Eamonn McCann on the Raytheon Victory18 Jun 2008On 9 August 2006, nine Northern Irish anti-war activists occupied the Derry offices of Raytheon, one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world, and destroyed its computers. Their action was sparked by anger at Raytheon?s complicity in Israel?s bombing campaign against Lebanon. The Raytheon 9 won a massive victory when they were acquitted of charges of criminal damage earlier this month. Campaigning journalist Eamonn McCann was one of the nine protesters. He spoke to Socialist Worker about the case There has been considerable controversy about Raytheon ever since the company announced that its factory was coming to Derry in 1999. Raytheon specialises in producing hi-tech bombs, missiles and battlefield control systems. It sells arms mainly to the US government. But it is also one of the largest suppliers of the Israeli army. The immediate cause of our occupation of the Raytheon factory was the bombing of Qana in southern Lebanon on 30 July 2006. This came at a time when the United Nations secretary general and even the archbishop of Canterbury were calling upon George Bush and Tony Blair to at least pose the idea of a ceasefire. But they adamantly refused. They wanted Israel to finish crushing Hizbollah and the Lebanese resistance forces. In the midst of this, a bomb was used to destroy an apartment building in Qana leading to the deaths of 28 people. We were almost certain that this was a Raytheon bomb. In campaigning against Raytheon we?d acquired a great deal of knowledge about what it was producing and where it was selling it. We held a meeting of the Derry anti-war coalition and decided to occupy the building. Our intention was not just to protest about what was happening in Lebanon ? it was much more practical than that. We believed that we could in effect decommission the factory, disrupt production and delay the ability of Israel to rain down further death on southern Lebanon. We were aware that Israel was running short of some of the weapons that Raytheon was delivering and that encouraged us in our belief that we could have some effect on Israel?s ability to wage war. We smashed Raytheon?s computers and used a fire extinguisher and other equipment to take out their communications hub. The charges levelled against us were affray and criminal damage. The charge of affray was thrown out because key to the charge is that you severely frighten people by your behaviour. We demonstrated in court that there was no evidence that we had frightened anybody. Then we fought the criminal damage charge. Of course, we didn?t deny doing any of the things we were accused of. In fact we said on the first day that we did all of the things we were accused of and that we would have done more if we could. I stood up in the witness box and said that we regretted that we couldn?t have done more. Our defence was not a moral defence ? it was a political defence. We didn?t say that this was a protest because we were angry at Israel?s actions. We said that this was a genuine, serious effort to disrupt the supply of arms to Israel. Our argument was that Israel was committing war crimes and that our action was intended to prevent this larger crime. If you hear the sound of a child being brutalised in the house next door and you rush in to smash the door down and save the child, should you be charged with breaking and entering? Obviously not. In the same way we were trying to save people in Lebanon who were being criminally attacked by Israel. We presented lots of evidence. This included documents from the Norwegian government about why it had withdrawn investment from Raytheon, journalism by Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn, and lots more to back up our argument. We explained what Raytheon?s weapons were and what they were used for. We were not required to establish as a certainty that these things were happening. We were required to show our belief that these things were happening. And we showed that we had a genuine belief based on reasonable evidence. The jury accepted that we believed that Israel was guilty of war crimes and that our action was intended to hamper this. We were vindicated. I hope the case will lead to a wider campaign over Raytheon. In light of the court?s decision, there is now a case for Raytheon to be investigated to determine whether it is a criminal enterprise.? For more information on the case go to www.raytheon9.org
Need for a new social alliance18 Jun 2008Interview with Susan George FLORENCE, Jun 3 (IPS) – A global alliance of human rights activists, environmentalists and ethically run small enterprises is needed to save the planet from self-destruction, says Susan George, chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. The institute works “to contribute to social justice.” Susan George, author of several books on development, now focuses on neo-liberal globalisation mirrored in the World Trade Organisation talks, international financial institutions and in North-South relations. “Even if committed to the social and environmental challenges, none of these groups individually will be able to save our future, which is dominated by powerful economic forces that have a short-term view and, if allowed, will continue exploiting and destroying the planet,” George says. We must recognise, she says, that change does not happen at an individual level. “Yes, I can change my light bulbs or reduce my carbon footprint, but we need a radical revolution that cannot be achieved individually.” IPS Italy correspondent Sabina Zaccaro spoke with Susan George at Terra Futura, an exhibition of ‘good practices’ in social, economic and environmental sustainability held yearly in Florence. In its fifth year, Terra Futura was dedicated to strengthening social alliances — and trying some audacious ones such as alliances among private citizens and financial institutions. IPS: Will the political-economic system really allow these alliances to happen? Susan George: The market ideology works to separate people, it is a model that separates people on a competition basis. Social contact is the only response to economy that works all the time to prevent this. People do not have to abandon their own field and commitment, but become used to working together. We are free agents, and if we understand that there’s an interest, that the vast majority of people can often no longer see where their interests lie — and that is part of the political fight that we have — then it is possible. If you show to people that they have an interest in alliances, and this is true for farmers, trade unionists, small medium enterprises…then yes, I think it possible to make those alliances. IPS: And who sets the rules? SG: It is hard to get binding rules, it could be easier at the level of the regions. In many places this is not possible because of corruption, or because the will of the government is to prevent this kind of thing and allow transnational corporations to do whatever they like. I would say that that’s what the European Commission is there for — to allow finance capitals and transnational capitals to operate as freely as possible. IPS: Can the ethical argument alone convince business? SG: No, not at all. They say how green they are, how caring they are, but it’s rubbish to believe it…Corporations and transnational organisations preach self-green regulation; ‘we will bring the proper solution’, they say, but it is totally illusive. IPS: So, what can be a convincing argument? SG: The right arguments are the arguments of force you cannot argue with, you don’t discuss; you don’t say ‘please’. When you are in a position where you are able to dictate. IPS: How? SG: Well, through alliances! At a much larger scale, at a big scale…the problem is scale. Alliances must be as broad as possible. Economic power is way ahead of us, so to me the problem is, can we go fast enough, become important enough in order to put a stop to that, to escape the current impasse. IPS: Does politics have a role in that? SG: If it would be just politics, I would not be that worried, since things due over centuries sort themselves out; but with the environment we don’t have that kind of time. I don’t say it often in public, because I don’t want people be in despair, but I am often in despair. IPS: Are you totally pessimistic? SG: I am hopeful; the only thing you can work on is hope. Generally, politicians are the last to move, but we need to make alliance with them. When politicians have an interest in something, they show that they are able to listen. Look at what happens with prices…and scarcity. Politicians and business do listen to that, they listen to the price of oil — they bring the wrong solutions, but they listen to price signals. IPS: Can oil be replaced with agro-fuels? SG: It’s criminal. There’s a lot of talk about using plants that are bio — but any plant is bio. I’ve just read that some of the species they’re intending to use are invasive species, they take over, and then will spread all over and take all the water out of the ground, and so on. So, it’s always the same thing — you cannot have just a techno solution because there’s the entire environment that you have to consider. I am not an agronomist, but I would refuse any introduction, any crop until the impact of that crop on the rest of the environment has been studied. You cannot just say ‘Ok, this is good, we will harvest it, and we will do ethanol out of it’, because you don’t know. That’s also what’s wrong with GMO (genetically modified organisms) seeds. They only look at the plant and what that plant is supposed to do, to repulse insects or whatever, but they don’t look at the whole of the environment, it’s not their task. Scientists are perfectly able to make a plant that can repulse insects, but they have no knowledge at all of how the birds, the butterflies, the worms, the bacteria, will react. (END/2008) Susan George is a Fellow and Chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute. Her latest books are La Pense enchane: Comment les droites laque et religieuse se sont empares de l’Amrique [Fayard, 2007], to be published in English as: Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think [Forthcoming, Polity Press 2008], and We the peoples of Europe [Pluto Press, 2008].
Ex-UK Army Chief Confirms Peak Oil Motive for War18 Jun 2008Brigadier-General James Ellery CBE, the Foreign Office?s Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad since 2003, confirmed the critical role of Iraqi oil reserves in potentially alleviating a ?world shortage? of conventional oil. The Iraq War has helped to head off what Brigadier Ellery described as ?the tide of Easternisation? ? a shift in global political and economic power toward China and India, to whom goes ?two thirds of the Middle East?s oil.? After the 2004 transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi civilian administration, Brigadier Ellery set up and ran the 700-strong security framework operation in support of the US-funded Reconstruction of Iraq. His remarks were made as part of a presentation at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), University of London, sponsored by the Iraqi Youth Foundation, on 22nd April. World Oil Shortage ?The reason that oil reached $117 a barrel last week?, he said, ?was less to do with security of supply? than World shortage.? He went on to emphasise the strategic significance of Iraqi petroleum fields in relation to the danger of production peaks being breached in major oil reserves around the world. ?Russia?s production has peaked at 10 million barrels per day; Africa has proved slow to yield affordable extra supplies ? from Sudan and Angola for example. Thus the only near-term potential increase will be from Iraq,? he said. Whether Iraq began ?favouring East or West? could therefore be ?de-stabilizing? not only ?within the region but to nations far beyond which have an interest.? Last month geological surveys and seismic data compiled by several international oil companies exploring Iraqi oil reserves showed that Iraq has the world?s largest proven oil reserves, with as much as 350 billion barrels, significantly exceeding Saudi Arabia?s 264 billion barrels, according to a report in the London Times. Former Bush administration energy adviser Matthew Simmons, author of the book Twilight in the Desert, says that Saudi oil production has probably already peaked, with production rates declining consecutively each year. This month the UK Treasury Department warned of the danger of an oil supply crunch by 2015, due to rocketing demand from China and India. The Threat of Easternisation Brigadier Ellery?s career in the British Army has involved stints in the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, Germany and Northern Ireland. ?Iraq holds the key to stability in the region,? he said, ?unless that is you believe the tide of ?Easternisation? is such that the USA and the West are in such decline, relative to the emerging China and India, that it is the East ? not the West ? which is more likely to guarantee stability. Incidentally, I do not.? Iraq?s pivotal importance in the Middle East, he explained, is because of its ?relatively large, consuming population? at 24 million, its being home to ?the second largest reserve of oil ? under exploited?, and finally its geostrategic location ?on the routes between Asia, Europe, Arabia and North Africa – hence the Silk Road.? Oil production peaks when a given petroleum reserve is depleted by half, after which oil is geophysically increasingly difficult to extract, causing production to plateau, and then steadily decline. US oil production peaked by 1970, while British production in the North Sea peaked by 2000, converting both countries from exporters into net importers of oil and gas. Oil industry experts and petroleum geologists increasingly believe that world oil production is precariously close to peaking. According to an October 2007 report by the German-based Energy Watch Group, run by an international network of European politicians and scientists, world oil production peaked in 2006. According to BP?s annual statistical review of world energy supply and demand for 2008, released on 11th June, world oil production fell last year for the first time since 2002, by 130,000 barrels per day last year to 81.53 million. Yet world consumption continued to rise by 1.1 per cent to 85.22 million barrels per day, outweighing production by nearly 5 per cent. Iraqi Reconstruction Corruption Whitewash Brigadier-General James Ellery is currently Director of Operations at AEGIS Defence Services Ltd., a private British security firm and US defence contractor since June 2004. In April this year, the same month as Ellery?s SOAS lecture, AEGIS won the renewal of its US defence department (DoD) contract for two more years, which at $475 million is the single largest security contract brokered by the DoD. The contract is to provide security services for reconstruction projects in Iraq conducted by mostly American companies. A US government audit by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, released exactly two years before Brigadier Ellery?s SOAS presentation, concluded that AEGIS could not prove it had properly trained or vetted several armed Iraqi employees. For a random sample of 20 armed guards, no training documentation was found for 14 of them. For 125 other employees, AEGIS reportedly failed to document background checks. The auditors concluded that ?there is no assurance that Aegis is providing the best possible safety and security for government and reconstruction contractor personnel and facilities.? During his April presentation at SOAS, AEGIS director Ellery declared, ?Iraq promises a degree of prosperity in the region as it embarks on massive Iraqi-funded reconstruction, a part of which will raise Iraqi?s oil production from 2.5 million bpd today to 3 million by next year and maybe ultimately 6 million barrels per day.? He added, ?With a budget of $187 billion over 4 years, Iraq is poised to have a considerable impact on the economies of countries whose technologies can fill the skills gap left by the latter years of Saddam Hussein?s regime.? During the UN sanctions regime imposed primarily by the US and Britain, Iraq was banned from importing thousands of household goods, including food, medicines, clothes and books, from 1991 to 2003, purportedly to prevent Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction. It is now widely recognized that the sanctions led to massive socio-economic deprivation, the break-down of civilian infrastructure, large-scale unemployment, and de-industrialisation, resulting in the deaths of up to 1.8 million Iraqis, half of whom were children. The humanitarian crisis led United Nations officials such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General, and Hans von Sponeck, former Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, to resign in protest. Today, those profiting most from reconstruction projects in Iraq are not Iraqis, but private contractors based primarily in the United States and Britain, according to a new report out last month by Stuart Bowen Jr, incumbent Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The Bowen Report found that at least 855 contracts valued at billions of dollars were cancelled before completion. Another 112 agreements were cancelled because of poor performance, while still more projects recorded as completed never happened. In one case, a $50 million children?s hospital in Basra is listed as completed although the contract was stopped when only 35 percent of the work was finished. During Brigadier Ellery?s tenure at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, under Paul Bremer?s leadership $8.8 billion of reconstruction funds were unaccounted for, and a further $3.4 billion was re-directed for ?security? purposes. A UN body to audit the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), by which the CPA Programme Review Board managed Iraqi oil revenues until June 2004, found ?gross irregularities by CPA officials in their management of the DFI,? and condemned the United States for ?lack of transparency? and providing the opportunity for ?fraudulent acts.? Under American- and British-administered Iraqi reconstruction programmes, Iraqi agriculture has been devastated. In 2004, the Coalition Provision Authority imposed a hundred economic orders designed to open Iraq?s economy to foreign investment, including Order 12 for tax- and tariff-free imports of foreign products. The Order allowed the giant American agribusiness conglomerate Cargill to flood Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cheap wheat, undercutting local food prices, and wiping out the livelihoods of Iraqi farmers. As an executive director of AEGIS, one of the most prominent US defence contractors in Iraq, Brigadier Ellery is a personal beneficiary of the privatisation of the Iraqi economy. In the conclusions of his April address, he said, ?Iraq has resources aplenty: not just oil, of which there is a prodigious quantity?, but especially ?the capacity to rebuild a balanced economy including agriculture – for which Iraq was a legend.?
Labels: corruption, energy crisis, iraq war, peak oil, reconstruction, supply crunch
Private Lives in Public Spaces18 Jun 2008Women are whispering. A friend recently expressed concern that her boyfriend had visited a lapdancing club as part of a work social. She didn’t want to be perceived as prudish or uptight and she didn’t want her boyfriend to be the odd one out at work for abstaining when his colleagues headed into the club. Her hushed ambivalence is a common response to the lapdancing clubs springing up all across the country recently as a result of a legal loophole. Lapdancing clubs have proliferated since they were allowed to be licensed in the same way as cafes and restaurants. Previously, they had to be licensed as sex encounter establishments along with sex cinemas, sex shops and peep shows. The 2003 Licensing Act states that a successful premises licence applicant does not require any other licence. Lapdancing clubs have capitalised on this clause and obtained premises licences only. These cannot be revoked unless a complainant proves that one of the four licensing objectives of “public order”, “public safety”, “protecting children from harm” or “creating a public nuisance” has been breached. The legal redress is clear. The Licensing Act need not exempt sex encounter establishments from requiring their own licence type. This utilises existing legislation, allows that legislation to perform the function it was intended to, and does not require any new legislation. Furthermore, it allows local authorities to consider their gender equality duty when making such decisions. Today, Roberta Blackman-Woods MP is proposing a ten-minute rule bill on this subject in parliament. She makes it clear that local authorities in London already have these separate licensing powers and that they could be extended countrywide. Yet the question of lapdancing clubs goes beyond the legislative argument and into the far murkier debate that surrounds this new social phenomenon. There is the personal and the political, inextricably linked. Barrister Philip Kolvin is advising both The Fawcett Society and Object on their campaigns to license lapdancing clubs as sex encounter establishments. Kolvin’s own reason for representing the Fawcett Society was personal. He is alarmed by the presence of lapdancing clubs around Gray’s Inn, where he works. His colleagues shamelessly go to the clubs after work, and he reports that there are limousines containing naked women having sex on the floor being provided as part of the transport service. Kolvin warns us that any cultural arguments are hazardous. We don’t want to go back to censorship. We don’t want to be accused of prudery. If we say there is a line, then the next question could be, what forms of sexual imagery do women approve of? At a Compass conference, the feminist scholar Angela McRobbie said she wants to see women having this discussion and dealing with the difficult questions. If women decide that they are fine about lapdancing clubs and see them as modern and empowering, she will accept that. But she doesn’t believe women are really involved in this debate. Instead she observes a strange silence on the issue. She also advocates the need to consider the responses of black and Asian women to lapdancing clubs. Are lapdancing clubs harmless? If the no-contact rules are adhered to, then presumably the lapdancing clubs leave lots of sexually frustrated men wandering the streets at night. Otherwise, we can assume that rules have been contravened and that lapdancing clubs are just another route into the sex industry at large. If neither of these harmful effects prevail, then perhaps these clubs are not needed, and men attend them with some newfound sense of social obligation in an increasingly commodified society where every pleasure must be paid for. I am of the view that the sexual empowerment argument for women is a myth. Women are reduced to sex objects for male gratification. They are emancipated only in the context of wage-earning capacity and participation in consumer culture. Increasingly, we find our power as citizens misleadingly equated with our power to consume or not to consume, to earn or not to earn. So I say let local communities be allowed to decide whether or not lapdancing clubs are approved in their area. Do you want one on your doorstep? At the Compass meeting, a lady in the audience voiced the liberal argument that lapdancers are choosing to work and benefiting from it. A former lapdancer countered her by saying, “This argument really annoys me. It’s all very well you saying that, but would you choose this job for your daughter, or your sister, or your wife, or even yourself?” Lets bring this back into the public domain and have a conversation about it in the public space. Let communities have a say in licensing these establishments, and let women have a say in their own representation. And let’s quit the double standards.
A New Encounter with an Old Standpoint17 Jun 2008The website of Standpoint, the new magazine published by the Social Affairs Unit, is now live. In his inaugural column, editor Daniel Johnson highlights the magazine's neoconservative credentials: “When you have a good idea, start a magazine.” This, according to our board member Gertrude Himmelfarb, is the motto of her husband Irving Kristol. In a long and fruitful life, he has started three. (Their son Bill has started one, too.) The first was Encounter, which Kristol co-founded with the late Stephen Spender in 1953. It was a transatlantic monthly in which the intellectuals of the free world could debate with one another and their communist counterparts. To write for Encounter was a privilege. Johnson doesn't mention it explicitly, but it is, of course, well-known that Encounter was founded and financed by the CIA as part of its psychological warfare strategy during the early cold war. According to historian Hugh Wilford, the magazine's "greatest achievement was in creating 'a certain kind of intellectual-cultural milieu' in which American and European interests came to appear as if they were identical." It's noteworthy that Johnson is happy to embrace the martial aspects of the parallel: Ever since it folded at the end of the Cold War, many people in Europe and America have lamented the old Encounter. But it was only when a new kind of assault came from a very different quarter on 11 September 2001 that a new Encounter again became an urgent necessity. The aftermath revealed such moral cowardice and intellectual confusion on both sides of the Atlantic that the battle of ideas has sometimes seemed in danger of being lost by default. To defend and celebrate Western civilisation is not merely desirable; it is imperative. The content is pretty much what you would expect. We get this from Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali: Happily Marxism, in its various forms, has been shown to be the philosophical, historical and economic nonsense that it always was. But we are now confronted by another equally serious ideology, that of radical Islamism, which also claims to be comprehensive in scope. What resources do we have to face yet another ideological battle? Nazir-Ali is an advisor to the Social Affairs Unit's Centre for Social Cohesion, whose director Douglas Murray also has a piece in the magazine. In the past, Murray has argued that Europe "has unsustainable demographic issues which – if un-addressed – will eradicate the continent as we know it within three or four generations" and that "Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board." (For a good antidote to this kind of fear-mongering see this article from Alex Harrowell at A Fistful of Euros). The Independent reports that the Social Affairs Unit is heavily funded by Alan Bekhor, an associate of the Reuben brothers, who had a big stake in Russian aluminium in the 1990s, before selling out to Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky. I don't claim to understand the details, but it would be interesting to know where these events fit in to the wider story of the dynamic between Berezovsky and Vladimir Putin. It's pretty clear, though, where Standpoint stands on "Putin's New Evil Empire."
Between False Refuge and the Peril of Return16 Jun 2008Peace, or something like it, breaks out in Iraq. US-led foreign forces declare violence has tapered off to the lowest levels in years, thanks to additional troops, security cooperation with Sunni tribal leaders and erstwhile insurgents, and a tentative halt to the activities of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. An Iraqi government derided as sectarian and dysfunctional steps up to promote political accommodation and begins taking more responsibility for security and providing services. Stability takes hold, paving the way for about two million Iraqis who have fled the country to make their way home.
An uncertain future
The scenario outlined above can be, and is, disputed. Whether or how long a period of relative calm will last remains to be seen; Iraq's political future – including a long-term US military presence being negotiated in Baghdad and Washington – is itself an open question. But on the subject of refugees, a dangerous certainty now unites Iraq's government, the United States, and some Western countries, notably Britain, where Iraqis have sought a haven from the bloodshed that the US invasion ushered in. They are encouraging – and in the case of Britain, forcing – the return of Iraqi refugees on the grounds that the country is now stable enough to receive them. Politically attractive though this may be, it also contradicts international law prohibiting the forced return of anyone to territory where his or her life or freedom is threatened. With prodding from Washington, the Iraqi government has renewed calls for refugees to return. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced at a recent summit on Iraqi reconstruction that his government would work to create conditions that facilitate return and provide financial incentives to Iraqis who return from abroad; the Ministry of Migration and Displacement subsequently announced that $195 million would be allocated to cover returnees' expenses. Since 2005, Britain has returned failed asylum seekers to areas controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which administers the three northern governorates that are the most stable part of Iraq, on the grounds that the region is safe. On 11 June 2008, the Guardian reported that the UK Border Agency planned to expand its deportation scheme to include other parts of Iraq, recently detaining dozens of failed Iraqi asylum seekers for possible deportation, including some from areas not controlled by the KRG. If confirmed, this would harden a policy toward Iraqi asylum seekers that was unforgiving from the start. A contradictory policy Home Office correspondence leaked in March stated that failed asylum seekers will lose financial support unless they agree to a voluntary repatriation program under the auspices of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The repatriation procedure as described in this correspondence included a waiver absolving the deporting authority of any responsibility for what may happen following repatriation. The basis for deportation to the whole of Iraq has drawn strength from a ruling in the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) earlier this year, narrowing the scope for protection against deportation under European Council directive 15©. The AIT's ruling found "neither civilians in Iraq generally nor civilians even in provinces and cities worst-affected by the armed conflict can show they face a ?serious and individual threat' to their ?life or person'...merely by virtue of being civilians." Contradictions abound in the justifications for repatriating Iraqis to the north and elsewhere. The Home Office December 2007 immigration policy statement on Iraq explicitly rejects the opinion of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that relocation to central and southern Iraq is unsafe; yet failed asylum seekers who agree to voluntary repatriation are asked to absolve those who send them back from any responsibility for what may happen after they arrive. UK authorities express a strong preference that returns be voluntary; yet surveys of Iraqi refugees, including Human Rights Watch interviews with those who have returned, indicate that economic and administrative pressure nearly always figure prominently in even voluntary returns to Iraq. To justify sending asylum seekers back, the asylum tribunal invokes and works to argue around a European Council directive aimed at preventing deportations back into armed conflict. That reading runs up against the UK's broad commitment, as a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, to the principle of non-refoulement: the agreement not to return refugees to countries where their lives or freedom are at risk.
Political expediency There is, however, one depressing note of consistency that emerges from Britain's treatment of Iraqi asylum seekers. Like the United States, its senior partner in the invasion of Iraq, Britain appears willing to use the lives of refugees to bolster political arguments for success in Iraq – the US by admitting only symbolic numbers of refugees, the UK by returning asylum seekers to danger. Perhaps the desire to claim victory or at least validation in Iraq by citing diminished violence – though by any standard other than the carnage of recent years, Iraq remains an incredibly dangerous place – as evidence of stability that could support the return of refugees, has trumped other considerations. These considerations should include the dire conditions facing approximately 2.7 million people who are internally displaced within Iraq; UNHCR estimates that more than a million of the internally displaced lack adequate shelter and food. The head of Iraq's parliamentary committee on displacement last month suggested that the committee should simply resign over what he called the government's inability to address the needs of the displaced and refugees. The narrative of emerging security and stability in Iraq, should it develop into durable fact, would be welcome. Meanwhile, Britain, like the United States, bears particular responsibility toward the refugees whose flight originated in the chaos and violence that the invasion of Iraq has wrought. It can begin meeting that responsibility by acknowledging that those Iraqis who seek safety in Britain have legitimate fears about what awaits them at home.
More troops for Afghanistan, no Iraq withdrawal16 Jun 2008At a joint press conference with US President George Bush yesterday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that more troops would be sent to Afghanistan, taking the UK?s contingent in the country to its ?highest level.? After speculation in the media of a rift between London and Washington over troop deployments in Iraq, he added that there was no ?timetable? for a withdrawal from the country. Britain has 4,200 troops remaining in Iraq on the outskirts of Basra and took part in the US-Iraqi offensive in late March against Shiite militiamen in the city. He also supported Bush in pledging that tougher sanctions will be imposed on Iran for failing to stop its nuclear energy programme. Defence Secretary Des Browne later told parliament that a further 230 soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan, taking the total to around 8,030 by early 2009. Sunday?s Observer newspaper had claimed that Bush had delivered a ?stern message? to Brown last week, warning about further reductions of British forces in Iraq. The White House moved to defuse the issue by saying, ?What the president said is what the president has been saying and Prime Minister Brown has been saying from the very beginning.? Downing Street declared that it was not British policy to set ?arbitrary timetables? on troop withdrawal. At their press conference Bush said, ?I have no problem with how Gordon Brown is dealing with Iraq. He?s been a good partner.? He continued, ?I just want to remind you that [Brown] has left more troops in Iraq than he initially anticipated. Like me, he will be making his decisions based on the conditions on the ground without an artificial timetable based on politics.? He warmly welcomed Brown?s pledge to send more troops to Afghanistan and to step up sanctions against Iran, praising him for being ?tough on terror.? In relation to Iraq and Afghanistan, Brown said, ?There is still work to be done and Britain plays, and will continue to play, its part.? He praised Bush as a ?true friend of Britain? and for the ?steadfast resolution that he has shown in rooting out terrorism in all parts of the world.? On Iran, Brown stated, ?I will repeat that we will take any necessary action so that Iran is aware of the choice it has to make?to start to play its part as a full and respected member of the international community, or face further isolation.? Britain would urge Europe to impose ?further sanctions? on Iran, he said, by freezing the assets of the country?s biggest bank and imposing new sanctions on oil and gas. Bush thanked Brown for his ?strong statement,? and added, ?The Iranians must understand that when we come together and speak with one voice we are serious.? Pressure was necessary to ?solve this problem diplomatically,? but ?Iranians must understand, however, that all options are on the table,? he threatened. Brown?s pronouncements gave Bush everything he wanted. They were a kick in the teeth to those in the ruling elite and sections of the press who hoped that Brown?s elevation to prime minister would signal an end to Tony Blair?s ?mistake? of aligning Britain too closely with the US. Brown?s craven support for Bush reveals that far more was involved than a policy error on Blair?s part. Both men represent the dominant financial elite, whose central aim is utilise relations with Washington to project a global military and economic presence for British imperialism, while strengthening its hand against its major European rivals, Germany and France. And even though things have gone badly, there is little sign that anyone has an alternative perspective to offer within ruling circles, least of all Brown himself. Brown?s pronouncements only highlighted the impotence of the perspective promulgated by the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), which helped organise an anti-Bush demonstration on Sunday in tandem with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the British Muslim Initiative. Originally banned from assembling in Parliament at midday, the police finally allowed it to take place in the early evening but continued to refuse it permission to march the few hundred yards to Downing Street where Brown was entertaining Bush. The StWC was the main beneficiary of the mass movement against the Iraq war and the widespread sentiment it provoked amongst working people for a political alternative to Labour. A key role was played by the Socialist Workers Party, which insisted that there was no possibility of the struggle against war being conducted on the basis of socialism. It had to formulate demands that could be supported by everyone, including a handful of Labour rebels and trade union functionaries, Liberal Democrats, nationalist parties, dissident Conservatives and the coalition?s other major affiliates, CND and the Muslim Association of Britain?a small group of Arab Islamists that portrayed the Iraq war in religious terms. As Blair?s hold on power became increasingly untenable the StWC sold the idea that Brown, then his chancellor, would break from policies that he had fully supported. A letter was drafted by Communist Party of Britain leader Andrew Murray and StWC convenor and SWP leader Lindsey German that whilst acknowledging that ?Brown has been at the Prime Minister?s right hand throughout the decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan? claimed, ?Nevertheless, it is our conviction that mass pressure, combined with electoral self-interest, can force the British government to break from George Bush?s wars.? The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were described as ?Bush?s wars? in order to provide a retroactive amnesty for all those Labourites who had voted in favour of war alongside Blair and Brown. The Sunday demonstration also saw the antiwar MP George Galloway using his opportunity to sow dangerous illusions in Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama. He repeated statements he made earlier in the month on Arab TV when he said, ?I pray for the safety of Barack Obama, and I pray that he can shift the United States? attitude. So as we come towards the November elections, and the real prospect of a significant victory for Obama, everyone will have to re-find their footing, and these puppet presidents and corrupt kings [in the Middle East] may discover that the ground has moved under their feet, Allah willing.? Earlier this year Galloway declared, ?My guess is America is looking for real change, and only Barack Obama represents that.? Obama seeks to portray himself as an opponent of the Iraq war, but has repeatedly rejected what he describes as a ?precipitous withdrawal? of troops?Bush?s ?artificial timetable??stating that he ?has always believed that our troops need to be withdrawn responsibly? and that troops involved in ?counterterrorism? operations would stay. In practice this means maintaining the occupation indefinitely. In his June 4 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, while repeating his support for diplomatic engagement with Iran, he said, ?I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.? Obama represents a section of the American ruling elite that has concluded that a significant change in stance and personnel is required to salvage the interests of US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally. These layers do not oppose military action as such, but regard the Bush administration?s single-minded focus on winning a military victory in Iraq as unwise and ultimately disastrous. An Obama presidency would not represent a fundamental break with the politics of American imperialism, but rather its continuation in a new form. The attempt to prevent and curtail a peaceful antiwar protest is made necessary by the absence of any democratic mandate for the policies pursued by Brown and Blair before him. It led to open conflict between a massive number of police and some protesters, resulting in 25 arrests and some serious injuries. Two rows of barriers were erected to prevent access to Whitehall, together with rows of police officers and riot vans.
42 days? Try 18 months16 Jun 2008Until the end of the second world war Europe was a continent of emigrants. Millions left for the Americas: some to colonise, others to escape hunger, financial crises, persecution, ethnic cleansing, war or totalitarian governments. European citizens arrived in Latin and North America en masse, without visas or conditions imposed on them by the authorities. They were simply welcomed, and continue to be in Latin America. They came to exploit the natural wealth and to transfer it to Europe, with a high cost for the native population. Yet the people, property and rights of the migrants were always respected. Contrast the European “return directive”, to be voted on in the European parliament this week. It imposes harsh terms for detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants, regardless of the time they have spent in European countries, their work situation, their family ties or their achievements in integrating themselves into local society. The EU is now the main destination for migrants around the world, because of its positive image of space, prosperity and public freedom. The great majority of migrants contribute to, rather than exploit, this prosperity. They are employed in public works, construction, cleaning, hospitals and domestic work. They take the jobs the Europeans cannot or will not do. Maintaining the relationship between the employed and the retired by providing generous income to the social security system, the migrant offers a solution to demographic and financial problems in the EU. For us, our emigrants represent help in development that Europeans do not give us (few countries reach the minimum objective of 0.7% of GDP in development assistance). Latin America received, in 2006, a total of $68bn sent back from abroad, more than the total foreign investment in our countries. My country, Bolivia, received more than 10% of its GDP in such remittances. Unfortunately, the return directive is a huge infringement of the human rights of our Latin American friends. It proposes jailing undocumented immigrants for up to 18 months before their expulsion. Mothers with children could be arrested, without regard to family and school, and put in detention centres, where we know depression, hunger strikes and suicides happen. How can we accept it? At the same time, the EU is trying to convince the Andean Community of Nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru) to sign an “association agreement” that includes a free trade agreement of a similar nature to that imposed by the US. We are under intense pressure to accept demands for liberalisation of our trade, financial services, intellectual property rights and public works. Under so-called “judicial protection” we are being pressured to denationalise water, gas and telecommunications. Where is the “judicial protection” for our people seeking new horizons in Europe? If the return directive becomes law, we will not be morally able to deepen negotiations with the EU, and we reserve the right to legislate so European citizens have the same obligations for visas that Europe imposes on the Bolivians, according to the diplomatic principle of reciprocity. The social cohesion problems that Europe is suffering now are not the fault of migrants, but the result of the model of development imposed by the north, which destroys the planet and dismembers human societies. I appeal to European leaders to drop this directive and instead form a migration policy that respects human rights, and allows us to maintain the movement of people that helps both continents. Evo Morales Ayma is the president of the Republic of Bolivia presidencia.gov.bo For more information on the Returns Directive, see No Fortress Europe‘s site – and sign the petition!
How many innocent people are going out of their minds today?16 Jun 2008We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group of historians on Sunday night. The president has spent much of his second term pleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, he will surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had. Even if historians were somehow to forget the illegal war, the mangling of international law, the trashing of the environment and social welfare, the banking crisis, and the transfer of wealth from rich to poor, one image is stamped indelibly on this presidency: the trussed automatons in orange jumpsuits. It portrays a superpower prepared to dehumanise its prisoners, to wrap, blind and deafen them, to reduce them to mannequins, in a place as stark and industrial as a chicken-packing plant. Worse, the government was proud of what it had done. It was parading its impunity. It wanted us to know that nothing would stand in its way: its power was both sovereign and unaccountable. Three days before Bush arrived in Britain, the US supreme court ruled that the inmates at Guantánamo Bay were entitled to contest their detention in the civilian courts. This is the third time the supreme court has ruled against the prison camp, but on this occasion Bush cannot change the law: the court has ruled that the prisoners’ rights are constitutional. Symbolically the decision could scarcely be more important. Practically it could scarcely be less. The department of defence can transfer its prisoners to an oubliette in another country, where the constitution’s writ does not run. The public atrocity of Guantánamo Bay has provided a useful distraction from something even worse: the sprawling system of secret detention camps the US runs around the world. We don’t, of course, know much about this programme. Bush first acknowledged it in September 2006. “Of the thousands of terrorists captured across the world, only about 770 have ever been sent to Guantánamo.” Other suspects, he said, were being “held secretly” by the CIA. “Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged.” He went on to claim that all the secret prisoners had now been transferred to Guantánamo Bay. Several lines of evidence suggest that this claim was false. The CIA appears to have overseen or controlled, and in some cases appears still to be running, black sites in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Macedonia, Kosovo, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand and, possibly, Diego Garcia. The US appears to be using ships as secret prisons. In just two years the CIA ran 283 flights – which the Council of Europe believes were used for transporting secret prisoners – out of Germany alone. It admits that it possesses 7,000 documents about its ghost detention programme. Are we to believe all this was done for the 14 men transferred to Guantánamo Bay? In Iraq, the US now admits to holding 22,000 prisoners without charge in its own facilities, some of whom are known to be kept away from the Red Cross and other visitors. Apart from those moved to Cuba, hardly anyone, so far, has come out of this system. At the end of last year salon.com interviewed Muhammad Bashmilah, who was arrested and tortured by Jordanian police, handed to the Americans, flown to an unknown country in autumn 2003, and held secretly by the CIA until he was transferred to Yemeni custody in May 2005. He reports that he was kept in a cell about the size of a transit van throughout the 19 months of his confinement, without any human contact except during interrogation. The lights and a source of white noise were left on permanently. Driven mad by isolation and sensory deprivation, he tried to kill himself several times. Eventually, when it became obvious even to the CIA that he had nothing to do with terrorism, he was handed over to the Yemeni government, who held him for another year until he was released without charge. Lawyers for some of the men transferred to Guantánamo Bay claim that, while in secret detention, their clients were left hanging from the ceiling by their wrists, beaten with electric cables, yanked around on a dog’s leash, chained naked in a freezing cell, and doused with cold water. “The CIA worked people day and night for months,” one prisoner reports. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.” Could it be worse than this? Yes. In 2003, a US official admitted to the Sunday Telegraph that the CIA was detaining and interrogating children. Discussing two boys aged seven and nine held in secret detention by the CIA, the official explained: “We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children, but we need to know as much about their father’s recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care.” According to another prisoner, the boys had already been tortured by Pakistani guards. A former CIA official told the New Yorker that “every single plan [in the secret detention programme] is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level – meaning the director of the CIA. Any change in the plan – even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added – was signed off by the CIA director.” Never mind detention without trial; this is detention without acknowledgement. When men and women disappear into this system, neither they nor their families know where they are. The Red Cross cannot reach them; they are beyond the scope of the law. They have been disappeared in the Latin American sense of that word. Do I need to explain that this treatment breaks just about every article in the Geneva conventions? Do I need to tell you that – without charges, trials, lawyers, scrutiny or even recognition – it is just as likely to net the innocent as the guilty? In 2006 George Bush maintained that “these aren’t common criminals, or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield – we have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantánamo Bay belong at Guantánamo”. But a new and detailed investigation by the McClatchy newspaper group has found that many of them were indeed either common criminals or bystanders, or men sold to the authorities in order to settle a feud. Who knows how many innocent people are going out of their minds in the CIA’s secret prisons today? Along with its innocent victims, the US government has locked itself into this system. As the justice department has argued, these prisoners cannot be released in case they describe the “alternative interrogation methods” (the euphemism it uses for torture) the CIA used on them, which could “reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage”. Like almost everything Bush has done, this programme promises to backfire. George Bush will be remembered not only for the lives he has broken, but also for smashing everything he claimed to defend.
After the oil crunch?15 Jun 2008There are two competing explanations for today?s high oil prices. One sees the price rise as the result of a temporary imbalance between supply and demand, exacerbated by a weak dollar and a bubble of speculative commodities trading. Fix these problems, adherents suggest, and the price can return to previous low levels, allowing business to continue as usual. The other sees the current price spike as symptomatic of a much deeper crisis, one that could end life as we know it in the rich, consuming west as global supplies of cheap oil begin to run short, not temporarily, but for ever. As Chris Skrebowski, editor of the UK Petroleum Review, puts it: ?This is what I would describe as the foothills of peak oil.? An imminent oil peak is no longer just a fringe theory: increasing numbers of experts view the topping out point as very close, if not actually upon us. ?Easy, cheap oil is over, peak oil is looming,? warns Shokri Ghanem, head of Libya?s National Oil Corporation. If they are right, we are about to move into a very different world. But while the reality of global warming is now nearly universally accepted, the potential problem of peak oil is still widely doubted or ignored. There is no official policy for a smooth transition to a post-oil future; the British government blithely reassures us (in response to a peak oil petition on the No 10 website) that ?the world?s oil and gas resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the forseeable future?. Both the International Energy Agency and the US government issue projections based on oil reserve estimates which many geologists and oil industry insiders suggest are grossly inflated. This complacency smacks of a fatal combination of ignorance and denial. Recent oil production figures suggest that the peak oil crowd is winning the debate. For the past three years world crude production has flatlined at about 86 million barrels per day, despite a rapid upward trend in prices. This lack of increase in supply, combined with rapidly rising demand in countries such as India, China and Brazil, lies at the root of today?s soaring prices. Unlike the oil price shocks of the 1970s, caused by political factors, the present crisis is caused by something far more intractable even than the Middle East conflict ? geology. David Strahan calls this ?the last oil shock? in his book of the same title; the one after which supply and demand can never be rebalanced and the world totters towards economic catastrophe. As Strahan points out: ?For three years the oil supply has been a zero-sum game in which if one country consumes more, another has to consume less.? In this case, unusually, it is the rich world which is losing out: countries which are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have seen crude oil use falling for two years, as price rises choke off demand. Indeed, what we do here no longer seems to matter much: car sales in Russia leapt by a staggering 60 per cent last year, while new vehicles flooded the roads in India and China. With oil massively subsidised in many Opec countries, some of the strongest growth in demand is now coming from oil producers themselves. Whether the actual moment of peak oil is now, next year or in five years? time is not what matters most; what defines this new era is the conclusive end of cheap oil. Never again will oil be bought at $20 a barrel, as it was through much of the 1990s. Instead, we will see crude prices rising steadily ? if not uniformly ? towards $200, $300 and $400 a barrel in years to come. The oil crunch has created a crisis for western leaders. George Bush made two humiliating trips to Riyadh to beg the Saudis to pump more. He was rebuffed: whether the Saudis can?t or won?t remains unclear. In France, President Sarkozy has had to contend with striking fishermen, and in Britain the hauliers are blocking roads and refineries once again. Gordon Brown?s absurd response was to ask North Sea producers to increase output ? despite the fact that offshore production peaked in 1999 and has since fallen by 40 per cent. The hauliers? protests have now spread to France and Spain. All seem to believe that the rising cost of energy should be borne by someone else, not them. They huff and puff to no avail ? the rules of geology cannot be broken. But peak oil may not be quite the crisis the catastrophists predict. So far, the price hike has been an environmental boon: the rise in fossil fuel prices has made emitting carbon more expensive, helping to make up for the more or less total failure of world climate change policymaking. Higher oil prices have made renewables more competitive, spurring rapid developments in wind and solar power: installed capacities of each are now doubling every two years. In the US, SUV sales have slumped ? General Motors may now drop t he Hummer and focus production instead on its new plug-in electric hybrid model, the Chevrolet Volt. The aviation industry has seen its profits evaporate, with many analysts declaring that the era of cheap flights is over. All of these should be causes for celebration. In global warming terms, oil at $139 a barrel has been the best thing to happen for a decade. Betting on failure But high oil prices cannot substitute for proper carbon regulation indefinitely. Even as the ?green tech? sector soars to new heights ? $100bn flooded in last year ? equally big investments are being ploughed into the dirtiest fuels of all: unconventional oil and coal. An upcoming report from the WWF and the Co-operative Insurance Society suggests that oil sands in Canada are three times as carbon-intensive as conventional oil, while oil shale in the US Rockies may be up to eight times more so. And these reserves are vast, estimated at 1.7 trillion barrels for Canadian oil sands and up to 1.5 billion barrels for US oil shale. Proven reserves of 174 billion barrels in Canada place the country second only to Saudi Arabia, which claims 260 billion barrels. But extracting this oil is environmentally devastating. Some open-cast mines in Canada?s oil sands are so huge they can be seen from space, and they have already laid waste to vast areas of fragile boreal forest. This is not oil that can be drilled easily out of the ground: each barrel requires the extraction of two tonnes of tar-soaked sand, which is then washed with hot water to remove the hydrocarbons, using both gas and water in massive quantities. Current operations use enough natural gas to heat a quarter of Canada?s homes, according to the WWF/CIS report, while 300 million cubic metres of water are diverted from the nearby Athabasca river. Ponds to hold the resulting toxic sludge measure up to 50 sq km each. Coal-to-liquids technology is also being ramped up worldwide, using the Fischer- Tropsch chemical process to produce synthetic petrol, diesel and kerosene from solid coal ? but again this is vastly more carbon-intensive than pumping conventional oil, doubling CO2 emissions. The Economist suggests both oil shale and coal to liquids become competitive with world crude prices at $70 a barrel or above. With high prices likely to continue, all the majors are moving rapidly to invest in this area. Even after making record profits on the back of high prices ? $27bn for Shell and $40bn for Exxon-Mobil in 2007 ? the evidence suggests that oil companies are moving away from renewables and instead ?recarbonising? by ploughing billions into unconventional oil as they run down their conventional reserves. In May this year, Shell pulled out of the London Array, expected to be the world?s biggest wind farm. Instead, the company plans to double its output from the Canadian oil sands, and is being closely followed in investing in unconventional oil by BP, Exxon-Mobil and ConocoPhillips. However, as the WWF report asserts, these companies are exposing their shareholders to a significant investor risk: essentially they are betting that world policy failure on greenhouse-gas regulation will continue indefinitely. If policy improves, high carbon prices will likely make dirty fuels uncompetitive when compared with renewables, and investors in solar, wind and other clean energy sources will win out at the expense of the oil majors. This has to be the best-case environmental scenario: that high oil prices continue, and that the pricing of carbon in world markets chokes off investment in dirty replacements. Then a true transition to a post-oil, low-carbon future becomes a real possibility. But this scenario depends on policymakers having the vision to squeeze fossil fuels further even as restive populations protest at losing their foreign holidays and big cars. As David Strahan concludes: ?All it needs is some brave political leadership. What a terrifying thought.?
42 Days: Creeping Internment15 Jun 2008The British state’s attempt to push through detention without charge for 42 days is a precursor to a plan to impose indefinite internment, targeted disproportionately against Muslims and ethnic minorities. The current controversy over 42 days is only a sign of things to come. The British state views the House of Commons victory as a stepping-stone on the way to obtaining the power to impose internment, that is, the power to label innocent people people as “terrorist suspects”, and subsequently detain them indefinitely without charge. Yet just as the House of Lords is expected to reject the Bill for now, it is equally expected that unelected Prime Minister Gordon Brown will attempt to galvanise the Parliament Act to force the Bill through. One of the most vocal voices in the state campaign for internment is that of Ken Jones, who as head of the Association of Police Chief Officers (APCO), and former chair of its counter-terrorism committee, insisted last year that there was a need to hold people without charge for “as long as it takes.” This “judicially-supervised detention” is, we were told, essential to counter the increasingly complex, global nature of terror cells. This was, however, only an official public admission of police planning that has clearly gone on far longer. The first hint that Scotland Yard was privately pushing for internment came on 8th October 2006. The conservative political commentator Iain Dale revealed that Sir Ian Blair as Metropolitan Police Commissioner told a Reform Club Media Group meeting under Chatham House rules that the British people should “brace themselves for a truly appalling act of terror”, following which “people would be talking quite openly about internment“. Then on the 19th October 2006, Professor Anthony Glees, director of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence & Security Studies at Brunel University, wrote a piece in the Independent, ‘Internment should be a policy option’, arguing for the overturning of the European Convention on Human Rights, which he insisted is “inappropriate for a country at war.” Advocating that “We need to think about how we should behave to people who consider us enemies”, namely Muslim communities, he went on to argue: “Internment in the second world war is called MI5’s darkest hour, but internment was a very effective way of keeping the country safe from Nazi subversion. People say that the vast majority of those interned were Jews, and they would be the last people to act in a subversive way. In fact research shows that there were some Jews in Britain as agents of the Third Reich. Their families were in the hands of the Gestapo and they were blackmailed. And some say that internment in Northern Ireland made the situation better. Internment needs to be talked about. There shouldn’t be things that shouldn’t be considered – if they can help.” The increasing attempt to legitimise the concept and practice of internment against predominantly Muslim communities adds to the raft of anti-terror legislation which is already systematically discriminatory. It also feeds into the the rampant politicization of intelligence, in which – as investigative journalist and Spectator editor Peter Oborne has documented in a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies – the spectre of terrorism both before and after 7/7 has been deliberately exaggerrated, and even fabricated, by the British government and police to legitimize authoritarian measures of social control at home and abroad. According to Harmit Atwal of the Institute of Race Relations in London: “There are two criminal justice systems in Britain today. In the first, under the ordinary rule of law, there is a balance between the rights of the citizen and the rights of the state. But in the second, under the special provisions of anti-terror laws, you can be arrested, questioned and publicly accused of being a threat to civilisation on the thinnest of pretexts, detained without fair trial and go slowly mad in the cells of Belmarsh, Woodhill or the immigration detention centres. The first system applies to white Britons. The second system applies to foreign nationals and, increasingly, British Muslims too.” Hence, the impact of creeping internment will most likely be the further systematic erosion of British national security. According to Des Thomas, a former Senior Detective Superintendent, Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) and Deputy Head of Hampshire Constabulary CID, the 7/7 attacks served “to facilitate the introduction of repressive legislation and oppressive policing resulting in the frightening and alienation of the Muslim community.” Thomas warned that the tightening of anti-terror powers is thus “conducive to allowing insurgents to establish an area from which they would be free to move, recruit and mount further attacks. Laws of this kind are often impossible to implement and the trying may itself act as a recruiting sergeant for extremist organisations.” Increasingly harsh anti-terror laws make “it easier for Muslim extremists to convince potential recruits” exposing the “short-sighted and repressive nature of the state response.” [p. 9] Thomas’ concerns are backed by the evidence – evidence that the British state, MPs and mainstream media continue to ignore. A study by the Democratic Audit at the University of Essex that: “The key to successfully combating terrorism lies in winning the trust and cooperation of the Muslim communities in the UK. However, the government’s counter terrorism legislation and rhetorical stance are between them creating serious losses in human rights and criminal justice protections; loosening the fabric of justice and civil liberties in the UK… harming community relations… having a disproportionate effect on the Muslim communities… prejudicing the ability of the government and security forces to gain the very trust and cooperation from individuals in those communities that they require to combat terrorism. The impact of the legislation and its implementation has been self-defeating as well as harmful.” Similarly, even Demos, a think-tank of which Brown’s predecessor Blair has been particularly fond, backs up these findings in a study setting out a six-point strategy for countering extremism by working within and alongside Muslim communities. The report finds that the potential radicalisation of younger generations of British Muslims is precisely the danger that increasing indiscriminate arrests under new anti-terror powers will exacerbate. Inevitably, casting the net so wide that innocent people are inevitably drawn into new police 42 day internment-regimes will culminate in increasing discontent, frustration, and anger at the injustice of the legal system. It will also generate a massive burden in manpower, cost and bureaucracy on a national security system which is already riddled with holes, to process thousands of cases the vast majority of which will be dead leads. Given that the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Kevin Macdonald, had already confirmed that an extension of detention time without charge is simply unnecessary (”Our experience has been that 28 days has suited us quite nicely“), the underlying state rationale behind creeping internment has neither been explained, nor justified.
Globalisation’s New Deal14 Jun 2008I know, far too much has been said and written already about ‘globalization’, mondialisation, Globalisierung, and also about their opposite numbers, anti-globalization, ‘glocalism’ and so on. No-one should propose adding to this untidy heap, without doubts and reservations. Yet I would like to try my hand again and ask your forgiveness in advance. The only excuse possible is that of approaching the Zeitgeist from a different angle. Rather than adding one more interpretation, I will try to decipher something that is in course of being said, and said not (or not only) by intellectuals, academics and ‘intéllos’, the shamans of our age. The emerging message I’m after is the one that may be coming from below, from the electorate of Scotland. Part of that message was delivered last May. It was a message favorable to fuller self-government, or possibly formal Independence, and it seems certain to carry us forward to one or more referenda on the matter fairly soon. But I suspect that a great deal more than this was already being said, or half-said, in such a striking shift. At least part of that may have come from deeper sources, which surely relate to the current way of the world as well as to party struggles, the plight of the Labour Party, and the weird dilemmas of Westminster’s archaic constitution. Political leaders naturally hope people are voting for policies on this and that, after canny calculations of gains and losses; but of course voters are also concerned with ‘directions’: general inclinations of society, affected by passions or longings that may well be in the background of debate. There is perhaps a feature of the Scottish electorate that may help us towards such a diagnosis. It’s the one indicated by Professor Tom Devine in his recent history The Scottish Nation 1700-2000 (1999), where he argues that the Scots have been the leaders in modern emigration. Comparatively viewed, they appear to have outdone the Greeks, the Irish, Jews, Italians and Norwegians from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and deposited a very extensive global diaspora whose size remains difficult to estimate. Most guesses put it at eight or nine times the size of our present-day population. But my point is less the migrants than as what they left behind, a population unusually affected by so much departure, over such a prolonged period of time. In Scotland Romany or Gypsy nomads are usually called simply ‘travelling people’: an appropriate label from residents who, if not travelling themselves, invariably have well-travelled relatives in Calgary, Cape Town, Nova Scotia, Auckland, Chicago or Perth (Western Australia) and who either go there, or receive fairly irregular visits from them and their descendants. Michael Russell has some amusing phrases about this in his book The Next Big Thing (2007). Wherever you go, he points out, you find that ‘Insecurity is part of the Scottish condition. We come from somewhere else, and settle where we feel least uncomfortable. We belong to places that we only visit, yet we are visitors in the place where we live…’. In his book Devine diagnoses what he calls ‘Highlandism’ as one byproduct of this sustained communal haemorrhage: a projection of imagined origins, the famously synthetic folklore of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, an identity deploying the most colorful items from successive wardrobes and cabin-trunks, with appropriate music and displays. This outstanding hemorrhage from such a small population may have fostered an unusually exposed and outward-looking mentality, a mind-set forcibly attuned to a wider view, and to contrasts of culture and custom. More than most other nations, Scots have been so to speak ‘pre-globalized’ by such mundane circumstances. This matter-of-fact Weltanschauung has little to do with the new intéllo fad of ‘cosmopolitanism’, the aloofness deemed ethically appropriate for the globalizing times. When Scots explorer Charles Macdouall Stuart reached the centre of the Australian continent in 1860, during his famed South-North expedition, the flag he proudly planted there had to be the Union Jack. Such was the old 1707 deal, the enchantment of that age. And what one might call the ‘self-colonization’ implicit in such triumphs has proved much harder to recover from than other, cruder forms of imperial hegemony. Returning to the enchantment of today: in spite of my earlier reservations about ‘globaloney’, some theory of what global circumstances means is of course needed. And here, one way forward in the morass may be to look back more carefully at certain neglected views of nationhood. What I have in mind is the curious question of the scale of modern countries and states. This tends to be taken for granted in most commentary and policy-formation; but should not be. It relates quite directly to what the last century’s main theorist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, always posed as the crucial problem in his field. The underlying puzzle has always been not why there are so many nation states and distinct ethnic cultures but why are there so few? In his classic Nations and Nationalism (1983) the social anthropologist Gellner observes that there can’t be less than somewhere between six and eight thousand identifiable ethno-linguistic populations scattered round the globe. Why, then, are there less than 200 or so national states? Gellner’s characteristic explanation of this disparity was in terms of overall social and cultural development. The culprit had been first-round industrialization and urbanization. These were not processes planned by some celestial council from a suitably all-powerful centre. No, industrialization evolved chaotically out of the unlikely fringe location of the North Atlantic seaboard, and was marked throughout by chronic unevenness and widespread antagonism. It was impossible for industries, larger-scale commerce, greater market-places and banks to develop at a small-town or region scale. Nor were they ever likely to be set up by the sprawling dynastic and military empires of antiquity, whose essential concern remained expansion, hierarchy and secure military dominance of an inherited rural world. By contrast, Capitalism was able to evolve only at an intermediate level, within societies smaller than the antique dynasties but much bigger than most ethno-linguistic groups. It demanded the formation of relatively large socio-economic spaces, to be viable. Viability in that sense may never have been a fixed or unalterable condition. However, in retrospect we perceive that for over two centuries it did come to mean something like France’ or like England: not something like Brittany, Provence, Monaco, Wales or Ireland. The Scots had already situated themselves within the bigger-is-better expansion, via the 1707 Treaty of Union. Their fate was to be the unusual one of successful ‘self-colonization’ in that world. That is, they avoided conquest or assimilation, and conserved a distinct civil society but only by accepting the broader rules of the new age, as laid down by France, England and other more viable polities. As Gellner points out, such rules required a sufficiently common culture and language, and the cultivation of popular assent. This should not be confused with present-day ‘nationalism’. Nationhood and nationality culture and politics may have been primordial; but the ‘-ism’ is a different and far more peculiar story. Nationalism didn’t enter common parlance until the last third of the 19th century, after Abraham Lincoln’s victory over the American secessionists, and the Franco-Prussian War. Gellner always emphasized the general point, and newer historical analyses have confirmed it. In all languages, nationalism became commonsense in conjunction with ‘imperialism’, as part of the climate leading into the world wars, and finally the Cold War of 1947-1989. ‘Nationalism is not the awakening and assertion of mythical, supposedly natural and given units…’ is how he sums it up, ‘It is, on the contrary, the crystallization of new units, suitable for the conditions now prevailing’. The conditions then prevailing were the emergent ones of primarily capitalist socio-economic development, at first in the North Atlantic area and then more globally. It was those conditions that favoured the norm, the typical scale and standards for the political entities of (approximately) 1789 to 1989. British nationalism was of course just one chapter in that story, a value-parade both enforced and widely exported — and defended down to the present with mounting desperation by New Labour governments. But what I want to suggest is that it is precisely ‘those conditions’ that are changing. Gellner was thinking in the 1980s, when the old identikit ‘nation-state’ rules remained in place, albeit shakily. But one aspect of globalization has been the collapse of at least some of them. When commentators declare so confidently that it ‘undermines’ borders and flags, as well as customs posts, they usually fail to make a vital distinction. Yes, possibly blood is draining out of an ‘-ism’; but there’s very little sign of it deserting nationalities, identities, cultural contrasts, and the wish to have, or to win, different forms of collective ‘say’ in the brave new globe. Speculation in this zone has been limited by a curious monotheism of out-look: the child, doubtless, of Christianity, Islam, and their kind, as well as of the odd theatre of the Cold War’s Iron Curtain. Globality is decreed in advance to possess one overall or commanding meaning: either Neo-liberal progress or some new universal oppression, choose your side. It’s treated as if it had come out of a grand blueprint, when most people accept there was no such design — or any conceivable way of finding out, should Deities be invoked. But in fact, may not globality simply be true to its more discernible origins? That is, a range of conflicts, ‘thrown up’ rather than devised for any numinous cosmic purpose? it may be too much to say ‘battlefields’ — but certainly terrains of decision, alternative directions and possibilities. Umberto Eco has identified one of these alternatives clearly, and amusingly, in his Putting the Clock Back. Look at the world since the First Gulf War, he asks: just who is so plainly clinging to past patterns and habits? We see the explosion and spread of what he labels ‘neo-war’, the curse of US-led globalization. That is, of threatened and actual incursions against largely phantasmagoric enemies like ‘Terrorism’ and Islam or ‘the West’ and crusade-style Christianity or Evangelism. The aim of these is to maintain and mobilize the mass public opinion upon which capital-letter Great power élites still depend, against the individualism, privatization and indifference that accompany so many transnational blessings and successes. Societies have mutated far more than states. And this is why the latter find themselves tempted into another version of the 19th century Restoration that tried to impose stability, values (etc.) between Napoleon 1st and the ‘Springtime of Nations’ in 1848. Brown and Bush can’t literally put the clock back; but at least they can try to slow it down a bit, with plausible aggression and of course the new forms of persuasion provided by the revolution in communications. The guilty parties here are unmistakable: they are the old lags of Gellner’s bigger-and-better epoch, plus new members and applicants to join the Body-builders Club — countries endowed with that favourite attribute of British Leaders, ‘clout’. America First, naturally, but with Great Spain, Great Russia, Great Serbia alongside cheer-leader Great Britain, plus rising muscle-flexers like India, Indonesia, Iran and China. The latter is currently bidding to take over the clout market, as Americans and Brits move towards retreat from Mesopotamia, and (soon) from Afghanistan. In Tibet the clock is being put back with a Great-nationalist vengeance: a menu of colonial repression once believed anachronistic, where no feeble alibis about ‘democracy’ required. I suppose pidgin Chinese will very soon dominate Club soirées, or at least share them with pidgin English and Russian. But right now the loudest voice defending values is now that of John Bolton, President Bush’s Ambassador to the UN. He has published his political memoirs as Surrender is Not an Option (2006). However, the great-at-all-costs Club is busy acquiring its own academic credentials as well. That is, Professors who seriously believe that the globe is safer with well-padded, first-round veterans in control. An astonishing volume entitled No More States? appeared last year from the stables of University College, Los Angeles, arguing not only that there should be no more of these small nuisances, but that possibly a reversal of thrust may be possible, in the sense of ‘agglomerationism’ — returns to one or other metropolitan fold by populations tempted astray by romantic delusion or bad verse. In case anyone fears I’m making this up, let me quote from Professor Richard Rosecrance’s summing up: ‘Potentially dissident Scotland, the Basques, Quebec and other provincial populations have gradually come to see the federation-metropole as a less hostile environment, and their independence movements have declined in proportion…(hence) few new states are likely to be created…It is possible, even, that the number of fully independent states may decline as political units begin to merge with each other…’ This conclusion had the good luck to be published not long before the 2007 elections in the U.K., and in that sense comment may be superfluous. But the general sense is unmistakable: global history must be frozen in its tracks, for the convenience of existing agglomerations, including the US and loyal fan-club Great Britain. Only the consolidation of a retrospective blueprint will allow stability and reasonable global order prevail. ‘Bigger is Better’ was therefore not just a phase social evolution had to go through, to improve the general lot. No, it has to be made per-manent, virtually eternalized, in the imagined interest of a species whose values have become indistinguishable from the established interest of the Big Lads Club. And on the other side, what about all the no-hopers? Here the list could hardly be more different, but in newly surprising ways. The best approach to it remains Foreign Policy magazine’s ‘Globalization Index’, a now long-running attempt to estimate and compare national successes and failures of the global times. I only have the 2006 ‘Top 20’ list with me, and have only just received 2007. But so far its overall aspect has changed little from year to year: ‘Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland, Denmark, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Israel, the Czech Republic and so on, and on, down to Slovenia, currently at No. 20. True, there have also been some exceptional entries. The USA appears in the Top 20 because in spite of manufacturing decline and job exports, it can’t avoid showing up because most of the new globe’s spare cash has been washing irresistibly through it, at least down to the regrettable ‘sub-prime’ property hitches of 2007. However, the broader picture remains unmistakable: a springtime of victorious dwarves, one might say. ‘Small is beautiful’? Sooner or later, one or more formal referenda will be of course be required for such entrants, but a kind of referendum movement, or direction, is already under way in Scotland, a gathering mixture of questioning and hardening conviction. Among Scots this takes the form of a firming ‘self-confidence’, a kind of matter-of-factness I mentioned earlier. As we have seen, the old question used to be: ‘Are you big enough to survive and develop in an industrializing world?’ The advent of globalization is replacing this with another, something close to: ‘Are you small and smart enough to survive?’ ‘Smart’ in the new circumstances refers of course to education, or to ‘consciousness-raising’ as feminists used to put it. And not too surprisingly, the most common answer coming up from the bowels and steerage accommodation of the common ship is: ‘You bet we are…nor do we mean to be deprived of the chance.’ I think some sense of this may have been part of the election groundswell last May, in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland — and maybe most notably in Scotland. On the emerging global vessel, it’s presence or nothing: speak up and act up, or the already existing officer and first-class passengers will not only stay there, but reinforce their grip over the lower-deck rabble of dependents, servants and migrating stowaways. In a remarkable recent essay called simply ‘Presence’, the Dutch social historian Eelco Runia has made the point with a humorous metaphor. Globalization can’t help meaning that we’re all ‘in the same boat’; but on this noble vessel, most of the occupants can’t help being virtual ‘stowaways’, travelling either on fake documents and overdrawn credit-cards, or just secretly, smuggled or bribed aboard at night or in disguise. However, as the global process continue its erratic course, this rabble has begun appearing on deck, in broad daylight. No, they want their tickets. It’s time they were released from the dank lower levels of ballast, coiled ropes and awful stairwells. ‘Equality’ is the demand: demands for use of the cafeteria and TV lounges, new cabins and beds, ideally with fresh bedding, as well as some formal presence by representation on the bridge. There used to be bigger-is-better techniques for avoiding this kind of nuisance. Allow them enough folk-dancing and local government down in the bilges, that’ll keep them out of trouble. But of course presence in Runia’s sense represents something more than these palliatives. The spirit of Gertrude Stein is turning out to be quite strong up on deck: something to do with the democratic air. On this bigger, final boat everyone now cannot help finding themselves aboard, ‘self-government’ is self-government is self-government. What Charles Stewart Parnell meant in the famous remark about nobody having ‘a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation’, in the sense of its will and sovereignty. The motto prefixes the recent Scottish Government’s ‘National Conversation’ on Scotland’s future. In the new context, does that mean ‘six or eight thousand’ states corresponding to Gellner’s original sources of human diversity? Nobody can know this, but what it already does imply is that no court of fixers and blueprint-fiddlers should decide who is in or out, or what their relationships with one another should be. To an increasing degree these are likely to relate to one another via formulae of confederation, quite different from federalism, subsidiarity, devolved regionalism and other dodges of the bygone era. And it’s worth emphasizing something else too, at this point — something fundamental that globalization is bringing home, everywhere and to everybody. While the threats of globalizing uniformity are often exaggerated, they do remain real enough to have brought something else, something really new, into recognizable perspective. One might call this, the threat to Babel. Globalization can’t help a degree of sameness; but, more strongly than empires of the past, the new mode may be forcing something more profound into existence. The counter to ‘all-the-same-ism’ can only be cross-fertilization, the societal equivalent of Darwin’s new species and forms. That’s what ‘the universal’ has always been, the capacity to transcend, to fuse, to breed hybrid novelty rather than merely ‘agglomerate’ in Professor Rosecrance’s sense. However, the power to do this rests at bottom upon more than the maintenance of diversity — it demands that differentiation be favoured, that it be positively fostered by globalization. The basic problem that Globalization confronts is having to perpetuate ‘Babel’, as well as confronting all its difficulties and contradictions. The reason is that human universals arise only via contrasts, by the transcendence of borders rather than their suppression — via cross-fertilization, through hybrids and surprises, from the unheard-of, in communities not just ‘imagined’ in Ben Anderson’s celebrated phrase, but previously unimaginable, from presences whose spell makes the past into a bearable future. And how on earth can anything like that be achieved without ‘independence’? In this context independence surely isn’t backward-looking or inward-looking me-first, chip on the shoulder time, and so on. It’s more like seizing the chance as the clock-hands move so decisively forward, the chance to contribute and to endure with an emerging purpose not yet wholly known, because societies must retain, or rediscover the power and confidence to surprise themselves. With all its daft twists and turns, and hopeless exaggerations, globalization may be undermining the older, late 19th century nationalism and simultaneously providing new stimuli for 21st century nationalism, or at least nationality-politics. In the most widely read popularization of globalization theory, the Oxford Very Short Introduction to the subject, my Austrian colleague, Manfred Steger, puts it at the end of his account, ‘there’s nothing wrong with greater manifestations of social interdependence as a result of globalization’; but what matters above all are ‘the transformative social processes that arise to challenge ‘the current oppressive structure of global apartheid’, new societal vehicles capable of ‘ushering in a truly democratic and egalitarian global order’. The emergence of new communities of will and purpose may be right in the main-stream of globalization, rather than futile attempts to stave the latter off. Imagine an email to the cosmos from Edinburgh, notifying whoever is listening of events recent and soon to come. It could read something like: “Back in state-political presence after three centuries, on different footing following lessons at once painful and positive; no deaths, comparatively little resentment, modest ambitions to make a difference.” No heaven-shattering utterance, I concede. Yet there would have to be an attachment going with this message too, about which I have so far deliberately said nothing: I sometimes think of it as ‘Adam Smith’, a connotation that renders boasting unnecessary, and which is also quite peculiar, in the sense that the family of myself and my brother happens to come from Kirkcaldy, the same small East coast port as the author of An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations (1776), the foundation of modern economics. In Scotland, this kind of allusion can be fatal. It’s guaranteed to arouse a deep-source genetic sarcasm that long preceded Social Darwinist nonsense: ‘So…they think their faithers must have kent some o’their faithers…Hm-m-m-m!’ It may be recalled that Smith’s actual father was the Kirkcaldy ‘Comptroller of Customs’, preoccupied with doubling his official wages by extorting harbour fees and tariffs from the coal and salt trades, as well as from Baltic, Russian and Dutch sea-captains. The birth-pangs of Neo-liberal Economism were every bit as dishonorable as those of other faiths. While they might have been suffered in Bremen, Tallin, or any number of other places, it so happened that Kirkcaldy was the decisive venue, and something of that took up permanent lodgings in modernity. And it can’t be denied, this does add a certain weight to endeavours at demolishing ‘the authority of the old system’, and a distinct edge to the ‘more daring, but often dangerous spirit of innovation’ now in charge across the River Forth from the old seaport. A few years back, Arthur Herman published How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2002). Mistaken theorists of an earlier moment — myself among them — used to complain about Scotland having missed or neglected its national opportunities, by failing to participate in earlier waves of anti-colonial liberation. But of course, the Scots never belonged there. Not having been colonized they ‘did it themselves’ via self-colonization, the subordinate affirmation of a kind of flightless or contained nationality, which implied exemption from many rules of the former imperial world. Today that time is ended. I have suggested that resuming the power of flight simply means participation in the new forms and rules, alongside many others. It’s a matter-of-fact need, neither too late nor too soon, and I suspect that something of this has already sunk into popular sensibility — the nascent ‘common sense’ of a different, dawning moment in history, the moment when Eelco Runia’s ‘presence’ is possible for us, as well as for ‘them’. I have drawn a general contrast between Old Lags laboring away on restoring the grandfather clock, and new, smaller arriving vehicles impatient with tradition, and anxious to move faster. In the British-Irish archipelago, this contrast has become in effect a ‘front line’ between Anglo-Westminster and former peripheral accomplices. Most clearly, the clash will be manifested in the battle over nuclear weapons, and the decision to replace the Trident weapons system with something better. This is of course partly Great-Power pantomine; but it happens to be located in western Scotland at the Faslane naval base. More than pacifism and general nuclear disarmament is involved: and it’s hard to imagine any ‘compromise’ over such an issue. So there will be endless problems and pitfalls, sure; but they are taking place at a great border crossing, as the world gets used to a different landscape. I suspect that one of the few useful tourist guides here may be Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s Free Trade Reimagined (Princeton, 2007). Unger’s argument is that the victory of ‘managed capitalism’ was unavoidable, but not necessarily linked to a tide of socio-political reaction derived from the 1960s. The rising waters of resurrected conservatism naturally appropriated a re-emergent capitalism — but did not succeed in making the free-trade world into its own. The lunacy of Neo-liberalism has been disproved by globalized reality, as well as that of centralized or State-Socialism. Hence managed capitalism is in desperate need of new management — the ‘reimagination’ of his title. There’s no chance of turning clock-hands back; yet the the new chronology signalled by their advance is quite different from what prevailed before 1989 — on both Right and Left. What happened in the 2007 elections was part of ‘everything else’. It did not betray but expressed the grander shift, the avalanche under way. Only a small bit of Globalization’s drawing-board, but definitely on it, contributing to the designs of a new and still mostly hidden hand. This article has been adapted from a lecture delivered on March 4th 2008 and is part of a project, ‘Edgelands’, sponsored by the Australian Research Council for 2008-09. Tom Nairn is one of Scotland’s leading writers and political theorists
Ireland Shows the Way14 Jun 2008Dublin In the midst of a growing economic crisis, Ireland?s urban working class and struggling rural people have united to deliver a blow to Europe?s ruling elite. The defeat of the Lisbon Treaty in yesterday?s Irish referendum has tossed out years of efforts by the European Union to come up with new, ?streamlined? procedures, and to get the increasingly unitary EU an (unelected) president and foreign minister. The Treaty was itself a modest rewrite of the European Constitution, rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. As the counts came in from around the country today, the Irish people?s decision was, in the end, not even close. The momentum for a No vote displayed in last week?s opinion polls continued right through polling day. With a turnout bigger than in any previous Irish Euro-referendum, the electorate smashed expectations that a big vote would boost the Yes side and defied the advice of 95% of the country?s elected politicians, who supported the Treaty. The politically disparate No campaign had rained blows from left and right, defending workers? rights and defending low corporation tax, against privatization and against abortion; the Yes side could scarcely defend itself, let alone fight back. Former Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte today compared the plight of the Yes campaigner to playing a video game: ?You pop the bad guy, two more pop up.? The various No elements avoided arguing among themselves during the campaign, but the battle to claim the victory has now begun. All analysts agree, however, that as in the 2001 Nice Treaty referendum, Irish people?s concern about military neutrality and the growing militarization of the EU was crucial. Many of the issues and energies in the Lisbon campaign have been addressed already in CounterPunch. The X factor in this result was the effect of the prevailing economic catastrophism: would voters take the conservative option of voting Yes to avoid the danger of deepening the crisis with political uncertainty? In the end it was the most at-risk sections of the population who delivered the most decisive No. The problem for the Treaty was that it was all too easy for voters to connect Ireland?s present economic woes to its role in Europe. As unemployment leaps, it calls attention to all the east-European immigrants working here; as previously astronomic house prices collapse, the president of the European Central Bank announces a coming rise in interest rates; as farmers worry about their futures, the EU negotiates at the WTO to allow more South American beef into European markets; as fishermen despairing of high fuel prices stage protest blockades at key ports, they complain about EU-imposed fishing quotas that force them to dump tons of their catches. A No vote does nothing to address any of these issues; indeed few of them even figured prominently in the campaign. But voting No was the means at hand to complain about them. Much of the media credit for the No win is being given to conservative businessman Declan Ganley and his new Libertas organization, with its respectably neoliberal campaign focusing on taxation and voting weights in EU institutions. But the results so far indicate that better-off Irish voters, from the fat farming regions of the south midlands and the prosperous suburbs of south Dublin, stuck with their traditional Europhilia. The Yes side won solid victories in well-off areas and a near-draw in prosperous rural regions. The No victory came with unprecedented turnouts in poorer areas of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and other cities, and with large No margins in more marginal rural areas in the west of the island and around the Border with Northern Ireland. Fishing communities delivered an overwhelming No. Former prime minister Garret FitzGerald has described the result as the most class-divided in Irish history. There is, without doubt, some space for the Left in Ireland and across Europe to exploit this huge victory in a tiny country against the European Union?s neoliberal elite, especially if EU leaders try to drive through yet another version of Lisbon. But the reasons that an uneasy Ireland voted No are not simple, and the complex and contradictory story here gives that elite the chance to shrug off the result and just live with the institutional status quo ante. Is Europe a regulatory threat to business? A military threat to peace? A liberal threat to traditional morality? A driver of climate-change enlightenment? A hungry vulture in third-world markets? A counterweight to US power? Take your pick: unlike the US, the definition of institutional Europe is up for grabs, internally and globally. I was speaking last night to a prominent left-wing politician and No campaigner. He spoke of hearing a No voter give her reasons: ?If the Lisbon Treaty goes through, Europe will bring in abortion, gay marriage, legal prostitution, euthanasia?? The campaigner was glad to have another No vote, but conceded: ?If I believed that myself, I would have voted Yes.? Harry Browne lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology. His book, ?Hammered by the Irish: How the Pitstop Ploughshares disabled a US war-plane ? with Ireland?s blessing?, is forthcoming from Counterpunch Books. He can be reached at: harry.browne@gmail.com
Cock ‘n’ Kabul Story14 Jun 2008How the plan to devastate and then ‘reconstruct’ Afghanistan is paying dividends This week the 100th soldier was killed since (illegal) British operations began in Afghanistan more than six years ago.?They have paid the ultimate price? said Gordon Brown, ?but they have achieved something of lasting value.? Shareholder value that is – with most of the ?aid? / reconstruction cash going to a small number of corporate contractors for overpriced and shoddy work. It?s considered legitimate for a corporation to make huge profits if its prepared to invest in a warzone. Its all about ?rewarding risk? and entrepreneurial prowess ? War is an attractive proposition for right-wing money men and ex-army / militia thug types. 8bn in reconstruction money (almost all of it from the U.S) has been spent so far and, on average, each contract awarded to the private sector costs four times more than if it was run by the Afghan government. It costs, for example, 6,000 to build a classroom under a government run contract – but US corporations are building the same schools with the same sub contractors for more than 25 grand a piece. Half of all aid is actually spent outside of the country. At the same time the average resident of Kabul will be lucky to get more than six hours of electricity a day. Most of the loot is being sucked up by reconstruction which runs over-budget. And since there?s no one?s checking the cashflow that comes as hardly a surprise. On average international ?donors? are spending three quarters of their ?aid? on privately run projects with no government oversight. Although the State Department does not gather the statistics because (says a spokesman) the figures are ?not important to us? ? it is estimated that only 3% of US aid is given to the Afghan government. The rest goes to the corporations that are so closely tied to (and sponsor) the Bush administration. It was never the invading powers? intention for their governments to pay for the reconstruction themselves – they?d be leaving that to the US and UK taxpayers. Using their leverage and influence to snap up lucrative investments and non-exec positions with the same companies bankrolling the political class help them all pick up this bountiful tax income through reconstruction, security and ?advice? contracts. Any shares in the corporations that win contracts can be packaged in a variety of ?financial instruments? (e.g. offshore trust funds) so the voter need never know that their political representative is making a fortune. And if you?re vice President and former Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton, like Dick Cheney, then you can simply operate under a subsidiary name – Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) in this case. And what a nice little earner that?s turning out to be. KBR picked up a 50 million contract from the State Department back in 2002 to build a new embassy in Kabul. The company has since been awarded further contracts worth 115 million. Mindful of all the bad PR, Cheney left Halliburton in August 2000, promising to sever all financial ties to the company. A few stock options later and Dick was 20 million better off. But he still pockets anything between 100,000 and 1/2 million each year in ?deferred compensation? showing that he continues to profit from the war he made the decision to wage. Afghanistan?s Rebuilding Agricultural Markets Program has been bankrolled by USAID (the government agency awarding contracts), with more than 25 million a year going to Chemonics International to persuade Afghanis to adopt the more profitable western approach to growing food. Chemonics is the the knowledge economy game where it receives hefty fees to ?advise? governments. Ninety percent of its cash comes through USAID – where its controlling owner, Scott Spangler, used to work as director under papa Bush. The Price is Right To help make the loot flow in the right direction, between 1990 and 2003 the Spangler family gave the republican party 50,000 ? and now they want to see a return for their investment. Despite Chemonics best efforts a country once more than self sufficient in food now sees half the population go hungry. Another option is to obtain a valuable contract ? in security for example ? and sub contract it out to the locals for a nice fee. Private security firm, United States Protection and Investigations, charges 2,500 a month for a security team of six. But when western security forces charge more than 1,000 a day, its so much cheaper to pay an Afghani security worker who only commands 60 a month. With six employees costing just 360 ? 80% of the money is straight profit. In fact even the World Bank director in Kabul, Jean Mazurelle, estimates that 35 to 40 percent of all international aid sent to Afghanistan is ?badly spent.? The consequences of inaction on locally-led development are clear. While Brown talks of an ?historic mission?, Afghanis are wondering where all the promised assistance has gone. Corruption in government and blatant profiteering by western corporations is only serving to alienate a population which then turns against those responsible for the abuses ? be they warlords, government officials or the international forces that support them. For more info on the recent rise of private military companies, check out Jeremy Scahill www.alternet.org/authors/5434 More than one in five of the 100 soldiers killed since November 2001 were not caused by enemy fire ? but accidents. The statistics are a little skewed when the crash of an aging Nimrod spy plane killed all 14 crew. Nevertheless of the 201 British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan more than 80 died because of accidents. Oops.
The Resistible Rise of the BNP13 Jun 2008One of the most shocking results last month was the election of Nazi British National Party (BNP) member Richard Barnbrook to London’s assembly. This was on top of 13 seats the fascist organisation won in councils in England. It also lost three seats, so its net gain was ten, bringing a total of 57 seats. The BNP often quotes a figure of over 100 seats, but this includes parish councils where it often stands unopposed or without its candidates identifying themselves as BNP members. In ten of its 13 seats the BNP replaced a Labour councillor, showing it can capture seats outside the inner cities where Labour’s base has collapsed. The BNP has also been given a massive boost with programmes like those featured in the BBC’s White Season and the endless flow of media attacks on immigrants. In many cases, far from challenging such ideas, Labour has been seen to go along with them, most recently in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. The BNP won its first seats in South Yorkshire – two in Rotherham; two in Amber Valley and two in Nuneaton and Bedworth, both in the East Midlands; and one in the Three Rivers borough in the Eastern Region. It also came very near to winning a number of seats, including Amber Valley where it lost winning a third seat by just one vote. Nine of the top 20 wards it just missed were in South Yorkshire. The North East also saw some worrying results, when the BNP came within 60 votes of winning in Hartlepool, and polled over 25 percent in Newcastle. In the 2004 European elections the BNP won 4.91 percent of the vote with 808,200 votes. On the basis of the votes gained this May, it has the potential to win seats in Yorkshire and Humberside, the North West and the Midlands in next year’s Euro election. But the disturbing headlines about the BNP’s victories are just one part of the story. It’s important to put these votes in perspective. The percentage of the BNP vote rose by only 0.6 percent from 2004 in the London Assembly election. Yet this was enough to push it over the critical 5 percent barrier and win a seat. However, because of the high turnout of 45.3 percent (up by 8.3 percent from 2004) it meant it won 130,714 votes. It’s worth noting that the total Conservative, BNP and UK Independence Party (UKIP) vote is almost the same as it was in 2004 – around 42 percent. UKIP’s vote collapsed from 8.2 percent to 1.9 percent, with their votes being distributed to the Tories and the BNP. But the BNP also faces problems. Nationally it is still finding it hard to break into inner city areas – but it is trying. Also its Eurofascist strategy – putting itself across as a respectable political party – is succeeding in winning it seats but also has limitations. As is the case with all fascist parties, the BNP is pulled in two different directions. One is towards elections, and another to taking to the streets in order to break up and terrorise progressive movements and immigrant areas. This creates tensions in its own ranks. We have seen several cases of this inside the BNP, most recently in Colwyn Bay, Wales. In May three BNP town councillors resigned before even attending a council meeting. One said he did not realise the BNP was a fascist party and didn’t like the fact that he was attacked by the party for helping an Asian family. On the other hand, we have also seen a section of the party frustrated by the restraints imposed in the quest for respectability, wanting to break out of the straitjacket of elections. That is why we have seen convictions of a number of BNP members for violence. For the BNP to carry out its aim of creating a fascist state, elections will not be enough and it will have to take to the streets. This is what all classic fascist movements have done in the past. The BNP has made several forays in recent years but has been pushed back by the anti-fascist movement. With its electoral success the pressure will grow for the BNP to capitalise on its gains and take to the streets in the near future. All this shows the urgency of building against the fascists on many fronts in the coming months. The success of the Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) carnival was proof that there is a real mood to build opposition. The next step is building the biggest possible turnout on 21 June for the demonstration called in London by LMHR and Unite Against Fascism (UAF). UAF will be calling a series of rallies all over the country, targeting particular places where the BNP has done well. The rallies alone will not be enough to challenge the growth of the BNP. In every city and region it will need local UAF groups involving trade unionists, students and other activists who can build roots to undercut the BNP at a local level. Next year there will be a Northern carnival, on the same scale as this year’s carnival in London. At the same time LMHR will be trying to reach out to young people and will be holding a series of concerts in Hull, Rotherham, Stoke, Barking and Dagenham. LMHR will also be creating, alongside teachers’ unions, an educational pack for schools to use in developing anti-racist education. This year’s election results shows there can be no complacency surrounding the BNP. Those who say we can just ignore the BNP and it will go away are playing a dangerous game. This strategy failed in France, as the growth of the fascist National Front shows. What is needed is a broad based movement that can undermine the BNP at both a national and local level. But that leaves open one important question: how can we build a socialist current that offers people an alternative?
New Labour Push Through 42 Days’ Detention13 Jun 2008The Brown government managed to pass its new anti-terror bill through parliament on Wednesday by a majority of just nine. By 315 to 306, it was agreed to extend the period in which a person can be detained without charge from 28 days to 42. Little now remains of habeas corpus, on which Britain?s international reputation as the home of personal liberty rested. The UK now has one of the most undemocratic terms on detention without charge in the world?worse even than Robert Mugabe?s Zimbabwe, which the British government routinely condemns as dictatorial and authoritarian. There had been speculation that Prime Minister Gordon Brown would lose the vote. Some 47 sitting MPs had voted against then Prime Minister Tony Blair?s plan to extend the period of detention without charge to 90 days and both the former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had spoken out against the 42-day measure. Virtually the entire media, with the exception of Rupert Murdoch?s Sun newspaper, had also denounced it, as had the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and human rights organisation Liberty. In the event, just 36 Labour MPs voted against the 42-day extension. That still would have been enough to defeat the measure, but it was salvaged by the nine votes of Northern Ireland?s Democratic Unionist Party. The DUP claimed that it had voted out of principle, in order to safeguard national security. But principle was the last thing that was involved in the debate. Afterwards, it emerged that democratic safeguards had been horse-traded for the sum of 1.2 billion?the financial aid package Brown reportedly offered Northern Ireland in return for DUP support. Labour discussions with the DUP continued up to the last hours before the vote. Reports indicate that the government has agreed that Northern Ireland will be able to keep the proceeds from the sale of army bases, worth 1 billion, and will gain a further 200 million through the relaxation of Treasury rules on the proceeds of new water charges. The government has also apparently pledged that Britain?s liberal abortion laws will not be extended to Northern Ireland. It took even less to buy off some potential Labour ?rebels,? some of whom were apparently persuaded to support the government by vague promises on compensation to miners with lung disease and that the UK would back a relaxation of sanctions on Cuba. The more fundamental concern for many of the putative rebel Labour MPs in switching to backing the government was the political implications of a defeat of the 42-day extension. Labour MP Austin Mitchell said that he had changed to supporting the extension in order to ?save Gordon Brown for the nation. I support him and I think he would be on his way out if he had been defeated on this.? After a series of electoral losses for Labour, and with opinion polls showing that the party?s supporters are leaving it in droves, the government feared that the bill?s loss would leave Brown fatally wounded. That only intensified accusations that Brown was proceeding recklessly in forcing the matter to a vote?utilizing the ?war on terror? for political posturing in the manner of his predecessor, and further discrediting Parliament in the process. Likewise, Liberty charged that Brown had ?sexed up? the case for extending the period of detention?the charge made against Blair over Iraq?s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Brown countered that his refusal to back down on the extension was motivated solely by ?national security? concerns, and made necessary by the fact that it took far longer for police to trawl through computers and decrypt potential terror plots. According to the latest figures available, however, 1,113 people had been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 between September 11, 2001 and September 30, 2006, of which just 104 were charged with specific terror-related offences. Moreover, since the limit was raised to 28 days in 2006, only 11 suspects have been held without charge for longer than 14 days. Writing in the Times, Philippe Sands QC said that the prime minister had ?plucked a detention number from the air with no evidence to back it up.? ?What seems to have happened is that early on in his premiership Mr. Brown took a punt on a number?an arbitrary 42 days?and is now stuck with it. The policy was fixed on the basis of an ill-conceived political objective?tough on terror?and not on the basis of the evidence or any proper consultation.? Powers already exist to extend the period of detention beyond 28 days. The Civil Contingencies Act allows for an additional 30 days, but the government argued that it wanted the police to be given the extra time without having to declare a state of national emergency. In the end, Brown agreed a number of supposed safeguards on the 42-day extension. These are that a chief constable and the Director of Public Prosecutions must request the extension from the Home Secretary only in the context of a ?grave exceptional terrorist threat.? Parliament must then debate and vote in favour of this extension within one week of the request being made. If it is passed, police will have 30 days to exercise their powers. But the government claims that the principle of habeas corpus will be upheld by judges having to regularly scrutinize such detentions. It has also said that those held beyond 28 days and then released without charge will be liable for compensation of up to 3,000 for each day they are held. None of these ?protections? are viable. As the Times newspaper editorialized, the security services would likely refuse to release details of the evidence on which they were applying for the extension to parliament, on the grounds that it would compromise national security. ?But if they did, and Parliament upheld a request, it would have voted on the evidence and thereby jeopardised the suspect?s chances of a fair trial. And if they did not, this vaunted parliamentary scrutiny would be little more than a charade.? More importantly, 42-day detention without charge (and 28, 14 and 7 days for that matter) is a flagrant abuse of democratic safeguards. Once again, the state has been given extraordinary powers to lock people up and interrogate them without those held having any legal recourse, or even knowing the grounds on which they are being imprisoned. And, as Liberty has pointed out, the Home Secretary?s decision to invoke ?grave and exceptional? circumstances is not subject to any legal requirement that he cite his evidence and can be taken in response to a supposed threat emanating from anywhere in the world. Political commentary following the vote was generally in agreement that the result would do nothing to win Brown popular support. The Guardian said it was a ?hollow victory? in which ?the prime minister has squandered parliamentary time, goodwill and his reputation as a man of principle on a symbolic sacrifice of liberty.? The Times wrote that Brown was ?still fighting for his political life.? Only the Sun lauded the result as ?a major victory for the PM after a torrid six months. He passed it with credit.? Such supposed ?credit? was immediately spent when it was revealed, within moments of the vote, that top-secret documents containing the government?s latest intelligence on Al Qaeda had been left on a London subway train. One document, commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, reportedly contains ?damning? information on Iraq?s security forces. The other document, reportedly entitled ?Al-Qaeda Vulnerabilities,? was commissioned jointly by the Foreign Office and the Home Office and marked ?UK Top Secret? and ?for UK/US/Canadian and Australian eyes only.? The revelation that an intelligence official had apparently forgotten the documents made a farce of Brown?s earlier insistence that his government would ?take no risks with security.? Brown no doubt was determined to see through the 42-day extension and prove himself ?tough? on national security to the likes of the Sun. He has been ridiculed as a ?coward? and a ?ditherer? after backing down on a range of issues, including calling an early general election immediately after he assumed leadership of the Labour Party. But focusing exclusively on the political crisis surrounding Brown serves to dull the political faculties of working people as to the consequences of Parliament?s decision. Numerous commentators claim that the government is in such a mess, and so weakened, that the bill will not make it onto the statute books. Former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, for example, said the ?thinness of the Commons majority? justified the House of Lords blocking the bill. And the Equality and Human Rights Commission established by the government under its chairman Trevor Phillips had already announced before the vote that it would launch a legal challenge to the extension if it were passed, on the grounds that it violates the European Convention on Human Rights. The Guardian editorialized that the law ?quite possibly, will never come into force.? Willem Buiter in the Financial Times gave voice as to what really had been agreed. The ?UK?s gutless House of Commons? had taken a ?major step on the road to a police state in the UK?a horrifying encroachment on human rights,? he wrote. ?This introduction of state-of-emergency-instruments and powers during ?normal? times is a constitutional outrage.? The correctness of the police-state analogy is further underscored by the fact that it was the police and security services which have been the prime advocates and movers of the extended powers?and no doubt insisted that Brown bite the bullet. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland Si
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