Budget Defeat Over Child Poverty12 Mar 2008In 1999 the Government said it would halve child poverty by 2010 – taking 1.7m children out of poverty. To date it has missed its targets and only removed 600,000 children from poverty. In the pre-budget briefings pouring out of Number 10 and the Treasury we were all led to believe that the Chancellor would make a major announcement today to get the Government back on course to meet its target. Instead, the Chancellor has admitted defeat in the war against child poverty and has confirmed that the Government will not meet its 2010 target – and will leave over 2.5m children still living in poverty in the fifth richest countries in the world. The measures announced today will only remove at most a further 250,000 children from poverty by 2010. Some of the media and other agencies have grasped at this straw argung that at least the Government’s budget proposals aren’t as bad as some thought they would be . But on analysis the situation is even more disappointing. In calculating child poverty the Government has massaged the figures by removing housing costs from the calculation. If these costs are put back the real assessment of child poverty confirms that in fact 3.5 million children will remain in poverty in our society. The TUC has rightfully expressed the deep disappointment of the trade union movement at the failure of the Government to prioritise effective action against child poverty. At the same time the Chancellor has done virtually nothing to tackle the unfairness of our tax system. Big business benefits from the lowest corporation tax in this country in decades, which is to be cut further on 1st April. Proposals to tackle the scandal of non doms, some of whom are paying less tax than their servants, have been watered down and there are no measures to address the 97 to 150 billions the Treasury now admits to losing each year from tax avoidance. If after eleven years in office, a Labour Government cannot meet such a basic aim of lifting our children out of poverty, many will judge this period of government as the greatest missed opportunity in the history of the Labour party. There is a growing feeling that the Government is running out of both time and ideas.
Back to the 1980s11 Mar 2008Anyone hearing business and enterprise minister John Hutton this week might be forgiven for thinking they?d been transported back to the 1980s. All you?d need to complete the picture is Kylie Minogue?s dulcet tones on the radio and Harry Enfield?s Loadsamoney sketch on telly every week. Mr Hutton, in case you?re wondering which millennium we?re in, has been waxing lyrical about ambition. Greed is good, he almost said. What he did say was that there?s no conflict between aspiring to the lifestyle of the super-rich and tackling child poverty: ?Our overarching goal that no one should get left behind must not become translated into a stultifying sense that no one should be allowed to get ahead.? Having just seen my team of super-rich so-called footballers thumped 4-0 three times in succession, I?m not so sure about the value of celebrating huge salaries. A few months on jobseekers? allowance would do them the world of good. More to the point, there?s simply no evidence that the poor are held back because the rich can?t fulfil their ambitions. That?s classic trickle-down economics: if you have more money than you know what to do with, it creates jobs for butlers and valets. People thought the slave trade was justified because it created jobs, too. Mr Hutton declared this week that ?any progressive party worth its name must enthusiastically advocate empowering people to climb without limits.? So we should stop bashing the rich. But ?bash the rich? is a slogan I haven?t heard since the poll tax protests. And as Tony Blair has demonstrated since resigning as prime minister, the Labour Party can be as good a road to riches as any. Yet policy after policy leaves the poor in poverty. And an important paper from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation this week showed how far we need to go to solve that conundrum. The paper investigated whether people-based or place-based policies were most successful. Its conclusion was that we really don?t know. Some programmes aimed at the poorest, such as Sure Start, appear to have been hijacked by the ?less disadvantaged?, it reports (there?s ambition for you). Others have made a difference, but how much is impossible to tell because there hasn?t been any rigorous assessment of what would have happened otherwise. Anyone who walks the streets of our poorest areas will know that it isn?t the tax burden on the richest that holds back progress. It?s the scarcity of support for the frontline services and community organisations that help to generate ambition and aspiration where there is none.
London: Capital’s Capital11 Mar 2008The reaction from much of the press to government plans for the City of London’s non-domicile super-rich might make you think they were about to hand control of the square mile to the RMT. The outrage from non-domicile fat cats was coupled with threats to leave Britain altogether and for a raft of bizarre claims that London-based capitalists were being driven out of the country. Digby Jones, once CBI boss and now Gordon Brown’s trade and investment minister, publicly turned on the rest of the cabinet when he said that the policy has caused “non-doms” to ask, “Does this mean they don’t want us?” The proposal is for non-domicile capitalists in Britain, but “resident” elsewhere on the planet, to pay either a one off sum of 30,000 or have their overseas income declared and taxed. The non-domicile law was introduced 209 years ago as an incentive to those who had benefited from the spoils of imperial conquest; who they had pillaged remained a private matter of conscience. The recent proposal actually originated in Tory HQ before autumn’s election-that-never-was after a YouGov poll had shown it to be a big vote winner. Seeing this, Gordon Brown quickly nabbed the policy as his own, not realising that he might have to stick to the commitment even if he managed to dodge an early election. Considering there is currently 120 billion held by British business in overseas trusts, this doesn’t sound too controversial – even the US already has similar tax structures in place. Yet when the hapless Alistair Darling attended a recent bash held by the “Worshipful Company of International Bankers” (a Livery Company of the City of London – more on these later) at which he eulogised in his speech about how great and good the super-rich are, the reaction was an attack on government tax policies and regulation from the Lord Mayor of London and for the 450 diners to bang their tables and jeer. There followed a series of U-turns as the chancellor “clarified” (ie watered down) his position. Even London Mayor Ken Livingstone – who has noticeably steered clear of the row and received only warm applause following his own fawning speech during the same dinner party – now genuflects to the City. “There isn’t an ideological conflict any more,” he said in an interview with Prospect magazine in April 2007. “The business community has been almost depoliticised.” Undemocratic Livingstone and his advisers lobbied heavily for Crossrail, the commuter rail link to ferry City workers from the Home Counties largely at the expense of residents and taxpayers, while his economic adviser, John Ross, has been defending the obscene profits, payrolls and bonuses of hedge fund managers. The position taken by government towards the City has always been one of kneeling before it. This has made Britain in the words of the neoliberal International Monetary Fund (IMF) a tax haven, due to the way in which City authorities actively assist businesses to avoid tax. (In a telling show of arrogance, the Treasury financial secretary, Jane Kennedy, retorted that the methodology used by New Labour’s usually beloved IMF was therefore “seriously flawed”.) But the City is more than just a tax haven. To really make sure that there is nothing in the way of wealth accumulation, several elements of regular local authorities must be kept at a distance. These elements include democracy. In a parliamentary debate in November 2002 the then Tory MP (now New Labour minister) Shaun Woodward said: “The City of London is indeed unique – unique in its national role, in its size, its population, its local finance, its responsibilities, its work in the arts and its charitable work. The City is unique too, in having an electoral system that was unaffected when, in 1969, the non-residential vote was abolished for local government elections.” (Incidentally, it was Labour chancellor James Callaghan who argued through this exception to the rule.) Woodward was certainly right about the uniqueness of the City of London – it is the most undemocratic local authority in Britain. While the 7,800 residents of the square mile have the vote, business based in the City can appoint a further 32,000 voters. In November 2002 a private act of parliament, submitted by the City of London itself and gushingly (and arguably unconstitutionally) endorsed by Tony Blair, doubled the business vote from 16,000. But it doesn’t stop here. The City of London Corporation is governed by three institutions: the Court of Aldermen, the Court of Common Council and the Lord Mayor. Residents and business are allowed to vote for the aldermen and the Common Council, but only “freemen” are able to stand for election. You can become a freeman either by “servitude” (apprenticeship to another freeman), by appointment by the part-ceremonial, part-business associations of the Livery Companies, by heredity, or by payment of a 30 “freedom fine” (if the sitting Common Council accepts you). If you want to be an alderman you must also have the blessing of the Lord Chancellor. The Lord Mayor must have previously been a sheriff, and sheriffs are appointed by the Livery Companies. Additionally, standing under a party banner is severely frowned upon. This basic structure has existed since AD 886, and was preserved by William the Conqueror to maintain a degree of autonomy for European merchants. All public expenditure comes from the interest earned on the corporation’s billions of pounds of wealth, hoarded away over centuries. And just to make sure this “better than everyone else” attitude continues, it runs two private schools for the wealthy (one for boys, one for girls), and the City of London Academy school in Southwark (with its own City run curriculum of business and commerce) for everyone else. But this is more than just another Great British anachronism – it ensures that the City is not held up to any unnecessary accountability. A democratic system might, for example, block the building of a new skyscraper or insist that the amassed wealth held inactive in its vaults be put to better use. So with local and national government on side the City has a free rein. In 2007 City bonuses hit 14 billion, a figure equal to annual national spending on higher education – and this was up from 10.9 billion in 2006. The rationale for all this, of course, is that wealth then trickles down through the economy. But a brief look at how the City treats its own workers puts the lie to this myth (and by “workers” I mean waged labourers rather than those paid to make a few phone calls between checking the size of their wallet). Barclays’ 2007 profits were 7.08 billion. But the people who clean the bank’s offices are paid just 7.50 per hour. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs (or “Golden Sacks” as it is often known, owing to its obscene bonuses) part-owns cleaning contractor ISS who pay their workers just 5.60 per hour. Marsh, the world’s leading insurance broker, recently suspended 12 cleaners in its City offices, contracted out from ISS, for demonstrating against poverty pay (only after completing their regular 12-hour shift). There are 20,000 cleaners working in the City on similar wages, yet average pay across the board stands at 971 per week (600 more than that of Devon and Cornwall). If the wealth has trickled down, the cleaners have obviously not managed to mop it up. The City boasts of its contribution of 10 percent to Britain’s gross domestic product. This, it claims, means it should be a special case when it comes to taxation. But what good is this contribution to the economy if even the people at its heart, vacuuming the floors and cleaning the computer screens, are paid up to 2 per hour below what Ken Livingstone himself considers a living wage? What good is having the richest square mile on the planet if the government claims poverty when it comes to paying the public sector? What good are champagne-quaffing City boys when in Tower Hamlets, a step over the border to the east of the City, two thirds of all children live in poverty? As profits in the City increase, so does the gulf between rich and poor, and as the rich purchase obscene levels of housing as investments and drive up prices elsewhere in the capital, it is the rest of us who have to tighten our belts. And it is important to remember that they are rich through lending, earning interest and gambling with money we as workers struggle so hard to produce. So the argument that asking for a few crumbs from the Livery Hall banqueting tables will cause the rich to leave the City is like arguing that you shouldn’t ask someone to stop punching you in the face because if you do they might stop punching you in the face so hard. New Labour’s attitude to the City is unsurprising. “True to his neoliberal belief in the market Gordon Brown has allowed the worst excesses of corporate greed to let rip in the City,” John McDonnell, the only MP to attempt to challenge Brown for the Labour leadership, told Socialist Review. “For a decade under New Labour finance capital has been given a free hand to profiteer at the expense of many who have lost their jobs, savings and pensions through City speculation. By turning a blind eye to the award of obscene levels of City payoffs and bonuses Brown has created a scale of inequality in our society not seen for three generations.” Lindsey German, the Respect candidate for Mayor of London and the London Assembly, said, “It’s time the government stopped giving such a favourable tax burden to the City. We’re always told that if they are taxed any more they will go elsewhere. “My attitude is that if they’re going to use blackmail then let them leave the country, and see how well they get on somewhere else. If we want to pay for transport and housing in London then the City is the obvious place the money should come from.” The City of London is, of course, the real constituency being represented by Brown. His arrogant belief that unbridled capitalism will bring an eternal boom for the benefit of the country has led to the City being allowed to do as it likes.
English Primary Education Criticised11 Mar 2008A major report has criticised the extent of testing imposed on primary school children in England and the trend to begin formal education at an ever-earlier age. The report by the Primary Review, based at the Faculty of Education, Cambridge University, highlights how primary age children (under 11) in England are subjected to a regime of testing, testing and more testing?more so than their counterparts in other developed countries. It is part of an ongoing review of British primary education that is the biggest undertaken since the Plowden report was issued over 40 years ago. The report noted the changes that have taken place in primary education in England since Plowden. One of the most significant is the reduction in the age that children start school from five years old to four. The number of primary schools has fallen by 3,000 in this period but the size of schools has increased by around 15 percent. The report questions the assumed benefits of starting younger and having a longer school year. The authors say, ?There is little evidence to support common-sense assumptions that spending longer in primary schools… results in higher attainment… The assumption that an early school starting age is beneficial for children?s later attainment is not well supported… and there are concerns about the appropriateness of provision for four-year-olds in schools.? It is highly critical of the type of teaching meted out to four year olds when they first enter school. It notes, ?It has been suggested that starting school at such a young age may be stressful for children… Several qualitative research studies have shown that young children?s opportunities to learn through play are curtailed in reception classes due to insufficient staff, lack of early years training, physical constraints… lack of equipment (especially sand and water and large play equipment) and adherence to primary school timetables.? Under-fives are also to be subjected to a proscriptive curriculum and testing. Beginning in September of this year, The Early Years Foundation Stage will lay out standards to be reached in reading, writing and numeracy for under-fives. It prescribes no less than 72 learning goals. The report also looked at the extent and level of testing used in English primary schools. From entering primary school, young children are faced with an assault course of testing. These include an assessment just seven weeks after beginning school, Key Stage 1 tests at the end of their second year and Key Stage 2 tests at the end of their sixth year. Children may also be subjected to additional tests at the end of years 3, 4 and 5. The researchers compared the regime of testing in English schools to those in other parts of the United Kingdom, Europe and Japan. Whilst these other countries also set tests, the report comments, ?The scale of assessment for the purpose of monitoring and accountability is of quite a different order in England compared to our other reviewed countries… There is more external, standard testing in England: it occurs more frequently and starts at a younger age; more subjects are covered by the statutory assessments; test results are published in league tables; testing is high stakes… assessment in England… is pervasive, highly consequential…? The report on assessment in English schools concludes by stating that ?the high-stakes nature of the assessments designed to make the system accountable compromises its potential benefits.? Since the publication of the report last month, teachers and parents have joined in expressing concern about the pressure that the emphasis on testing is placing on children. John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told the Independent, ?The whole testing regime is governed by the need to produce league tables. It has more to do with holding schools to account than helping pupils to progress.? Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, explained, ?There are schools that start rehearsing for Key Stage 2 SATs [Standard Assessment Tests] from the moment the children arrive in September…other schools…rehearse SATs during Christmas week… They should be having the time of their lives at school, not just worrying about tests. It is the breadth and richness of the curriculum that suffers. The consequences for schools not reaching their targets are dire?heads can lose their jobs and schools can be closed down. With this at stake it?s not surprising that schools let the tests take over.? An increasing number of parents are seeking alternatives to state primary schools. Around 50,000 children are being educated at home. A recent paper issued by James Conroy and colleagues at Glasgow University noted, ?Both the numbers opting for home schooling and the range of motivations of those wishing to do so have expanded considerably in recent years. One substantial and growing group is comprised of those who have abandoned formal schooling because they believe it is too constrained.? The new Early Years Foundation Stage will also apply to independent bodies offering childcare. Under the new curriculum every child will have to be tested at the age of five whatever kind of school they attend. The government will have the power to close schools, kindergartens or nurseries that do not comply with the Early Year Foundation Stage Curriculum. Even childminders who care for young children in their own home will be subject to the new curriculum. It will in effect become illegal not to teach literacy and numeracy to under-fives. Parents at an independent Steiner school at Wynstone, near Stroud, Gloucestershire are opposed to its introduction. They are campaigning to force the government to exempt Steiner schools and kindergartens. The Steiner schooling movement puts the emphasis on young children learning through play. Steiner kindergartens do not teach literacy or numeracy, which are not begun until the child begins school at the age of six. At the same time the government is increasing fees for the registration of child care providers. A number of organisations involved in the care of under-fives recently wrote to the Times saying, ?we are alarmed at the potential impact of these proposed increases upon parents and providers.? Steve Biddulph, an Australian educational psychologist, speaking at a recent conference in London warned, ?Forcing learning destroys that learning. It makes children go backwards. The harm may well be life-long,? He cited evidence from an American study that showed that children?s language learning slows down in a formal academic setting, but speeds up the more they are allowed to interact through free play. The same relationship was observed in the development of children?s reasoning skills. The government claims that its statutory approach is intended to ensure that children from poor backgrounds get the same educational start as children from better off families. Biddulph pointed out that this could be achieved more effectively through properly resourced programmes aimed at disadvantaged communities. Penelope Leach, the childcare expert, called for home visits to assist disadvantaged families rather than a prescriptive approach. Lilian Katz, Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, presented evidence demonstrating that children who are pushed to read and write at an early age do less well in later years. This was particularly true of boys, she said, arguing against a ?hothouse? approach to education. ?Research suggests the benefits of formal academic instruction for four and five-year-olds seem to be promising when they are tested early,? Katz said, ?but considerably less so in the long term. When these children are followed over a period of three or more years, those who had early experience in more intellectually engaging curricula were more likely to do well in school than their peers, who had early exposure to academic instruction.? Beverley Hughes, Labour Children?s Minister, has dismissed the protests of parents, child psychologists and educationalists as ?unrepresentative.? The Cambridge report confirms the picture presented by last year?s UNICEF report, which showed Britain to be one of the worst countries amongst the most developed economies in which to be a child. The high level of risky behaviour of children in Britain was a reflection of the psychological impact of their experience of childhood. The pressure of constant testing and loss of esteem of children failing to reach set standards can only add to the psychological pressure being imposed on young children.
Sleight of Hand in Iraq11 Mar 2008Since the Iraq war began five years ago, a lot of the spin has been aimed at showing that Britain and “the international community” are winning. We are repeatedly told that UK troops are to be reduced to the point where we will leave southern Iraq altogether, a land of peace, freedom and democracy. Now Gordon Brown’s latest “troop reduction” turns out to be another bit of wishful thinking, or spin. But are British troops being kept in Iraq – in danger and at great expense – so that Brown doesn’t have to have an inquiry into the war? This week it has become increasingly clear that Brown’s claim last autumn that numbers would be cut to 2,500 in “the spring” is unlikely to happen any time soon. At the risk of making everyone dizzy, it’s worth recapping the various promises of the last six months. It was during a visit to Iraq in October used promises of troops cuts as a weapon in the propaganda war (against the Tories). In the middle of the Conservative party conference and with Brown considering an election, he “announced” a reduction from 5,500 to 4,500. The announcement backfired badly when it emerged that it was a classic recycling exercise, with half the reduction already promised and 250 of those troops already home. This was the first of a series of banana skins that led to last autumn’s non-election. Brown then made a more formal announcement in the Commons that troops would be cut to around 4,000 by Christmas, followed by a cut to about 2,500 in the spring. Troop levels did indeed come down to a current figure of around 4,100. But on Monday, the Telegraph revealed that senior military sources were against any further cut, partly on operational grounds and partly “because they fear that the mission would become ‘meaningless’ if numbers dropped further”. On Tuesday, the Ministry of Defence was conceding that the cut might not happen in the near future. Today, with defence secretary Des Browne visiting Iraq rather quietly, the BBC is reporting that “BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said he had been told it was ‘highly unlikely‘ the figure would drop to anything like that amount [2,500].” Budget day seems to be a good day to bury bad news as the cut to 2,500 becomes the latest in a long history of troop cuts that arrive slightly later than promised. Some of the promises have been off-the-record briefings to friendly journalists, some have been formal announcements. I’m sure they all seemed plausible enough at the time. But it’s worth going back to that reported comment from a military source about the need to maintain a meaningful level of troops in Iraq. Since the remaining troops have been reduced to an “overwatch” function, they haven’t been doing very much apart from “force protection”, although sadly they remain at risk. For some time, people like me have suspected that the reasons for keeping them in harm’s way are political – partly to appease the US, partly as a reason to reject opposition calls for an inquiry into the origins and conduct of the war. I’ve been very critical of the inquiries we’ve had so far and it’s a valid concern that another inquiry could cost quite a lot of money and still pull its punches, as establishment inquiries inevitably do. But with the costs of the non-war now reaching 1.6 annually, we’ve perhaps got the most expensive non-inquiry ever.
The prisoner of Dhaka11 Mar 2008There is a decent, brave man sitting in a dungeon in a country where the British empire began – a country of poets, singers, artists, free thinkers and petty tyrants. I have known him since a moonless night in 1971 when he led me clandestinely into what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, past villages the Pakistani army had raped and razed. His name is Moudud Ahmed and he was then a young lawyer who had defended the Bengali independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. “Why have you come when even crows are afraid to fly over our house,” said Begum Mujib, the sheikh’s wife. This was typical of Moudud, whose tumultuous life carries more than a hint of Tom Paine. As a schoolboy, Moudud wet his shirt with the blood of a young man killed demonstrating against the imposition of “Urdu and only Urdu” as the official language of Bangla-speaking East Pakistan. When the British attacked Egypt in 1956, he tried to haul down the union flag at the British consulate in Dhaka, and was bayoneted by police: a wound he still suffers. When Bangladesh – free Bengal – was declared in 1971, Moudud brought a rally to its feet when he held up the front page of the Daily Mirror, which carried my report beneath the headline, BIRTH OF A NATION. “We are alive, but we are not yet free,” he said, prophetically. Once in power, Sheikh Mujib turned on his own democrats and held show trials at which Moudud was their indefatigable defender until he himself was arrested. Assassination, coup and counter coup eventually led to a parliamentary period headed by Zia ur-Rahman, a liberation general with whom Moudud agreed to serve as deputy prime minister on condition Zia resigned from the army. Together they formed a grassroots party, but when Moudud insisted that it must be democratic, he was sacked. Whenever he came to London he would phone those of us who had reported the liberation of Bangladesh and we would meet for a curry. His pinstriped suit and inns-of-court manner belied his own enduring struggle and that of his homeland: recurring floods and the conflict between feudalists and democrats and, later, fundamentalists. “I am the prime minister now,” he once said, as if we had not heard. Outspoken about his people’s “right to social and economic justice”, especially women, he was duly arrested again, then won his parliamentary seat from prison. On April 12 last year, late at night, 25 soldiers smashed into Moudud’s house in Dhaka. They had no warrant. They stripped his home and “rendered” him, blindfolded, to a place known only as “the black hole”. There, he was interrogated and tortured and forced to sign a confession. He was finally charged with the possession of alcohol – a few bottles of wine and cans of beer had been found. The supreme court declared his prosecution and detention illegal. This was ignored by the government, which calls itself a “caretaker” administration, but is a front for a military dictatorship. Moudud is suffering from a pituitary tumour and has been denied medication for six months. He is terribly ill, says his wife, the poet Hasna Jasimuddin Moudud. “Thousands of people have been detained for being activists, or just supporters,” she says. “The country is a prison, and the world must know.” There are striking similarities between Moudud’s case and that of the Malaysian opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, who this week all but overturned the old, autocratic regime. Both were framed in order to silence them. The difference is that Anwar Ibrahim’s case became an international cause celebre, whereas there is only silence for Moudud Ahmed, locked in his cell, ill, without charge or trial. In the next few days, Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed, the “chief adviser” to the caretaker government – in effect, the head of Bangladesh’s government – will visit London. He is said to have a meeting arranged at 10 Downing Street. I and others have written to Dr Fakhruddin, asking him to comply with the supreme court’s ruling and to release Moudud. He has not replied. If Gordon Brown’s recent pronouncements on liberty have a shred of meaning, it is the question he must ask.
Kill King Coal10 Mar 2008Everyone should be concerned that the UK’s energy department wants new coal plants. Gordon Brown must intervene urgently to halt these plans. He must ensure new coal plants are not built on his watch without their carbon captured from the outset. Reserves are hotly debated, but we know that enough oil and gas remain to take global warming close to, if not into, the realm of dangerous climate effects. But coal contains enough carbon to produce a vastly different planet altogether – a more dangerous and desolate planet from the one on which civilisation developed. Our climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic – with detrimental effects on wildlife, the beginning of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland and a progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise. The shifting of climatic zones will lead to the extermination of many animal and plant species, the reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but heavier rains and floods. Stronger storms will be driven by latent heat, including tropical storms, tornados and thunderstorms. Coal caused fully half of the fossil fuel increase of carbon dioxide in the air today, and on the long run coal has the potential to be an even greater source of CO2. Due to its dominant role, agreement to phase out coal, except where the CO2 is captured, is 80% of the solution to the global warming crisis. Of course, it is a tall order. Yet it is doable – compare that task with the efforts and sacrifices that went into the second world war. If the west makes a firm commitment to this course, we can begin discussing the problem with developing countries. Given the potential of technology assistance, the growing grasp of the likely effects of climate change, and leverage that global trade gives us, securing the cooperation of developing countries is entirely feasible. Great Britain, the US and Germany have contributed most to fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, on a per-capita basis. This is not an attempt to cast blame. It merely recognises the early industrial development in these countries, and points to our responsibility to lead in finding a solution to global warming. Energy departments, influenced by fossil fuel interests, take it as a God-given fact that we will extract all fossil fuels from the ground and burn them before we move on to other ways of producing usable energy. The public is capable of changing this course dictated by fossil fuel interests, but clear-sighted leadership is needed now if the actions are to be achieved. Can we find a country that will place a moratorium on any new coal-fired power plants unless they capture and store the CO2? Unless this happens soon, there is little hope of avoiding the climate tipping points, with all that implies for life on this planet.
Commemoration and Denial10 Mar 2008In the coming months, the same event will be commemorated by two different groups in starkly contrasting fashions. May 15 sees the 60th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. In Britain, the programme of celebrations includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades for Israel in London and Manchester. Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, and without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they will seek to remind the world of the Nakba ? catastrophe in Arabic ? that accompanied Israel?s birth in 1948. In 1947 there were 1,293,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32% of the population, the UN partition plan assigned them 55% of the country, including the economically developed citrus growing plains. Israel?s Declaration of Independence was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new state and its Arab neighbours. When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish state had acquired 78% of Palestine. 180,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish state. 700,000 to 900,000 had been made refugees. In April and May, before the expiry of the British mandate, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces, and more than 100,000 Palestinians fled. To the north, in Galilee, the Haganah – the mainstream Zionist defence force – systematically conquered clusters of villages, emptying them of inhabitants and often levelling them. In June, the Israelis advanced further into territory designated for the Arab state, capturing the towns of Lydda and Ramle where they killed 250 Palestinians and expelled almost all the rest ? 40,000 ? at gunpoint. In 1948, 500 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed. More than 70,000 Palestinian houses were demolished. In the Jaffa area, 96% of the villages were totally destroyed. As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the UN-allotted borders of the Jewish state, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population. At the onset of the conflict, Jews owned 1,159 square kilometers of land (6% of the total). By July 1949, thanks to the Absentee Property laws passed in haste by the new Israeli parliament, they owned more than 20,000 square km. In 1954, more than one third of Israel?s Jewish population lived on absentee property. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property. For many years, Zionists claimed that the Palestinians had left voluntarily at the behest of Arab leaders. That myth has been repeatedly disproved: there?s no evidence of so much as a single broadcast or leaflet telling people to abandon their homes. There is, on the other hand, a great deal of evidence that the Zionists used the war to alter the demographic facts on the ground. On April 6, for example, Ben Gurion told a Zionist meeting: ?We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way?. I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.? The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and is as vile as denial of any other historic crime. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is resisted because it undermines the moral foundations of the Israeli state. It?s a handicap in the Israelis? global propaganda battle with the Palestinians, and a challenge to their own self-definitions, a truth that simply cannot be assimilated. The Nakba is no mere historical controversy. It?s an unresolved issue. The Palestinian refugee population ? descendants of those driven out in 1948 ? now numbers more than 4 million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. Each year since December 1948, the UN General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees? right of return. Any peace treaty that leaves these people out would be neither just nor lasting. As if experiencing a Nakba wasn?t enough, the Palestinians are now being threatened with a Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. In a shocking perversion of an historical legacy, the word was used by an Israeli defence minister to describe the punishment that would be meted out to the people of Gaza ? who are there because they were driven there in 1948 – in response to the Qassam rocket attacks. Already, as I write, in the past four days alone, more than 100 Palestinians, including 49 unarmed civilians, among them 25 children, have been killed. Another 250 have been injured. As the furious assault on Gaza continues, Israel?s 60th birthday celebrations look increasingly unpalatable.
Misplaced Priorities10 Mar 2008AS Gordon Brown’s “mini-me” Chancellor prepares his budget speech for Wednesday, campaign groups and unions are already issuing their wish-lists, urging Alistair Darling to use his alleged control over the Treasury’s purse strings to deliver social justice and sound investment in Britain’s long-suffering infrastructure. The National Pensioners Convention president is calling for an immediate increase in the state pension, the restoration of the link to earnings and a doubling of the winter fuel allowance – along with Age Concern and Help the Aged. Meanwhile, children’s charity NCH wants to see the “cycle of deprivation” broken with help for poorer families. Britain’s unions have urged Mr Darling to ignore the usual siren-song from the likes of the CBI and pay public servants decent wages while obliging business to shoulder its fair share of taxation. However, the auguries do not look good. On Sunday, we saw the Chancellor again echoing Mr Brown’s desire for a “competitive” rate of corporation tax.
The defence select committee, which has done the number-crunching, called the 52 per cent increase in the cost of Iraq operations to 1.45 billion – and this is after the much-vaunted troop reduction – “surprising,” which merely demonstrates that the art of British understatement is alive and well in Westminster. In Afghanistan, the cost has merely risen by 48 per cent to 1.42 billion – presumably the cost of airlifting out the PR “hero” Prince Harry. MPs voted through the Ministry of Defence’s “spring supplementary estimate” last night, which gave the green light to increase the military budget by these amounts. In doing so, they should pause to consider what better things could have been done. Britain’s workers and pensioners will be anxious to know why the watchwords at home are “competitiveness” and “cost savings,” while it seems that Mr Brown’s original declaration that he would spend “as much as it takes” on Iraq still stands. For such massive sums of cash to be flung into the void without any real hope or expectation that they will improve matters for the Iraqi or Afghan people is little short of obscene from a government that vetoes any progressive policies on the grounds of “affordability.” CND chairwoman Kate Hudson points out that “the human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are clear, with an estimated 655,000 dead in Iraq alone, but the opportunities lost by spending these billions on further destruction rather than on humanitarian reconstruction adds to the long list of tragedies unleashed by Bush’s wars. “The public should be told why billions are being diverted from public services to fighting an unwanted and unnecessary war.”
The Patient Stalkers10 Mar 2008This was surely a victory for the people. We have lost, over the past 20 years, all kinds of public services, but next month one is due to expand. After heavy bludgeoning by the government, Britain?s general practitioners have agreed to open their surgeries late into the evening and on Saturday mornings. As Gordon Brown says, the health service is ?too often centred on the needs of the providers rather than those of patients.?(1) Now we will have a service better matched to the pattern of our lives. This, at any rate, is the government?s story, and at first sight it is plausible. The truth, as always, is stranger and more complex. It begins with a bare-faced lie. The government launched its campaign a year ago, with a press release published by the Department of Health. This claimed that a report by the Cabinet Office, published the same day, ?reveals that nine out of ten? people polled ?said they want public services, such as GP surgeries, that are open some evenings and weekends, even if that means they would sometimes be shut during the working week.?(2) This was reported verbatim by the press(3), but it was a complete fabrication. I have read the report(4). It contains no mention of this poll, or anything resembling it. The terms ?surgeries?, ?evening?, ?weekend? and ?working week? do not occur. But on the strength of this fiction, extended opening hours became government policy. It is a bit like the war with Iraq: the decision to go ahead was made before the evidence materialised. Just as the government was publishing its misleading press release, Ipsos Mori was completing the huge poll – of 2.6 million people – that the same department had commissioned. This, surely, would support its fictitious claim. Who would not welcome longer opening hours? To the department?s intense discomfort, Ipsos Mori found that ?the vast majority of patients (84%) say they are satisfied with the hours their GP practice was open during the last six months?(5). Those who must visit GPs most often are the most relaxed about opening hours: only among 18-34 year olds – the healthiest section of the population – does the level of unhappiness rise above 20%(6), and then only by a whisker. But, like the weapons of mass destruction, if the government said the public demand was there, it had to be. On Thursday Gordon Brown insisted that ?people want weekend opening; people want to be able to see their GP in the evenings.?(7) Yes, some people do, but not very many. The Confederation of British Industry was also unhappy with the results. It commissioned another survey, again from Ipsos Mori. This received responses from just 1,014 people – one 2,500th of the department?s sample size. It asked a slightly different question: ?how easy or difficult was it to get an appointment at a time that was convenient to you??. Thirty-one percent said they had found it ?fairly or very difficult?(8). The CBI issued a report claiming that ?a commonly heard complaint is that GP practices are not open at weekends, early in the morning or in the evening ? GP services are not responding to clear signals for change from patients?(9). But it produced no evidence: the survey didn?t ask about opening times. There are plenty of reasons why patients might have found it difficult to get a convenient appointment. But even if the government is using dodgy figures and has misjudged popular support, what?s wrong with longer opening hours? Strange to relate, quite a lot. In some places, where there are large numbers of commuters who travel far to work, it makes sense. But Gordon Brown wants to impose it on surgeries everywhere. This means, in effect, transferring resources from children, the old and the very sick to working people, who need the services least. GPs will have to work shifts, which undermines one of the most important foundations of the NHS: the continuity of care. It is not clear that longer opening times will in reality be much more convenient for working patients: the appointment clerks, specialist nurses, consultants, physiotherapists, dentists, X-ray departments, biochemistry labs, blood sampling services and computer technicians with whom GPs work are not available in the evenings and at weekends(10), so patients might have to come back to complete the consultation. If the government wants a genuine health supermarket, open all hours, it will have to pay much, much more. So why is it so keen on this reform? Because it assists a quite different agenda. To avoid the political firestorm big business rains on any government that stands in its way, Gordon Brown must make constant concessions. What business wants most is the 40% of the economy controlled by the state. He must find clever and camouflaged means of delivering it that do not prompt us to take to the streets. This means waging a public relations war against GPs and the other public sector dinosaurs who impede choice and change. It means a thousand small steps towards privatisation. The government is expanding the number of independent sector treatment centres, even though they turn out to be far less efficient than the NHS and leave the taxpayer with major liabilities(11). It is opening staggeringly expensive polyclinics, operating seven days a week, which will be run by multinational companies(12). It will allow the primary care trust in Birmingham to shut the city?s surgeries and replace them with primary care units franchised to corporations – the promoter of this scheme happily admits to modelling it on McDonalds(13). It is transferring GPs? surgeries to supermarkets (the first was opened by Sainsbury?s last week(14)) and giving high-street chemists responsibility for diagnosing and treating minor ailments, even though they are not qualified to tell the difference between an ordinary cough and lung cancer. No minister can now discuss the NHS without mentioning ?new providers? or ?alternative providers?, which is their code for private companies, or ?choice? and ?reform?, which means privatisation. The CBI has produced a long list of complaints about GPs? failure to ?rise to the challenge? of the market(15). In truth they are among the most efficient workers in the NHS. One of the reasons why their pay has jumped so quickly is that they have responded more effectively than the government expected to the incentives in their new contract (giving the government a further stick with which to beat them). They are way ahead of the hospitals in their use of information technology. But there is money in primary care, which is why they are now in the firing line. GPs say that the government was hoping they would reject its demand for longer opening hours, knowing that the private sector could then step into the breach. None of this serves either the customer or the taxpayer. The irony of Brown?s reforms is that they are wholly centred on the needs of the providers rather than the patients – as long as the providers are corporations. So don?t wait to take to the streets. Little by little, the privatisation of the NHS is happening already, disguised as a crusade for patient power. References: 1. Gordon Brown, 7th January 2008. Speech on the National Health Service.
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page14171.asp 2. Department of Health, 19th March 2007. More family doctor services for deprived areas.
http://www.gnn.gov.uk/environment/fullDetail.asp?ReleaseID=272142&NewsAr… 3. Eg Sarah Hall, 19th March 2007. Fruit, veg and a trip to the GP as stores are asked to open surgeries. The Guardian. 4. Prime Minister?s Strategy Unit, March 2007. Policy review – Building on progress: Public services. http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/policy_review/documents/building_on_… 5. Department of Health, 2007. The GP Patient Survey 2006/2007: National Report, p58. http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/PublishedSurvey/GPpati… 6. ibid, p60. 7. Gordon Brown, quoted by Daniel Martin, 7th March 2008. GPs grudgingly agree to work evenings and weekends at last. Daily Mail. 8. LLM Future Services, 2007. Survey conducted for CBI, May 30th-31st 2007. Sent to me by the CBI. 9. Confederation of British Industry, 18th September 2007. Just What the Patient Ordered: Better GP Services. http://www.cbi.org.uk/ndbs/press.nsf/0363c1f07c6ca12a8025671c00381cc7/f60cebe0663c98d68025734600573f81/$FILE/CBI%20report%20?Just%20what%20the%20patient%20ordered?%20September%202007.pdf 10. Gruffydd Penrhyn Jones, GP, pers comm. 11. Allyson M Pollock and Sylvia Godden, 23rd February 2008. Independent sector treatment centres: evidence so far. British Medical Journal, vol 336, pp421-424. doi:10.1136/bmj.39470.505556.80 12. See British Medical Association, January 2008. Access to GP services in England. http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/Gpaccess. 13. Nick Britten, 4th February 2008. GP surgeries ?could be run by Tesco or Virgin?. Daily Telegraph. 14. Hugh Wilson, 4th March 2008. The Sainsbury?s GPs: checkout, then check-up. The Guardian. 15. See Confederation of British Industry, 18th September 2007, ibid.
Waged London: photographer Larry Herman on his new project10 Mar 2008Larry Herman was born in New York, and moved to Britain during the Vietnam War. Since then he has lived in Glasgow and Sheffield, but mostly in London. At art school Larry trained as a sculptor. He started taking photographs in his mid-20s and has since produced several books. In the early 1980s he stopped photography to work in steel mills, foundries and on London Underground. He returned to professional photography in 1993. His most recent book, Land, Land, Land! looks at the living conditions for rural African Americans in the US South. What prompted you to start the Waged London project? I always need something to do that I think is important, something with enough scope to occupy me for the several years I take to work on my independent projects. Clearly our period of time is marked by war ? but it is also marked by mass migration. According to the United Nations, today there are more people living in towns and cities than there are living in the countryside. That will have a profound effect in the future. We are living in a world where more and more people have no other means of sustenance than selling their labour. I?m from New York, and when I was a child New York and London used to compete for the title of the biggest city in the world. Now they are mid-ranking cities as other huge cities have grown ? though London is still one of the ?heartland? cities of the world, of course. So millions of people are being economically compelled off the land and towards the cities. They will starve to death unless they accept being forced into selling their labour. I wanted to put that process of people selling their labour in the centre of this project. So I photograph wherever people work. I define that quite widely, but all the photographs in the project will relate to people?s working experiences in some way. What sort of difficulties have you encountered with the project? I had to narrow the project down, so I chose to focus on people who sell their labour by the hour, rather than salaried workers ? though, at one level, that is a false demarcation. Initially the project was called Low Wage London, but I felt that title was too subjective. For instance, I met a family with six low incomes that when combined meant they did OK. In contrast a family with one income of 18 an hour would be really struggling. I have come across difficulties taking pictures of people in work. Managers have a lot to hide and often simply don?t want me around. Getting access can be difficult. I don?t want to put people in any sort of jeopardy with their employer.So I do a lot of photographing from the rear or with people?s faces hidden. I also don?t photograph people without their permission and I deliberately don?t use names or even identify specific workplaces. It?s beyond my comprehension how a person can be ?illegal?. I don?t care whether they?re here with the sanction of the state or not. People have a right to be where they are simply on the basis that that?s where they are. Is the Waged London project partly about bringing the hidden into view? Many migrant workers certainly are hidden from view ? but so, in a way, is everyone who sells their labour. The media keep us all hidden ? most notably during strikes, but also in many other ways and on a daily basis. When images of working people do emerge, they tend to be shown as entertainment, or as victims, or as people who just produce distress and heartache for us all. For example, Africa is full of intense political activity. Millions of people struggle every day to organise a better society that can meet the needs of everyone. All of this is either ignored or reported in a way that portrays people as helpless, as passive victims and nothing more. I am in awe of people?s dignity ? the dignity that comes from an ability to put two feet on the floor every morning, but also from the determination to resist and organise. How do your political convictions fit into your work as a documentary photographer? I am inspired by the world as it is. I see myself as a political person who happens to be a photographer. I define myself politically. Of course, I also have ideals of how the world should be, but my motivation and inspiration come from the reality of the world. As a social documentary photographer, I am recording my the world around me as part of the process of influencing it. I?m very aware that we have all sorts of things that we don?t have to fight for, because other people have fought for them in the past. But we do have to constantly defend those gains. For instance, there is an appalling attack on women?s rights in Britain at the moment ? the growth of porno?culture, and the chipping away at the time limits on abortion. But there is always a level of resistance that provides inspiration and a sense of dignity. If there wasn?t resistance, they wouldn?t need violence to defend the status quo. The real thing, the interesting thing, is to photograph the world in resistance. People refusing to acquiesce, refusing to be passive. I want to move people from being the passive objects of history to being its originators. What do you look for in an image to reflect this political commitment? It?s important not to have anything redundant in the photographs ? everything in the image must contribute to the succinct statement I?m making. In this sense still photography is closer to poetry than to film, because it says something very precise. I also always use captions, sometimes long ones and sometimes very brief ones. They give a context to the image and help prevent it from being used in an abusive way. If I was the only photographer in the world, I would do things differently. But as it is, it is far too easy to photograph people with their dignity down ? it is too easy to photograph degradation. So at one level, I?m using people as metaphors to tell the world what I think of it. When I photograph, say, a cleaner in a hotel, I want that image to ram home what that person is doing in numerous different ways. I also want the image to be aesthetically pleasing. I?m not a news photographer in the sense of simply firing the camera into events. Some news photographers criticise me for being too ?arty? ? but I also get art photographers criticising me for being too ?newsy?! What do you think of the idea that photography should be ?neutral?? I am recording my period of time, but I am not a camera. I don?t see my role as some kind of ?community photographer?. I want to show the reality of people?s lives. This means interpreting and editing the world in a certain way. There is a battle of ideas in our society. Millions of people die for reasons that are eminently solvable. Natural events turn into catastrophes because of the system we live under. So you can rebuild New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina ? but not for the people who lived there, apart from those who will be needed to service the tourists. But people are resisting everywhere ? though not always in a particularly organised way. In that context, it is important to throw your lot in with the people who are resisting. There is immense coverage of the US election, but I hardly ever hear a report that makes sense. People parachute in and observe ? but they don?t relate to the reality in front of them. At best it?s pretentious and at worst downright erroneous. They never, or rather hardly ever, interview ordinary people ? instead they interview themselves. When I was last doing a project in the US I never met anyone who owned a single thing ? yet those are precisely the people who are kept out of the debate. The dominant values are those of the status quo. We are products of society where there are sides. And if you say you?re neutral, then you are in fact taking sides. Class struggle permeates every element of our society. Sometimes it is difficult to see ? but it is there. You sometimes have to fight hard to bring to light ? but it is there. And in the face of class struggle there is no neutrality. You either align yourself with the oppressors of the world, or you take the opposite side. Whenever I?ve been in a situation, I?ve chosen sides ? in Ireland, the Miners? Strike, or wars in southern Africa. And whenever I?ve done that, people have defended me back. ——————————— Waged London will be on show at the Marxism festival of resistance in July this year. For more details about Larry?s work go to www.larryherman.net
Why I Told Parliament: You’ve Failed Us On liberty9 Mar 2008Two things are striking as you read through the oral evidence presented to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The first is the measured calm of the majority of your witnesses and, indeed, of the majority of the committee, in the face of the most serious attack on personal freedom and privacy ever mounted during peacetime in this country. British democracy is on the brink of being changed beyond recognition, yet nothing seems to disturb the equanimity of your proceedings. Even allowing for the well-mannered traditions of parliamentary committees, the lack of urgency and of a sense of crisis seems remarkable. The second point that occurs to an outsider unfamiliar with parliamentary routines is that this campaign against Britain’s historic rights and freedoms began at almost the precise moment the European Human Rights Convention was incorporated into British law as the Human Rights Act (HRA) in 1998. In other words, the HRA, a Bill of Rights by any other name, has allowed the executive and Civil Service to roll back individual liberty and privacy and has done almost nothing to defend the British public from the accumulation of centralised power. Let me make it clear that the HRA has brought many benefits, for instance in the questioning of rape victims, treatment of old people and ensuring that foreign prisoners who may be tortured in their countries are not deported. But despite its many advantages, the reality is that the HRA does not work effectively as a Bill of Rights and cannot guarantee the civil liberties necessary for a free society, a point perhaps tacitly admitted by the appearance of Gordon Brown’s green paper last summer. The shocking loss of rights in Britain is now being noticed with bafflement abroad by people who do not understand this turn of events in one of the oldest democracies in the world. On a book tour last month in France, I was repeatedly asked by journalists: ‘Why in Britain? Why are there no demonstrations?’ There are complex answers to these questions, but an obvious one is that the government has consistently advanced the argument that new laws meet singular threats from crime, terror and antisocial behaviour. We accepted these appeals with a rare faith in the wisdom and benevolence of our leaders, a faith, incidentally, that I increasingly do not share. After a decade, the account shows a devastating loss of the freedoms that we once regarded as our birthright, the self-evident and self-perpetuating virtue of the British people and their constitution. The shocking part of it all is that it has occurred with almost no coherent analysis, scrutiny or opposition in Parliament, no debate about the direction of our society and only a little understanding and exposition in the media. We have taken a false sense of security from the HRA. Indeed, there seems every reason to suspect that it has served the executive and Civil Service as an alibi, while the balance between state power and individual freedom has been critically altered in the state’s favour. If the maintenance of civil liberties is the best measure of a code of rights, then the HRA must surely be declared a failure. But this is not due to any innate problem with the act, rather to the state of parliamentary democracy, which I will come to later. To show how the HRA fails us in practice, I want to draw the committee’s attention to the key article eight in the act, the one that guarantees ‘the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence’. By far the most dramatic threat to ordinary people’s freedom in the last decade has been the growth of the database state. Under Labour’s plans for ‘transformational government’, an almighty surveillance structure is envisaged, through which, by the admission of the man in charge, Sir David Varney, the state will know ‘a deep truth about the citizen based on their behaviour, experience, beliefs, needs or desires’. As Jill Kirby pointed out in a recent Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, the government’s intention is to centralise and share all information on the citizen, both horizontally and vertically, without the citizen’s knowledge. It is hard to imagine a more sinister apparatus of intrusion, and so control, but the project advances untroubled by the scrutiny of Parliament. The state’s nightmarish lust for our personal data does not stop there. Already, all journeys undertaken on motorways and through town centres are recorded by the network of automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, with the information retained for two years. Under the National Identity Register, it seems that 49 pieces of information will still be required by the state and that every important transaction in the citizen’s life recorded. And there is a new proposal to collect 19 pieces of information, including mobile phone and credit-card numbers from people travelling abroad, which the government plans to use for ‘general public policy purposes’ – that is, the mass surveillance of a free people. I remind the committee of something American cryptographer and computer expert Bruce Schneier wrote: ‘It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could some day facilitate a police state.’ The story of the HRA’s failure gets worse when you reach the guarantees on the privacy of family life, home and correspondence. The act simply doesn’t perform. There are now five databases that will, in various degrees, breach the privacy of children and their families. The home is threatened for the first time since 1604 by new regulations concerning bailiffs who, under the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act, are about to be allowed to offer violence against the householder. As to our correspondence, with more than half-a-million intercepts of post, email, and internet connections a year, with nearly 700 authorities allowed to apply for phone records and to intercept a person’s communications on the thinnest pretext, it is clear the HRA has not and will not guarantee the privacy of our communications. I hope I will not be thought melodramatic when I say that if this trend continues, there will be some who will not feel able to continue to live in this country. There is a profound but unacknowledged crisis in this country. Our liberties have been attacked, but we have also suffered a collapse in what I would call the liberty reflex, both in and outside Parliament. Twenty years ago, the measures I describe above, which are often brought into law by statutory instrument – effectively ministerial decree – would have been unthinkable. The media would have been inflamed; former members of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) such as Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt would have been talking about a police state and there would almost certainly have been marches and protests. But today we just let it go. This is why I believe a new Bill of Rights is imperative. But it must be a Bill of Rights that is clearly British in origin and that draws its potency from our traditions and culture, and from the settlements of 1689 and Magna Carta, insisting, for example, on the right to trial by jury, which is not found in European charters and conventions. There is no question that such a bill would include the alleged guarantees in the HRA, but, crucially, the drafting would be part of a process of general political renewal, in which there was a rebalancing of powers at the very top of our democracy. It should be a work of simplicity and eloquence in which the British people, not Parliament or a team of ministerial scribblers working from some bogus consultation process, define their inalienable rights as part of a new covenant between the people and Parliament and between the executive and Parliament. It goes without saying that it should be entrenched, that is, placed beyond the reach of the authoritarian tendencies that are obviously alive in the Civil Service and the current administration and permitted by an easily manipulated parliamentary majority. Conventional thinking says such laws cannot be ‘entrenched’ and that no parliament can bind its successors. But in reality this is nonsense. All constitutions, however strongly codified, always allow for a process of amendment. The Parliament Act may be amended so that a Bill of Rights could be altered only in circumstances where there was a consensus. The result would be the people’s prized possession, a thing that every child would learn at school and could perhaps quote at will later in life. As you see, I do not recoil from the idea of unelected judges deciding where Parliament has overstepped the mark, because over the last few years, it has been the judiciary that has so often supported the principles of liberty and rights. MPs would be wise to agree with this and stop pretending to the public that they are the sole defenders of the public realm. Parliamentary sovereignty is the reason why discussion about a Bill of Rights never gets anywhere. Its mystical power is unquestioningly viewed as the secret, or, at least, the guardian, of our free society. But is that really so? In the political context, the OED defines sovereignty thus: ‘Supremacy in respect of power, domination or rank; supreme dominion, authority or rule.’ Parliament is obviously not sovereign, because the executive runs everything. The government decides on and schedules parliamentary business, appoints the chairs of select committees and controls and smothers debate by means of standing orders and standing committees. The truth is that Parliament can offer the public little effective protection because it is itself in the thrall of the executive. There is a temptation in this debate to think in rather academic terms about concepts of law and sovereignty, yet I am struck by the vivid examples of change that you hear about every day – the spread of unnecessary and intrusive CCTV; the appearance of immigration officials – plus heavies with earpieces – randomly stopping people outside London tube stations to question them about their status; the pupils being fingerprinted at their school library; the use of the ‘mosquito’ to control young people; the commands barked through speakers telling people to behave; the appearance of listening devices on the streets of Westminster. Certainly our society has its problems, but I feel certain that this hectoring attitude stems from the government’s fundamental disrespect for the people and their rights. The attitude is at the heart of the transfer of power from the individual to the state. Entrenching a Bill of Rights would go a long way to arresting the trend. But what we don’t need is a placebo bill drawn to act as a new alibi. I believe there is a very good reason why a Bill of Rights has been put on the political agenda by a government that is already responsible for the HRA. It recognises the strength of the case that has been made against it by civil libertarians and wants to answer that case before the next election with a measure that seems incontestably wedded to the principles of a free society. It is a shrewd and cynical exercise, because at the same time the government will attempt to own the process and so ensure that nothing that remotely threatens executive power reaches the statute book. Finally, I want to say something about the phrase ‘rights and responsibilities’ used by Jack Straw and Gordon Brown in respect of a new bill. This springs from the telling belief among ministers that rights are somehow in the gift of the government and that they are entitled to require people to sign up to a list of responsibilities in exchange. This is arrogant nonsense. The citizen’s responsibilities are defined by common, civil and criminal law and ministers display a constitutional impertinence by suggesting otherwise.
How this government has undermined society Communications Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2002), government agencies make 500,000 secret interceptions of email, internet connections and standard mail. Since summer 2007, the government and some 700 agencies have had access to all landline and mobile phone records. Databases Police build network of ANPR cameras on motorways and in town centres. Data stored for two years. The National Identity Register will store details of every verification made by ID card holder. Data used without knowledge of citizens. ID card enrolment will require biometric details and large amount of personal data. The Home Office plans to take 19 pieces of information from anyone travelling abroad. No statutory basis. Free expression Public-order laws have been used to curtail free expression. The Race and Religious Hatred Act (2006) bans incitement of hatred on religious grounds. Terror laws are used to ban freedom of expression in some areas. The courts Asbo legislation introduces hearsay evidence which can result in jail sentence. The Criminal Justice Act (2003) attacks jury trial. Admissibility of bad character, previous convictions and acquittals. The Proceeds of Crime Act (2002) allows confiscation of assets without prosecution. Special Immigration Appeals Court hearings held in secret. Terror laws Terror laws used to stop and search. Current rate is 50,000 per annum. A maximum of 28 days detention without charge.
UK and US Culture9 Mar 2008Can I claim that my age [78], my life’s experience [WWII Nazi occupation, two dictatorships plus a revolutionary civil war], my birthplace [Athens, Greece], my profession [civil engineering], and my strict adherence to rationality and honesty, as an atheist, give me the right to address [mostly] young Britons and young Americans and “lecture” them on the subject presented below? The answer is: No! I do not have the right. I have the duty to address them. Here is the subject: The German weekly magazine “Der Spiegel” [“The Mirror”] is one of the most important mainstream magazines of Europe and arguably of the world. “Der Spiegel” is definitely not a radical leftist publication. In its latest issue, that of February 25, 2008, on page 56 we read: “A clean ‘surgical coup’ would have been ‘attractive in many respects’, noted on May 6, 1976 the Planning Staff of the British Foreign Ministry”. Now, what is a “clean surgical blow”? It is a method of killing women and children by using technology developed in institutions of higher learning, also known as “universities” or “institutes of technology”. The greatest experts in the world in this kind of “surgery” are Bush father and son, husband and son, respectively, of Barbara [of New Orleans fame]. This technology involves bombs, rockets, etc. By extension a “surgical coup” is an occupation of a country without the use of bombs, etc, but through torture and intimidation. What was the target of this “surgical coup”? Rome! The cradle of Christianity [or something of the sort]. Note the date: it is 1976! Why would rational people want to do a thing like that? The [rational] people we are talking about are: US President Gerald Ford [plus “Kissy” of Harvard, aka Henry Kissinger], James Callaghan [British Prime Minister], Valery Giscard d’Estaing [President of France], Helmut Schmidt [Chancellor of Germany], et al. The reason for the coup: a “horror picture” [Horrorvorstellung] of the Italian Communist Party winning the elections. [Note: That the Italian Eurocommunists (a term coined by the CIA!) were very “soft” communists, almost social democrats of the German kind, and most importantly note that they were completely independent from the Soviets and therefore they did not constitute a “threat” to the West, that was known to the Americans, the British, and the rest of the “civilized” West.] The “Der Spiegel” article goes on: “Since the end of the Second World War again and again the USA has paid millions to [foreign] politicians and parties. One part of the money landed at Secret Service officers who cooperated with extreme rightist terrorists, whose bomb attacks with dozens of dead were then charged to radical leftists.” Beautiful and Christian world! Thus, declassified documents in the UK, the US, and Germany “show that the British above all [the others] were thinking about a radical solution… a coup d’etat through rightist military in Rome”, by means of the above mentioned civilized “surgery”! Now, addressing the ordinary Britons, especially the young Britons, one could ask why the British insisted in sowing murderous violence (that is what a coup means) in the lives of a peaceful people? The answer is not very difficult. The British elites are the poodle of the American elites. To secure the favor of the “owner” they, the British elite, have to be arse-lickers. The expressions: “The British are the lieutenants of the Americans” or “there is a special relationship” between them, are rather hypocritical. How about the ordinary Britons? On the basis of my personal experience I have concluded that, in very general terms, in any given population the “distribution” of socio-political ideology is approximately as follows: about 30%, for a strange biological [?] reason, are rightists (that is crypto-fascists or even crypto-Nazis, but are called, simply, “conservatives”), about 40% consider themselves “moderate” or even “progressive” (but in reality they are scared people striving to make a living), about 15% are politically indifferent to the point of cynicism, about 10% are leftists (honest people with integrity and dignity), and finally there is the 5% of economic elite with their servant personnel ( the latter are called, also, politicians, military, etc). Therefore, it is a considerable part of the ordinary Britons that allows the British elites to be the “poodle” of the US elites. That part could be the 30% of the “conservatives” reinforced by part of the cynics or it could be the 40% of the “moderates” aided again by the cynics. The nomenclature in Britain is Conservatives vs. Laborites, in the US it is Republicans vs. Democrats, and so on for other countries. Let us go back to the case of Italy. Notice that the date for the discussion about a coup in Italy is May 1976. Only 20 months before that date, in July of 1974, the same coup scenario ended in Greece after a seven-years-long dictatorship instigated by the US elites through the rightist military in Greece. No need to elaborate on the brutality of the 1967-1974 military dictatorship in Greece. However, there is an interesting lesson to be learned: today in the central prison of Athens there are two members of the military dictatorship, Ioannidis [the master torturer and dictator for the last lap of the scenario] and colonel Dertilis [a sheer murderous person]. They have been in prison for 33 years. The only protection their US mentors could offer them was a modicum of luxury in their cells. It would be equally interesting to follow the fate of Musharraf of Pakistan, when the people tortured by his goons demand justice. The “Der Spiegel” article closes with the following paragraph: “Luckily for Italy things turned differently. In the June 1976 election it was surprisingly the DC [Christian Democracy] that won 38.7 percent. The PCI [Italian Communist Party] stayed at the opposition with 34.4 percent.” Does the word “luckily” show how “mainstream” is the position of the German magazine or does it mean that the Italian people avoided “surgery”? Let us hope it is the latter. As for the 34.4 per cent of the 1976 Italian communists, in no way all of them can be considered leftists of the above mentioned 10%. Most were of the “moderate” variety. What would have happened if the Italian communists had won? Not much. The state would have been a copy of the Christian Democrats with a more humane face this time and possibly with some benefits for the working people. However, the climate could have been favorable to plant the seeds for a pareconish kind of society! So, finally, we arrive at the crucial question. Why is it that the British and the American elites, products of Oxford and of Cambridge or of Harvard and of Yale, respectively, do not give a damn about human life and act in an immoral and even in a rather “psychotic” way? Let us try to see who these elites are. They are white, they profess to be Christians, they are very rich, they have the arrogance of the highly “educated” [education supposedly based on the classical Greek ideas], they are deeply racist, they carry the complex of the awareness of being untalented [so, they buy Rembrandts!], they grow in families of cruelty and hypocrisy, they are cowardly [so, they build armies and brutal police forces to dominate the ordinary people and thus feel secure], their women are equally brutal [in some cases even worse, e.g. Thatcher]. No need to go on, there is enough accumulated evil up to this point to last for the next dozens of Vietnams and Iraqs, not to mention “surgical” interventions in Italy, Greece, etc. But, as the [Chomskyan] argument goes: it is the institutions that use the individuals to carry out the brutality. If the present “batch” of elites goes, then there would be another one to replace them, say a “batch” of Soviet communist elites. However, could it be that the institutions are products of the culture of the particular societies, the UK and the US ones, for the case we are talking about? But the culture of a population is the sum of the beliefs and acts of the individuals that constitute that specific population. Therefore, the only way to stop the brutality by the UK and the US elites is for the ordinary people of these countries to start thinking about changing their culture. [Note: Of course I did not mean to “lecture” anybody. All I tried to do is furnish some bits of information about the Italian case which might be unknown to young Britons and to young Americans. Information, that helps one to understand the human pain of the Iraqis, the Afghans, and the Palestinians.]
How Not to Bore the Pants off Kids9 Mar 2008Over the last ten years or so, the government has brought a regime into schools that has battened down on teachers to teach reading and writing in a way that bores teachers and bores kids. What?s more, evidence has come out over the last few months that it doesn?t work. The government has reduced the whole exciting, entertaining, uplifting world of books to what they call ?literacy?. Then they created a testing system which narrows this down to a set of questions about the so-called facts of stories and poems which emphasise the idea that the best a child can do with a story is to get its logic and order right. The results of the tests (SATs) are published so a school?s worth is measured against the school?s SATs results. The consequence of this is that schools are teaching to the SATs. When teachers look at stories and poems, they immediately start asking the children SATs-type questions ? spot the adjectives in this poem, what happened next in the story, and so on. Teachers are forced to spend less time reading and enjoying stories and poems and more time reading parts of stories and asking children ?fact? questions. This is a disastrous way to treat books and reading. Books are about ideas and feelings. We read in order to find out what it would feel like to be in this or that situation. We explore other people?s way of thinking and we look and how they and the society changes. Reading small extracts from books, followed closely by ?fact? questions, misses all this. The government has introduced something else that detracts from what books are for ? one hour a day, compulsory synthetic phonics teaching for all children between the ages of four and six. This is to ensure, they say, that every child gets hold of what they call ?the alphabetic principle? ? showing children that letters correspond to the sounds we make with our mouths. The problem with this is that English spelling is not regular. Many combinations of letters produce different sounds and a single sound we might make, can be spelt in several different ways (think of ?ee? in ?sleep?, ?ea? in ?lead? and ?ei? in ?receive?). This means that synthetic phonics will never be enough to teach reading. We need other systems to learn how to read, such as learning whole words (known as ?look and say?) and the only way we get the hang of that is reading from context, that?s to say, reading the words from understanding the meaning of the sentence, the paragraph and the story. The meaning is vital. What follows is that we have to spend a great deal of time, thought and energy in working out how to make the meaning of what children read exciting, interesting and fun. And here we have the key to it all. If we want children to read, we have to work out how to make book-loving schools and book-loving homes. This means rethinking the whole matter of reading and writing. Schools should have the money to employ trained librarians and home-school reading liaison staff to work with parents on finding and reading interesting books. Schools need time, advice and money helping teachers to get in the most exciting and interesting books and exploring the most interesting ways of reading them. We need to dispense with the futile system of asking children questions that teachers already know the answers to. Instead, we need to set up a space where we invite children to ask the people in a story questions that puzzle them and where other children can pretend to be those characters and try to answer the questions. Books can also be seen as starting points for putting on shows, creating art, dance, music, film and powerpoint displays. The work that children write shouldn?t be shut away in scrappy little exercise books but should be published and performed. This way a connection is made in the children?s minds between the world of literature and their own ability to write. The crazy thing is that we knew all this thirty years ago, but successive governments have got away with rubbishing it all. They even created the perfect democratic, professional structure (called Language in the National Curriculum, or LINC) where teachers, researchers and advisers came together to work out and publish the best kinds of classroom practice. It started to become so successful (and threatening to their top-down, dictatorial methods) the government of the day scrapped it. We need to fight for a return to the ways of LINC. This way teachers can research their own practice, share it with others and grow professionally as they work, rather than carry on with the present mind-numbing method of teaching by numbers. And this is how reading and writing about our ideas and feelings can be put back at the heart of education. Just as socialists fight for the right of people everywhere to be without war, poverty, exploitation and injustice, so we must fight for people of all ages to be able to express ourselves through what we read and write.
Brown and Class-less9 Mar 2008I was recently invited to give a speech at the annual general meeting of the NUJ Black Members Council, which I duly did on Saturday morning. I generally try and avoid preaching to the converted so I began, on the subject of how ethnic minority journalists can break the glass ceiling, by illustrating how race intersects with class. I started with this: “Over two weeks, BBC 2 films will give voice to the prejudices, alienation, fears and confusion of white working class Britain – a constituency that rarely finds its voice on the BBC, at a time of sweeping social change. ... ‘What we wanted to do was look at these issues in a rounded, non-political way and I think we’ve done that,’ says season commissioner Richard Klein.”
That from the BBC’s in-house magazine, Ariel. Two points should immediately be noted, I said. Why does the white working class rarely get heard on the BBC, by its own admission? Second, how can you make a series featuring immigration, Muslims, the BNP and Enoch Powell in a non-political way? Anyway, there was an issue here being overlooked by everyone. The experience of minority groups in the UK is sometimes more affected by class and yet we keep viewing issues through the prism of race or religion. This applies to educational achievement as much as it does to media. Race relation “experts” such as Lee Jasper (good riddance) were prime candidates reponsible for using this scattergun approach and branding the entire education system as racist without asking why Indian and Chinese kids consistently outperform white kids of either gender. The same applies to employment. Most ethnic minorities who work in the press are of middle class backgrounds from Oxbridge and may be under-represented simply because most Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and African-Caribbean households are working class. The media industry and politics throw up further complications. Because these industries depend much more on personal relationships and the understanding you’re going to fit into the culture, class differences are exacerbated by race. So if you’re not going to socialise or network with white colleagues, it affects your promotion prospects. Furthermore, media employers sometimes cannot get over the person’s race or religion and over-politicise it. That can mean minority journalists are either condemned to “specialist stories” or not allowed to go near them. That makes it harder for them to break the glass ceiling. The big problem here is that many white commentators apply this class blindness to ethnic minorities (and sometimes women) too. The BBC’s “provocative” White season is a prime example of this silliness. Last week a researcher from Radio 4 called after reading an earlier article when I asked who had failed the white working class. The corporation is simply the latest to fall into this trap. The problem faced by white working classes isn’t that of race but their class, as Chris Bertram and Chris Dillow point out. Does anyone really believe there aren’t Asian working class families who resent Polish workers moving into the area? When the BBC’s Richard Klein told an audience of programme makers, according to Ariel, that the corporation was “ignoring, at its peril, a great swathe of white, working class audience”, then its symptomatic of a wider problem: that media gatekeepers reflect only their own experiences in programming and journalism rather than that of wider Britain. The White season is a tokenistic effort after which the middle class commissioners, pleased that they’ve done their bit for the proles, will go back to their usual habits, as they do with ethnic minorities. Except, there the lives of working class minorities are ignored while shiny happy middle class Asians making music or becoming successful entrepreneurs are lapped up. But even worse is the patronising attitude that underlies it all. Here, I can’t really do better than quote Justin McKeating: “Going by the website, the season reduces working class people to exhibits in a zoo, to reality television show freaks, to anthropological curiosities in National Geographic. Here’s some knobbly-faced salts of the earth in a Bradford working men’s club. Here’s every little-brained, little Englanders’ worst nightmare, a white girl in a hijab.” It’s spot on. Any discussion of the white working class cannot go without a mention of Enoch Powell or the BNP can it? Because middle-class people aren’t racist you see, only white working class males can be remember. To ensure the White season gets complete overkill across the corporation Newsnight invites Nick Griffin on to debate the series. From there it can only go downhill. Kirsty Wark pointed out that the BNP doesn’t get much electoral traction and that their own polls illustrated many working class people didn’t cite immigration as a top concern (so why invite the BNP leader then?), while drugs and drinking culture were. Griffin still managed to blame that on Pakistanis and Islam, to which Wark limply replied: “I think there is a number of people who would dispute that.” I can only shake my head in despair at this travesty of journalism. (Though, she would be competing quite strongly with Andrew Anthony of I’m-not-sure-what-liberal-values-are fame, since he was recently found complaining that the series gave Muslims an easy ride.) I tried to sum this all up for the Radio 4 researcher and my audience at the NUJ. Ethnic minorities in Britain are basically treated similarly to white working classes: as problematic and stereotyped guinea pigs who are sometimes seen through tokenistic efforts but usually ignored until an issue comes up. Then the middle-class media land likes to get all “provocative”. What the industry needs is to re-examine how they employ people and how that affects output, not just the odd season of programming. And that minorities are sometimes affected by class more than race. The researcher never called back.
Pick up your gun and shut up9 Mar 2008I?ve been resisting the urge to write anything about the current flap concerning Armed Forces members being ?abused? in Peterborough. The story appears to be a thin concoction based on a single incident some 15 months ago. Nor, as it happens, do I see much point in hurling verbal abuse at squaddies, anyway. Unfortunately, the sheer inanity and reflexive nationalist windbaggery that the story has called forth (exemplified by the pre-fascist racist bear pit that is the BBC?s Have Your Say) is just too maddening. I shall try to be brief. Argument number one from the blusterers is that the troops deserve our support regardless of whether we agree with the war(s). Our anger, they say, would be better directed at the Government who sent them. This position is similar to that which the Liberal Democrats adopted during the invasion of Iraq -their ?opposition? lasted only as long as it hadn?t happened. The moment it did they fell meekly into line and supported ?our boys?. I have little idea what the exhortation to support our troops really means, particularly when it is said that we can support them without supporting the war. If this is so then clearly it cannot mean wishing them success. Rather, it must mean wishing that they don?t get hurt. Well, fair enough, I don?t want to see British troops get hurt. But then I don?t want any troops to get hurt. I do recognise that it’s inevitable, however, so if combatants on one side or another have to get hurt, as complicated as matters may be, I?d rather it was the aggressors. The logic of this is clear. If I see a man attacked in the street, I do not want to see either him or his assailant hurt unnecessarily but, since I recognise both the victim?s right to self defence and the attacker?s aggression, I?d rather see the latter hurt than the former. The same is true for our troops in Iraq. I don?t want to see any of them killed but if they continue to aggress against the Iraqis, then I?d rather British troops were hurt. Anything else is simple racism. Yet those who call on us to support our boys, while saying that we don?t have to support the war, were they to apply their principle evenly, would be calling on us to support the mugger even if we don?t agree with mugging. ?Just doing my job? is no defence if your job stinks. As a side point, it?s also worth stating something else that really should be obvious: there is nothing intrinsically honourable about serving in the Armed Forces. The Armed Forces are an organisation maintained to pursue certain goals, frequently through violence. How honourable it is to be a soldier depends upon how honourable the goal is and the methods one uses ? if you?re defending a people against aggression with minimum force, be proud. If you do it with excessive force, be less proud. But if you?re inflicting aggression against a defenceless people, hang your head. I might feel proud of getting involved in a pub fight if the cause of my violence was to defend a man from a racist attack but I would feel ashamed if I was involved in the same fight in order to commit such an attack. Nor is being a soldier honourable becaue they are often in genuine danger and carry out their orders knowing that there is a serious risk they might be killed. Otherwise, being a terrorist would be honourable for the same reason and suicide bombers would be confered even greater respect. There is nothing intrinically honourable or dishonourable, respectable or ignoble, about placing oneself at risk. Again, the cause in which one does it is key. Nor is bravery an issue: I?m not brave enough to be an armed robber, doesn?t mean I can?t condemn them. Nor do I accept the defence that soldiers are only obeying orders and have no choice. Of course they have a choice, they can refuse to obey orders, which I believe they should. Yes, consequences flow from that choice but I’d rather go to the stockade than kill innocent people. I’d also hope that I’d be brave enough still to take that stance if I faced a firing squad instead. To argue in the 21st century that ?theirs is not to reason why? is actually an insult to them -it suggests that either they are incapable of moral judgements or that they should ignore their own consciences. I believe the first is false and the second indefensible, not least because those who take this line are unlikely to apply it universally. Would those who believe that our troops should follow orders without question have condemned Iraqi troops who defied Saddam? Or German troops who refused to take orders from the 3rd Reich? Of course not. Certainly, it is true that many of our forces, from the poorer and less educated parts of society, may have joined the army because they needed a job and are very likely heavily indoctrinated once they?re in. But this can only be a mitigation. If they are fully aware of what they are doing, disagree with it, yet do it anyway, they are cowards. If they are propagandised then they are to be pitied in the same way that some who are convicted of a criminal offence are judged to be less than competent and so not entirely responsible for their actions. Uncritical devotion to authority is not honourable, it’s pathological. Then there is the argument that we should support our troops out of gratitude, for defending us now or for having defended us in the past. Both arguments are misguided. It is no more logical to support the army uncritically because of good it does in some areas than it would be to support any other organisation for similar reasons. I?m grateful for nurses: doesn?t mean I have to support them when they start offing pensioners. The argument that we should show respect because of the British Army?s defence of Britain during WWII is similarly vacuous. What it actually amounts to is capitulating to a group of people today because a group of people under the same name 60 years ago did us a very big favour. In fact, it is entirely the same principle that a few people still use for disliking Germans today -because of what ?they? did 60 years ago. In fact, with a few exceptions, Germans today did nothing 60 years ago – it was another bunch of people who happened to live on the same piece of land. Nor is true, in any case, that the army is defending us now. In fact, it is much more plausible to make the case that they are actively endangering us. Several studies have shown that, by ?riding pillion? on US policy, the British Government and its Armed Forces are actually putting all of us at far greater risk. Having been reduced to a mercenary force for US strategic interests, it should hardly be surprising that the actions of the British Army have made us a target for terrorists. In any case, it?s a pretty repugnant argument that our gratitude to troops for services rendered to us excuses atrocities committed against others. It?s a selfish assertion that our welfare outweighs that of someone else. I might be grateful to my next door neighbour for the loan of his lawnmower but I don?t have to defend him when he?s found guilty of beating his wife. Another argument in the windbags? arsenal is that one shouldn?t criticise the troops because we don?t know what it?s like on the front line. Again, it’s a specious argument. Otherwise, it would be wrong for me to criticise the ?enemy? troops as well. I certainly don?t recall criticism of Iraqi troops being off the table during the Gulf War because we didn?t know what everyday life in the Republican Guard was like. The argument makes about as much sense as saying that we shouldn’t criticise a murderer because we don?t know the circumstances in which he did it. If one disagrees with the objective then the circumstances of its pursuance are simply not relevant. Our troops may fight bravely sometimes (when they’re not slaughtering people from miles away at sea or up in the air) and, amongst the imperialist carnage, there are doubtless genuine acts of bravery and heroism. Nor do I believe that every squaddie out there goes to the Middle East with the intention of doing ill. In the end, though, this does not matter. What matters is that they are thinking, feeling human beings who are responsible for their actions. If they agree with the war(s), they are culpable, if they oppose them yet fight anyway, they’re cowardly. If they ‘re conditioned, they are pitiable. True bravery is not to fight against people who are not your enemy -it is to make a stand for what you believe is right, even knowing that you may suffer greatly for doing so. Sometimes that can mean picking up a gun. Too often, it means never picking it up to begin with.
Stop the biofuels bandwagon9 Mar 2008The tide of public and expert opinion has been turning inexorably against biofuels in recent months. First news began to leak out about hungry Mexicans protesting about rising corn prices, as more and more of the global harvest was siphoned off for ethanol. Then studies by scientists confirmed that all current biofuels are worse ? some by an order of magnitude ? in greenhouse emissions terms than conventional mineral petrol and diesel. Now the government?s chief scientist has come out strongly against biofuels, again because of the long-term threat they pose to our food supply. There?s only one problem: the UK and Europe still have targets to massively ramp up biofuel use. These targets were set prematurely, when governments enthusiastically jumped at the chance to encourage the use of so-called renewable fuels which offered the promise of allowing people to keep driving while not destroying the climate. Unfortunately, the celebrations were premature. We now know that biofuels release far more carbon dioxide than fossil fuels because of the emissions that are caused through deforestation and agriculture in their production. We know also, as Professor Beddington emphasised in this week?s lecture, that there simply isn?t enough land space to feed a growing world population if valuable carbohydrates from staple food crops are burned in cars. The oft-repeated statistic that it takes a year?s worth of food for one person to fill the petrol tank of the average 44 is reason enough to abandon this failed enterprise. Now is the time to act, before the biofuels mistakes of the past get compounded by the EU?s rush to prematurely set targets for their increased use. The case is very simple: meeting the EU?s targets on biofuels use ? of 5.75% by 2010 ? will dramatically worsen both carbon emissions and the food supply crisis. The targets must be abandoned immediately. Gordon Brown should listen carefully to Professor Beddington?s advice, and act on it. The government must quickly abandon our national targets for biofuels use, and urge its EU partners to remove the target across the entirety of Europe. Much damage has already been done to the rainforests of Indonesia as a result of rising demand for palm oil as a feedstock for biodiesel. We know that there is no such thing as ?sustainable? palm oil, because any rise in demand will lead to further encroachment into these unique forests. Europe should offer Indonesia financial assistance to protect its remaining areas of tropical forest, instead of adding to the pressure for their destruction through biofuels demand. Estimates vary, but a few billion euros would go a long way to preserving what is not only the last surviving habitat of the orang-utan but also a vital store of standing carbon. In the longer-term, European politicians need to face up to the fact that the future of road transport is far more likely to be electric than liquid fuelled. Already Israel is planning the installation of a network which will allow electric cars ? charged with renewable energy from solar power ? to travel the whole country. No one is arguing that research on second-generation biofuels, which may be able to produce fuel more efficiently without harming food supplies, should be stopped. But more research is needed to study their potential ecological impacts before governments again get too enthusiastic. The lesson from the biofuels debacle is clear: look before you leap.
We shall (not) overcome… Nuclear protest survived six Tory governments. But not New Labour7 Mar 2008It survived six Tory governments, the end of the Cold War and the rise and fall of mass marches against the British nuclear deterrent. But after 50 years in which the tradition of peaceful demonstration has been maintained outside the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the New Labour era has finally done for one of the most famous symbols of protest in British political history. Today would have seen the latest gathering of the band of women who have assembled on the second Saturday of each month since the 1980s to object to the continuing development of the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent. Instead, following a High Court ruling this week, the protest tents are being removed, demonstrators are being threatened with arrest and “no camping” signs are being erected. From being a symbol of the right to protest, Aldermaston has become the latest testament to the desire of successive New Labour governments to curtail the right to assemble, demonstrate and object to government policy. Evidence from the Ministry of Defence to the High Court cited “operational and security concerns”. In their High Court appeal, legal representatives for the Aldermaston women argued that the by-law which ostensibly took effect last May banning “camping in tents, caravans, trees or otherwise” amounted to an unlawful interference with freedom of expression and the right of assembly guaranteed by articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. David Plevsky, appearing for the Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp, said the new regulations were “criminalising the peaceful, traditional and regular activities of the AWPC”. It cut no ice. Before the ruling, Sian Jones a member of the peace camp, said: “If we don’t win this review our very existence will be under threat. But there are also wider implications for the long-held right to protest, which is such an important part of British society. Aldermaston has been known as a place of protest for the last 50 years, and this year is the 50th anniversary of the first CND march there.” That battle has now been lost. As a result of the heavy-handed prohibition of a long-running series of protests which have never resulted in violence, a march this Easter to Aldermaston ? intended to commemorate the pioneering protest of 1958 ? has now taken on a wholly contemporary significance. After a series of assaults on the right to protest around Westminster and beyond, the 2008 trek through Berkshire is set to become the latest chapter in the fight to wrest back civil liberties that New Labour appears determined to take away. The CND is planning a 50th anniversary day of action on Easter Monday, when the atomic weapons establishment is to be surrounded by a “human chain” to highlight what it says is the stifling of legitimate protest. The police have warned that anyone causing an obstruction during that protest is likely to be arrested and prosecuted. Kate Hudson, the chairperson of CND said: “We feel this is an extremely serious matter where the long-established and hard-won right to protest is now under attack. People are extremely worried about the weapons of mass destruction being produced at Aldermaston and it is unrealistic of the Government to think that they will not take part in expressing their views. “We hope that on Easter Monday people will not only come because it is the 50th anniversary of the first march but also to show the need to defend their civil liberties.” One campaigner planning to take part, 57-year-old Margaret Jefferson, from west London, said: “I think it is essential that people make a stand on this issue. I had stayed at that peace camp as have so many others without posing any threat to anyone. What is this Government afraid of, what do they think we will do? “We live in a very dangerous world as it is and with the end of the Cold War there is even less justification for nuclear weapons. As long as these weapons are here there is the risk that a version of them will come into the hands of terrorists.” One of the most famous figures to participate in 1958 is too frail to be there on Easter Monday. But there is no questioning his ongoing commitment to the protest and outrage at the modern Labour Party’s complicity in its suppression. Michael Foot, the former Labour leader, who marched with his late wife, the actress and author Jill Craigie, said last night that he was “deeply saddened” to hear of the camp being closed down, and especially dismayed that this should happen under a Labour government. “We thought the cause was right and just and we were glad to take part in these marches,” Mr Foot said. “I think it is wretched that they are now thinking of shutting down the camp after it had been goingsuccessfully for more than 20 years and I am sure Jill would have felt the same way as well. “The governments at the time sometimes behaved very badly towards these protesters who were simply exercising their rights in a peaceful way. But these were Tory governments, the Labour Party supported them as I recall, I was the leader at the time. But times seem to have changed.”
Asylum Watch: Mind your language7 Mar 2008When Amar Albadawi arrived in the UK from Darfur, he made a beeline for English language classes. He couldn?t speak a word of English and as an asylum seeker dispersed to a house in Rochdale he wasn?t joining an established, Arabic-speaking refugee community. One year later, he recalls that studying English was a priority. ?I found that wherever I went I needed someone to translate. I might wait up to an hour for an interpreter at Rochdale city council,? he says. ?Really the first thing I had in my mind was that I must learn the language.? Albadawi?s experience runs contrary to the ?fewer translations, learn more English? mantra of communities secretary, Hazel Blears. Blears? department published new guidance earlier this month ramming home the view that translation is a disincentive for learning. But this announcement also comes hot on the heels of sweeping cuts to English classes that exclude large groups who urgently want and need to learn. The end of free universal access to English for speakers of other languages (Esol) was announced in October 2006, in the face of escalating costs and a chaotic, massively oversubscribed service. The new measures were to prioritise public funding ?towards those learners most in need of help?, according to the Learning and Skills Council (LSC). The new funding rules for Esol came into force in September 2007. Most adult students now have to pay fees ranging from 500-900 for a 15-hours-a-week course over a full academic year. Newly arrived asylum seekers, who live on asylum support of 41.41 per week and cannot work, can no longer access classes for free. Refugees can, if they demonstrate they receive benefits. Hard-won concessions allow for some exceptions, including free classes for asylum seekers who have been here for six months, refused asylum seekers who cannot be returned home and asylum-seeking children up to the age of 19. Despite these softeners critics believe this has only served to tweak laws that amount to more barriers to Esol. The new arrangements are not without their critics in government. First the Audit Commission, then the Commission on Integration and Cohesion expressed concerns that the new funding regime would leave the most vulnerable without the skills to get by. These fears have now been realised, according to a damning survey of Esol tutors and college head teachers by the University and College Union (UCU), published in November 2007. They describe a fall-off in enrolments because would-be learners cannot pay. A learner hardship fund has mitigated some damage but provides no long-term solution and overburdens teachers with paperwork. Tutors go on to describe the impact of a far less publicised but equally damaging development: the shift in education policy to favour higher level English and English for work over beginner level courses. As a result, colleges are facing chaos with ?hundreds of students on entry-level waiting lists that stand no chance of getting a place,? according to Susan McDowell from Lambeth College, quoted in the report. UCU?s survey concludes that the new regime is hurting the poorest and most vulnerable most. ?Hazel Blears is wrong to suggest the availability of translation services is the biggest disincentive for people not to learn English. We know that the biggest disincentive is the now prohibitive cost of learning English for so many people,? says UCU general secretary Sally Hunt. These findings come as no surprise to Kathryn, an Esol teacher from Manchester with six years formal teaching experience. ?If you are catering for learners who can get Level 2, that person is already at GSCE level and you are delivering to people who can cope,? she says. ?Think about the others. It is the poor and uneducated illiterate in their own languages who suffer.? Kathryn believes it is a ?basic democratic right? to learn the English language. She was so struck by the situation of people ?with no rights at all in a complex world? left ?unable to communicate? that she and a friend ran a free class for refused asylum seekers for six months in south Manchester. Others have also been moved to act. The award-winning conversation class at the Common Place social centre in Leeds is free to 50 students a week. Zoube Maelke from Syria, attendee and chef, explains that it is the ?only place some asylum seekers can come?. Projects like these, though, as Kathryn points out, are only possible with ?mountains of goodwill?. The Home Office calls on new arrivals to ?embrace a common language? in the preamble to its citizenship test, but the new funding restrictions and employment-led priorities make it harder than ever to access Esol. It is left to activists on the ground, without recourse to public funds, to fill in the gaps. If Albadawi arrived in the UK today, he would not be able to afford English classes. He would find himself waiting for hours for interpreters in Rochdale. And all the while council employees with reduced translation budgets would view him with hostility as another immigrant who refuses to learn English. - More information: www.dfes.gov.uk/curriculum_esol
Beyond Bread and Butter7 Mar 2008Last year proved again that the public sector is where the unions still have both strong organisation and the ability to act strategically. Strikes by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and Communication Workers? Union (CWU) on pay cuts, job losses and backdoor privatisation, and by the Prison Officers? Association (POA) over industrial rights and pay, showed that industrial action and popular campaigning are not only still possible but that they are the most potent challenge to the government?s continued pro-market policies. These unions have raised the question of alternatives to New Labour?s public sector reform and its insistence that ?there is no alternative? to introducing market mechanisms. Unions are increasingly pressing alternatives based on principles of democratisation. The importance of these strikes is that they have been high profile, actively involved the membership and have had some successes. They have begun to break the pattern of large-scale defeats experienced by unions ? like those of the miners and printers ? in the 1980s. Wider challenge It is also significant that the unions have framed their demands not merely in terms of economistic, ?bread and butter? issues but as part of a wider challenge to government policy. They have begun to move beyond simply campaigning against the effects of neoliberalism to challenge this economic orthodoxy itself. The CWU leader, Billy Hayes, lambasted the government for being willing to intervene to bankroll hand-over-fist the failing private financial organisation, Northern Rock, while remaining unwilling to intervene to settle the postal workers? dispute and safeguard a valued public sector service like the Royal Mail. The POA leader, Brian Caton, used the occasion of his union?s illegal national lightning strike to condemn the government?s policy of locking more and more people up in prisons while running down the restorative justice system. He made it clear that ?prison does not work? on its own and that the POA does not support the ?hang ?em and flog ?em? brigade. Mark Serwotka, the PCS leader, made the connection between deteriorating working conditions and the declining quality of service provision. Thus, job cuts leading to work intensification, pay cuts leading to falling morale and outsourcing leading to cutbacks have been convincingly put forward to explain why service standards are falling. In these broadsides against government policy, market-defined notions of efficiency, effectiveness and productivity have increasingly come under scrutiny and the importance of a public service ethos is being explicitly asserted. Such a process is essential to creating receptiveness to ideas about how public services can be genuinely ?public? and fulfil the aspirations that most people have for them. It is a process that can take hold in practical, lived ways in local communities. Here, the public sector unions need to do more imaginative thinking. It?s no use just repeating the demand to renationalise. It was people?s dissatisfaction with their experience of nationalisation that opened the way for support for actual and de facto privatisation. The unions need to develop further positive solutions based on popular participation and control. In this way these public service unions could spearhead a political form of trade unionism, effectively providing the backbone of a progressive opposition to a government that only has credible opponents to its right. The opportunities to do so will be present again in 2008. Teachers, lecturers, local government and health workers, as well as civil servants and police and prison officers, will all have disputes with the government this year over pay and jobs. Private and public sector unionism Is all this just the preserve of public sector unionism and not applicable to the private sector? Sure, in the public sector unions are stronger, line management more supportive and bargaining units larger and more coherent than in the private sector. Consequently, unions have more facility-time and can organise more easily. Indeed, union density in 2006 in the public sector was 59 per cent, compared with only 17 per cent in the private sector, while 83 per cent of working days ?lost? due to strikes were accounted for by public sector action. But the public sector only looks good in comparison with the private and when we look at the overall picture we get a measure of the difficulties afflicting unions in general. The overall density of union membership was 28 per cent in 2006 and the pattern of recent decades ? falling overall in both sectors, albeit with a big gap between private and public ? continues. While public sector strikes have dominated since the late 1990s, overall action has fallen and strike days ?lost? have only exceeded one million once in the past decade. We need to recall that although private sector density is abysmally low, it still accounts for just over 40 per cent of all members because the private sector dwarfs the public sector by numbers employed. Moreover, the growth of numbers employed in the public sector since 1997 has now come to an end and the public sector continues to fragment as more services are contracted out or given over to the voluntary sector. Organised labour cannot keep to its comfort zone of a small and shrinking public sector. Political trade unionism But can the idea of political trade unionism be applied to the private sector? There are some obvious pointers. In the cases of air, rail and bus transport, as well as food production, childcare and pensioners? homes, unions could easily set themselves up as the honest and true defenders of quality provision. By robustly establishing that investment in staffing levels, pay, working conditions and training are essential to providing the high quality goods and services that people demand and expect, unions can replicate the kind of producer-user alliances that are emerging in the public sector. Whether public or private sector based, working with communities outside the workplace is crucial if these alliances are to grow popular roots. Most towns and cities have trades councils, which exist to coordinate campaigns across unions. They are starting points to approach the various organisations in their localities for these alliances. The campaigns by the London and Birmingham Citizens groups involving unions, faith groups, community and voluntary organisations over ?living wages? and social provisions offer one model of how to construct local alliances (see Red Pepper, Aug/Sept 2007). Another is the way in which the PCS union has worked together with the National Pensioners? Convention over issues of benefits provision; from this, mutual support against job losses and real cuts in the level of pensions has followed. A final example can be found in
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