fields, where income differences are narrower, outcomes are better,? (The Impact of Inequality: empirical evidence, 2006). For Wilkinson, the distribution of wealth and resources is an indicator of how either conflictual or co-operative a society is: ?Because more unequal places are marked by a more conflictual character of social relationships?so that they suffer not only more homicide, but also more violent crime, less trust, less involvement in community life, and more racist?we should see them all as part of a single continuum affecting the nature of social relations throughout a society. Inequality seems to shift the whole distribution of social relationships away from the most affectionate end toward the more conflictual end?[1]. The relevance of this to the present is obvious: for most of the twentieth century the trend in this country was toward increasing equality, but from the late 1970s?with the triumph of neo-liberalism?inequality began to increase, a process which continues to this day (Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2007, p19). The distribution of wealth has become increasingly polarised, and with it our society has moved ?away from the most affectionate end toward the more conflictual end?. Or as the LSE criminologist Robert Reiner has summarised it: ?Economic laissez-faire engendered moral laissez-faire. There is copious evidence demonstrating that inequality produces crime and violence. This is not primarily because of social exclusion or poverty. It is relative deprivation that counts most. Contrary to Blair’s many quips on the topic, the rich are a major part of the problem,? (?Be tough on a crucial cause of crime – neoliberalism?, The Guardian, 24 November 2005). One of Thatcher?s most famous mantras was that ?there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families? (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Thatcherism was, rhetorically at least, supposed to liberate the individual from the overbearing strictures of the state and collectivism, freeing the sovereign individual to pursue his or her interests, like every other sovereign individual, on the level, meritocratic playing field of the free market. Utter nonsense: it is a picture of the world which pretends the distinction between labour and capital doesn?t exist; it pretends that the equality of opportunity does exist; and it pretends that ?the free market? has ever really existed to any significant degree, while the truth is that practically every industrialised economy on Earth got there through state protection of infant industry. And this goes through to the present day, where biotechnology and the Internet only exist thanks to state stewardship. Even the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, has recently conceded: Remember Friday March 14 2008: it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died. For three decades we have moved towards market-driven financial systems. By its decision to rescue Bear Stearns, the Federal Reserve, the institution responsible for monetary policy in the US, chief protagonist of free-market capitalism, declared this era over. It showed in deeds its agreement with the remark by Joseph Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, that ?I no longer believe in the market?s self-healing power?. Deregulation has reached its limits,? (?The rescue of Bear Stearns marks liberailsation?s limit?, Financial Times, 25 March 2008). The freedom and individualism of Thatcherism, like the free market, is an illusion. In reality, labour has been atomised, but capital has not: it is still as collective as ever, as assisted by the state as ever, and more heavily concentrated and more dominant over the individual than ever. The idea of attaining democratic, co-operative control over capital and ending coercive wage labour has gone: the individualism of our time extends no further than the egocentric satisfaction of selfish, largely created, consumer wants. ?Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul? The sociologists Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert have written about what they call ?the new individualism?. It is worth quoting them at length: ?individualism today is intrinsically connected, we argue, with the growth of privatized worlds. Such privatized worlds propel individuals into shutting others and the wider world out of their emotional lives (…) As market forces penetrate ever more deeply into the tissue of social life, what we see taking place today is a shift from a politicized culture to a privatized culture. People, increasingly, seek personal solutions to social problems in the hope of shutting out the risks, terrors and persecutions that dominate our lives in the global age (…). The classically free individual as the man who removes himself from the masses is necessarily a way of life possible only to people of means, to those able to attain and maintain a bourgeois life (…). Privatization (?) concerns the spread of neo-liberal economic doctrines into the tissue of our social practice itself. This process expands market deregulation into personal and intimate life, producing in turn isolating, deadening, calculating forms of life (?). What we are suggesting is that people today increasingly suffer from an emotionally pathologizing version of neo-liberalism (?) the individual self?in extending its imperial sway over the social environment?liquidates the solidity and substance of the world into a privatized terrain of needs and desires (?). ?Privatized? could here be roughly translated as the imperative: ?Don?t rely on anyone for long, and avoid support or help from others, as survival depends on going it alone, constantly changing partners and networks, and always looking out for Number One?. Fear of dependence, in turn, places a further strain on the intrinsically lonely parameters of privatized life, as individuals head off manically in search of all sorts of illusory substitutes to fill in for what is missing in their private and public lives??[2]. This ?emotionally pathologizing version of neo-liberalism? isolates the individual and sets all against all. It recalls the homo economicus of neo-classical free-market economics, and its counterpart, public choice political theory: the purely selfish model individual whose only drive is the maximisation of personal utility. Neo-classical economics claims to be the modern day descendant of the work of Adam Smith, but Smith?s view of human nature was fundamentally different: w
UKWatch.net